Mu (negative)


The Japanese and Korean term mu or Chinese wu, meaning "not have; without", is a key word in Buddhism, especially Zen traditions.

Etymology

Old Chinese *ma 無 is cognate with the Proto-Tibeto-Burman *ma "not". This reconstructed root is widely represented in Tibeto-Burman languages; for instance, ma means "not" in both Written Tibetan and Written Burmese.

Pronunciations

The Standard Chinese pronunciation of wú 無 "not; nothing" historically derives from Middle Chinese mju, Late Han Chinese muɑ, and reconstructed Old Chinese *ma.
Other varieties of Chinese have differing pronunciations of. Compare Cantonese mou4; and Southern Min and .
The common Chinese word wú 無 was adopted in the Sino-Japanese, Sino-Korean, and Sino-Vietnamese vocabularies. The Japanese kanji 無 has on'yomi readings of mu or bu, and a kun'yomi of na. The Korean hanja 無 is read mu. The Vietnamese Hán-Việt pronunciation is vô or mô.

Meanings

Some English translation equivalents of wú or mu 無 are:
In modern Chinese, Japanese and Korean it is commonly used in combination words as a prefix to indicate the absence of something, e.g., / / museon for "wireless". In Classical Chinese, it is an impersonal existential verb meaning "not have".
The same character is also used in Classical Chinese as a prohibitive particle, though in this case it is more properly written.

Characters

In traditional Chinese character classification, the uncommon class of phonetic loan characters involved borrowing the character for one word to write another near-homophone. For instance, the character originally depicted a ji "winnowing basket", and scribes used it as a graphic loan for qi 其 "his; her; its", which resulted in a new character ji to specify the basket.
The character wu originally meant "dance" and was later used as a graphic loan for wu "not". The earliest graphs for 無 pictured a person with outstretched arms holding something and represented the word wu "dance; dancer". After wu 無 "dance" was borrowed as a loan for wu "not; without", the original meaning was elucidated with the 舛 "opposite feet" at the bottom of wu "dance".

The Mu-koan

The Gateless Gate, which is a 13th-century collection of Chan or Zen kōans, uses the word wu or mu in its title and first kōan case. Chinese Chan calls the word mu 無 "the gate to enlightenment". The Japanese Rinzai school classifies the Mu Kōan as hosshin "resolve to attain enlightenment", that is, appropriate for beginners seeking kenshō "to see the Buddha-nature"'.
Case 1 of The Gateless Gate reads as follows:
ChineseEnglish translation
趙州和尚、因僧問、狗子還有佛性也無。州云、無。A monk asked Zhaozhou Congshen, a Chinese Zen master, "Has a dog Buddha-nature or not?" Zhaozhou answered, "Wú"

The koan originally comes from the Zhaozhou Zhenji Chanshi Yulu, The Recorded Sayings of Zen Master Zhao Zhou, koan 132:
ChineseEnglish translation
僧問：狗子還有佛性也無？
師云：無。
問：上至諸佛，下至螻蟻皆有佛性，狗子為什麼卻無？
師云：為伊有業識在。		A monk asked, "Does a dog have a Buddha-nature or not?"
The master said, "Not !"
The monk said, "Above to all the Buddhas, below to the crawling bugs, all have Buddha-nature. Why is it that the dog has not?"
The master said, "Because he has the nature of karmic delusions".


The Book of Serenity, also known as the Book of Equanimity or more formally the Hóngzhì Chánshī Guǎnglù, has a longer version of this koan, which adds the following to the start of the version given in the Zhaozhou Zhenji Chanshi Yulu''.
ChineseEnglish translation
僧問趙州，狗子有佛性也無。
州云，有。
僧云，既有為什麼卻撞入這箇皮袋。
州云，為他知而故犯。		A monk asked Master Zhao Zhou, "Does a dog have Buddha Nature?"
Zhao Zhou replied, "Yes."
And then the monk said, "Since it has, how did it get into that bag of skin?"
Zhao Zhou said, "Because knowingly, he purposefully offends."

Origins

In the original text, the question is used as a conventional beginning to a question-and-answer exchange. The reference is to the Mahāyāna Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra which says for example:
Koan 363 in the Zhaozhou Zhenji Chanshi Yulu shares the same beginning question.

Interpretations

This koan is one of several traditionally used by Rinzai school to initiate students into Zen study, and interpretations of it vary widely. Hakuun Yasutani of the Sanbo Kyodan maintained that
This koan is discussed in Part 1 of Hau Hoo's The Sound of the One Hand: 281 Zen Koans with Answers. In it, the answer of "negative", mu, is clarified as although all beings have potential Buddha-nature, beings who do not have the capacity to see it and develop it essentially do not have it. The purpose of this primary koan to a student is to free the mind from analytic thinking and into intuitive knowing. A student who understands the nature of his question would understand the importance of awareness of potential to begin developing it.

One-sided interpretation

The Japanese scholar made the following comment on the two versions of the koan:
A similar critique has been given by Steven Heine:

"Unasking" the question

The term is often used or translated to mean that the question itself must be "unasked": no answer can exist in the terms provided. Zhaozhou's answer, which literally means that dogs do not have Buddha nature, has been interpreted by Robert Pirsig and Douglas Hofstadter to mean that such categorical thinking is a delusion, that yes and no are both correct and incorrect.

In popular culture

In Robert M. Pirsig's 1974 novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, mu is translated as "no thing", saying that it meant "unask the question". He offered the example of a computer circuit using the binary numeral system, in effect using mu to represent high impedance:
The word features prominently with a similar meaning in Douglas Hofstadter's 1979 book, Gödel, Escher, Bach. It is used fancifully in discussions of symbolic logic, particularly Gödel's incompleteness theorems, to indicate a question whose "answer" is to
"Mu" may be used similarly to "" or "not applicable," a term often used to indicate the question cannot be answered because the conditions of the question do not match the reality. A layperson's example of this concept is often invoked by the loaded question "Have you stopped beating your wife?", to which "mu" would be the only respectable response.
Because of this meaning, the programming language Raku uses "Mu" for the root of its type hierarchy.
The Japanese manga series Death Note ends in a thematic conclusion which contains mu's usage as "not applicable": "All humans, without exception, will eventually die. The place they go after is MU ".
Tsugumi Ohba, the writer of Death Note, explained in the postmortem follow-up volume that the meaning behind "MU after death" was that "the dead person should never come back to life, and it's cheating to revive dead characters as manga. So it became MU". Ohba further explained that "all humans die someday, and when we die, we can never come back to life, so let's do our best while we are at it" was the single most important theme Ohba wanted to express in writing the series.