What This Concept Is About
In classical Chinese Buddhism the most familiar way to describe the human situation is a pair: 凡夫 (pṛthagjana — "ordinary being," one still caught in ignorance) and 聖者 (ārya — "sage," one who has realized). When Chinese Chan literature puts these two characters together as a single phrase — 凡聖 — the grammar is significant. It is not a taxonomic list ("ordinary and also sage") and not a scale ("ordinary rising up to sage"). It is a hinge word, the way "breath in, breath out" names a single living process by naming its two poles. The question the Zen canon asks of this pair is not *which side are you on, and how do you climb to the other?* but *what happens to the pair itself when it is taken seriously?*
That is the crux, and the four Zen records on which this entry rests — 《古尊宿語錄》(Recorded Sayings of Ancient Worthies), 《景德傳燈錄》(Jingde Records of the Transmission of the Lamp), 《汾陽無德禪師語錄》(Recorded Sayings of Chan Master Fenyang Wude), and 《楊岐方會和尚後錄》(Later Records of Yangqi Fanghui) — hammer at it from many sides at once. Below I will unfold ten angles that the source material itself emphasizes. Each one is a facet of the same teaching, and together they form the actual shape of the concept.
(一) 凡聖本來無別 — Originally there is no distinction. This is the foundational claim. 《汾陽無德禪師語錄》opens with the line 「朕兆未生，誰論凡聖」 ("Before the first stir, the first faint sign — who would speak of ordinary and sage?"). The image is striking: a thought has not yet arisen, the world has not yet flickered into "I" and "other," and at that depth the two sides of the pair simply do not yet exist as separate things to be named. The same record continues: 「從上諸聖，無一法與人」 — "The sages of old had no separate dharma to give to people." The point is not that sages are withholding; it is that there is no esoteric transmission, no special teaching for the inner circle. The classics and the medicines are the same, the sage drinks from the same stream as everyone else.
(二) 凡聖皆假名 — "Ordinary" and "sage" are names, not things. This is the second move, and it is more delicate. 《景德傳燈錄》records the Chan master Yunju Zhi saying:
「清淨性中無有凡聖，亦無了人不了人。凡之與聖二俱是名。若知假名不實，即無有當名者。」 "In the nature of pure clarity there is no ordinary and no sage, no one who understands and no one who does not. 'Ordinary' and 'sage' are both names. If you know the names are empty fabrications, then there is no one who carries them."
The technical term is *prajñapti* — provisional designation. The pair has *use*; it does not have *essence*. To say "she is a sage" or "I am an ordinary being" is to attach a label that was never glued on in the first place. Knowing this is not cynicism about awakening; it is the moment the label's grip loosens.
(三) 凡聖路絕 — The road of "ordinary vs. sage" is cut off. Now the famous Chan stroke. 《古尊宿語錄》 repeats the phrase in many forms — 「凡聖不存」、「凡聖俱盡」、「凡聖路絕」, "凡聖俱歇滅," "大展長空，凡聖路絕" — and 《楊岐方會和尚後錄》 condenses it into four lines:
「楊岐一訣。凡聖路絕。無端維摩。特地饒舌。」 "One phrase from Yangqi — the ordinary-and-sage road is cut off. Then Vimalakīrti, for no reason at all, adds his tongue."
Two things are happening at once. First, the *opposition* itself — the duality, the ranking — is cut. Second, the very act of cutting is itself an expression, a teaching, an utterance, and the next half of the verse refuses to let that utterance rest: even Yangqi's "cut off" is itself a finger pointing at the moon. The pair is cut, and the cutting is also shown to be a teaching device, which is in turn *not* clung to. To stop at "I have realized that ordinary and sage are one" is already to be back on the road.
(四) 截斷之後猶須「向上一竅」 — Even after cutting, there is still "one opening above." 《古尊宿語錄》warns: even the one who can "截斷凡聖及盡有無" ("cut through ordinary-and-sage and exhaust both being and non-being") still has not arrived. There is what the tradition calls 向上一竅 (xiàngshàng yī qiào — "the one opening still above"). The opening metaphor suggests not a higher plane to climb to, but something that cannot be exhausted by cutting — the source that keeps issuing forth, the Vimalakīrti "inexhaustible lamp" image. Cutting is not the end.
