u/astroemi

This is the 9th case of Wansong’s Book of Serenity,

>On the road to Taishan there lived a certain woman. Wherever a monk asked her, "Which way does the road to Taishan go?" the woman would say, "Right straight on." As soon as the monk would go, the woman would say, "A fine priest--he goes that way too." A monk told Zhaozhou about this; Zhaozhou said, "Wait till I check out that woman for you." Zhaozhou also asked the woman the same question. The next day he went up in the hall and said, "I have checked out the woman for you."

Zen’s pretty big on checking it out for yourself. So what’s your job when reading these cases? What do you check out for yourself?

I think that’s going to look different for everybody, but it’s only going to look different after we do the work of understanding what the hell is going on in the case. Does the translation make sense? Do we need to know anything important about its context in order to understand the meaning of the conversation? What does Wansong and Tiantong (or other Zen Masters say about this case)?

"Now I want to ask you: What was the point of Zhaozhou’s investigating the old woman?"

Here's Tiantong with some work for you,

>Old in years, attaining the essence, no mistake in transmission— > >The Ancient Buddha Zhaozhou succeeded to Nanquan.  > >The dead tortoise loses its life due to designs drawn on it; > >Even the steeds 'Chariot' and 'Wind-chaser' are encumbered by halter and bridle. > >Having checked out the woman's Chan, > >Told to people, it's not worth a cent.

In the 8th case from the Book of Serenity, Tiantong and Wansong (in parenthesis) write,

>If you are clear and free, (Like insects chewing wood...)  > >There's no objection to my babble.(...happening to make a pattern.) 

This is in the context of the case about Baizhang’s Fox (go read it if you haven’t). Where an old man is turned into a fox for saying something he thought was true but hadn’t experienced it first hand. Baizhang (who has had the experience of enlightenment) corrects him.

Tiantong says about this in his verse (which you should also read), “'Not falling,' 'not blind,' they haggle, As before entering a nest of complications.”

So the old man was corrected because Baizhang said some words to him, but Tiantong calls that back and forth “haggling”, then he calls his own words babble.

Wansong compares all of this to insects chewing wood and making a pattern without intending it. Does he mean Tiantong's verse? Or does he mean Baizhang and the old man's interaction? If the latter, I think he is saying that in terms of Zen, there wasn't a right or wrong, a winning or a losing. Mostly it came down to the old man responding to Baizhang's words and adjusting in turn.

I don’t have many people in my life who understand how cool accomplishing this feels, so I came to share it with the only maniacs who do. It was pretty great having the achievement show up on my screen and being told by team Cherry that I played masterfully. 10/10 experience, would do again.

It took me 22 attempts with the final attempt taking 12h 57m. According to Steam only 2.7% of people who played Silksong hace the achievement.

Here’s a list of what I died to in each attempt. My second attempt was my best one before my final one. For some reason I left the ant hunter (i forget his name) and I was overconfident (because I had always first tried it in every single one of my practice runs) and died to his traps.

Then there are multiple times I died in early game to the skaarguard because I am stubborn and wanted to change my route to a faster one. The rest of them are pretty straightforward.

1 Died to voltwyrm
2 Died to the ant hunter
3 Died to moss mother
4 Died to a fire enemy in deep docks
5 Died to lace
6 Died fleeing from pinstress
7 Died to first ant gauntlet
8 died in mount fay to the cold
9 Skaarguard
10 died to deep docks easy gauntlet
11 Skaarguard
12 Skaarguard
13 Trobioooooo
14 Skaarguard
15 Trigonometry Aspid
16 first ant gauntlet
17 Skaarguard
18 ant gauntlet
19 beastfly
20 ant guantlet
21 Skaarguard
22 STEEL SOUL BABY

I also died a bunch of extra times to the first enemy in the secret room to the right of where you spawn at the start of the game but I don’t really count those. I always killed it because I felt it was good luck to do so. You can add maybe an extra 10 deaths if you want to count it.

Edit: Shoutout to u/SuperLandon11 and his routing which helped me immensely (even though I refuse to get the plasmium thing to fight Widow): https://www.reddit.com/r/Silksong/s/ZzYEn0cHxJ