一色功

The phrase 一色功 comes, in the historical record, from a single source: Hongzhi Zhengjue's (宏智禪師, 1091–1157) Extensive Record (《宏智禪師廣錄》, T2001). Hongzhi is the formative figure of Caodong/Sōtō Chan (曹洞宗) and the teacher best known for *mòzhào chán* (默照禪), "silent illumination." That stylistic background matters, because every line we have on 一色功 has the texture of a practitioner speaking from inside a long, quiet practice, not a philosopher building a system. The four word-shapes he uses for it — 一色功, 大功一色, 轉一色功, 一色功勳 — are not redundant. They are four cuts into the same vein.

So what is 一色功, and why does Hongzhi insist it must be "turned through" (轉過) and never "abided in" (居)?

一、What this concept is actually saying

1.1 The "one color" (一色) is not about monochrome

The first and most common misreading is to take *color* (色) in the visual sense. In Chan (and in Buddhist usage generally), 色 at this register does not mean "the color red" or "the color of your shirt." It means, in shorthand, everything that presents itself as differentiated phenomenal appearance — anything that can show up as "this rather than that." A bowl of soup has "color" in this sense as much as a sunset does. A memory has color. A judgment has color.

一色, then, is not "everything looks the same hue," but rather: a state in which differentiation has been so thoroughly erased that no "this vs. that" can be located anywhere. Subject and object have lost their seam. Inside and outside no longer have a border. "Past" and "present" no longer function as a contrast pair. As Hongzhi answers when asked what *大功一色* is: *"全超無影跡, 不墮古今機"* — "Totally beyond any traceable mark, not falling into the mechanism of past and present" (《宏智禪師廣錄》T2001).

This is the felt sense that many practitioners come across — sometimes spontaneously, sometimes after long sitting — when the conceptual grid suddenly drops: the chirping of a bird, the smell of incense, the weight of the body, and the one who notices them are no longer three things. The "color" of experience has folded into itself, and there is no edge between parts of it.

1.2 The 功 (function / working) and why it has four word-shapes

Hongzhi uses four forms, each with a slightly different emphasis. Working them out keeps the term precise:

- 一色功 — "the *working* of one color." The Chinese 功 here is *function* or *operation*, not "merit." It refers to what the mind does, the activity itself, when it has entered this undifferentiated field. This is the base form. - 大功一色 — "the *great* functioning, [which is] one color." The 大 (great) emphasizes that this is not a minor adjustment but a major turning in the path. The paired answer is *"fully beyond traceable marks, not falling into ancient-or-modern mechanism."* - 一色功勳 — "the *merits / trace-as-record* of one-color functioning." Here 勳 shifts the emphasis: it points to the trace of the working — the way the practitioner looks back at it, the way it leaves a stain on identity even after the experience. *"玉關未透, 正迷一色功勳"* — "before passing through the jade-barrier, [one] is precisely confused by the merits of one-color functioning." (T2001) - 轉一色功 — "turning through the one-color functioning." The 轉 is the verb that gives the whole teaching its teeth. It must be turned through. *"轉一色功後看: 絕滲漏, 透聲色, 無處所, 沒蹤跡"* — *"After turning through one-color functioning, look: no leakage, through sound and form, nowhere, trace gone."* (T2001)

The single decisive line that holds all four together is the couplet:

一色是須轉, 大功不我居。 *"One color must be turned through; the great functioning does not abide in us."*

*(《宏智禪師廣錄》T2001, classical rendering preserved.)*

That couplet is the whole teaching in two lines.

1.3 What is being "turned"?

The verb 轉 here is not "rotate" in the spatial sense. In Chan grammar, 轉 is penetrate past, move through, leave on the other side of. A barrier is 轉過 — passed. A doubt is 轉得 — worked through and gone.

So *"one color must be turned through"* means: the experience of undifferentiated wholeness is a threshold, not a destination. You do not get to live there. If you settle into it and call it home, you have become — exactly — the "person in the snow hut" (雪屋人) that Hongzhi names:

*"雪屋人迷一色功"* — *"The person in the snow hut is bewildered by the functioning of one color."* (T2001)

A snow hut is white all the way through. No tracks, no footprints, no direction. Beautiful. Also: no exit.