(五) 當下能入凡入聖 — Functionally one enters ordinary and sage, without being held by either. 《古尊宿語錄》 describes a single instant in which one can "入華藏、入解脫、入清淨、入穢淨," and also "入凡入聖," yet "遍處尋覓終不可得" — search for it everywhere and you will not find it. Such terms remain *空名* (kōngmíng, "empty names") for birth-and-death as much as for ordinary and sage. The pair is functional: it names what one is *doing* in a given moment, not what one *is*. In the morning, washing bowls, you are "ordinary." When the right question is asked and the right answer crashes down, you are "sage." Neither is the final word about who is washing the bowls.
(六) 超離並非否定日用 — Cutting through does not abolish daily life. This is where Chan most distinctly parts with a quietist interpretation. 《古尊宿語錄》 insists on phrases such as 「不拘凡聖自在行」 ("unbound by ordinary and sage, walking freely"), 「離凡離聖縱橫妙」 ("free of both ordinary and sage, wondrous in every direction"), and 「凡聖路坦然，各自看謀略」 ("the road of ordinary and sage is open and level; each of you, look for your own strategy"). The word 坦然 (tǎnrán — "broad, level, untroubled") is significant: there is nothing esoteric about the cutting. It does not produce a secret spiritual state. It is returned to the immediacy of *seeing color, hearing sound, this body, this place* — what 《古尊宿語錄》 calls 妙絕凡聖, the wondrous cutting-through that goes with 見色聞聲、身土交映、本有天真. Cutting is *of* daily life, not *away* from it.
(七) 凡聖平等、同源、共有 — Equal, same source, shared. The records pile up parallel phrases: 「法身普現凡聖等」 ("the Dharma-body universally manifests — ordinary and sage are equal"); 「凡聖共有，沙界同源」 ("ordinary and sage share one source, the same as the sands of the world"); 「情與無情及聖凡，解脫門開同一路」 ("sentient and insentient, sage and ordinary, the gate of liberation opens onto a single road"). The 偈頌 (verses) of 《景德傳燈錄》sum it up:
「了知凡聖同途。迷悟本無差別。涅槃生死一如。」 "Know this: ordinary and sage walk the same road. Confusion and awakening have no difference between them. Nirvāṇa and saṃsāra are one taste."
And:
「河沙凡聖體通同。迷來盡似蛾投焰。悟去皆如鶴出籠。」 "As many as the sands of the Ganges, sage and ordinary share one body in full. In confusion all are like moths flinging themselves into the flame; in awakening all are like cranes walking out of the cage."
I want to keep the original pair of images intact. *The moth and the crane* — confusion as a self-immolating fascination, awakening as the unhurried step out of the cage. These are *not* metaphors for the difference between two kinds of person. They are metaphors for a *turn* that any ordinary or sage can be in. The point is not that sages were once moths; the point is that the burning and the unhurried walk are *one* body in expression.
(八) 凡聖路殊同啐啄 — The roads differ; the moment of breaking is the same. Here is one of the most striking images in the record, and one easily flattened. The compound 啐啄同時 (cùzhuó-tóngshí — "the chick pecking and the shell cracking, in one instant") comes from a story that Chan tells repeatedly: a chick is hatching; from outside it pecks the shell, from inside it cracks the shell; the moment of emergence is a single, undivided event in which both actions are *the same event*. 《汾陽無德禪師語錄》 uses this image to say: 「凡聖路殊同啐啄。直教點鏑不遺時。」 — "The roads of ordinary and sage are different, yet in the moment of breaking the shell they are one. Strike the arrow true without losing a moment." The teaching here is neither "no difference" nor "all difference." It is: *the path is real, and the breakthrough at the end of the path is real, and the breakthrough collapses the distinction you thought you were building the path to overcome.* 一啐一啄, one peck, one crack — that single instance cannot be split into an "ordinary" half and a "saintly" half.
(九) 由凡入聖之修行歷程 — The path from ordinary to sage is real, and its verb is 割愛. Here Chan does not retreat into "there's nothing to do." 《汾陽無德禪師語錄》 pounds out a verse that takes one unusual line and recurs to it again and again across many couplets: 「入聖超凡割愛親」 — "Enter sagehood, transcend the ordinary, by cutting attachment's nearest kin." This inverted syntax matters. Note the order: not *transcend the ordinary then enter sagehood* (which would let you rehearse a future goal), but *enter sagehood, transcend the ordinary, by way of cutting.* The cutting is the verb that holds both terms together at once.
