The Finger and the Moon
The Teaching
When a man with his finger-tip points to something to somebody, the finger-tip may be mistaken for the thing pointed at; in like manner the ignorant and simple-minded, like children, are unable even to the day of their death to abandon the idea that in the finger-tip of words there is the meaning itself.
— Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra
… is like a man calling the attention of another man to the moon by pointing his finger toward it. The other man ought to look at the moon, but instead he looks at the finger and by so doing, not only misses the moon but misses the finger, also. And why? Because he has taken the finger to be the moon.
— Śūraṅgama Sūtra
Commentary
It’s probably the best-known image in Buddhism, and it begins as a warning about words. The older sutra puts it bluntly: some people go to their deaths thinking the meaning is in the fingertip. The later one adds the twist that makes the image stick. If you stare at the finger, you lose the moon, and you lose the finger too. Once a pointer is mistaken for the thing it points at, it stops even being a good pointer.
That’s the risk every teaching on this Map runs. A teaching is a finger. The words of the Upanishads, the parables and the koans all point somewhere, and the danger is to collect fingers and forget to look.
Ram Dass, speaking to a room of psychologists in 1980, put the modest version: “We can point at the moon, a little bit.” The traditions never claimed more for their words than that.
Themes
Connections 9
Unsure
The Laṅkāvatāra is Indian. The Śūraṅgama first appears in China (c. 705), where Chan read it beside Zhuangzi. Whether the finger owes anything to the fish trap is unknown.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Buddhism and Judaism while these teachings took shape.
Arose apart
No known transmission between Buddhism and Christianity while these teachings took shape. No known exchange while either’s teachings took shape. The Buddha’s life later reached Christian Europe as the legend of Barlaam and Josaphat (10th–11th c.), and a Christian church in Tang China used Buddhist terms (Xi’an Stele, 781).
Arose apart
No known transmission between Buddhism and Christianity while these teachings took shape. No known exchange while either’s teachings took shape. The Buddha’s life later reached Christian Europe as the legend of Barlaam and Josaphat (10th–11th c.), and a Christian church in Tang China used Buddhist terms (Xi’an Stele, 781).