By Liu Yu
A koan: Monks from the eastern and western halls under Master Nanquan Puyuan were fighting over a cat. He happened upon them and said to the assembly, "If you can express the way, you save the cat. If you cannot, I will kill it." No one dared reply, so Nanquan killed the cat. Later, when Master Zhaozhou returned from outside, Nanquan told him what had happened. Upon hearing it, Zhaozhou took off his straw shoes, placed them on his head, and walked out. Nanquan said, "Had you been here earlier, you would have saved the cat."
A millennium has passed. The case of "Nanquan Kills the Cat" has long ceased to be merely an old sectarian record; it has been refined into a miniature spiritual theater. Blade light and straw sandals, silence and sharp dialogue, cessation and transcendence interweave here into countless taut aesthetic symbols, guiding us into the profound, unfathomable, yet intimately breath-aligned realm of Zen contemplation.
The act of killing the cat is, first and foremost, a stark aesthetic severance. Through this most drastic action, Master Nanquan severed not merely the breath of a life, but indeed the monks' attachment to the "cat-as-form," and even more, their entrapment within the "net of deluded consciousness" woven from discrimination and conceptualization. This severance, praised by Master Xuedou Chongxian as "a single cut, two segments, embracing partiality," is decisive and indeed "partial." Its shock lies precisely in its total suspension of worldly logic and sentimental ethics. Its intent is unrelated to worldly cruelty; it is, in fact, a fierce metaphor for the Zen imperative of the "great death" before the "great life." It aims to shatter the comfortable world constructed by practitioners through concepts, emotions, and discriminating minds, forcing them to confront the cliff-edge where "the path of language is cut off, the place of mental activity is extinguished." In that instant, violence transforms into an ultimate ritual of spiritual purification, steeped in a cruel yet solemn, tragic beauty.
However, if only Nanquan's "cut" remained, this drama would end with a single cold shout. Zhaozhou's entry onto the scene—his act of "taking off his shoes, placing them on his head, and walking out"—is the divine brushstroke that illuminates the entire koan. With an almost absurdist theatrical gesture, he provides a "trans-logical response" to Nanquan's challenge. Straw sandals are meant to be worn on the feet, connecting with the earth and traversing reality. Placing them atop the head is not only a direct manifestation of "reversing root and branch," mocking the monks' upside-down strife over illusory external forms, but also, on a deeper level, elevating "the matter underfoot"—that is, immediate, authentic living and practice—to the highest position.
Zhaozhou's move is akin to "simply lowering the head with a faint smile, letting all their tricks wear themselves out." It sidestepped the binary trap of "kill" or "save," "gain" or "loss." With a gesture that is light, bizarre, yet deeply rooted in the everyday, he completely redirects the gaze from the suspense of the cat's life and death to the practitioner's own mode of being. This "shoes-on-head" and Nanquan's "swing of the blade" form a perfect mirroring of establishment and destruction, movement and stillness, thunderous force and effortless ease, revealing the kind of wisdom in Zen that, when facing ultimate dilemmas, leaps beyond rational thought into the fecund ground of sharp, creative insight.
The artistic charm of the koan lies especially in its never-solidifying constellation of interpretations. From Xuedou Chongxian affirming Nanquan's resoluteness, to Hakuin Ekaku questioning Nanquan's attachment and elevating Zhaozhou's transcendence, and further to Master Qilian focusing on compassionate guidance for the confused, the commentaries of successive Chan masters themselves constitute a spiritual dialogue traversing time. They do not seek a single correct answer; rather, within their respective dimensions of understanding, they allow this prism of a koan to refract unique lights of awakening. This embodies the essential Zen principle that "the path beyond the highest cannot be transmitted for a thousand ages"—the ultimate truth cannot be fully captured by language; it can only be continually "reanimated" within the lived experience and spiritual collisions of the individual. Thus, the koan becomes an open, invitational structure, inviting every participant to engage in their own spiritual adventure.
To comprehend Zhaozhou's "shoes-on-head," one can hardly bypass his famous "To have some tea." This cup of tea shares the same spirit as the shoes on the head. Both pull one back from the maze of concepts, the anxiety of contention, and the burden of history (having visited or not having visited), settling them into the most plain and direct action before their eyes—drinking tea, walking the path, undertaking the immediate. Zen is not found in abstruse doctrinal debates, nor in the suspense of the cat's life and death, but in the authentic flavor of "drinking tea" in the present moment, in each footprint "underfoot." With his 120 years of life, Zhaozhou lived and explicated this Zen style of "daily life as the training ground," transforming profound philosophy into the stuff of human existence, reaching the supreme realm of "pure unity, the joy of Dharma and Zen." Ikkyu Sojun's sigh that "Lu Yu never reached this place" praises precisely this elevation of tea from an art form to the revelation of life's fundamental truth at a master's level.
The "Nanquan Kills the Cat" koan preserves a moment of Zen thought at its most tense and transcendent. It resembles a marvelous technique that pierces illusion yet leaves room for boundless reflection. Nanquan's sword makes the dust clinging to the mind's altar fall; Zhaozhou's sandal uplifts the full weight and truth of life itself. Between the "cutting" and the "lifting," beyond the debate of "killing" and "saving," the koan ultimately guides us back to reflect upon ourselves: when logic is exhausted and words fail, can we, like Zhaozhou, find our own "straw sandals," and with composure—even humor—place upon our heads the entirety of life, and walk the path of awakening? This, perhaps, is the most intimate and profound aesthetic illumination this thousand-year-old koan offers to contemporary souls across the ages.
Liu Yu is the lead editor of the cultural commentary "A Thousand Hamlets." Liu holds a BA in English Literature from HKBU and an MA in History from HKU.
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