Incense from Yunmen's Barrier
Shūhō opens his monastery by burning incense he says he found inside Yunmen's barrier and carried for twenty years. What a single old case can do to a life, and how such a case is handed on, is what this theme follows.
The incense, he says, was the secret that locked monks' mouths, picked up on a hill near Kamakura and kept hidden in a bag, and he offers it to his teacher Nanpo to repay the kindness of the Dharma milk. The rest of the record keeps testing with cases. He sits down, looks at the assembly and says that meeting like this they are already five world-mountains apart, and if they wait for him to speak, three lives and sixty aeons. He takes up Xuedou's sayings one by one, comments on them, and lists in a separate section the ones that miss.
- koan
- koan practice
- language
- paradox
- silence
- interpretation
- discernment
- teacher-student relationship
- teaching
- skillful means
Enter a dialogue
- Opening your monastery, you burn incense you say you found inside Yunmen's barrier and kept hidden for twenty years. What is that incense?
- Meeting like this, you tell the assembly, we are already five world-mountains apart, and waiting for you to speak takes three lives. When does anyone meet?
- If Yunmen's barrier is the secret that locks a monk's mouth, why did you spend a lifetime of sermons talking about it?
- Kept hidden in a bag for twenty years, the incense's fragrance only grew plainer. What does an insight do in all the years nobody sees it?
- Someone keeps waiting for the one sentence that will change everything. Why do you tell a monk begging for such a phrase that listening for it is futile?