Zen verse?
This person even knew Zen verses?
When living, sit, don’t lie. When dead, lie down, don’t sit.
How can a set of stinking bones, be used for training?
Those who did not know could not understand at all, but those who really knew could tell the profoundness of the Zen verse. Even Buddhist masters might not be able to freely say such verses!
Zhang Ye’s Zen phrase meant: A pile of stinking bones will rot, but if it stubbornly insisted on doing the actions of meditation without understanding the verses, then they were demonstrating “When living, sit, don’t lie. When dead, lie down, don’t sit”. By the time you had such thoughts, your senses and character would only be fake inside out. How was there any merit established? How was one to gain enlightenment? Or if it was put simply, Zhang Ye was telling them: Are you learning to meditate or learning to be a seated Buddha? If you were meditating, then that was not something you could do just sitting there. If they were learning to be a seated Buddha, Buddha was not a fixed state, so how was one to accomplish it by sitting? To gain Buddhist enlightenment from meditation was not a feasible route!