放汝三頓棒, spare you three rounds of blows, is a reprieve: Yunmen lets Dongshan off the staff. Blyth prints “A beating is what you want!”, inflates the count to sixty, and states on the page that he rejects the reprieve reading.
The confrontation
The dictionary's band
Attested band verbatim from the dictionary entry 放汝三頓棒
- spare you three rounds of blows
Entry Explanation (verbatim)
This encounter verdict lets the addressee off three rounds of staff blows … a case-specific reprieve rather than a general rule.
Blyth knew better
Blyth knew better
Some take it as, “I give you sixty blows,” some as, “You deserve sixty blows.” One commentator says that letting him off the punishment is more painful than giving him the sixty stripes. I doubt it. It is better to think that Tozan was actually struck …
Zen and Zen Classics, Volume 4: Mumonkan, p. 128
This is the strongest knew-better in the whole audit. Blyth reports the attested reprieve reading and rejects it in print; he weighed the dictionary's reading and chose its opposite. The sibling entry 三頓棒 fixes the count at three, so “sixty” is outside the band on two counts.
The literal reading
Yunmen quizzes Dongshan on where he has been, then pronounces the verdict 放汝三頓棒: 放, to release or let off; 汝, you; 三頓棒, three rounds of the staff. It is a reprieve, a case-specific verdict letting Dongshan off the beating rather than a rule that he must be beaten. The next morning Dongshan returns to ask what his fault was; Yunmen rebukes him as a rice-bag, 飯袋子, and only then, at the rebuke, does Dongshan awaken (山於此大悟, 0294c29).
The alteration
Blyth reverses the verdict's force. 放, the graph that spares, becomes a command to beat: “A beating is what you want!” The reprieve is turned into its opposite, an injunction to strike. He then inflates the count, printing “sixty” where the text and the sibling entry 三頓棒 both fix it at three, and titles the case around the stripes. The koan turns on the reprieve; render it as a beating and the hinge of the case is gone. The rare thing here is that he lays the choice out in the open and takes the reading the band excludes.