Chan masters of the tenth century described their teaching as a transmission outside the scriptures, passed directly from mind to mind, and some of their students drew the conclusion that sutras, study and good works were beside the point. Yongming Yanshou, himself a Chan master, spent his career answering them. The mind that Chan points to, he argued, is the same mind the scriptures describe, so that reading a sutra, reciting a Buddha's name and sitting in meditation are not rival paths but one practice seen from different sides.
He was born in 904 near Hangzhou, capital of Wuyue, a coastal kingdom that kept its independence through the decades of war that followed the fall of the Tang. Its ruling Qian family spent lavishly on Buddhist monasteries while rulers in the north were suppressing them. The earliest account of his life, in the Song Biographies of Eminent Monks compiled by Zanning about twelve years after his death, says he served as a clerk overseeing military supplies, recited the Lotus Sutra without pause, and left his wife and children to be ordained under the Chan master Cuiyan Lingcan. A century later the poet Su Shi recorded a story told of him: that as a tax official he had taken government money to buy captive fish and set them free, was condemned to death, and was released because he faced the executioner unmoved. On Mount Tiantai his understanding was confirmed by Tiantai Deshao, the national teacher of Wuyue and an heir of Fayan Wenyi, which placed Yanshou in the youngest of the five Chan houses.
From 952 he taught on Mount Xuedou, the mountain where Xuedou Chongxian would preside seventy years later, and Zanning describes him sitting before its waterfall in plain cloth, eating wild greens. In 960 Qian Chu, the king of Wuyue, made him abbot of the rebuilt Lingyin monastery, and in 961 moved him to the new Yongming monastery in Hangzhou, whose name he took. There he gathered monks from the Tiantai, Huayan and Faxiang schools, set them to question one another, and weighed their arguments against the teaching of the one mind. The result was the Zongjing lu, a hundred fascicles built largely from quotation: by his own count, from three hundred sutras, Chan sayings and treatises. Zanning records that the king of Goryeo, in Korea, read his writings and sent him a robe woven with gold thread.
The Wanshan tonggui ji, a run of a hundred and fourteen questions and answers, carries the argument into practice. Its sceptic asks why anyone who knows that the mind is Buddha should look outside it, or do good at all; Yanshou answers that the absolute and the everyday cannot be pulled apart, so that chanting a sutra, reciting a Buddha's name and releasing captive animals all return to the reality the meditator seeks. In the same book he set Chan meditation beside recitation of the name of the Buddha Amitābha, though elsewhere he treated recitation as a help for those who did not yet trust that their own mind is the Buddha. Later Pure Land writers made more of this than he did. From the twelfth century they counted him among their patriarchs, and the verse on joining Chan with the Pure Land that is most often quoted as his first appears in texts written long after his death.
He died in the twelfth month of the Chinese year that began in 975, which fell in January 976 by the Western calendar; Wuyue submitted to the Song in 978. His Zongjing lu waited a century for print, then entered the Song canon. Later Chan histories, the Japanese Rinzai ones above all, gave little room to a master who valued scripture, while Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese Buddhists went on reading him as a major teacher.