Stages of the True Field, 12 Day of Summer, 525 M.E. (Betelgeuse): Although the midweek forecast had a 40% chance of rain for today, the skies cleared up enough overnight that I was able to get out to the Chattahoochee and walk a Harrison. Along the way, on the connecting stretch between the Cochran Shoals and Sope Creek areas, I met the gal above. She stayed close to the trail and didn't bolt away from me - I suspect she had a faun nesting somewhere nearby and was either being protective of her young or using herself as a decoy to distract me. We exchanged pleasantries and I went on my separate way, leaving her there.

The old shape-shifting fox-man (to return to that long koan) responded to the question, "Is an enlightened person subject to cause and effect or not?," with the Theravada answer, "An enlightened person does not fall into cause and effect," and was reborn as a fox for five hundred lives.

The Zen teacher Baizhang avoided a yes-or-no answer to the question with the Mahayana response, “An enlightened person does not ignore cause and effect.”

The term Mahayana is from the Sanskrit term for "greater vehicle" and some Mahayana Buddhists call the Theraveda schools Hinayana, or "lesser vehicle." I don't like the term "Hinayana" both because it sounds derogatory and also because it's relativistic (lesser only in regard to the greater, greater only in regard to the lesser).

After hearing Baizhang's Mahayana answer, the old man was supposedly released from rebirth in the fox’s body.

But wait, there's still more (I told you it's a long koan) -  after the funeral for the fox's body, Baizhang explained the whole story to the monastics. But a clever monk, Huangbo (there's always one in the crowd), asked him, “The man from ancient times gave a mistaken answer, and he was reborn as a fox for five hundred lives. What would have happened if he gave the correct answer?"

Baizhang said, “Come up close and I’ll tell you.” Huangbo went up and slapped Baizhang across the face. Baizhang clapped his hands, laughed and said, “I thought I was the red-bearded barbarian, but here’s a guy who is even more the red-bearded barbarian.“

Those wacky Chinese patriarchs, always whacking each other when they're not tweaking noses. For the record, Baizhang had his nose painfully tweaked by his teacher and then had his face slapped by a student, and that's just in two koans. The whole collection of koans reads at times like a Three Stooges script. "Oh, a wise guy! (Bonk!) (Bink!) (Konk!)" The Chinese obviously had a different attitude toward corporeal punishment than we do today (times change). I once heard American Zen teacher John Daido Loori say he had to establish a rule at his monastery that striking the teacher was NOT ever a correct answer to a koan. 

The red-bearded barbarian (Barbarosa) is a reference to the revered Indian patriarch Bodhidharma, the man who allegedly first brought the Mahayana to China. According to legend, Bodhidharma had red hair and blue eyes, quite the ethnic contrast to the uniformly dark-haired Chinese. Also, the Chinese considered everybody not from China to be barbarians (redheaded women buck like goats). So Baizhang is basically saying, "I thought I was the enlightened one here, but here's a guy who's even more enlightened than me," because Huangbo alone saw through how ridiculous the whole old priest/fox story was.