野花芳草 “wild flowers and fragrant grasses” → Suzuki: “the lilies of the field.” Matthew 6:28 printed as the rendering of a suchness verse, with a “Behold” the Chinese does not contain.
The confrontation
The consensus
| Translator | Renders it | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Plain reading | “wild flowers and fragrant grasses grow thick of themselves” | character-by-character; the verse has no lily-word and no imperative in any witness |
| Suzuki sole outlier | Behold the lilies of the field… | Manual of Zen Buddhism, p. 98 (2005 BuddhaNet digital edition) |
The dictionary's evidence
野花芳草自叢叢 is a stock line of the oxherding tradition: a fresh corpus sweep (tag-stripped, counted across line breaks) finds it verbatim in six corpus files. None contains 百合, a lily; none contains an imperative.
- Puming’s Picture 10, in Muyun’s verse collection · J31nB268 人牛不見杳無蹤，明月光寒萬象空，若問其中端的意，野花芳草自叢叢。 0652b01–02The oxherding verse collection, “Puming’s original song” · J23nB129 人牛不見杳無蹤，明月光寒萬象空，若問其中端的意，野花芳草自叢叢。 0362b12–13The Chan verse anthology Zadu Hai, attributed to Puming · X65n1278 人牛不見杳無蹤，明月光寒萬象空，若問其中端的意，野花芳草自叢叢。 0098c17–18
Man and ox both vanished, not a trace remains; the bright moonlight is cold, the ten thousand forms empty. Should anyone ask the real meaning of this: wild flowers and fragrant grasses grow thick of themselves. (same line · 3 recensions)
The stage is titled 雙泯, “Both Vanished”: man and ox are both gone, and with them the watcher. The picture above the verse is an empty circle. The dictionary fixes the genre (十牛圖, “the Ten Oxherding Pictures”); the line itself needs no entry, because the divergence is plain-character-checkable: no witness contains 百合, a lily, and none contains a command to look. Six pages earlier in the same Manual, annotating Kuoan's Pictures VIII and IX, Suzuki attaches a Christian parallel openly, in a footnote attributed by name to Meister Eckhart. Here the Gospel phrase is not attributed: it is printed as the translation.
The literal reading
Picture 10 of Puming’s oxherding series: man and ox have both vanished without trace, the moonlight is cold, the ten thousand forms are empty. If anyone asks what this means, the verse answers with a scene, not an address: 野花芳草自叢叢, wild flowers and fragrant grasses growing thick of themselves. The doctrinal work is done by 自: they grow so of themselves, with no one left to be shown them.
The alteration
Two changes ride in on one phrase. First, “the lilies of the field” is the verbatim King James wording of Matthew 6:28, and by 1935 it carried the Sermon on the Mount with it; printed as the rendering of 野花芳草, it imports an unattributed Gospel frame into a Chan verse. Second, Suzuki adds “Behold”: an imperative, an addressed observer. The verse’s grammar runs exactly the other way. 自叢叢 says the flowers flourish of themselves, and the stage’s whole point, announced in its title 雙泯, is that both man and ox have vanished; there is no one left to behold. The same reversal of 自 is documented in this dossier for Kuoan’s Picture IX, where Suzuki inserts wondering questions into the parallel suchness line. The import is small, exact, and doctrinally loaded.