Chinese accounts tell that somewhere in his middle years Pang Yun loaded his money and possessions into a boat and sank it in a river near Hengyang, in southern China. He did not give the wealth away, and the translators of his record suggest he feared it would hinder whoever received it. Afterwards he kept his wife, his son and his daughter, and earned a living making and selling bamboo ware. That choice, to drop the property and keep the household, is the whole of what he is remembered for. In eighth-century China awakening was the business of monks, who left their families and shaved their heads. Pang did neither, and the Chan masters of his day treated him as an equal.
Tradition says his record was gathered after his death by Yu Di, the prefect of Xiangzhou, and it places the turn early in the Zhenyuan era, which began in 785. Pang went to Shitou Xiqian, one of the two great Chan teachers of the time, and asked who it is that keeps no company with the ten thousand things; Shitou covered his mouth with his hand. When Shitou asked how he spent his days, Pang answered with a verse whose last line sets the saints' miraculous powers beside carrying water and hauling firewood. Shitou then asked whether he would wear a monk's black or stay in a layman's white, and Pang said he would follow what he wanted. He did not shave his head. He went on to Mazu Daoyi, the other great teacher, and put the same question; Mazu said he would answer once Pang had drunk the West River in one gulp.
The claim his sayings carry is that nothing has to be added to an ordinary life for awakening to happen in it. It is never argued as doctrine. It shows in quick exchanges with the monks Danxia Tianran, Yaoshan and others, and above all in his family. When he moved north to Xiangzhou, on the Han River, his daughter Lingzhao kept them both by selling bamboo strainers, and more than once she proves quicker than her father. The record also tells how she died. Pang asked her to tell him when the sun reached noon. She told him the sun stood at noon and was in eclipse, and while he went out to look she sat down in his seat and died. Seven days later he died himself, with his head on Yu Di's knee. The translators of his record worked out that the only eclipse in those years fell on 27 July 808, which puts his death in early August; his birth is unrecorded, and about 740 is their estimate.
The record's own closing lines say that monks and laypeople mourning him called him a Vimalakīrti, after the householder of the Buddhist scriptures who outdebates the Buddha's monks. The Anthology of the Patriarchal Hall, the Chan history of 952, calls him a householding bodhisattva who never changed his Confucian dress. More than three hundred of his verses are said to have circulated. Six catalogues of the Song dynasty list early editions that are now lost; the oldest that survives is a Ming woodblock print of 1637, held in a single copy in the Cabinet Library in Tokyo. One of his exchanges, about falling snow, became a case in the Blue Cliff Record, the twelfth-century kōan collection, and in Japan he is known as Hōkoji. The Recorded Sayings of Layman P'ang, the English translation by Ruth Fuller Sasaki, Iriya Yoshitaka and Dana R. Fraser, appeared in 1971.