April 18^th, 2020

According to an account in a number of early Zen annals, one day when Tao-hsin was in Emperor Wu’s old capital, he happened to notice the sky above Oxhead Mountain south of the city. It looked so unusual, he decided to investigate and saw a monk meditating at the bottom of a cliff.

When Tao-shin approached him and asked what he was doing, the monk, Fa-jung said, “Contemplating the mind.”

Tao-shin asked, “Who is it who is contemplating, and what sort of thing is the mind?”

The monk stood up and bowed.