What this concept is saying
*Yìlèi zhōng xíng* (異類中行, “walking freely among other kinds”) is a Chan expression associated with the master Nanquan Puyuan (南泉普願). It points to a mode of realization that no longer inhabits the opposition between Buddha and ordinary being, sacred and common, purity and impurity—and therefore can move unobstructedly through every kind of circumstance.
The phrase is preserved and discussed in the *Congrong lu* (《從容庵錄》, commonly known in English as the *Book of Serenity*). Nanquan says:
「喚作如如早是變也。今時沙門須向異類中行始得。」 “The moment you call it ‘suchness,’ it has already changed. Monastics today must be able to walk among other kinds.”
The first half is indispensable to the second. Nanquan is not simply recommending that practitioners associate with unusual people or imitate animals. He is exposing a subtler attachment: after relinquishing worldly identities, one may construct a spiritual identity around “suchness,” “awakening,” or “Buddhahood.” The living reality is then turned into an object of thought and a badge of attainment. The name may be venerable, but grasping it still divides experience into a knowing subject and a truth supposedly possessed.
“Walking among other kinds” means that realization is no longer protected by remaining on the “Buddha” side of a Buddha–ordinary-being divide. One can enter difference without being imprisoned by difference: meet humans and animals, intelligence and dullness, praise and blame, clarity and confusion, without turning any of them into a fixed essence—or turning oneself into a spiritually superior observer.
This is the setting of Nanquan’s deliberately startling statement:
「三世諸佛不知有，狸奴白牯却知有。」 “The buddhas of the three times do not know that it is; cats and white oxen, on the contrary, know that it is.”
This should not be flattened into the claim that animals possess better doctrine or a higher cognitive faculty than buddhas. The saying overturns the practitioner’s attachment to a special, self-conscious “Buddha-knowledge.” The buddhas do not stand apart from reality and know it as an object called “it.” Cats and oxen evoke life before it has been dressed in spiritual classifications. Yet even this explanation must not become a theory that romanticizes animal instinct. Nanquan is dismantling both sides of the comparison, not installing the ox in the Buddha’s former throne.
That is why the water buffalo appears repeatedly. Nanquan speaks of “raising a water buffalo,” tells Zhaozhou that he will “go to the donor’s house before the mountain and become a water buffalo,” and, when asked where he would go after death, answers, “Down the mountain to become a water buffalo.” The buffalo represents an “other kind”: lowly rather than exalted, earthy rather than abstract, entangled in fields and human labor rather than enthroned in a purified spiritual realm.
To “become a buffalo” is therefore not zoology, a doctrine of literal rebirth specified by the story, or theatrical self-abasement. It is the refusal to reserve awakening for a refined identity. If realization cannot descend the mountain, enter the mud, accept a humble form, and respond within conditions, it remains attached to its own purity.
Nanquan sharpens the point in his instruction to Daowu:
「智不到處作麼生宗……切忌道著。灼然道著即頭角生。」 “At the place intelligence does not reach, how can one establish the essential principle? … Above all, do not speak it out. If you plainly speak it out, horns immediately grow.”
“Intelligence does not reach” does not license irrationality. Chan texts constantly employ language, inquiry, and precise discrimination. What fails here is the attempt of objectifying intelligence to stand outside living reality and capture its source in a formula. Once one claims to have stated it, “horns grow”: one has manufactured a recognizable spiritual creature, another fixed identity among fixed identities.
This gives “other kinds” a productive double edge. Walking among difference without obstruction is *異類中行*. But grasping an identity, including the identity “one who transcends identity,” makes one sprout horns. One is then no longer free among distinctions; one has merely become attached to a new distinction.
The story’s decisive moment is accordingly behavioral. Three days later, Nanquan encounters Daowu and Yunyan sewing. Asked how he carries this matter out, Daowu withdraws into the monks’ hall without answering. Nanquan comments:
「他却是異類中行。」 “He, indeed, is walking among other kinds.”
The point is not that silence is inherently enlightened. A person can remain silent from fear, resentment, incomprehension, or a desire to appear profound. Daowu’s departure matters within the encounter because he does not turn living realization into an object for display. His answer is an uncontrived movement within the situation. Copying that movement would already miss it.
Wansong later locates this saying in a lineage of inquiry: “This discourse on other kinds was first raised by Nanquan, echoed by Guishan, transmitted by Daowu and Yunyan, and now becomes Caoshan’s Three Falls.” Tiantong Zhengjue’s verse adds:
「水牯牛隊裏，異類中行。」 “In the herd of water buffalo, walking among other kinds.”
Placed in relation to “walking above the buddhas and patriarchs” and “traveling the roads of humans and devas,” the line marks a crucial turn. Chan realization must be able both to go beyond inherited religious authority and to return to conditioned life. “Above the buddhas” without “among the buffalo” can become transcendental pride; immersion in ordinary life without awakening is simply habitual samsara. *Yìlèi zhōng xíng* names their nondual integration.
