運水搬柴 unsui hansai Carrying Water, Hauling Firewood

運水搬柴 (unsui hansai): carrying water and hauling firewood, the daily work of Zen monks.

In the phrase, 運 is to carry, 水 is water, 搬 is to carry and move, and 柴 is brushwood cut for fuel.

Asked by the master Shitou how his daily affairs have been, the layman Pang says there is nowhere to open his mouth. Then he offers a verse. It ends: Supernatural power and marvelous function: carrying water and hauling firewood. Shitou approves it, and Pang does not shave his head and stays a layman.

In Pang's verse, 神通 is a Buddhist word for the powers won by meditation, among them the divine eye and the divine ear. Two chores answer them: the marvel is the chore.

The master Yuanwu Keqin recalls the fifteen hundred monks taught by Xuefeng. Each day they all worked together, carrying water and hauling firewood. How unlike the brothers of his own day, he says, who sit up straight and eat their fill.

In his rule of 1246 for the officers of a monastery, Dōgen writes of Guishan, cook under Baizhang. Guishan carried water and hauled firewood, Dōgen says, and did not shrink from the hardships of the monks' assembly.

Pang's line also drew objections. The philosopher Zhu Xi answered that the water has to be carried rightly before it is a marvel. In Japan, the appendix to the Confucian Yamaga Sokō's history of 1669 mocks the monks who take carrying water and hauling firewood for the Way.

The Nanbōroku is a book on tea presented as the record of Sen no Rikyū's teaching. In its opening part, tea in a small room is carrying water, gathering firewood, boiling the water and making tea. Tachibana Jitsuzan, who is thought to have written the book, named it in 1690.

A phrase book for calligraphers of 1966 enters 運水搬柴 among phrases for the brush. The tea monthly 淡交 listed the phrase in 1993 beside 著衣喫飯, putting on clothes and eating rice.

In English, D. T. Suzuki gave the line in 1922 as I draw water, and I carry fuel! Fung Yu-lan rendered it in 1947 as carrying water and chopping firewood, beside Baizhang's words on the man before enlightenment and after. In the books archive.org can search, the saying Before enlightenment, chop wood and carry water; after enlightenment, chop wood and carry water is in print from 1972. Pang's line stands behind the saying, though it is not its source.

The last line of a verse given to the Tang layman Pang Yun 龐蘊, who died in 808 or 815; the oldest record of it read here is the Chinese lamp history of 1004; the four characters stood as a phrase of their own for the work of a monastery in Song China, and were used in Japan from Dōgen's talk of 1241.

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