What we found

The lead is a non-translation

The pith-word of the whole book is not mistranslated. It is left untranslated. The dictionary attests an English reading for 無, the word “no,” Zhaozhou's flat negation taken up by Wumen as the object of inquiry. Blyth prints the bare Japanese sound “Mu,” discards his own parenthetical “(No),” and then fills the sound with a mystical void: “the state of Mu, the blessed state of the poor in spirit,” “a condition of the soul.” Two pages on, between those construals, he translates the koan's own prohibition, 莫作虛無會, do not take it as nothingness. He renders the rule, then breaks it on either side.

Across the oeuvre the same move recurs until it is a habit. The encounter shout 喝 is printed as the Japanese “Kwatz!” in five separate works; the awakening-word 悟 is carried through a whole history as “satori”; the seated practice 坐禪 is “zazen,” the public case 公案 is “koan,” the exchange 問答 is “mondo.” The great wisdom 摩訶般若 is “Makahannya,” the Great Vehicle 摩訶衍 is “Makaen,” the teaching-body 法身 is “the Dharmakaya,” and Great Hero Peak 大雄峰, the Buddha's own summit, is the opaque “Daiyu Peak.” Where the dictionary attests an English word and Blyth prints a foreign sound, the answer of a Chinese master is delivered as a cipher and the English demoted or discarded. That is the site's first finding, and it is now the length of the oeuvre.

Five families, honestly counted

In the Mumonkan, 17 of the 48 cases carry a grounded divergence, 21 terms in all, and 31 are faithful; the per-work bases for the rest of the oeuvre are computed above, each kept separate. The divergences sort into five families, all of them construal-layer, and the same five hold across every audited work. Non-translation (Family A), now the largest and most pervasive: 無 becomes “Mu”, 喝 becomes “Kwatz!”, 悟 becomes “satori”, 法身 becomes “the Dharmakaya”, 大雄峰 becomes “Daiyu Peak”, 摩訶衍 becomes “Makaen”. Reification and register import (Family B): 主人公, the master of the house, becomes “True Self,” glossed “the Nature of the universe”; 本來面目, the original face, becomes “the Original Self”; 涅槃妙心 becomes “the Secret Essence of Nirvana”, and 煩惱即菩提, afflictions are awakening, becomes the Christianizing “illusion is salvation.” Valence reversal (Family C): 放汝三頓棒, a reprieve, becomes “A beating is what you want!” Valence reversal (Family C): 放汝三頓棒, a reprieve, becomes “A beating is what you want!”; the same register shift turns 是非, right and wrong, into the bare “this and that.” Wrong referent (Family D): 庭前柏樹子, the cypress, becomes “the oak tree,” at every occurrence and in three books, and 露地白牛, the white ox, becomes “the white cow of the dewy ground.” Dropped elements (Family E): the mild findings, a treasury, a deictic, or the tracklessness of the bird's way silently absent. Severity is marked honestly across every work, and mild stays mild. The families page lays out every term with its band, work by work.

Choice, not ignorance

The sharpest evidence is not a new charge. It is the knew-better row on nearly every case: places where Blyth renders the very same term, or its own injunction, correctly. On the flagship he translates the prohibition against reading 無 as nothingness and then reads it as nothingness. On the reprieve case he prints the attested reading, that Dongshan was spared the staff, and rejects it in so many words: “I doubt it. It is better to think that Tozan was actually struck.” On the True Self case he renders Rinzai's 無位真人 as a plain “Real Man of undefined status” one page from lifting 主人公 into the Nature of the universe. The oeuvre sharpens the point to its finest edge: in 1942 he rendered the same 無 into plain English, “No!”, and by the 1966 Mumonkan he left it “Mu”; in one volume he calls the beast “Water Buffalo” and softens the same animal to a “cow” a few pages on; the courtyard cypress he prints as an oak in three separate books. What a translator can render correctly, and elsewhere renders otherwise, is a choice. Read fairly, that is the strongest thing the record says for him: these are not failures of comprehension. Read precisely, it is the sharper finding, and it is why the site holds Blyth to the standard it does. The standard is his own best work.

The Japanization, recorded not belaboured

Under all of this runs a second layer: Blyth reads a Chinese corpus through Japanese sounds throughout. 無門關 Wumenguan becomes “Mumonkan,” 趙州 Zhaozhou becomes “Joshu,” 慧能 Huineng becomes “Eno,” 禪 Chan becomes “Zen.” This is the apparatus layer, and it is kept strictly separate: it is recorded in its own side-view, generated directly from the data, and it is never counted in the construal denominator. Only where the Japanese sound is itself the rendering of a dictionary-attested term, Mu, Makaen, shippe, zazen, does the finding cross into the construal cases, as Family A. The distinction is deliberate: calling Zhaozhou “Joshu” is a convention of Blyth's Japanese lineage, not a divergence of meaning, and the audit refuses to inflate the one into the other.

Reading Blyth's Mumonkan

Blyth gave the Mumonkan and the wider Zen oeuvre one of their most learned and most readable English voices, and most of it is trustworthy: in the Mumonkan 31 of 48 cases pass this audit clean, several word for word against the dictionary's own targets, the faithful controls dominate every other work's base as well, and where a predecessor sanitized the text Blyth prints it at full strength. Nothing here retires him. But where his English diverges it leans one way, toward a Self, an Essence, a Truth, a mystical void, a gentler and more devotional Zen than the koans contain. A reader who knows this reads him better, not worse: the commentary with pleasure, the koan lines with a bookmark in the source. Every case on this site shows its evidence above its interpretation and links the line, so where Blyth's English and the record part ways, you no longer have to take anyone's word for it, including ours.