The Zen master does not tolerate this roundabout way of handling reality. Hence his swinging of the stick. The stick, however, is not meant to give one a shock. It is meant to make one feel it as something most intimate, most concrete, and most personal. Touch is the most primary sensation.
Hearing comes next, while seeing is the farthest away from actuality itself.
Intellection is seeing and not touching. The stick came to be utilized sometimes for a pedagogical purpose, but its primary use was direct and instinctual, as it were. No idea of instrumentality was there in its first application. If the monk had been wrestling at all with the problem of self, the blow would have at once awakened him to the solution. Instead of giving any verbal answer which might be expected of a philosopher or of any ordinary professor of logic or dialectic, Baso gave his questioner a kick on the chest which made the monk fall to the ground.