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WorkYongming Yanshou

唯心訣

(lit.: Formula of Mind Only)

A short treatise on the one mind that spends most of its length listing a hundred and twenty ways to miss it.

by Yongming Yanshou28 passages held

  • Chinese, the original language
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Original language
Chinese

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Overview

Yongming Yanshou wrote this short treatise, a single fascicle in balanced parallel prose, and most of it is a catalogue of mistakes. It opens by saying that the scriptures' many teachings all point to one thing: the one vehicle of the Lotus Sutra, the pure realm of reality of the Huayan Sutra and the hidden treasury of the Nirvana Sutra are all names for a single mind, and whoever wakes to it understands everything at once. Then it lists the ways people miss it, a hundred and twenty wrong views by its own count: clinging to stillness, punishing the body as if pain were the Way, nourishing spirit and breath to preserve what is natural, extinguishing feeling to sit in emptiness, taking a stage on the path for the highest sainthood. The title calls the book a jue, a condensed instruction of the kind a teacher hands down. Two pieces travel with it under the same number in the modern canon: a song on meditation and wisdom supporting each other, and a warning to the world on how rare a human birth is. The Ming northern canon took it in, and the Qing Yongzheng emperor included it in his own selection of Chan records.

Key concepts

What counts as a 'wrong view' in this treatise?

Not a false belief about facts but a way of holding the mind that misses it. Yanshou's hundred and twenty are mostly pairs that fail in opposite directions: clinging to existence is like guarding a mirage city, denying it is like insisting on a rabbit's horns. Trying to hold either side splits what is one, which is why he says all of them fail to enter the middle way.

Why does a rope look like a snake?

Because the mind lays its own labels over what it meets and then takes them for things outside. Yanshou calls this the imagined nature, a term from the consciousness-only school: what is only constructed appears as external dust, and a stump is seen as a man, a rope as a snake. Nothing has a name in itself, he writes; forms arise from intention and names from words.

What does 'turning the light around' mean?

Directing attention back to the mind that is looking instead of out at what it sees. In the song on meditation and wisdom Yanshou says that a teaching heard once can stir the seeds of awakening, and that in one thought of turning the light around, true wisdom opens. It is the practical form of his claim that knowing the wondrous principle lies only in contemplating the mind.

What are calm and insight?

The two halves of Buddhist meditation: calm settles and steadies the mind, insight sees clearly into what it is. Yanshou's song says the beginner learns them as a method, under the names stopping and observing, and that they later mature into concentration and wisdom, the root of awakening. Underneath, he insists, they are one thing that only seems to be two.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

A Catalogue of Wrong Turns

Most of the treatise lists ways sincere people miss the mind while seeking it. Why effort, discipline and even stillness can lead away from what they aim at is the uncomfortable question it puts to every practitioner.

Yanshou counts a hundred and twenty wrong views, and many of them are virtues pushed one step too far. Some nourish spirit and breath to preserve what is natural; some punish the body as if pain were the Way; some extinguish feeling to congeal emptiness, or imitate mindlessness until they resemble wood and stone; some sit upright inwardly hugging their own dullness. All of them, he says, are striking ice for fire and climbing a tree to catch fish. Sand, he adds, is no seed of rice.

  • spiritual error
  • attachment
  • emptiness
  • meditation
  • concentration
  • middle way
  • perception
  • suffering

Enter a dialogue

One Mind Behind Every Teaching

The scriptures say a thousand different things, and Yanshou claims they all point to one. If he is right, the hard part is not learning more teachings but seeing what the one they share has been all along.

The treatise opens by saying that mind cannot be settled by true or false, being or nonbeing, and still less described in words; the sages spoke of it in a thousand ways only to meet different people. Everything that misleads comes from taking a rope for a snake or a stump for a man. To know the wondrous principle, he writes, one need only look into the mind: karma piled up like the Ganges' sands melts in a single thought, and the darkness of a thousand years breaks before one lamp.

  • mind-only
  • mind
  • nonduality
  • buddha-nature
  • innate enlightenment
  • principle and phenomena
  • awakening
  • enlightenment
  • insight

Enter a dialogue

Stillness and Insight

The song bound in with the treatise asks why calm and understanding must grow together, and the warning after it asks how much time a human life actually leaves for either.

In the song on meditation and wisdom supporting each other, Yanshou calls them one thing that seems to be two: meditation is father and wisdom mother, meditation the general and wisdom the minister, meditation the moon that puts out false stars and wisdom the sun that lights a dark room. A moment of silence, practised, grows into true concentration. The warning to the world then counts the cost of delay: a human birth is as rare as dust on a fingernail against the soil of the earth, and a life passes like a spark struck from flint.

  • concentration
  • wisdom
  • meditation
  • practice
  • spiritual practice
  • buddhist practice
  • rebirth
  • samsara
  • time

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
28
distinct concepts
63
by passages held, corpus-wide
#743

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “buddha-nature” and “nonduality”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 7 concepts, joined by 15 pairings. 35 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
buddha-naturenonduality5
emptinessmeditation5
emptinessnonduality5
meditationnonduality4
emptinessmind-only3
mind-onlynonduality3
nondualitywisdom3
attachmentbuddha-nature2
attachmentmeditation2
buddha-naturemeditation2
buddha-naturemind-only2
emptinesswisdom2
meditationmind-only2
meditationwisdom2
buddha-natureemptiness1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. Wanshan tonggui ji (萬善同歸集)

    A companion to the Records of the Source Mirror, turned from doctrine to practice: what the one mind means for chanting, merit and the bodhisattva's deeds.

     ZH
  2. Zongjing lu (宗鏡錄)

    His main work and by far his longest: the summa that the rest of his writing condenses or applies.

     ZH
  3. 唯心訣 you are here ZH
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