Mu: Wielding Manjushri's Sword
Chaozhou Ts'ung-shen was a Chinese Chan (or Zen) master and a Dharma successor of Nanchüan. According to Case 19 of the Gateless Gate , as a young student, Chaozhou (or Joshu in Japanese) "asked his teacher, Nanchüan, ‘What is the Way,’ and Nanchüan replied, ‘Ordinary mind is Way.’ Chaozhou asked how he should move toward it. Nanchüan answered, 'If you try to move toward it, you go away from it.' Chaozhou said, 'But if we do not try, how do we know that it is the Way?' Nanchüan replied, ‘The Way does not belong to knowing or not-knowing: knowing is illusion, not-knowing is blank emptiness. If you really attain to the Way, it is like vast emptiness – limitless and boundless. How, then, can there be a right and wrong in the Way?' At these words, Chaozhou was enlightened.” After forty years of training with Nanchüan, Chaozhou wandered throughout China and studied with other Zen masters for another twenty years, deepening his insight. At the age of eighty, he b...