The original face

This original face is a well-known Zen riddle where the pupil is asked, “When you were born, just when you were born, your face was covered with little wrinkles. When you were young, your skin was smooth. When you get old, your skin is covered with wrinkles again. Now, what is your true face, your original face, which you had before your parents were born?”  It’s quite easy to work out a philosophical answer to this. We can say well, of course, the true Self has no attributes. These wrinkles or absence of wrinkles, they’re all attributes. True Self is beyond attributes. The original face is the true Self.

The teacher never accepts those things. If the pupil persists in them, he hits him quite hard. Now, he has to go and find the original face. They can think,  “Well, I know it, I can quite easily say. These attributes, these passing things, reputation, money, poverty, illness, they’re not me. They’re passing attributes.”  In actual fact, when something happens, I find they may be masks but they’re actually me.

As she’d expected, the father said nothing.  When the child was born, he took it to the temple, threw it in front of the priest and said, “It seems that this is yours”. He shouted at him for a few minutes then went.  Hakuin said, “Is that so?” He lost all his reputation. He took the baby around when begging for milk. He who had been so great was now totally disgraced. One day, the true mother saw him with the child, and her mother’s heart was touched. She went to her father and said, “No, it wasn’t”. She told him who it had been. Her father also was touched, and they took back the child.