The supporting lines specify what cutting means in concrete terms:
- 「六根永滅邪思漏」 — the six sense-faculties forever cut off the leaking of crooked thinking; - 「速除癡騃無明苦」 — swiftly remove the dullness and the suffering of ignorance; - 「斬釘截鐵勤精進」 — with the finality of cutting nail or iron, persist with vigor; - 「滅除妄念絕煩塵」 — extinguish delusive thoughts and sever the dust of affliction; - 「心同朗月添群象」 — the mind becomes like a bright moon, with myriad reflections appearing on its surface; - 「光明解脫身」, 「圓通自在人」 — the body becomes luminous liberation; a person of unobstructed freedom.
The record then acknowledges that along the way the tradition uses graded names — 愚人 (the dull one), 高人 (the lofty one), 下人 (the lower one), 應供人 (the worthy of offerings), 高賢德行人 (the lofty virtuous practitioner), 大人 (the great one). These names are *not* being endorsed as metaphysical species; they are being used honestly, the way a doctor names stages of recovery. And crucially the record says 「識得愚人是智人」 — "to recognize the dull one as oneself is already the wise one." The reversal is not by changing class, but by recognition.
(十) 執有執無皆為大病 — Clinging to either "there is a difference" or "there is no difference" is disease. This is the final, indispensable clause. The same passage of 《景德傳燈錄》 that announces "ordinary and sage are empty names" immediately follows with:
「見有淨穢凡聖亦是大病；作無凡聖解又屬撥無因果。」 "To see ordinary and sage — and pure and impure — as really existing is a grave illness. To interpret things as 'there is no ordinary and no sage' belongs to the nihilism that denies cause and effect."
This is the doctrine's own safety belt. Without it, the teaching collapses. "There is no distinction" — taken literally — produces the patient who says, "I don't need to meditate, we are already Buddhas." That, in classical terms, is 撥無因果 (bōwú-yīnguǒ — "denying cause and effect"): if no distinction means no practice, then the rope that ties action to result has been cut in the wrong place. The other patient says, "I am a sage, others are ordinary" — and that is the disease of affirming the distinction. The teaching is to use the pair, see through the pair, *not to install a new view on top of it.*
(十一) 機鋒中的截斷 — In responsive teaching, the cut is the very act. The Zen records show these principles being enacted, not merely stated. 《景德傳燈錄》 collects several exchanges where the question "How far is ordinary from sage?" is met not with words but with body and shout:
- The master is asked 「今日一會抵敵何人」 ("Whom do you oppose in today's assembly?"). He answers: 「不為凡聖」 ("I do it for neither ordinary nor sage"). - Another asks 「如何是離凡聖底句」 ("What is the sentence that leaves ordinary and sage behind?"). The master simply points: "Sōngshān ān héshang" — just another master. No conceptual answer is offered; a living person is the pointer. - Asked the same question, another master responds with a *shout* (喝, hè); another steps down from the meditation seat and stands. - The master Touzi Datong says plainly: 「有佛有法有凡有聖亦不存，坐繫縛汝諸人」 — "If you hold there is Buddha, dharma, ordinary, sage, that very holding binds you." And, more tersely: 「凡聖攝不得」 — "The pair 'ordinary and sage' cannot contain this matter."
The shapes of these responses — *the shouting, the stepping down, the gesture, the brief pointer* — are not amusements. They embody the doctrine: the pair cannot be exhausted by language, so the body itself responds. To reduce the concept "凡聖" to a thesis statement is already to have missed it.
(十二) 名稱可互換 — The names themselves can be turned. Finally, a quiet but disturbing sentence from 《古尊宿語錄》: 「聖者起凡情，凡人而乃聖」 — "The sage rises up with the feeling-tone of ordinary being; the ordinary becomes sage." The names are not reliable signposts; they can be used *sideways*. To fix your identity by either one is precisely to be held by the very thing the canon calls a rope.
Life Investigation: Walking Through the Concept with Contemporary Scenes
Let me now take this framework and walk through it in scenes from contemporary life, matching each piece of doctrine to a moment most readers will recognize. I am being careful — as the source material demands — not to flatten or metaphorize where the doctrine is specific.
