Talk:The Gateless Gate

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

WikiProject Buddhism This article falls within the scope of WikiProject Buddhism, an attempt to promote better coordination, content distribution, and cross-referencing between pages dealing with Buddhism. Please participate by editing the article The Gateless Gate, or visit the project page for more details on the projects.
??? This article has not yet received a rating on the quality scale.
??? This article has not yet received a rating on the importance scale.

Article Grading:
The article has not been rated for quality and/or importance yet. Please rate the article and then leave comments here to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article.

What should this page be called? 無門關 has some problems translating into English. "Gateless Gate" appears to be the most common, but is potentially misleading because it implies that 門 is the same thing as 關. I think the most literal translation (and I'm not sure about this -- it is often misleading to try to parse medival Chinese based on knowledge of modern Chinese) would be something like "the doorless checkpoint". 關 occurs most commonly (in modern Chinese, anyway) as a verb meaning "to close", which might imply that, as a noun, it should be understood primarily as a potential obstruction; something that might be passable or might not be passable. "Gateless Passage" seems a little better than "Gateless Gate". "Gateless Barrier" may be the closest English equivalent. However, Google strongly implies that "Gateless Gate" is more common. Maybe it would be best to avoid the translation issue and just move to a non-English title. "Mumonkan" gets more Google hits than "Gateless Gate". However, it doesn't seem quite right to use the Japanese title for what is essentially a Chinese work. So, my recommendation is to move the page to Wumenguan. Any objections? - Nat Krause 04:41, 28 Nov 2004 (UTC)

If "Gateless Gate" gets the most hits in English, then it's the right name for the article. But by all means feel free to add a paragraph about the naming into the article itself though. Jpatokal 10:01, 28 Nov 2004 (UTC)
"Mumonkan" gets the most hits in English, though. I take that back. "Gateless Gate" gets more hits when the search is limited to English. - Nat Krause 11:47, 28 Nov 2004 (UTC)
The strongest case seems to me to be for the article to be Gateless Barrier.
  • Gateless Barrier is the title of the translation by Shibayama, the only mainline Rinzai roshi to publish about this in English
  • Gateless Barrier is the title of the translation by Aitken—to my knowledge, the only American having inka to have translated it
  • The prolific Cleary called his translation No Barrier (he is often particularly terse; charmingly, he translated the title of the Mo Ho Chih Guan as Stopping and Seeing, rather than the probably safer Great Calming and Contemplation)
  • Blyth's Mumonkan p14, note 2 reads in part "...Kan, barrier, was an expression used by Jōshū, Jōshū's barrier. There was Ummon's One Letter Gate" (3 Chinese characters omitted here, sorry, don't know how to do, but the first is obviously the character for the number 1 and the third is the character for guan/kuan/kan.) "Kan is really the bar the closes the gate, the essential part of the gate"
FWIW a teacher of mine seemed to say that guan was a common word for the barrier or checkpoint one needed to pass to get up over certain mountain passes.
Opposing viewpoints, of course, by Reps/Senzaki, Sekida, Yamada, who all have Gateless Gate. Even Andy Fergusson. And yes, the echo chamber effect gives Gateless Gate the most Google hits. But I appeal to the principle that when something's obviously wrong, we fix it. --Munge 05:39, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)
This blogger makes a case for "Gateless Frontier".
I am a speaker of Mandarin Chinese and "關" also connotates "test", "difficulty", "obstacle" or "trial". Frontier mangles the meaning even more, since the English connotations of the word do not fit the Chinese; despite the claim of the author. The best commonly-used translation would thus be "Gateless Barrier". The Fascist 11:22, 4 May 2006 (UTC)
Sure get a lot of hits when I google "guan pass". My working hypothesis is it might have referred to a mountain pass, the frontier in the sense that the pass represented a boundary, and a checkpoint set up at the boundary to check your credentials.
BTW as far as "door" is concerned, the very shape of the "men" ideogram seems to support "gate" more than "door" --Munge 08:21, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)
But 門 or “门” (that's its form in simplified Chinese) means door literally. Like “我家的门” means "my house door". The Fascist 11:27, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

Correct. 門 is gate, and 関 is checkpoint/barrier. (At least in Japanese, but I doubt the Chinese is much different.) Jpatokal 08:28, 9 Mar 2005 (UTC)