A teacher poses a question or scenario that cannot be resolved by ordinary logic or reference to doctrine, forcing the student to exhaust intellectual options until a non-conceptual response emerges. The obstruction itself is the method: the dead end is engineered to break reliance on discursive answering.
A response counts as a 'live word' when it issues directly from immediate awareness rather than from memorized formula or explanation; the same sentence can be dead when recited and alive when spoken from realization. The distinction lies not in content but in whether speech carries the speaker's actual state.
The interlinear notes and verses treat the original exchange not as a puzzle to be solved but as a situation to be entered, often answering with another gesture, a scolding, or a praise rather than an explanation. This reframes interpretation as responding in kind rather than translating into plainer terms.
A monk, when his time came, chose to die standing on his head to confound the expectation that even death follows a conventional posture, and his corpse reportedly held the position until his sister rebuked it. The anecdote illustrates treating the moment of death as one more occasion to refuse habitual form.