好雪片片不落別処 kōsetsu henpen bessho ni ochizu Fine Snow, Flake by Flake, Falls Nowhere Else

好雪 kōsetsu is said in delight: the scholar Iriya Yoshitaka read it as a cry, fine snow! 片片 henpen is flake after flake, and 不落別処 bessho ni ochizu is does not fall in another place. Where the snow does fall, the line leaves to the reader.

As the Chan books tell it, Layman Pang took leave of Yaoshan, and ten monks saw him to the gate. Pointing at the snow in the air, he said, Fine snow, flake by flake: it falls nowhere else. A monk named Quan asked, Where does it fall? Pang slapped him. When Quan asked, And what about you, layman?, Pang slapped him again: Your eyes see as if blind; your mouth speaks as if dumb.

Pang was a layman of Hengzhou who studied under the masters Shitou and Mazu and never became a monk. Two early books with an entry on him, of 952 and 1004, tell of his questions to the masters. Read whole, neither has the snow. The record of his sayings that tells the story reaches us in print from 1637; its Song editions are lost.

The Chan master Xuedou chose the story for his hundred cases with verses. He added a word of his own, a different answer from the monk Quan's: at the question, just grab a snowball and hit Pang. It is his commentator Yuanwu who makes the target plain. Xuedou's verse begins snowball, hit! snowball, hit!, and in 1248 Dōgen opened a sermon with those words.

Yuanwu, commenting on Xuedou's verse, reads the snow as the one color. In the eyes it is snow, in the ears it is snow, and nothing is outside it. Then he quotes the master Yunmen: not to see the one color is to hold up half of it. In his own words Yuanwu adds that to hold up the whole, one must know there is a road that goes beyond.

At the ceremony of Daitō's opening sermon as abbot of Daitokuji, which he founded, a monk took him through the case line by line. Daitō answered each line in a phrase of his own. In 1619 a piece of calligraphy of the line, sealed 宗朝, was shown to be judged. It came with word that it might be the hand of Tōkai Sōchō, an abbot of Daitokuji. The answer called the hand poor for Tōkai's, said it did not look written in imitation, and ended: I do not know for certain.

The swordsman Yamaoka Tesshū ends his account of the state of no enemy, dated 1882, with the line. Where there is no self, he writes, there is no enemy. For one truly awake to this, between skilled and clumsy, strong and weak, grown man and child there is not one point of difference. This is the marvelous place called 好雪片々不落別處.

Two readings divide the line. In one, each flake settles exactly where it ought to fall, as if it meant to. Among the books our history read, that reading is not met before the twentieth century; a handbook of tea scrolls of 1973 leads with it. In the older one, Yuanwu's, the snow is the one color, with nothing outside it. Our history signs the second, as a reading and not a finding: the snow falls here, on everything alike, and nowhere else.

The words of the Tang layman Pang Yun, who died in 808 or 815, as the Chan books tell it, when he took leave of the master Yaoshan in the snow; first found in Song China, a phrase in a monk's mouth before 1072 and case 42 of the Blue Cliff Record of 1125; spoken in Japanese Zen from the fourteenth century and brushed as calligraphy by 1619.