喝, the master's encounter shout, carries an attested English reading. Blyth prints the untranslated Japanese sound “Kwatz!” for it, and he prints it at every occurrence, across five works of the oeuvre.
The confrontation
The dictionary's band
Attested band verbatim from the dictionary entry 喝
- an encounter shout
- a Chan shout
Entry Explanation (verbatim)
An encounter shout is a sharp voiced action used in public questioning, answer, testing, and appraisal.
Blyth knew better
Corroboration: the band is uniform, the non-translation total
The band is a single kind of thing, an encounter shout, and 喝 is left as the untranslated Japanese sound at every occurrence in Blyth's hand: Tokusan “shouted ‘Kwatz!’” (Volume 2, p.31), and again through Volume 2 at pages 34, 37, 38 and 63, again in Volume 3, and “Kwats!” in Zen in English Literature (p.320). And he plainly hears the cry as a shout: he glosses it as “a war-cry” and writes that “the universe shouts at us, we shout back” (Volume 3), using the very English word the dictionary attests, yet he never renders the koan-word with it. This is the Mu archetype at oeuvre scale: where the dictionary attests an English word, the answer of a Chinese master is delivered as a Japanese cipher.
The literal reading
喝 is the voiced action a master throws into an exchange to question, test, or appraise. Linji's most famous statement of it, the four shouts, opens with 有時一喝如金剛王寶劍, sometimes a shout is like the diamond-king's precious sword. The graph names a shout, and the dictionary attests it in English as an encounter shout, or a Chan shout. It is a sound with a job, not a proper name.
The alteration
Blyth keeps the shout as a sound but changes whose sound it is. The Chinese 喝 becomes the Japanese “Kwatz!”, and the English word the dictionary attests is never supplied. Because the graph is Chinese and the reading is attested in English, the untranslated transliteration falls outside the band, the same way “Mu” does for 無. The difference is scale: this is not one koan but a habit that runs the length of the oeuvre, from the Seigen and Nangaku histories to the 1942 first book. A reader who meets “Kwatz!” meets a Japanese exclamation where a Chinese master raised his voice, and the plain English that would carry the act, a shout, is nowhere on the page.