Appendix: the mild findings

Dongshan's 鳥道 is the bird's way, and the load-bearing feature the dictionary states is its tracklessness: a course through open air that, unlike a road pressed into the ground, leaves 無蹤, no track for the next traveller to follow. Blyth's “the Way of the Birds” keeps the calque and drops the tracklessness, so the point of the image, that the way cannot be followed by imitation, goes unsaid. A dropped load-bearing element, Family E, and mild: the phrase survives, only its edge is lost.

In Nanquan's case the animal is a cat, 貓兒, and the dictionary attests the action as cut the cat. Blyth narrates it with a diminutive the Chinese does not have: Nanquan “snatched up the kitten,” and threatens to kill the kitten. A kitten is not a cat; the diminutive softens a grown animal into something smaller and more pitiable, and tilts a hard case toward pathos. Wrong concrete referent, and mild.

Asked what the Buddha is, Dongshan answers 麻三斤, three catties of hemp. The dictionary attests 麻 as hemp; the alternate reads it as three pounds of hemp. Blyth prints “Three pounds of flax.” The measure, three pounds, is squarely in band; the isolated divergence is the plant, hemp to flax, two different fibre crops long conflated in older sinology. It is the same wrong-concrete-referent move as the cypress and the ox, at the mildest stakes, and it is marked mild. In candour: the Mumonkan audit let the identical rendering pass as faithful, on the strength of the in-band “three pounds”; the finer point, hemp against flax, is the reason this one is recorded here, and only as a mild.

Zhaozhou's four-material saying pairs each buddha-image with the element that undoes it: the gold buddha 金佛 with the furnace, the wooden buddha 木佛 with fire, the clay buddha 泥佛 with water. The dictionary attests the first member as a gold buddha. Blyth renders the pairing but prints “the iron Buddha” for the furnace-member. His “clay” and “wooden” are exactly in band; only the metal slips, gold to iron. The two flanking members, rendered correctly in the same sentence, are the measure of the one that is not. Wrong concrete referent, and mild.

Yongjia's Song of Enlightenment answers the question of one's school with 摩訶般若力, the power of the great wisdom. 般若 is wisdom, and the dictionary attests the fuller phrase 摩訶般若波羅蜜 as the great perfection of wisdom. Blyth prints the bare Japanized sound, “The Power of the Makahannya,” leaving the term untranslated where an English reading is attested. It is the Mu archetype in a milder register, and marked mild because the loanword is common in Zen writing.

In Wumen's verse (頌曰) on Ruiyan calling to himself, 本來人 is the person as originally present, the original person. The band keeps it a person. Blyth writes “the true original self,” the same reflexive-person-into-Self move as the major finding on 主人公 in this case, but milder: “person” has become “self,” yet without the further cosmic gloss (“the Nature of the universe”) that pushes the 主人公 reading out of the band decisively. It is recorded as a mild sibling of the case's flagship term.

奪人不奪境 is the first of Linji's Four Selections: take away the person, not the surroundings. 境 is the objective realm, the scene, the whole environing world, and the dictionary attests it as surroundings or scene. Blyth narrows it to a discrete “thing,” which shrinks a standing rubric about self and world into a contrast of self and object. The reading is close, and mild, but the scene is not a thing, and the pairing that the Four Selections turn on is blunted.

The Xinxin Ming line turns on 是非: as soon as right and wrong arise, the mind is thrown into confusion, in the dictionary's attested reading. 是非 is evaluative, right and wrong, the ratiocinating judgment that splits the world into approved and condemned. Blyth prints the bare demonstrative “this and that,” which names mere spatial duality and drops the moral-logical charge the line depends on. The neighbouring phrases are in band; the single shift is 是非. Valence and register, Family C, and mild. PAGE NOTE: the printed page could not be verified. The Poetry and Zen source carries a parse-artifact pagination in the recon ledger, so the page pin is withheld rather than invented.

A monk asks Fengxue how to proceed without transgressing, since speech and silence both touch on 離微. 離微 is a technical pair from Sengzhao: 離, separation, and 微, subtlety, the boundary that speech and silence alike can enter. Blyth's koan line, “Both speech and silence transgress; how can we not do so?”, renders 離微 by nothing at all: the pair is folded into the verb and vanishes. It is a total omission of a two-graph technical term, but a mild one, because his commentary then expounds 離 and 微 accurately.

Yongjia's line 語默動靜體安然 says that whether speaking or silent, moving or still, the 體 is at peace. 體 is what a thing is in itself, its substance as against its function, and the dictionary attests it that way. Blyth renders it “the Real Self,” a capitalized standing subject, the same reification he applies to 本來面目, the original face, when he prints “the Original Self.” A quiet substance becomes a metaphysical Self. Marked mild, and grounded in the entry. PAGE NOTE: the printed page could not be verified. The Poetry and Zen source carries a parse-artifact pagination in the recon ledger, so the page pin is withheld rather than invented.

Mazu's answer is 即心是佛: this very mind is Buddha. 即 is the deictic “this very,” the pointing finger that presses the identity onto the mind in front of you. Blyth's koan line, “The mind is the Buddha,” drops 即, softening a pointed identification into a general proposition about mind and Buddha. It is the mildest grounded finding in the audit and is flagged as borderline: the identity survives, only its deictic edge is lost.

Shoushan holds up the bamboo slat: call it a 竹篦 and you 觸, refuse the name and you 背. 觸背 is the paired verdict: touching it or turning away from it, touching it or going against it. Blyth's second horn is inside the band: “If you don't call it a shippe, you go against the factuality.” The first horn is not: 觸 is contact and offense, and his “If you call this a shippe you omit its reality” inverts contact into omission. His later overlay, “ignore its absoluteness / ignore its relativity,” is likewise outside the two-word pair. It stays mild because one horn is faithful and the miss is on the other.

In the flower-sermon formula the Buddha transmits 正法眼藏, the treasury of the true teaching eye. Blyth renders it “the Eye of the True Law” and drops 藏, the treasury. The missing word is not incidental: 藏, the treasury or storehouse, is the very thing Wumen's commentary interrogates a few lines later, asking how such a treasury could be transmitted at all. Dropping it removes the object of the koan's own question. It stays mild because the eye survives and the sense is close; it is a silent omission of one load-bearing graph, not a reversal.