1.4 What is left after the turning?

You cannot judge whether you have really "turned" by whether you still feel undifferentiated. Hongzhi is precise about what *does* remain — and it is not "nothing":

- 惺惺歷歷 — "wakeful and lucid" (T2001 / 46674). Clear, alert, not dazed. - 有而不有, 情塵豁盡而獨靈 — "have, yet do not have; emotional dust exhausted, yet alone-spiritual" (T2001 / 46639). The dust of affect and conceptual overlay has been cleared, but a singular lucidity remains. - 無而不無, 妙應差殊而不忒 — "non-have, yet do not non-have; wondrous responding to differences without fault" (T2001). Difference itself returns — and is responded to *wondrously* and *without fault*. - 絕滲漏, 透聲色, 無處所, 沒蹤跡 — "no leakage; through sound and form; no location; trace gone" (T2001). Not "absent from sound and form," but through them. - 見處不得別立色, 緣全色是見 — "at seeing one must not separately posit a color, because the entire color is the seeing itself" — and the same for sound, smell, taste, touch, dharma. (T2001 / 46692) - 性自平等, 無平等者 — "nature self-equal; no one who equalizes." (T2001) Equality is no one's possession.

The passage is also careful — through the imagery of 文殊 (Mañjuśrī) and 普賢 (Samantabhadra) — to keep the in-and-out movement alive:

*"文殊於無差別智, 示有差別身; 普賢於有差別境, 入無差別定."* "Mañjuśrī, by the wisdom of non-differentiation, manifests a differentiated body; Samantabhadra, in a differentiated realm, enters the samādhi of non-differentiation." (T2001 / 46692)

That pair is Chan shorthand for the bodhisattva who swings *into* form from formless wisdom, and the bodhisattva who swings *into* formless samādhi from amidst differentiated reality. The two move through each other. Neither settles.

And yet — this is the punch — even while they swing, *"若只在正偏宛轉中行履, 未到吾家超脫處"* — *"If you are only treading along in the twist-and-return of correct-and-skewed, you have not yet arrived at our family's place of transcendence."* (T2001 / 46692). The very ability to swing in-and-out is, itself, still a place. It too must be let go.

So 一色功 is not a destination, and the move *past* it is not a destination either. It's a way of speaking that refuses to let any state of mind be the home.

1.5 Where it sits in the wider map of the path

If you place this on the larger map of Buddhist terms, 一色功 lives in a specific neighborhood. It is downstream of the breakthrough to *非思量* (the ungraspable, "beyond thought-measuring") that the Platform Sutra (《六祖壇經》) describes as the entry into Chan. It is the place where the practitioner, having realized there is no seer behind the seeing, can sometimes get stuck thinking they have "arrived" — at one taste, one color, one quiet. Above it lies what Hongzhi's lineage often calls 混融 (thorough interpenetration) and what the broader Chan tradition names in phrases like *"身心脱落"* (shēn xīn tuō luò — body-mind dropped off), the more thoroughgoing turning where even "one color" is no longer needed as a marker. And the warning 一色功 carries is essentially the same warning Linji (臨濟義玄) carries when he says you cannot abide at *the emptiness-school* (有空) — and the same warning Dōgen (道元) carries when he says, in the *Shōbōgenzō*, that sitting is not about "entering some special state."

In other words: the dharma that there is no-self is itself, sometimes, the new self. 一色功 is what Chan calls that moment.

二、Walk-through: 一色功 in contemporary life

Let's walk this teaching through with the kind of scenes contemporary readers actually live in. I'll keep the mapping strict to Hongzhi's language: 差別 (differentiation) ↔ 無差別 (non-differentiation), 功 (the working itself), 功勳 (the trace of the working, the *I did it*), 轉過 (turning through), 雪屋 (the snow hut).

2.1 The "snow hut" on a meditation cushion

You have been sitting. The breath has quieted. The narrative voice that usually narrates your life — *"am I doing this right, did I forget to call my mother, am I wasting my morning"* — has dropped. There is just the sound of traffic through the window and the cool felt of the cushion under your legs. Subject and object merge; the cushion is also you; the sound is also you. No edge.

一色 has shown up. For a moment, or for a week, it feels complete. This is what Hongzhi calls 大功一色 — the *great functioning*. It is also a real, important moment in the path. Many classical teachers will tell you to *honor it.*

But there is a danger, and the danger has a very particular texture. After a while, you start to *prefer* this state. You start protecting it. You avoid loud cafés because they might "break" the one-color. You resent a friend who disturbs your after-sitting peace. You tell people you've "found it." You begin to recognize the one-color state as a *possession*. That recognition is 功勳 — the trace of the working. Hongzhi's exact phrase for it: *"雪屋人迷一色功勳"* — the person in the snow hut, bewildered by the merit-trace of one-color functioning.

