洗鉢盂去 hatsu u o araisare Go Wash Your Bowl

洗鉢盂去 tells a man who has eaten his gruel to go and wash his bowl. 鉢盂 is the bowl a monk eats from. The temple word best known in Japan for it is 応量器 ōryōki, the eating vessel of one who trains in the Buddhist way. 去 after a verb can send a man off to do the thing, as in 喫茶去. The Japanese reading of the Edo commentator 天桂伝尊 Tenkei Denson keeps it as a verb, go: 鉢盂ヲ洗ヒ去レ. On one page he also gives get it washed, where 去 finishes the act.

Hatsu u o araisare is the reading 鉢盂を洗い去れ said aloud. The Edo commentator 天桂伝尊 Tenkei Denson reads it so in his books printed in 1883 and 1885. So do a Zen dictionary of 1915 and the title of a tea journal's column on the phrase in 2022. The dictionary 字通 reads the bowl hatsuu, and a book of 1908 prints hachiu.

The Zen dictionary of 1915, 山田孝道's 禅宗辞典, enters the story under its case name, 趙州洗鉢, Zhaozhou washes the bowl. It calls it a kōan and quotes it from the Mumonkan.

The master is 趙州從諗 Jōshū Jūshin, in Chinese Zhaozhou Congshen (778–897). In the 無門關 Mumonkan, The Gateless Gate, which Mumon Ekai compiled in 1228, case 7 tells the story: a monk asked 趙州: "I have just entered the monastery; I beg the master for instruction." 趙州 said: "Have you eaten your gruel?" The monk said: "I have." 趙州 said: "Go and wash your bowl." The monk had an awakening.

Mumon's comment: 趙州 opens his mouth and shows his gall, lays bare his heart and liver. If this monk did not hear it truly, he calls the bell a jar. And his verse: only because it is so plain, it takes the longer to get. Had you known the lamp was fire, the rice would long since have been cooked.

The story is older than the Mumonkan. In its oldest telling found in the canon texts searched, the Transmission of the Lamp of 1004, the monk does not say he is new: "I am confused; I beg the master for instruction."

The master 雲門 Unmon died in 949. His recorded sayings, in a book whose preface is of 1076, quote the case of 趙州 and the monk and ask a question of it: Tell me: was there an instruction, or not? If there was, what did he tell him? If there was not, how did this monk come to awaken?

宏智正覺 Wanshi Shōgaku raised the case before his assembly. He said: the gruel eaten, go and wash the bowl: the true rule, complete as things are of themselves. His verse on the case is case 39 of the Book of Serenity, under the same title, 趙州洗鉢. An anthology whose compiler's note is dated 1175 prints twenty-eight verses on the case, with its continuation. One of them, signed 長靈卓, ends at the tea table: the bowl washed, we meet, and there is a bowl of strong tea besides.

The monk 偃溪廣聞 Enkei Kōmon died in 1263. His stupa inscription tells how his own awakening came. One night, going into the hall at the third watch, he stumbled and woke as from a dream. The next morning his teacher raised the case of 趙州 washing the bowl. As he was about to open his lips, the teacher stopped him, and the doubt of his whole life melted like ice under the stick.

In Japan, Dōgen 道元 took the case up in two talks recorded in his Eihei kōroku, both within the years 1246 to 1252. In one he told the case and then gave a verse that ends on the case's own words, the gruel eaten, wash the bowl. The other does not name the case. In it he asked his monks whether they had eaten their gruel and whether they had washed the bowl. After a long silence he said: The bowl has no bottom and has never been washed. His translators Leighton and Okumura note that he also set the case as number 67 in his Mana Shōbōgenzō.

A monk asked 大休宗休 Daikyū Sōkyū (1468–1549) what it meant that 趙州 told a monk go and wash your bowl and that monk woke at once. Daikyū answered with a couplet: scoop up water and the moon is in your hands; play with flowers and their scent fills your robe.

The earliest English found in the books read for our history is in two books of 1934, read here in later printings. Nyogen Senzaki and Paul Reps's The Gateless Gate, first published that year, gives Then you had better wash your bowl. D. T. Suzuki's An Introduction to Zen Buddhism, its preface dated August 1934, gives Go and get your bowls washed. The earliest go wash your bowl known here is of 1953, in Heinrich Dumoulin's study translated by Ruth Fuller Sasaki. The English divides on the last character: some translators give go, and some leave it out.

As our history of the phrase reads it, the four characters are the whole of the answer. In that reading the answer is the meal as it is: the gruel eaten and the bowl to wash.

The answer of the Chan master Zhaozhou (778–897) in a story whose oldest telling found in the canon texts searched is in the Transmission of the Lamp of 1004, where it reads 洗鉢去; the four characters as brushed are recorded by 1076, and the Mumonkan of 1228 made the story its case 7.