雙劍倚空飛 sōken kū ni yotte tobu Twin Swords Lean on the Sky and Fly

雙 (read sō) is a pair, and 双 is its modern form. 劍 (read ken) is sword, and 剣 is its modern form. 倚 (read yotte) is leaning on. 空 (read kū) is the sky, as our history reads it; it can also mean emptiness, its Buddhist sense. 飛 (read tobu) is to fly. Read in Japanese, the five characters become sōken kū ni yotte tobu.

A capping phrase is a short comment written beside the lines of a Zen kōan collection, beside its case or its verse.

At the sixty-fifth case an outsider asks the Buddha: I do not ask about what has words; I do not ask about what has none. Beside it Engo writes: Even so, a man of the household has a little fragrance about him. Twin swords, leaning on the sky, fly. Luckily he does not ask. At the eighty-seventh case he sets it beside the verse's wrong, wrong, followed by one arrow brings down two eagles.

In Japan, our history found it in the recorded sayings of Jikusen Bonsen, a Chinese master who taught there from 1329 to 1348. Searching SAT's Taishō canon and the dated items of the National Diet Library's full-text index, it found no earlier use by a master in Japan. Zhaozhou is asked the meaning of the patriarch's coming from the west and answers the cypress tree in front of the hall. Asked again, he gives the same answer, and the phrase follows. Jikusen's text does not mark whether the words are his own comment or part of the story he tells.

The sword master Kamiizumi Nobutsuna, founder of the Shinkage school, wrote it into a license for his pupil Marume Kurando. The county history that prints the license dates it to 1567. The license names two swords, the sword that kills and the sword that gives life, as the most essential thing of his house. It asks which is the better and which the lesser, and says they may be called by this phrase. His lines issued the same words, with small differences, in 1610 and 1637.

In Hakuin's commentary on the sayings of Daitō, made in 1749, it stands after a question in Daitō's New Year sermon. The sermon names the Buddha's dharma and the world's, and asks which one will you all nod to? A Zen dictionary of 1915 reads it as cutting off both heads, being and non-being. It speaks, the dictionary says, of the sharpness of a thrust that does not involve either head of a question.

Of the three English books our history read, Thomas and J. C. Cleary's translation, copyrighted 1977, renders it Twin swords fly through space, without the leaning.

Our history reads the phrase as the figure of a pair: two blades, equally sharp, and neither the lesser. Each use it read in context stands on something doubled. Our history takes the sword master's question, which is the better, which the lesser?, to say plainly that the pair cannot be ranked. The 1915 dictionary's reading is held beside it.

A capping phrase that Engo Kokugon wrote beside the text of the 碧巌録, completed in 1125, at its sixty-fifth and eighty-seventh cases; in the Chinese canon as CBETA holds it, the words stand nowhere else.