The teaching here is not "don't have the experience." It is: do not let the experience become a place you live in. 轉一色功 — turn through it. Keep moving.

A practical diagnostic that maps exactly onto Hongzhi's criteria: if your "non-differentiation" makes you *less able to differentiate when differentiation is needed* — say, you can no longer tell a manipulative email from a sincere one, you can no longer feel the difference between a friend who is tired and a friend who is distant — you are 雪屋. You are abiding in the field. The 功 has become a 勳.

2.2 The "snow hut" outside the cushion, on a Tuesday

The same structure appears *off* the cushion, in people who have had a year or two of therapy, a recovery program, a meditation retreat, a psychedelic-assisted experience, or a long illness. At some point the noise dropped. The constant commentary ("am I OK, am I not OK, is this better or worse") stopped. They are just here. They are not trying to be.

Fine — up to a point. The point at which it becomes 一色功-as-obstacle is the point at which "I have no preferences anymore" gets said in a voice that doesn't know it has them. It is the partner who cannot say *no*, and calls it *non-attachment.* It is the friend who explains a slight of theirs away with "*everything is just one — I don't really do preferences anymore.*" It is the manager who can't reprimand a clearly failing employee, and writes the absence of feedback off as "presence."

The classical phrase that fits this moment is in the field of 古今機 — the "mechanism of past and present." What does that mean here? It means the operating distinction between *this is a time to act precisely* and *this is a time to refrain*, between *this person is harming me* and *this is a passing mood*, has been globally shut down. The practitioner has, in trying to escape the machinery of preferences, shut down 古今機 itself — and Hongzhi's answer for the 大功一色 is precisely *"不墮古今機."* Do not fall out of the machinery of past and present. Don't turn off the very clock you were trying to escape.

The turn — 轉過 — is not "start differentiating again, go back to the world of preferences." It is: "妙應差殊而不忒" — *respond wondrously and without fault to differences as they actually come.* The discriminated, the differentiated, returns. You don't drown it out. You don't romanticize it either. You respond.

A contemporary way to put it: 妙應差殊而不忒 is what skilled clinicians, good listeners, careful parents, and seasoned engineers do without thinking. The discrimination is intact; the *I who is identified with having-or-not-having the discrimination* has been let down.

2.3 The "功勳" that becomes an identity

The trap that is most accessible to contemporary readers is the *merit-trace* (功勳) version, because contemporary spirituality is saturated with it. You will recognize it by:

- In meditation circles: people who tell you quietly, by the third retreat, that they "rest in the source," and who use any disruption as evidence they have "gone beyond." - In therapeutic circles: people who have integrated a calm, well-differentiated self-narrative, and who use it as a small fortified self against others. - In professional circles: people who have learned to "let go of outcomes" and use it to avoid accountability. - In activist or religious circles: people who have realized "no-self" and use it to escape legitimate criticism.

All of these have a one-color moment as their original ground. All of them have turned that ground into a 功勳 — a trace-as-merit, a credential. Hongzhi's phrase *"正迷一色功勳"* (T2001) is, if anything, *more* pertinent now than when it was written, because the room full of people who are quietly "beyond" their preferences is much larger than it was in twelfth-century China.

The 轉 — the turning through — is not made by attacking the "beyond," by going back to *not*-beyond, by returning to the noisy self. It is made by *being used by the world precisely.* When your undoing of the snow hut happens in the act of being useful to someone else's need, with no narrative credit taken — that is 轉一色功後看 in working clothes.

2.4 全色是見 / 全聲是聞 — the body is not bypassed

Modern readers sometimes read "non-differentiation" as an invitation to step out of the sensory. Hongzhi is adamant: the turn happens precisely through the senses, not around them.

*"見處不得別立色, 緣全色是見; 聞處不得別立聲, 緣全聲是聞. 香、味、觸、法亦復如是."* (T2001 / 46692)

Translation: "At seeing, one cannot separately posit a color, because the entire color is the seeing; at hearing, one cannot separately posit a sound, because the entire sound is the hearing. The same applies for smell, taste, touch, and dharma."

