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7. The Transmission of the Lamp, fasc. 8, under Beirei.
8. Ibid, under Risan.

p. 32

chih 知 as "knowledge" and takes it as best characterizing Shen-hui's intellectualistic approach. [9] This statement most decidedly proves that Hu Shih does not understand Zen as it is in itself, apart from its "historical setting."

　　 Shen-hui's chih does not mean intellectual knowledge, but is rather what I have called "praj~naa-intuition." [10] It may take many pages to explain my position in regard to chih, but I have to do it because it is the central notion constituting Zen. And when one knows what chih is, one knows something of Zen.

　　 When Buddhist philosophers talk so much about suchness or thusness, and when the Zen master raises his eyebrows, or swings his stick, or coughs, or rubs his hands, or utters the "Ho!" cry (喝 kwatz in Japanese), or just says "Yes, yes," or "ju shih," or "We thus go," almost ad infinitum, we must remember that they all point to something in us which may be called pure self-consciousness, or pure experience, or pure awakening, or intuition (rather praj~naa-intuition). This is the very foundation of all our experiences, all our knowledge, and defies being defined, for definition means ideation and objectification. The "something" is the ultimate reality or "subjectum'' or "emptiness" (`suunyataa). And what is most important here is that it is self-conscious, though not at all in the relative sense. This self-consciousness is chih, and Tsung-mi and Shen-hui quite rightly make it the gateway to all Zen secrets.

　　 I should like to have Hu Shih remember that knowledge, as the term is generally used, is the relationship between subject and object. Where there is no such dichotomous distinction, knowledge is impossible. If we have something of noetic quality here, we must not designate that as knowledge, for by doing so we get into a confusion and find ourselves inextricably involved in contradictions. When the self becomes conscious of itself at the end of an ever-receding process of consciousness, this last is what we must call self-consciousness in its deepest sense. This is truly the consciousness of the self, where there is no subject-object separation, but where subject is object and object is subject. If we still find here the bifurcation of subject and object, that will not yet be the limit of consciousness. We have now gone beyond that limit and are conscious of this fact of transcendence. Here can be no trace of selfhood, only unconscious consciousness of no-self, because we are now beyond the realm of the subject-object relationship.

　　 Shen-hui calls this chih, which is no other than praj~naa-intuition, or simply praj~naa in contradistinction to vij~naana, "discriminatory knowledge." Here is the irrationality of Zen beyond the comprehension of human understanding.

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9. Refer to Hu Shih, in this issue, p. 15.
10. See my paper on this in Essays in East-West Philosophy: An Attempt at World Philosophical Synthesis, Charles A. Moore, ed. (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1951), pp. 17-48.

p. 33

Chih is the absolute object of praj~naa and at the same time is praj~naa itself. The Chinese Buddhist philosophers frequently call it, tautologically, pan-ju chih chih-hui 般若之智慧 (hannya no chiye in Japanese), for they want to have chih-hui as it is ordinarily understood, sharply distinguished from praj~naa (pan-ju).

　　 The professional philosopher or historian may reject the existence and reality of chih as we have it here, because he, especially the historian, finds it rather disturbing in his objective and "historical" treatment of Zen. The historian here performs a strange tactic. He summarily puts aside as fabrication or fiction or invention everything that does not conveniently fit into his scheme of historical setting. I would not call this kind of history objective but most strongly colored with subjectivism.

　　 I think I am now ready to present a bit of Zen epistemology. There are two kinds of information we can have of reality: one is knowledge about it and the other is that which comes out of reality itself. Using "knowledge" in its broadest and commonest sense, the first is what I would describe as knowledge and the second as unknowable knowledge.

　　 Knowledge is knowable when it is the relationship between subject and object. Here are the subject as knower, and the object as the known. As long as this dichotomy holds, all knowledge based on it is knowable because it is public property and accessible to everybody. On the contrary, knowledge becomes unknown or unknowable when it is not public but strictly private in the sense that it is not sharable by others. Unknown knowledge is the result of an inner experience; therefore, it is wholly individual and subjective. But the strange thing about this kind of knowledge is that the one who has it is absolutely convinced of its universality in spite of its privacy. He knows that everybody has it, but everybody is not conscious of it.