圓悟佛果禪師語錄

Each new monastery made Yuanwu its host and every questioner his guest, and the roles kept trading places. Who is teaching whom when a master and a monk meet in the hall is the question his sermons keep staging.

The record opens each abbacy the same way: incense for the emperor's long life, for the officials, and then for his teacher Wuzu Fayan, the old adept who after more than thirty masters had smashed him with a single hammer blow. Then come the questions from the floor. At Jiashan, where he had once stayed as a visitor, he asks the assembly whether anyone can tell guest from host. One palm does not clap, he says elsewhere, and if he sits the student must stand: a teaching exists only in the exchange.

• teaching
• transmission
• skillful means
• teaching methods
• language
• spontaneity
• freedom
• direct experience
• chan buddhism

Outside the Blue Cliff lectures Yuanwu took up the old cases on his own account, in prose remarks and in verse. What it means to judge an ancient exchange rather than merely retell it is what these fascicles show at work.

Three fascicles of comments and two of verses take up many of the stories Xuedou had used, Deshan crossing Guishan's hall among them, and give Yuanwu's verdict without Xuedou in between. The verses are short and abrupt: a great furnace smelting gold, thunder startling spring, someone calmly smoothing a tiger's whiskers. His sermons draw the same line. The road beyond, he quotes, a thousand sages do not pass on, and students who toil at it are monkeys grasping at shadows; the case only works when it is already present before a word is spoken.

• koan
• conceptual thought
• nonconceptuality
• discernment
• emptiness
• nonduality
• buddha-nature
• perception
• direct realization

A Chan abbot prayed for the emperor, wrote verses on portraits and lit funeral pyres. Whether a teaching that refuses forms can be carried by forms, and what it says at a cremation, is where these pages press.

The last fascicles keep the ritual work of the office. In the capital Yuanwu opened the hall on behalf of the state, pointing to the high seat as the seat of emptiness and his robe as the robe of patience. Monks brought him their paintings of his face and asked for inscriptions, and he wrote twenty, calling the likeness a rotten stump, a trickster wagging its lips, an old awl slipped from the mould. And he spoke the words over the fire for dead monks: yesterday one was pitiable, today one more desolate still.

• ritual
• impermanence
• compassion
• liberation
• awakening
• realization
• spiritual practice
• meditation