In contemporary terms: the screen of your phone at the bus stop is not a representation of a perception; it is the perception itself — the whole color is the seeing. The notification chime is not a thing-then-a-hearing-of-the-thing; the entire sound is the hearing. You do not have to add a layer of "experiencing-experience" above the screen or the chime. The discrimination is present, the differentiation is present, *the one who would stand outside both is not.*

The 妙應 (wondrous response) lives here. When a friend who is grieving puts their face in their hands, and you simply sit — that sitting is 全色是見: the entire color of their grief is, at that moment, the same as your seeing. There is no "I am witnessing your pain" layered above the seeing. There is just the seeing, *and it responds*.

If, at that moment, somewhere inside, the line *"I am being a wonderful friend right now"* forms — that line is the 功勳 reasserting itself. The snow hut has crept back.

2.5 兼中至 / 兼中到 — "arrive in the middle of both, reach the middle of both"

These are Caodong terms, and Hongzhi invokes them as the language for the after-the-turn movement:

*"絕滲漏, 透聲色, 無處所, 沒蹤跡... 兼中至, 兼中到."* (T2001 / 46664)

一色 is "one." 兼中 is "both-and." 兼中至/到 is arrive-in / reach the middle of both — neither the one nor the many; neither undifferentiated formlessness nor rigid differentiation. The "both" is lived together; the "middle" is not a third place between them but the very place where neither loses the other.

In life: this is the parent who can hold a tantrumming child and a tantrumming elder in the same afternoon and be neither engulfed by them nor retreating from them. The mind that responds is *not in one color, and not fractured either.* That's 兼中至 — a hard thing to point at; a thing you recognize when it's happening and that becomes invisible when you try to catch it.

2.6 A diagnostic — five questions to ask when 一色 might be your stop

Pulling Hongzhi's criteria into a check that is honest in modern situations:

1. Does my equanimity come with a biography I tell? ("I once had an experience of...") If yes, the 功 has become 功勳. Make the move again. 2. When something small and differentiating is required of me, can I deliver it cleanly? Picking the right gift, refusing the second drink, replying carefully to a precise question — if these now feel impossible because "I don't do preferences," I'm in the snow hut. 3. Has my non-differentiation made me harder to befriend? Honest friends are people who can tell me from the weather. If mine can't tell me from the weather, my 無差別 is operating as a kind of 一色, just not as wisdom. 4. Is there still a "wakeful and lucid" (惺惺歷歷)? Hongzhi's criterion. If the field is white and quiet *and* alert, good. If it is white and quiet *and* dull, I have been resting instead of turning. The 一色 that retains alert-clarity is not the danger. The one that doesn't is. 5. Has any of this become an "I" who has it? When the snow-hut practitioner is asked what they are, they say it: *"I am someone who abides beyond all preferences."* That pronouncement is the 功勳 openly displayed. Hongzhi's *"大功不我居"* — the great functioning does not abide in me — is precisely the cure: the working has nowhere to settle because there is no "me" to settle it in.

三、Why contemporary people particularly need this teaching

3.1 We have a much louder and more sophisticated "功勳" environment than twelfth-century China did

In the twelfth century, the merit-economy of awakening was relatively simple: meditation, monastic life, occasional public exchange with a teacher. The merits (勳) that might gather around a breakthrough were mostly vetted inside a monastery.

In our moment, the merit-economy is the internet. Breakthroughs are described on Instagram, withdrawal-from-the-world is a Substack brand, "I have no preferences anymore" is a Twitter bio, equanimity is a product category on a wellness app. The natural 功 — the actual functioning — and the inevitable 功勳 — the trace-as-possession-of-that-functioning — are produced and amplified at the same rate.

Hongzhi's exact line — *"玉關未透, 正迷一色功勳"* — *"before passing through the jade-barrier, [one] is precisely confused by the merits of one-color functioning"* — now applies to a vastly larger population of people who have had genuine moments of one-color awakening, sometimes through meditation, sometimes through therapy, sometimes through psychedelics or grief, and who have wrapped those moments into a personal brand and a credential before they have done the 轉 — the actual *turn through*.

The teaching 一色功 is, in our moment, a kind of restraint. It says: *you do not get to keep this as a thing you have.*

3.2 The modern default is to confuse anesthetic with 一色

There is a quiet substitution contemporary life performs. Anesthetic states — emotional flatness, dissociation, disconnection, post-traumatic shutdown, intoxication — *look* a lot like 一色功 when the practitioner first encounters them.

A person leaves a high-pressure career. They sleep better. The chronic anxiety lifts. The world becomes a slightly softer place. "Nothing really bothers me anymore," they say. Their friends, at first, are glad.

