_Once, as he was visiting Chu-yu, the latter said, "A man of your age should try to find a place to settle down and teach." "Where is my abiding place?" Chao-chou asked back. "What?" said his host, "With so many years on your head, you have not even come to know where your permanent home is!" Chao-chou said, "For thirty years I have roamed freely on horseback. Today, for the first time I am kicked by an ass!_"18_
He finally did settle down, at eighty, accepting an invitation to come and live at the Kuan-yin monastery in Chao-chou in northeastern China, where he stayed until his death some forty years later. His lack of interest in worldly, administrative details is illustrated by the story that during his forty years as abbot of the monastery he installed no new furnishings and made no attempt to collect alms. Perhaps this tells us why Huai-hai's line won the day. Yet Chao-chou was the popular favorite. His preference for colloquial language endeared him to the people. He tried to demonstrate that enlightenment can be found and subsequently heightened through ordinary everyday activities. The following anecdote suggests his idea of Buddhism had little to do with the Buddha:
_Master Chao-chou was asked by a monk, "Who is the Buddha?" "The one in the shrine," was the answer. "Isn't it a clay statue that sits in the shrine?" the monk went on.
"Then who is the Buddha?" the monk repeated.
"The one in the shrine," replied the Master.
"Have you finished your rice gruel?" asked the Master.
"Yes, I have finished it," replied the monk.
"Then go and wash your dishes," said the Master.
When the monk heard this, he was suddenly awakened.19
The thrust of this anecdote is that through the everyday doing of what needs to be done, we can find authentic values and our original nature. As the modern scholar Chang Chung-yuan points out, "This simple activity of the Ch'an monk, washing the dishes after eating gruel, is the most ordinary thing, the sort of activity that is completely spontaneous and requires no mental effort. While engaged in it, a man is free from assertion and negation."20
When we are doing manual tasks we experience them directly; we do not have to intellectualize about them. This acting without thought, without judgments of good or bad, is in fact a parable of enlightenment. So it was that Chao-chou could so effectively use rote tasks as a teaching device, for they showed a novice how he could free his mind from its enslavement to opinions and values. This stress on the meaningfulness of daily manual activities, as distinct from philosophical speculation, seems to have been the major position of Chao-chou. This attitude is particularly borne out in another celebrated Chao-chou anecdote.