Tell me what happens.

Chao Chou is making the point that all the dust residing withinin the monastery has come from outside and has been blown in. In his statement 'look! another dust again' he is making the point that the man asking the questions has come from outside and is bringing with him more dust. What isn't there to understand? It's hardly a profound and complex piece of philosophical literature, just a simple allegory with the message that what is pure comes from within but is corrupted by outside influences.

 

I think it can mean more than that. But that's because it was made to not make perfect sense.

But you could interpret it to mean something about the act of questioning purpose.

 

I 'tried again' and came to the same conclusion. Sorry, it's just not that profound an allegory. Ever read Plato's allegory of the cave?

Inside the cave

Socrates begins his presentation by describing a scenario in which what people take to be real would in fact be an illusion. He asks Glaucon to imagine a cave inhabited by prisoners who have been chained and held immobile since childhood: not only are their arms and legs held in place, but their heads are also fixed, compelled to gaze at a wall in front of them. Behind the prisoners is an enormous fire, and between the fire and the prisoners is a raised walkway, along which people walk carrying things on their heads "including figures of men and animals made of wood, stone and other materials" The prisoners can only watch the shadows cast by the men, not knowing they are shadows. There are also echoes off the wall from the noise produced from the walkway.
Socrates asks if it is not reasonable that the prisoners would take the shadows to be real things and the echoes to be real sounds, not just reflections of reality, since they are all they had ever seen. Wouldn't they praise as clever whoever could best guess which shadow would come next, as someone who understood the nature of the world? And wouldn't the whole of their society depend on the shadows on the wall?

Release from the cave

Socrates next introduces something new to this scenario. Suppose that a prisoner is freed and permitted to stand up. If someone were to show him the things that had cast the shadows, he would not recognize them for what they were and could not name them; he would believe the shadows on the wall to be more real than what he sees.
Suppose further, Socrates says, that the man was compelled to look at the fire: wouldn't he be struck blind and try to turn his gaze back toward the shadows, as toward what he can see clearly and hold to be real? What if someone forcibly dragged such a man upward, out of the cave: wouldn't the man be angry at the one doing this to him? And if dragged all the way out into the sunlight, wouldn't he be distressed and unable to see "even one of the things now said to be true", viz. the shadows on the wall (516a)?
After some time on the surface, however, Socrates suggests that the freed prisoner would acclimate. He would see more and more things around him, until he could look upon the Sun. He would understand that the Sun is the "source of the seasons and the years, and is the steward of all things in the visible place, and is in a certain way the cause of all those things he and his companions had been seeing" (516b–c). (See also Plato's metaphor of the Sun, which occurs near the end of The Republic, Book VI)[3]

Return to the cave

Socrates next asks Glaucon to consider the condition of this man. Wouldn't he remember his first home, what passed for wisdom there, and his fellow prisoners, and consider himself happy and them pitiable? And wouldn't he disdain whatever honors, praises, and prizes were awarded there to the ones who guessed best which shadows followed which? Moreover, were he to return there, wouldn't he be rather bad at their game, no longer being accustomed to the darkness? "Wouldn't it be said of him that he went up and came back with his eyes corrupted, and that it's not even worth trying to go up? And if they were somehow able to get their hands on and kill the man who attempts to release and lead up, wouldn't they kill him?"

 

It isn't exactly a koan in the truest sense, and can be taken on a number of levels. Mr Stoned is right in a literal way. The story uses the Zen monastery as an analogy for the purity of Dharma (and therefore of the ultimate nature of reality), and the dust as an analogy for the trials and emotions of samsara (our own reality). In the Zen and Vajrayana understanding of reality there is no dust or a monastery to be tainted by it, as all is one and 'empty' in ultimate nature.

The man is actually asking, if reality is already pure and already ultimate nature, as you believe, then why are you meditating to clear away impurities and reach ultimate nature? The answer is that the 'dust' will never stop appearing, nor does it need to for you to become enlightened, it's a continual expression of ultimate nature and simply needs to be understood as that. There is no dust to sully the purity of reality, nowhere that a meditator need go except here and now to experience it.


One day, when the brilliant Chinese Cha'n master Chao-chou was sweeping
the court of the monastery, a man asked him:
-Ch'an monastery supposed to be clean and pure. Why is there dust to sweep?
Chao-chou replied:
-It came trom outside.
On another day, when the same thing happening, a monk asked him:
-Sir, you are a man of good understanding, why do you still have dust?
Chao-chou replied:
-Look! another dust again.

MelT

 

That's a good explanation Melt. I'm not too familiar with the 'Dhama' and other buddist (I assume it was a buddhist temple?) teachings, but interpreted it quite literally. You are quiet right in interpretting dust as a corrupting inpurity that corrupts from the outside and penetrates ones defences, in this case, the monastery.

 

I don't believe Plato was correct about the forms or his particular view on the distinction between body and soul, but I certainly wouldn't call his work 'boring.' It was what introduced me to Philosophy.