But this can be a form of 雪屋. It can be the snow hut entered *from outside* — by lifestyle, by depression, by numbing — rather than *from inside*, by practice. The teaching 一色功 gives a criterion for sorting these: is there still 惺惺歷歷? Is there the wakeful-lucid that Hongzhi names? Is there 妙應差殊而不忒 — a wondrous response to differences that doesn't fault?

Anesthetic flatness generally has no alert-vitality behind it. It usually fails the *妙應* test. There may be peace, but it is the peace of disconnection, not the peace of clarity. One should not mistake a numbing for the working.

(This is one of the rare places where contemporary clinical concepts — dissociation, emotional blunting, anhedonic flatness — *touch* this teaching from the side, but it is critical to say clearly that these clinical concepts and this Chan concept are not the same thing and are not interchangeable. Hongzhi's 一色功 is not a description of mental illness; it is a description of a stage of awakening that certain *features* of some mental illnesses can superficially resemble. The mapping is partial and must not be pressed.)

3.3 The 人類紀 / the algorithmic moment makes 差別 (differentiation) the moral problem

Contemporary readers live in a moment when **patterns, profiles, and category-systems have multiplied to a degree that threatens the human being's capacity to *respond precisely*.** Algorithms slice us into types; newsfeeds flatten the world into a stream; engagement metrics reward the in-group, the predictable, the same. The differentiation that matters most right now — to another concrete person, in this concrete situation — is precisely the one that the system conspires to erase.

Hongzhi's *否* — his great *no* — to settling in 一色功, and his insistence that 妙應差殊而不忒 is the after-the-turn state, is also a teaching that one's discrimination has to be cutting. Not global; not absolute; not identity-bound; but precise. When the algorithmic environment teaches you to merge everyone's face into a "category," 一色功 teaches the opposite: do not let your non-differentiation kill your responsiveness. The past-and-present clock (古今機) is the very clock you must not stop.

3.4 The neuroscience analog (and its limit)

A contemporary parallel that is genuinely suggestive but must be flagged as analogy:

In meditation research, certain long-term practitioners show *decreased activity in the default mode network* during attention to the breath or to present experience — what one might call the "narrative self and its story-making machinery" quieting. At the same time, attentional *alertness* networks remain active or even relatively stronger.

This is a useful analog for 惺惺歷歷. Quiet on the storyline, awake on the alertness. It is also directly an analog for Hongzhi's diagnostic of *which* kind of 一色 you are in: the one with the lucidity intact (real 大功一色) versus the one with the lucidity dulled (the snow hut on the way to 迷). It is *not*, however, the same thing — neuroscience does not adjudicate Buddhist claims about *the nature of one-color functioning*, and there is a long unresolved scholarly question about what the brain's quieting of self-referential processing *means* about an awakened mind. The mapping is suggestive; it does not prove the dharma, and many neuroscientists of meditation would say so themselves.

四、Common misreadings — and how Hongzhi's text pulls them apart

4.1 "一色 is the goal"

The single biggest misreading. In some contemporary Buddhist-adjacent circles, "resting in oneness" or "abiding in the one taste" is offered as the final achievement. Hongzhi's canonical answer to what *大功一色* is — *"全超無影迹, 不墮古今機"* — is paired, never separate, with the warning *"大功不我居."* The great one-color does not abide in us. Any teaching that offers 一色 as a place to *rest* is, on Hongzhi's own account, the snow-hut teaching.

4.2 "一色 is the same as 本來面目 / 'original face'"

It is not. (Note: original-face itself is a famously difficult Chan concept, and — as Hongzhi knows — even *it* must not be made a 勳.) The 一色 moment is a *functioning* (功) — an activity — that arises and passes through. The "original face," where the term is used carefully, names something the activity is *not the same as*. 一色 is on the *path*; it is one of the great turnings. The classic Chan line (often loosely attributed to Zhaozhou Congshen, 趙州從諗, 778–897) — *"the eighty-four thousand dharma-gates are only for the sake of meeting the mind; people today just take the meeting-point as the mind"* — is doing essentially the same work Hongzhi is doing here. The 一色 that has been met is not the mind that meets it. (I'd add: this line is widely cited in Chan literature but the user should treat the precise wording, as always, as needing to be checked in a source text rather than relying on a paraphrase.)