Scene 1 — The morning run, the meditation app, the leadership podcast. You start meditating. After a few weeks you begin to feel you are meditating "right," and you start to recommend it to friends — but with a subtle undertone. The undertone is: I have moved somewhere; you have not. The mind creates a small, almost invisible caste: *the meditators* and *the unmeditators*. This is the danger explicitly named in the materials as 「見有凡聖……亦是大病」 — seeing ordinary and sage as real and discrete. The mind fabricates a pair. The teaching says: the *practice* is real (six-sense yokes, vigor, cutting through delusion); the *rank* is not. Notice when "I meditate differently from her" becomes a quiet identity. That quiet identity is exactly what 割愛 (gē'ài, "cutting attachment") is cutting through.
Scene 2 — Reading a Chan verse, hearing a teacher, feeling "I get it." You read 「了知凡聖同途」 ("ordinary and sage walk the same road") and feel a small release. Days later, when someone is panicking at work, you find yourself musing internally, *they just don't see it yet.* This is the second error, equally forbidden in the sources: you have installed the *view* "there is no difference" as a new identity — a kind of secular sagehood. 《景德傳燈錄》 warns this precisely: 「作無凡聖解又屬撥無因果」 — to interpret dharma as *no ordinary and no sage* belongs to the denial of cause and effect. There *are* differences — in confusion, in clarity, in conduct. The teaching is to walk the road, not to arrive at a label and sit there.
Scene 3 — The performance review. You are passed over for promotion. A colleague is praised as "really senior" while you are told to "keep developing." The world is sorting you. The Chan texts acknowledge this sorting is *real*: 凡聖路殊, "the roads of ordinary and sage are different." The mature response is not denial — "ranks don't exist" — but 坦然 (tǎnrán): open, level, not flattened or bitter. The 啐啄 image is useful here. The chick's peck and the shell's crack are not the same *position*, but the moment of breakthrough is a single event. Your pecking at your own situation from the inside, and the recognition from the outside (or its absence), are *events*, not verdicts about what you are. The teaching refuses to turn the moment into a sentence about your identity.
Scene 4 — Grief. Someone you love dies, or your parents age and decline. You notice in yourself two competing currents. The first: *I should be equanimous, I have read the dharma, I should not be so ordinary in my suffering.* This is the sage-costume being tried on; it is a particular shape of self-binding. The second: *I am just an ordinary person, this is too much, perhaps there is no path through.* This is the abandonment of the road. The teaching of 《古尊宿語錄》 — 「入凡入聖……生死亦唯有空名」 — names both movements together. You enter ordinary *and* sage, sometimes in the same hour, and "birth-and-death too is an empty name" — meaning: it is real pain; it is also not the final word; both of these can be true at the same instant of a person's life, and the moment of being-told-this is the moment the third option appears: not identification with the sadness, not denial of it, but the 啐啄, the breaking through.
Scene 5 — The relationship. You live with another adult. Over time you assign them categories: *they are the spiritual one, I am the practical one*; or *they have grown, I have not*; or, in a difficult patch, *they are ordinary, I am stuck with an ordinary person.* Every such sentence is a 凡聖 line drawn. The teaching asks: what would it be to use the pair, see through the pair, and walk it together? The classical line 「情與無情及聖凡，解脫門開同一路」 ("sentient and insentient, sage and ordinary, the gate of liberation opens onto one road") includes *your partner* and *the kitchen sink* in the same sentence. The 一路 (yī lù, "one road") is not a dismissal of difference but a holding of difference without rank.
Scene 6 — Social media. You scroll a profile and someone seems to be living in a fully integrated, awakened life. The mind quietly produces: *they are sage, I am ordinary.* The mind, having read one too many lucid posts, produces the opposite: *I am at peace with everything, I see through everything.* Both movements are exactly what the sources condemn. The teaching does not ask you to stop using Instagram. It asks whether you can hold the term 凡聖 like a tool and put it down — neither refusing nor clutching it — when you have finished the work in front of you. The Chan phrase 「凡聖路坦然，各自看謀略」 ("the road is level, each of you find your own strategy") implies that the road is shared, but the *strategy* is yours — not theirs, not the algorithm's.