Its place on the path of liberation is therefore late but indispensable. Ethical discipline, concentration, study, and insight loosen greed, aversion, delusion, and attachment to self. But insight itself can become a dwelling place: “I understand emptiness”; “I am beyond ordinary concerns”; “I must preserve this pure state.” Walking among other kinds tests whether the separation between awakening and life has actually ended. It is not a substitute for ethical cultivation or liberating insight. It is their embodiment when there is no longer a sacred self trying to remain uncontaminated by the world.
A walkthrough in everyday life
Imagine an evening commute after a draining day. A crowded train is delayed. Someone watches a loud video without headphones; a child is crying; a colleague sends a message marked “urgent.” You had spent the morning reading about Chan and had briefly felt spacious and clear.
First, distinctions arise. There is noise and quiet, considerate and inconsiderate behavior, fatigue and alertness, work and private time. Walking among other kinds does not require pretending these differences are unreal. Functional discernment remains: the message may require an answer; the child may need help; the loud video may genuinely disturb others. Nonduality is not perceptual or moral blindness.
Next, identity coagulates around the distinctions: “These people are unbearable”; “My colleague has no boundaries”; “I am the one trying to remain mindful.” Now the crowded carriage is populated not merely by different conditions but by supposedly fixed kinds of beings. Most importantly, “the mindful one” has become another kind. Horns have begun to grow.
You notice irritation in the body, the impulse to condemn, and the wish to recover your earlier “spiritual state.” This noticing is not yet *異類中行* if it becomes a platform from which a purified observer supervises an inferior, irritated self. That would preserve the division between a Buddha-part and an ordinary-part inside one person.
Walking among other kinds begins when neither side must be expelled. Fatigue is allowed to be fatigue; irritation is known without being enthroned as truth; the noisy passenger is not reduced to “an inconsiderate person”; the spiritual self is not fed by congratulating itself for tolerance. You remain directly available to the situation.
Perhaps you put the phone away for one breath, then answer the genuinely urgent part of the message and state that the rest will wait until morning. Perhaps you politely ask the passenger to lower the volume. Perhaps you give your seat to the parent holding the child. Perhaps nothing useful can be done, and you simply stand without composing an inner prosecution.
None of those outward actions is, by itself, “walking among other kinds.” The same polite request can come from care, self-righteousness, fear, or concealed aggression. The classical mapping concerns the mode of engagement: entering the concrete difference of the situation without fixing self and others into essences, and without protecting an image of spiritual purity.
Now suppose the passenger reacts rudely. This is where the phrase becomes demanding. “Beyond Buddha and ordinary being” does not mean “incapable of anger,” nor does it mean passively accepting abuse. You may set a firm boundary or seek assistance. But you do not need to convert firmness into hatred, or the other person’s conduct into their permanent identity. Wisdom distinguishes harmful conduct; fixation declares, “This is what that being ultimately is.”
The most common mapping error is to equate the water buffalo with impulsiveness: “I felt angry, so I expressed it naturally—very Zen.” Nanquan’s buffalo is not permission to obey conditioning. Habitual reaction is precisely a lack of freedom within conditions. The buffalo image overturns spiritual self-exaltation; it does not sanctify every urge.
Consider a second, quieter scene: scrolling on a phone before bed. The recommendation system presents outrage, beauty, tragedy, advertising, friends’ achievements, and spiritual instruction in one continuous stream. Here “other kinds” arrive every few seconds, while the system learns which distinctions keep attention captured.
Walking through this scene means seeing each appearance without being drafted into a succession of identities: consumer, judge, rival, savior, expert, victim. You may still distinguish trustworthy information from manipulation and nourishment from compulsion. Indeed, clear discernment may lead you to close the app. What falls away is the fantasy that there is a pure “me” outside the system while every click continues to train it.
Artificial intelligence offers a limited analogy. A model can assign labels, detect patterns, and produce fluent statements about “suchness,” yet linguistic competence is not liberating realization. Conversely, a human being’s unarticulated response is not awakened merely because it escapes verbal description. The analogy helps us notice the difference between naming and embodying, but it cannot establish what awakening is. Neither current brain science nor AI research supplies an agreed empirical equivalent of Chan liberation, and the Chan claim should not be presented as scientifically proven.
In an intimate relationship, the practice becomes still more exacting. One partner says, “You never listen.” The immediate temptation is to classify: one becomes the reasonable person, the other the emotional one. A pseudo-Zen response—“There is no self who listens”—uses emptiness to escape responsibility. Walking among other kinds means entering the other person’s lived world without surrendering discernment: hearing the hurt, examining the concrete pattern, admitting what is true, disputing what is inaccurate without contempt, and changing behavior where change is needed. The “buffalo” here is the willingness to leave the elevated seat of being right and enter the muddy field of repair.
