佛果克勤禪師心要

Most of these readers could not leave office, family or a far-off monastery to sit in Yuanwu's hall. Whether awakening can be found and kept in the middle of their affairs, or only away from them, is what the letters keep answering.

To the statesman Zhang, a pacification commissioner, Yuanwu writes that worldly affairs and the Buddha's teaching have never been different, and to monks that the two must be worked into one piece. He does not make it easy. A breakthrough is only the start: afterwards comes long, unbroken care, eating and dressing as ordinary ways of nourishing what was found, guarded as one would cross a land of poisoned wells. And he presses the young, who think there is time: one breath that does not return, and this life is over.

• ordinary life
• everyday practice
• practice
• spiritual practice
• meditation
• perseverance
• equanimity
• birth and death
• liberation

Words are the only thing a letter can send, and the letters distrust words. What separates a saying that wakes its reader from one that merely informs them is the question beneath the advice.

Yuanwu takes over an old distinction: a phrase met as living is never forgotten, one met as dead cannot save even its holder. He then makes it practical. Knowledge about Chan is chasing a shadow, and the more someone seeks, the further it runs. Silence is no refuge either, since monks who hear that the teaching stands like a sheer wall and fall mute have only found a subtler way to measure it. The living phrase cuts, like Yunmen's sayings or Linji's sword, and a sword that cuts needs sharpening again.

• language
• conceptual thought
• nonconceptuality
• direct realization
• realization
• awakening
• koan practice
• nonattachment
• nonduality

Many of the letters go to monks about to take the high seat themselves. What a teacher owes a student who arrives saying birth and death is the great matter, and how to tell whether they mean it, is what Yuanwu hands on.

His advice to new abbots is a physician's. Only someone often ill knows the nature of medicines, he writes, and a teacher must read each student's sickness, see where they have fallen, and only then show the fundamental matter. Teachers without that skill lead students into the weeds to play with antiques. Even a view equal to the Buddha's, he warns, still meets the obstacle of the Buddha-stage. To his secretary Dahui he sets out the line of Linji from Mazu and Huangbo down to Fengxue and Xinghua, the inheritance Dahui was to carry.

• transmission
• teacher-student relationship
• teaching
• skillful means
• compassion
• chan
• chan buddhism
• discernment