庭前柏樹子, the cypress tree in the courtyard, is Zhaozhou's answer for why Bodhidharma came from the West. Blyth prints “the oak tree”, a botanically unrelated species, at every occurrence, and builds the commentary on it.
The confrontation
The dictionary's band
Attested band verbatim from the dictionary entry 庭前柏樹子
- the cypress tree in the courtyard
- the courtyard cypress
- the juniper tree before the hall
Blyth knew better
Corroboration: the band is uniform
The attested band is uniform: cypress, or the botanically adjacent juniper, across every witness of this line. 柏 is the cypress and juniper graph; oak is an unrelated species that appears nowhere in the entry. Blyth prints “oak” at every occurrence, pages 246 to 250, and builds the commentary on it. There is no faithful “oak” anywhere in his own hand to set beside it, because the tree is simply the wrong tree. And the error is not confined to the Mumonkan. In A History of Zen he prints “The oak tree in the front garden” (Volume 3, p.64) and speaks of “Joshu and the oak tree” (p.83); in Games Zen Masters Play he gives a whole case the title JOSHU'S OAK TREE and prints “The oak tree in the (temple) front garden” (p.154), where he also reprints the koan's own dialogue faithfully, “Don't express it objectively!” and “I do not do so” (p.155). He had the full passage across three books and kept the oak in every one. The cypress is nowhere in his hand.
The literal reading
A monk asks the stock question, why did the First Patriarch come from the West; Zhaozhou answers with whatever is in front of him: 庭前柏樹子, the cypress tree in the courtyard. The koan works by irreducible concreteness, one particular tree in one particular yard. 柏 is the cypress and juniper graph across the whole corpus; the band admits cypress, courtyard cypress, and juniper, and nothing else.
The alteration
The concreteness survives the translation but points at the wrong thing. Blyth's tree is an oak, a different species from a different family, and not a marginal variant of the band but outside it entirely. Because the koan works by irreducible concreteness, one particular tree, the swap is not cosmetic: every reader who meets this most famous of Zhaozhou answers in Blyth's English meets an oak, and the commentary that follows, pages 246 to 250, is built on the oak. A cypress and an oak are not the same image made twice; one of them is not in the text.