# **Mumonkan (Aiken)** Case 4: Huo-an’s Beardless Barbarian Wumen’s comment: Practice must be true practice. Satori must be true satori. Once you see the Barbarian’s face intimately, at first hand, you have it at last. But when you explain this experience, you immediately fall into dualism. Wumen’s verse: Don’t discuss your dream before a fool— Barbarian with no beard! That obscures the clarity Aiken: > …only at death do we lose the human confines of our birth. (This is in response to Huo-an’s death poem: An iron tree in bloom; the rooster lays an egg, seventy-two years— the cradle has fallen.) Aiken: > The true practice of zazen is a matter of bringing the mind into focus so there is nothing but the object of your concentration before you. Aiken: > Talk is dualistic.