露地白牛 is the white ox in the open ground. Blyth prints “the white cow of the dewy ground,” which leaves the band twice: the ox becomes a cow, and the open, exposed ground becomes “dewy.”
The confrontation
And where he construes the word, it leaves the band further
“The dewy ground” means the beautiful and “natural” condition of being without dichotomy. (p. 164)
“The white cow” is a life of singleness of mind and unattachment to thoughts and feelings. (p. 164)
The dictionary's band
Attested band verbatim from the dictionary entry 露地白牛
- the white ox in the open ground
- the white bull standing in the open
Entry Explanation (verbatim)
Changqing Da'an describes a water buffalo he tended during thirty years at Guishan, repeatedly pulling it back from crops until it changed into this white ox, plainly present and no longer needing to be driven.
Blyth knew better
Blyth knew better
From this time he called himself Water Buffalo.
Zen and Zen Classics, Volume 3: A History of Zen (Nangaku Branch), p. 31
In this same volume Blyth renders the bovine graph 牛 at full strength, “Water Buffalo,” a real animal with a species. Here he softens the same beast into a “cow.” And the ox lows in the koan itself: 吽吽, which Blyth's own Anzan answers “Moo! Moo!”, a bellowing ox, not a milk-cow. He had the animal and its voice on the page.
The literal reading
露地白牛 is a stock image of the settled mind: an ox turned out onto open, exposed ground, no longer needing to be driven off the crops. 露地 is the bare, open field; 白牛 is the white ox. The dictionary attests the whole as the white ox in the open ground, or the white bull standing in the open. Both halves are concrete: a particular beast on a particular kind of ground.
The alteration
Two shifts, one image. First the animal: 牛 is the ox or bull of the band, and Blyth prints a “cow,” a milder, domestic beast, the same softening he applies to the water buffalo of Mumonkan case 38. Second the ground: 露地 is the open, exposed field, but Blyth reads 露 as dew and writes “the dewy ground,” then builds the commentary on it, glossing the dew as a “beautiful and natural condition.” Neither reading is in the band, and together they replace a plain ox on open ground with a white cow in a dewy meadow, a gentler and more pastoral picture than the one the Chinese draws. The commentary that follows rests on the invented dew.