本来面目 honrai no menmoku The Original Face

本来 is from the beginning, and 面目 is the face, what a person is known by. Japanese reads it with の, and reads 面目 here as めんもく, the face; read めんぼく, it means one's honor. Two Japanese dictionaries give the phrase as a Buddhist term of Zen.

In the Chinese texts of 952 and 1004, before your father and mother were born is not part of the Sixth Patriarch's words. It stands apart, as a separate question, in the entry for the master Nanquan. Among the dated texts read for this history, the two stand joined in a twelfth-century sermon of Hongzhi's and instruction of Mi'an's.

The Mumonkan, compiled in 1228, makes the Sixth Patriarch's meeting with the monk Ming its case 23, think neither good nor evil. The Patriarch asks: Just at such a time, which is Senior Monk Ming's original face? Wumen's verse on the case ends: the original face has nowhere to hide; when the world is destroyed, it does not decay.

In the Fukan zazengi, which Dōgen wrote on his return from China, the original face is what appears in sitting: Body and mind of themselves drop away, and the original face appears.

Natsume Sōseki, in a preface dated November 1907, tells of sitting with the priest Sōen at Kamakura. Asked what his original face was before his father and mother were born, he was floored. In his novel Mon, serialized in 1910, an old Zen master sets the hero the same question.

A waka handed down under Dōgen's name, whose authorship is disputed, is titled on the original face. It opens with spring's blossoms, summer's cuckoo and autumn's moon. Kawabata Yasunari opened his Nobel lecture of 1968 with it. He wrote that he sometimes wrote it out, with a poem of the priest Myōe, when asked for calligraphy.

In English the phrase is in print by 1910, untranslated, as the name of a koan, Honrai no Memmoku. Original face, with before you were born, stands in a lecture book of 1924 that quotes D. T. Suzuki, and in Suzuki's Essays of 1927. R. H. Blyth, in his Mumonkan of 1966, wrote that Suzuki's Your original face before you were born, though not literal, gives us a shock.

From the Chan story of the Sixth Patriarch Huineng and the monk Huiming on the Dayu ridge: the oldest Platform Sutra tells the meeting without the question, which stands in four characters in Huineng's mouth by 1004; in Japan, Dōgen uses the phrase in the Fukan zazengi, written in 1227 (the phrase read in the texts the Taishō prints).