室 “a room” → Suzuki: “a cage.” One character; every witness and every other translator disagrees.
The confrontation
The consensus
| Translator | Renders it | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Whitfield | “house” | Records of the Transmission of the Lamp, Bk 6.104 |
| Ferguson | “room” | Zen’s Chinese Heritage |
| Cleary | “room” | lamp-record translations |
| Wick | “room” | The Book of Equanimity |
| Anzan Hoshin | “room/house” | Cases for Meditation |
| Suzuki sole outlier | a cage | The Zen Doctrine of No-Mind, p. 87 (1958 edition) |
The dictionary's evidence
7 line-anchored witnesses use 室 (room / house). 0 use any cage word. A fresh corpus sweep found 43 occurrences of 室有六窓 (across all window-graph variants); zero cage-variants of the parable.
A room has six windows, with a macaque inside; a call at any window, and the one within answers. (same line · 6 recensions)
A room has six windows; the macaque daily goes in and out at will.
Fresh corpus sweep (CBETA xml-p5, 2026-07-20; tag-stripped, counted across line breaks): 43 occurrences of 室有六窓 across window-graph variants (28 with the two common graphs alone); 0 cage-variants of the parable. Two raw regex hits for an enclosure word near 六窓 were inspected and excluded as unrelated: a stele’s 樊籠如六結 (“cage like six knots”) and a repentance text’s 籠繫六畜 (“caging the six domestic animals”). The parable’s earliest home, the Jingde Chuandeng Lu (T51n2076 0249b16–18), names the dwelling with the ordinary word for a house (the reading behind Whitfield’s “house”) and contains no cage word either; the room-recension shown here is itself canonical, appearing in Yangshan’s own recorded sayings (T47n1990 0585b08–11), Hongzhi’s Extensive Record (T48n2001 0025a07), and the Congrong-an lu (T48n2004 0272b22).
The literal reading
A room has six windows. Inside sits one macaque. From outside (in most witnesses a second macaque, in some a person at a window) comes the call from the east (“Macaque!”), and the one inside answers; a call at each of the six windows draws the same single response. In one recension the macaque 日縱其出入: it goes in and out of the room at will.
The alteration
The six windows are the six sense-gates (六根); the one macaque is the one nature, answering at every gate. 室 is a dwelling: the nature lives in the house of the senses and responds freely at each window; one witness even has the macaque going in and out at will, the freedom of a resident, not a captive.
Suzuki’s “cage” inverts the image. The dwelling becomes a trap; the answering nature becomes a prisoner; and the passage now teaches the “monkey-mind trapped by the senses” trope: a reading the characters do not contain, and one his rendering helped put into English circulation. The parable’s whole point is responsiveness. “Cage” makes it captivity.