Mumonkan Case 8 — Keichū Makes Carts | Zen Teishō by Sensei Michael

All of us, from time to time, make the same basic mistake. We confuse foreground and background. We take something that is secondary and make it primary, and we take something that is alive and immediate and push it off to the side in favor of something that has been dead for some time.

In our lives we have our phenomenological experience. We can lift a glass to our lips and actually taste the wine beyond any idea of it. We hear a sound directly. We see a face. We feel the space we’re sitting in. But almost immediately we begin trying to do something with that experience. We start breaking it down and trying to conceptualize it, comparing it against other experiences, explaining it to ourselves, explaining it to somebody else, and memorializing it.

And over time it becomes very easy for us to get turned around and begin to think that the labels, the judgments, the context, and the story we are telling ourselves matter more than the experience itself. So we take the story and put it in the foreground, and the actual experience fades so far into the background that we lose touch with it entirely.

I’m not saying that Zen practice is about eliminating foreground and background. Maybe we move conceptually past those ideas, but it’s really about appreciating the whole of it and not highlighting one to the detriment of the other. It’s not about rejecting thought or clinging to raw sensation. Both thinking and experience need to be present.

The art of real practice-enlightenment is learning to step back just enough to witness both—how they interplay, how they react—without getting caught up in the story and without becoming intoxicated by either the experience itself or the narrative we attach to it. It’s about patiently observing what’s happening and looking for the gap where we can step in and respond, where suffering can be met and transformed through our active engagement.

And that’s not easy. We say things like this very easily. Living it is another matter altogether.

There’s a case in the Mumonkan that points directly at this problem. It’s the eighth case, although depending on the edition it may be numbered differently. In any event, it’s extremely short and surprisingly tricky. It’s called Keichū Makes Carts. I can’t remember the last time I spoke about it at length, but I want to sit with it more carefully today.

The case reads:

Master Gettan asked a monk,
“Keichū made a hundred carts.
If he took off both wheels and removed the axle,
what would he make clear about the cart?”

That’s it. There’s no response from the monk. Just the question, hanging there. And almost immediately, most of us are already off and running.

We picture a cart in our mind’s eye. We imagine the wheels coming off, the axle being removed, and we start trying to reason it out. And in doing that, something subtle but very important happens. Our attention shifts entirely into the discursive realm, into the theoretical. We’ve left what’s actually present and entered a world of mental manipulation.

And that move itself is exactly what the case is pointing at. But it’s difficult to see, because we try to use conceptual thinking to point out a conceptual trap.

Keichū wasn’t just a made-up figure. He’s traditionally regarded as a master craftsman in early China, closely associated with the invention or refinement of carts. There’s an appeal to authority built right into the case. If you were a young Chinese student encountering this, you’d recognize the name immediately. This would make you sit up a little straighter.

“A master made this. This must be important. This must mean something.”

And then Gettan asks: if the master removes the wheels and removes the axle, what is made clear about the cart? You can feel how strong the pull is to answer this conceptually, to arrive at some clever formulation or philosophical insight. But the moment we do that, we’ve already overshot the mark.

When people come to see me in dokusan for the first time, one of the things I often do is very simple. I gesture to the table beside me and point to the bell, and I say, “That’s a bell.” And it’s remarkable to watch what happens.

The moment I give the explanation, people look at the bell. And the moment I say, “That’s a bell,” they look right back at me. The bell disappears. The object that was present a moment ago is replaced by an idea. It becomes something they know about rather than something they are actually encountering. The bell becomes dead.

If I go further and say it’s a good bell or a bad bell, a loud bell or a quiet bell, those judgments feel solid—especially coming from someone who rings a lot of bells. They feel substantial. And then we do what we always do: we take those ideas and overlay them onto reality itself, and over time it becomes very easy to mistake them for what’s actually there.

And of course this doesn’t just happen with bells. It happens with cushions, with teachers, with practitioners, with spouses, with children, with world events. That’s a good practitioner. That’s a bad practitioner. That person gets it. That person never will. Watch what happens in your own mind the moment those labels appear. Color enters. Tension enters. Distance enters. Something living becomes fixed.

You can see this very clearly in everyday life. Maybe you’re talking with someone, enjoying their company, feeling at ease. Maybe you meet them at a bar (well, not you, Hōen—you stand outside and say hi as they’re coming in). You’re having a good time, getting to know one another, and then at some point they say, “By the way, I’m a Trump supporter.”

For a lot of people, that’s it. The curtain comes down. But if you lift the curtain back up and peek underneath, what actually changed? The face is the same. They’re probably sitting in the chair the same way they were before, unless you swung at them. What’s being manipulated? It isn’t the person. It’s the story.

Notice this carefully: nothing changed in the field of experience. Only an interpretive overlay snapped into place.

This is exactly where Gettan’s question is aimed.

If you remove the wheels and remove the axle, what is made clear about the cart? We’re tempted to say, “There is no cart,” or “That’s a mess of a cart,” or perhaps we imagine it scraping along the ground. Maybe you get clever and say the cart is just a mental construct. Or maybe a little wiser and say it only exists through conditions.

There’s truth in some of that. But it remains safely in the realm of explanation. The case isn’t asking you to negate the cart. It’s asking you to see how cart-ness itself is functioning. Without “wheels” and “axle”, there’s nothing to “roll”, nothing to “carry”, nothing to do its “job”. What fails isn’t existence. What fails is our conceptual ideal of function.

That’s difficult. It’s meant to be difficult.

There’s a verse associated with the case:

Where the active wheel revolves,
even a master fails.
It moves in four directions:
above and below, south and north, east and west.

This isn’t talking about a wheel as an object. It’s talking about activity. The moment you grasp it, define it, or try to hold it still, you’ve already stopped it. Even a master fails there. If you conjure a master, you’ve already created a novice.

This is where people get confused and think the solution is simply to “be present.” Just let things be what they are. That kind of quietism isn’t it either. Be careful—because the moment you think you’ve got presence, you’ve already put the axle back in.

Presence isn’t something you can possess. It isn’t a stable state you can stand on as long as you cling to it as an idea. It has to move. It has to function. It appears in all directions at once. It collapses the barriers between self and other, practice and life.

Mumon’s commentary is very short. He says, “If you can realize this at once, your eye will be like a shooting star and your spiritual activity like catching lightning.” There’s nowhere you can’t tread, because all the distance and separation you thought were there were built out of conceptual divisions. When those fall away, nothing is excluded.

Things function freely just as they are. The wheel moves in all four directions—above and below, south and north. Reality doesn’t wait for our timing to change.

If you’re holding onto the bell or the wheel as a fixed object, you’re stuck in one direction. If you’re holding onto someone as a “Trump supporter” or a “liberal,” you’ve nailed the wheel to the floor. When the cart of your expectations falls apart, your ability to actually encounter what’s here becomes real.

You can stop defending a position, stop chasing things around in the world of imagination, and meet the movement itself.

But in the end, Gettan’s question still remains. If Keichū removes the wheels and removes the axle—what if he praises the cart? What if he curses the cart? What does that make clear about the cart? What does it make clear about your life?

It doesn’t answer the question for you. It’s not meant to. Only you can do that.

You can’t think this through with your head. It won’t work. You’re going to have to meet it directly. Each of you has to work out your salvation with your own hands.

Get to work and see.