Scene 7 — Attempting to "do the spiritual practice." You sit down to meditate, and immediately the inner judge appears: *a real practitioner would not be distracted like this.* This is 凡聖, hiding inside practice itself. The Chan response is double. First: 「六根永滅邪思漏」 — the work of 割愛 (cutting) is right here, even in the wandering of the six senses; the disturbance *is* the practice, in the same sense that the chick's *peck* is the practice, not a failure of practice. Second: the achievement, when it comes, is not the moment of becoming a "sage meditator" but the moment 凡聖路絕 — when, in a single instant, the distinction-making itself falls quiet. That instant, the literature insists, is not something you can install as an identity; you cannot today vow *I am sage* and tomorrow be the same sage.
In each scene, the doctrine refuses both the upward re-arrangement ("I am higher than they are") and the flat reading ("nothing matters, all is one"). It asks for the cut that holds both: name what is happening — promotion, grief, scrolling, fight, meditation — use the name, and refuse to let it freeze into what you are.
Why Contemporary People Need This
Several currents in present-day life make this particular concept unusually load-bearing.
(一) The metricized self. Contemporary information environments constantly rank: followers, income brackets, "wellness" levels, productivity scores, even meditation-app streaks. The Chan teaching 凡聖路絕 — the ordinary-and-sage road is cut off — names what the metrics have quietly installed and offers a way of being with the metrics that does not require you to take the ranking as the structure of your worth. That is a daily, practical need.
(二) The swing to flattening. The same culture that pushes ranking also pushes flattening: *we are all equally valid; nothing is better than anything else; all paths are the same.* This is the second illness the canon calls out — *作無凡聖解又屬撥無因果*. If everything is the same, then the work-of-cutting (割愛), the discipline of discernment, the real difference between befriending someone and abandoning them, collapses. Without this safety belt, "we are all already Buddhas" becomes a recipe for both complacency and paralysis. The concept, properly held, preserves difference without rank and prescribes practice without punishing the practitioner.
(三) The pull of spiritual bypassing. A great deal of contemporary spiritual language is bypass — emotional bypassing, intellectual bypassing, identity bypassing. The 反裝句 (inverted syntax) 「入聖超凡割愛親」 (not *transcend ordinary then enter sagehood*, but enter sagehood and transcend ordinary *by cutting*) makes the order unforgeable: you cannot install yourself as a sage and then do the cutting later. The cutting is the entry. By-passing *is the cut not happening.* Contemporary practitioners need this clarity more than they need affirmations.
(四) Neuroscience as mirror, not proof. Contemporary affective neuroscience describes, for instance, how self-referential processing (the "default mode") continually reconstructs a ranking self: how the brain is constantly pre-occupied with its social standing, its future, its past. This is a useful *mirror* for the textual observation that 凡聖名相 (the naming-and-ranking pair) is continually arising and continually needing to be cut. The analogy is suggestive but not equivalent. Neuroscience can describe the *mechanism* of self-comparison; it does not, on its own, describe the *turn* (the 啐啄, the moment the shell breaks). Classical Chan would say that the *mechanism* can be mapped, and the *turn* — what the texts variously call 歇 (xiē, "resting"), 頓 (dùn, "abrupt"), 大用現前 (dàyòng-xiànqián, "the great function right in front") — is what matters. So neuroscience's value, where it is helpful, is in showing that the *habit* of asking "am I ordinary, am I sage?" is deep and persistent. The dharma's value is in saying: this habit is to be known, exhausted, and the *exhaustion itself not clung to.*
(五) Algorithmic environments and small comparisons. Algorithms are engines of 凡聖 sentiment — fine-grained, immediate, ambient. Each scroll is a fresh census of how you compare. The Chan teaching, applied here, is not the recommendation to "log off" (the culture has enough of that advice). It is the slow practice of holding the comparison thought, *naming* it without naming it as yourself, and letting it pass — what the literature calls 縱橫妙 (zònghéng-miào): freedom of movement through any direction, ordinary and sage both, neither held.
Common Misreadings and Clarifications
(一) Reading "ordinary and sage" as a hierarchy. This is the most common error, especially in readers who arrive at the concept from a psychology-of-stages background (Kegan, Loevinger, Cook–Greuter). The Chan texts are not denying that there is a difference in clarity, conduct, and compassion. They are denying that the difference is *carved into the substance of the person*. 「凡聖共有，沙界同源」 — ordinary and sage share one source — is *not* a denial of difference. It is a denial of the *kind* of difference. The difference is in 機用 (jīyòng, "responsive functioning"), not in essence. Practically: respect the difference without metabolizing it into a ranking.