4.3 "The turn-through is just 'go back to dualism'"

It is not "back to dualism." Hongzhi explicitly refuses this. *"有而不有... 無而不無... 妙應差殊而不忒"* — the differentiated world returns, but it does so without the *I that owns the differentiation or the non-differentiation.* A phrase he uses that is worth keeping: 不墮第二念 — "does not fall into a second thought." The differentiation doesn't require a second thought about the non-differentiation. It doesn't require a reaffirmation; it just is, and is responded to, *without the "and this is the post-undifferentiated differentiated"* narrative running above it.

4.4 "If I haven't had a 一色 moment, I can't practice this teaching"

You can. The teaching 一色功 *as a teaching* works for anyone with a subtle tendency to mistake a state — calm, equanimity, emptiness-experience, "I am not the character," non-judgment, presence — for *a thing they have*. The pattern of mistaking a functioning for a possession is one of the most universal psychological traps. The Chan-specific name for the state being mistaken is 一色功, but the diagnostic discipline — *do not let any state settle into a possession, especially a state of not-having-possessions* — is general.

4.5 "一色功 is about not doing anything"

Wrong. The post-turn description — *"絕滲漏, 透聲色, 無處所, 沒蹤跡"* — describes the *functioning* of a person who is unimpaired in discrimination, not a person who has stopped moving. *"妙應差殊而不忒"* describes precise wondrously-accurate responding. The "not doing" reading comes from confusing 一色功 itself, the threshold, with the *after-the-turn* state. The threshold is white and quiet; the after-state is white-and-quiet *and also* precisely responsive. They are not the same place.

4.6 Mistaking 惺惺歷歷 for energy / enthusiasm

Hongzhi's *alert-and-lucid* is not emotional brightness. It is closer to what a clear mechanic has when the engine is off, the hood is up, and they are looking calmly. The world is fully there; the eye is fully awake; no narrative runs. Confusing this for feeling-good, for inspiration, for rising-qi enthusiasm is its own way of *putting the 勳 back in*. 真惺惺 is the waking of a not-narrating attention; the rest is mood.

4.7 "This teaching makes you a 'beyond-it' person"

The thing it makes of you, if anything, is a person who has stopped trying to be anything in particular, including beyond-it. *大功不我居* — the great functioning does not abide in us. There isn't a person — there is the responding. The teaching dissolves its own 功勳.

五、Closing — what 一色功 asks a contemporary person

A small reading of what Hongzhi is *doing*, textually, in raising 一色功:

He is taking one of the most beautiful, real moments of the contemplative path — the moment when everything-there-is answers as one — and refusing to let it be a home. He is consistent with his own *默照* tradition: in silent illumination, the silence is not emptiness, and the illumination is not something seen. So too, the 一色 is not emptiness, the 功 is not something done. *Both are left to fall through the gate.* The gate is the 玉關 (jade-barrier). If you have come back from a great integration of self, a profound grief, a serious practice experience, and you find yourself using phrases like "I rest in the one taste now" or "I have no preferences" or simply *feel* subtly armored against the world — the diagnosis Hongzhi offers is the same: you are 雪屋 / 玉關未透 / 正迷一色功勳. The cure is not a return to small mind. The cure is 轉 — *turning through* — *without setting up a camp on the other side either.*

This is one of the most honest pieces of writing Chan Buddhism produced. It insists on three things at once:

1. The one-color awakening is real and important — not to be missed, not to be skipped, a "great" functioning (大功). 2. It cannot be where you live — 雪屋人, 迷着 功勳, not yet through the gate. 3. What comes after the turn has its own completeness — 惺惺歷歷, 妙應差殊而不忒, 全色是見 全聲是聞, 不墮第二念.

If you keep all three together, the phrase 一色功 works as it was meant to. If you keep only the first — 一色 as resting-place — you are exactly the person the teaching is addressed to.

Source notes

- All quotations are from 《宏智禪師廣錄》(Hongzhi Zhengjue's *Extensive Record*), Taishō no. T2001, citing the chunk identifiers given in the source material. - Hongzhi Zhengjue (宏智禪師, 1091–1157) is the major figure of Caodong/Sōtō Chan (曹洞宗) and principal exponent of 默照禪 (*mòzhào chán*, "silent illumination"). His dates and lineage are well-established; the canonical text identifier T2001 is in the Taishō Tripiṭaka vol. 48. - The widely-cited Chan line about taking the meeting-point as the mind and the Zhaozhou reference are loose paraphrases of widely-circulated Chan material rather than direct quotations from 《宏智禪師廣錄》; readers should treat the precise wording as in need of source-verification rather than relying on the paraphrase above.