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WorkYongming Yanshou

Wanshan tonggui ji

A hundred and fourteen questions from a sceptic who thinks good works are beside the point, answered one by one.

by Yongming Yanshou210 passages held

  • Chinese, the original language
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Original title
萬善同歸集
Original language
Chinese

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Overview

One question in this book asks how burning a finger, or one's whole body, can serve the Way, when the Biographies of Eminent Monks and the monastic rules of the Lesser Vehicle both condemn it; Yongming Yanshou answers that giving up the body for the teaching accords with the Mahāyāna scriptures, and cites them. The question is typical. Yanshou wrote the book in three fascicles as a run of a hundred and fourteen questions and answers, most of them put by someone who thinks the practices it defends are unnecessary. If the mind is Buddha, why look outside it? If ultimate reality has no marks of good and evil, why do good? If the most gifted awaken suddenly, why do they still need practice? Yanshou names the target on his first page: the practitioner who sits in emptiness and calls that true cultivation. Against him the book argues that principle and practice, the absolute and the everyday, cannot be pulled apart, so that every good act returns to the one reality the meditator seeks: chanting a sutra, reciting a Buddha's name, releasing captive animals, and, for those in office, pardoning prisoners and lifting tolls. At the end Yanshou gives the book ten further names, each a pair it holds together, such as the expedient and the real, or emptiness and existence. The preface the text now carries, by Shen Zhen, dates from 1072. In this book, too, Yanshou set out how Chan meditation and recitation of the Buddha Amitābha's name belong together, and from the twelfth century Chinese Pure Land Buddhism counted him among its patriarchs. James Benn, a historian of Chinese Buddhism, has studied its defence of self-immolation.

Key concepts

What does the title mean by good deeds 'returning to the same'?

That every good act, however small or worldly, ends in the one reality the meditator seeks. Yanshou opens by saying that all good things return to the true nature of things, which holds them as space holds everything and brings them forth as the earth brings forth plants. Chanting, giving, bowing and meditating are not rival paths. They are many streams running to the same sea.

What are 'principle' and 'phenomena'?

Principle is the true nature of things, one and without marks; phenomena are things as they appear, many and changing. Yanshou says the relation between them is hard to see and, examined closely, is neither one nor different. A deed is never outside principle, and principle is never apart from deeds. A line he quotes sums up the warning: do not let principle stall the deeds, or the deeds obstruct principle.

What are the two truths, and why does the book need both?

Buddhist teaching speaks on two levels: the conventional truth of persons, acts and their results, and the ultimate truth of emptiness. Yanshou insists the Buddhas always teach through both, and that without the conventional the ultimate cannot be reached either. He quotes the consciousness-only treatise: to deny the two truths is emptiness grasped the wrong way, a sickness the Buddhas call incurable. Emptiness rightly seen keeps cause and effect.

What are the 'two adornments' of merit and wisdom?

The two things every Buddha and bodhisattva is said to possess fully: merit, the good stored up by deeds, and wisdom, the insight into emptiness. The quietist keeps only the second. Yanshou quotes the master Huizhong: since all Buddhas carry both, how could anyone deny cause and effect? Merit pursued without insight only buys a better rebirth; with insight, it becomes as wide as reality itself.

What is the 'Pure Land of mind-only'?

Yanshou's way of joining Pure Land devotion with Chan. A Pure Land is a Buddha's realm where the faithful hope to be reborn; mind-only says every realm is a manifestation of mind. Once objects are seen as mind and mind as Buddha, he writes, whatever is called to mind is Buddha. So rebirth in the Pure Land does not contradict the teaching that nothing lies outside the mind; it is that teaching practised.

Themes of the book

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

If Mind Is Buddha, Why Practise?

Every objection in the book is a version of one thought: if the mind already is Buddha, effort is beside the point. Whether seeing that the goal is already here ends practice, or is exactly why it begins, is the question Yanshou answers a hundred ways.

The opponent is the practitioner who sits in emptiness and calls it true cultivation, and Yanshou lets him speak well: good is not liberation either, the true body is already clear, why not just drift free with no-mind? The answers turn the premise round. It is because mind is Buddha that one practises, since iron with no gold in it never yields gold however long it is forged. A jewel can be clear by nature and still need its ore scraped away. Principle and practice are neither one nor two.

  • spiritual practice
  • practice
  • meditation
  • emptiness
  • nonduality
  • buddhahood
  • buddha-nature
  • awakening
  • skillful means

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Good Deeds in the World

A bodhisattva's emptiness is supposed to show as care for others. What counts as a good deed for a monk, for a magistrate and for a person releasing a caught fish, and why each still matters if all is empty, runs through the book's practical half.

Yanshou names deeds, not virtues. He commends buying back the lives of animals bound for the kitchen, citing the scripture that all men have been one's fathers and all women one's mothers. He tells those in office to free prisoners, pardon punishments, bring exiles home and lift the toll barriers and trade taxes. He defends the hermit's solitude as training for teaching. And he defends, against the Biographies of Eminent Monks and the monastic rules, those who burn a finger or the body as an offering, as Mahāyāna scripture allows.

  • compassion
  • merit
  • ethics
  • ethical practice
  • generosity
  • bodhisattva practice
  • bodhisattva path
  • karma
  • rebirth

Enter a dialogue

Calling the Buddha's Name

Reciting a Buddha's name looks like the simplest practice and, to a Chan purist, the emptiest. How sound, chanting and bowing can reach the formless mind, and why Yanshou would not let Chan despise them, is the question here.

The objector says names are empty and cannot convey anything, so calling a Buddha's name is like describing food to the hungry. Yanshou answers from scripture and from mind-only: once objects are seen to be mind, and mind seen to be Buddha, whatever is recalled is Buddha. One stick of sandalwood perfumes a forest of foul-smelling trees, and one string made of lion's sinew snaps every other string. When a king doubts that a lifetime of evil can be undone by recitation at death, the monk Nagasena replies that stones sink, but on a boat they float.

  • pure land
  • devotion
  • ritual
  • religious practice
  • repentance
  • merit
  • liberation
  • dependent origination

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
210
distinct concepts
245
by passages held, corpus-wide
#341

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: “emptiness” and “karma”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 27 pairings. 81 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
emptinesskarma18
emptinessnonduality13
emptinessspiritual practice11
compassionemptiness9
emptinessskillful means9
nondualityskillful means9
emptinessmeditation7
emptinessmerit7
karmaspiritual practice7
compassionskillful means6
compassionmerit5
compassionnonduality5
karmamerit5
meditationnonduality5
meditationskillful means5
meditationspiritual practice5
compassionkarma4
skillful meansspiritual practice4
compassionspiritual practice3
compassionmeditation2
meritskillful means2
meritspiritual practice2
nondualityspiritual practice2
karmameditation1
karmanonduality1
karmaskillful means1
meditationmerit1

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) you are here 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

    Shortest of his works on this shelf: a single fascicle that turns the teaching of the Records of the Source Mirror into a checklist of errors.

     ZH
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