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literature and massive commentaries, students of religion are apt to miss the living religious truth by being captured by words. Lin-chi's answer -- "This weed-patch has never been spaded" -- was a severe criticism of such a superficial, verbal understanding. It also served to liberate the monk from his bondage to the scriptures. To Lin-chi's answer, the monk then replied: "How could the Buddha deceive us?" For the monk, the twelve divisions of the Three Vehicles were the true and authoritative words of Buddha himself. To call them a 'weed patch' or worse, 'toilet paper', was unpardonable. The sacred word preached by the Buddha could not be in error. And so the monk retorted: "How could the Buddha deceive us?" Lin-chi then said: "Where is Buddha?" Then, the monk, who had spoken so highly of the scriptures, fell silent, Lin-chi, of course, would have rejected the answer that the Buddha was in India in the fifth century B.C. In a somewhat similar vein, you will remember that Soren Kierkegaard emphasized 'contemporaneity' (Gleichzeitigkeit) with Jesus Christ as the necessary condition for faith. In his book Philosophical Fragments, he wrote: "One can be a contemporary (in time) without being contemporary (in spirit)"[12] if one has no faith. The real contemporary is not contemporary by virtue of an external, immediate contemporaneity, but by virtue of an internal, religious contemporaneity through faith. For Kierkegaard, to encounter Christ one must see him not with the eyes of the body, but through the eyes of faith. As the First Letter of Peter puts it: "Without having seen him you love him; though you do not see him, you believe in him and rejoice with unutterable and exalted joy" (I, 8). The real contemporary, wrote Kierkegaard, is not an eye-witness in the immediate sense of the word; he is a contemporary as a believer. Through the eyes of faith every non-contemporary (in the immediate sense) becomes a contemporary.[13]

　　 Zen, likewise, emphasizes contemporaneity with the Buddha, not by virtue of an immediate contemporaneity, but by virtue of an internal contemporaneity. In Christianity, however, the subject of contemporaneity is the Christ, as we see in His words, "I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself" (John XII, 32). In Zen, on the other hand, the subject of the contemporaneity is none other than the person concerned. Not faith in the Buddha, but the Self-Awakening of the Dharma is essential to Zen. Wu-men Hui-k'ai, a Chinese Zen master of the Sung dynasty said: "If you pass through (the gateless barrier of Zen) you will

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not only immediately see Joshuu (the great Zen master of the past); you will also walk hand in hand with the successive Patriarchs, mingling your eyebrows with theirs, seeing with the same eyes, and hearing with the same ears." In Zen, to become a contemporary of the Buddha means that one becomes an Awakened One himself by awakening to the same Dharma (i.e., the Buddha-nature) to which the historical Buddha and later Patriarchs awakened. For Zen and for original Buddhism, there is no Buddha apart from one's own Self-Awakening.

　　 When asked by Lin-chi "Where is Buddha?", the monk, had he really understood the meaning of 'Buddha', should have pointed to the Buddha-nature actualized in himself, and said: "Here is a Buddha." As it was, however, the monk remained speechless. But how different was his speechlessness from the silence of Fu Ta-shih before Emperor Wu! While Fu Ta-shih's silence eloquently revealed the Buddha-nature, the speechlessness of the monk exposed only the powerlessness of a Buddhism which relies so heavily upon the scriptures.

　　 In his discourses, Lin-chi addressed each person in the audience as "the one who is, at this moment, right in front of me, solitary, being illuminated, in full awareness, listening to (my) discourse on the Dharma". "If you wish to transcend birth-and-death, going-and-coming, and to be freely unattached, you should recognize the Man who is listening at this moment to this discourse on the Dharma. He is the one who has neither shape nor form, neither root nor trunk, and who, having no abiding place, is full of activities. He responds to all kinds of situations and manifests his activities, and yet comes out of nowhere. Therefore, as soon as you try to search for him, he is far away; the nearer you try to approach, the farther he turns away from you. 'Mysterious' is his name."[14]

　　 We should not miss the point that it is our true Selves that Lin-chi called 'Man' and 'mysterious'. To awaken to 'Man' or "true Self who is, at this moment, in full awareness, listening to this discourse on the Dharma" is nothing but Self-Awakening through which one becomes an Awakened One, that is, a Buddha. Huang-po, Lin-chi's teacher, and an outstanding Zen master of T'ang China once said: "Your Mind is Buddha; Buddha is this Mind. Mind and Buddha are not separate or different." Buddha is not separate even for one instant from our Minds.