(二) Reading "no distinction" as "nothing matters" (撥無因果). The text treats this as a *serious illness*, not as a sophisticated reading. 「作無凡聖解又屬撥無因果」 — to interpret things as "no ordinary and no sage" is the nihilistic denial of cause and effect. If you read the doctrine of equality as an excuse to skip the practice, you have read *the opposite* of what was taught. 割愛 (cutting attachment) is work; cannot be done by declaration.
(三) Reading "凡聖路絕" as intellectual agreement. The canon is explicit that the road is "cut" (絕) by means that include gestures, shouts, sitting, and body — not by means of a proposition. 「下禪床立」, 「喝」, 「指嵩山安和尚」 — these are responses to the question of how far ordinary and sage are apart. They are not arguments against the question. To say "I see that the pair is empty" is, in the technical sense, *a new pair*: one who sees and one who does not. The texts are ruthlessly persistent: when you install "I see it," you are back on the road.
(四) Reading "sage" as a high ego state. Sometimes in popular usage "saintly" becomes moral perfectionism: never angry, never selfish, never confused. The Chan record does not promise a permanent state of moral brightness. 「聖者起凡情，凡人而乃聖」 — "the sage rises up with the feeling-tone of ordinary being; the ordinary becomes sage" — explicitly denies this picture. The sage drinks coffee and gets distracted. What distinguishes the sage is not a different kind of experience but a different *relationship* to experience: the ordinary reaction and the sage reaction meet in the same heart, in different moments, and the heart itself is not raised to a superior plane.
(五) Reading "凡聖共有" as monism. The phrase 「法身普現凡聖等」 is sometimes collapsed into "everything is one substance." This misreading forgets the structure of the original claim. "共" (sharing) implies that two are held together without being merged into one thing. 凡聖 (the pair) and 法身 (Dharma-body) are not the same term; they are claimed to share an equal basic condition. Useful analogue: water is in waves, water is in ice; but the word "water" does not flatten the difference between liquid and solid. (The analogy is suggestive, not the doctrine: water is a substance-metaphor; Chan does not assert substrate.)
(六) Reading the response as the doctrine. When modern students quote 「下禪床立」 or 「喝」, they often present these as if they were *teachings*. They are not — they are *instances* of the cut that the *teaching about cutting* points to. The teaching cannot be replaced by re-uttering the shouts. The actual cut has to happen. How this happens, in the tradition, is precisely through practice — through 割愛, through sitting, through the moment when 啐啄 happens. The textual record is a ledger of pointers; it is not the path.
(七) Reading "equal source" as the end-point rather than the foundation. Because the texts say things like 凡聖同一路 so often, beginners sometimes mistake the foundation for the ceiling. The texts' first, foundational, ever-recurring affirmation *is* that ordinary and sage share one source. But that affirmation is the *floor* of the building, not the *roof*. 割愛 is the roof. 啐啄 is the breakthrough under the roof. 向上一竅 — the one opening still above — is what is *left over* after all of that. To mistake the floor for the ceiling is to stop at "we are all the same," which is precisely the disease the canon never tires of warning against.
To bring this to a close — what is unusual about 凡聖 in the Chan record is that it is *both* the most ordinary pair in the tradition *and* the one that is most thoroughly dismantled by the tradition. The pair is useful at every step (a teacher needs to point at the difference between clarity and confusion; a beginner benefits from knowing the path is real); the pair is also transparent at every step (the same teacher turns around and refuses to claim "I am sage, you are ordinary"; the same beginner is told that the seeing-through of the pair *is not* an arrival at a new label). The teaching's wager is that if you are willing to live in that tension — *using* the pair and not *clinging* to the pair, *practicing* as if there is a path and *opening* as if there is none beyond — then you are walking, however imperfectly, in line with the four records we have drawn on here. The road is 坦然 (level, open). The cut, when it comes, is 一句 (one phrase), 一拍 (one snap of the palm), 一啐一啄 (one peck, one crack). What follows is not a further label, but the day's actual business, with its colors and sounds, in body and place.