Why contemporary people need it
Contemporary life continuously sorts beings into kinds. Algorithms cluster preferences; workplaces rank performance; political discourse divides allies from enemies; lifestyle culture divides optimized people from failures; spiritual communities can divide the awakened from the unconscious. Some classification is practically necessary. The suffering begins when provisional descriptions harden into identities with supposedly permanent essences.
*Yìlèi zhōng xíng* addresses this without demanding a bland world in which differences disappear. It offers a more difficult freedom: use distinctions without being used by them.
This matters because contemporary spirituality is especially vulnerable to becoming a curated identity. Calmness, minimalism, therapeutic vocabulary, ethical consumption, meditation experience, and knowledge of emptiness can all become ways of saying, “I am not one of those people.” Nanquan sends precisely this refined practitioner into the buffalo herd. The test of insight is not how elevated its vocabulary sounds, but whether it can meet inconvenience, shame, conflict, work, dependency, aging, and death without constructing a separate awakened self.
It also corrects the fantasy that liberation means permanent residence in a special mental state. Pleasant clarity depends on conditions and changes with them. If practice is organized around preserving that state, ordinary life becomes an enemy. Walking among other kinds allows clarity and confusion, success and failure, solitude and crowds to become fields of practice. This does not make all mental states equally wholesome; it means that no state lies outside the possibility of wise response.
Ethically, the teaching supports intimacy without fusion. Because a person is not reduced to a category, compassion can remain open. Because differences are not denied, compassion need not become permissiveness. One can oppose harmful conduct without manufacturing an absolutely evil being; one can care for someone without pretending their actions cause no harm.
In the wider liberation path, this is the movement from insight to unobstructed functioning. Seeing through fixed selfhood loosens the need to defend “my kind.” Compassion permits entry into the lives of other kinds. Ethical discipline keeps that entry from becoming self-indulgence. Wisdom prevents compassion from hardening into a new identity. The result is not passivity but responsive participation—“descending the mountain,” in the imagery surrounding Nanquan’s buffalo.
Common misreadings and clarifications
1. “Other kinds” means only animals. Animals, especially the cat, white ox, and water buffalo, are the text’s concrete images. But the force of the expression is wider: it concerns moving through differentiated forms without becoming trapped in the opposition between Buddha and ordinary being. Reducing it to animal imagery misses its challenge to spiritual identity.
2. Animals possess a superior mystical knowledge. “The buddhas do not know; cats and oxen know” is a Chan reversal, not comparative cognitive science. “Not knowing” here undercuts objectifying possession of truth. “Animal knowing” evokes immediacy, but should not be romanticized into a doctrine that instinct is enlightenment.
3. Transcending distinctions means that right and wrong no longer matter. This confuses freedom from fixation with the loss of discernment. A liberated response must still recognize suffering, deception, exploitation, and appropriate boundaries. If “nonduality” is used to excuse harm, conceal power, or silence the injured, it has become another horned identity.
4. The instruction rejects thought and language. “Where intelligence does not reach” identifies the limit of objectifying thought, not the uselessness of intelligence. Nanquan teaches through language, and Wansong preserves and comments upon that teaching through still more language. Words can orient, question, and expose attachment. What they cannot do is convert living realization into an object securely possessed by the speaker.
5. “Do not speak it” means that silence is always the correct answer. Daowu’s withdrawal is responsive within one encounter. Mechanical silence is imitation. In another situation, explanation, confession, protest, or a direct answer may be the unobstructed response. Chan freedom cannot be reduced to Daowu’s choreography.
6. It means behaving strangely or breaking conventions. Eccentricity readily becomes a performance of being beyond ordinary rules. That is still identity-making. Nothing in *異類中行* exempts a practitioner from consequences or ethical responsibility. Often the least theatrical act—washing a dish, apologizing, answering carefully, keeping a promise—is the truer descent into the herd.
7. It means suppressing one’s humanity to become buffalo-like. The buffalo is not an ideal of dullness. Nanquan’s imagery punctures attachment to refinement and rank. Suppressing emotion, intellect, or personality merely creates a different spiritual costume.
8. It is the same as remaining immersed in ordinary habits. Ordinary compulsion moves within conditions because it cannot do otherwise. *Yìlèi zhōng xíng* moves within conditions without being bound by the identities generated there. Outwardly the two may look similar; inwardly one is driven by grasping, while the other expresses non-abiding discernment and compassion.
9. It is an introductory instruction requiring no prior cultivation. Its imagery is accessible, but its demand is radical. Without ethical training, meditative stability, and insight into attachment, “beyond Buddha and ordinary being” can become a flattering excuse for remaining unchanged. The expression points to realization embodied after spiritual dualism has been penetrated; it does not cancel the path that makes such embodiment possible.
The deepest question posed by *異類中行* is therefore not, “Can I explain nonduality?” It is: when life places me among people, feelings, duties, and conditions that do not fit my preferred identity, must I retreat to the pure side of a division—or can wisdom enter the difference completely, act appropriately, and leave no fixed self behind?
Nanquan’s answer is not another definition to possess. It is the water buffalo going down the mountain.