The first sermon in Yunmen Wenyan's recorded sayings begins by giving the scholars their due. The monastic rules train conduct, he tells the assembly, the discourses train concentration and the treatises train wisdom; even the scheme by which the Tiantai school, the great scholastic tradition of Chinese Buddhism, sorted the Buddha's teaching into five periods and eight kinds has its place. Then he says that a monk who masters all of them still stands a world away from the matter itself. The rest of the record shows what he put in their place: a monk asks what the Buddha is and receives the name of a household object, a single word, or a rebuke.
He was born in 864 at Jiaxing, near Suzhou, as the Tang dynasty entered its last decades. He became a monk under Zhicheng, a teacher of the monastic rules, and took full ordination in 883. The training did not satisfy him, and he went looking for Chan, the school that claimed to transmit awakening directly rather than through the study of scripture. A story first recorded around 1100 says that Muzhou Daoming, an eccentric heir of the master Huangbo, twice refused him at the gate; the third time Yunmen pushed his leg through, and Muzhou slammed the gate and broke it. Muzhou sent him on to Xuefeng Yicun in Fujian, the most sought-after Chan teacher of the day, and Yunmen became his heir.
The Tang fell in 907, and the empire broke into rival states; the north was at war, the south comparatively quiet. After years of travel Yunmen joined the monastery of the master Rumin on Mount Lingshu, in today's Guangdong, and succeeded him as abbot in 918. Liu Yan, the founder of the Southern Han kingdom, took him under his protection. In 923 Yunmen asked the king's help to build a new monastery on Mount Yunmen, which gave him his name; he moved there about five years later and taught there until his death in 949. The tradition counts his disciples at 790.
What he taught there is the claim he is remembered for: awakening is not reached by mastering an account of it, and an ordinary word, given at the right moment, can show it more directly than any doctrine. His answers were built so that they could not be turned into doctrine. Later teachers called the shortest of them his one-word barriers; one of them was simply guan, a frontier pass. Often he put a question to the assembly, waited, and when no one spoke gave the answer himself in their place; his record holds some 290 of these substitute answers. A story that circulated from the early twelfth century says he forbade his monks to write his words down, and that two of them made robes of paper and noted his sayings on them as soon as they heard them.
His disciple Shoujian compiled the three fascicles of his record, and it was in print by 1076. The Yunmen house became one of the five houses into which Chan histories divide the school, and in the early Song dynasty it thrived among educated officials. Xuedou Chongxian, fourth in its line, built many of his hundred verses on old cases around Yunmen's words, and eighteen cases of the Blue Cliff Record turn on them. In the twelfth century the monk-historian Juefan Huihong put Yunmen's life in the first fascicle of his collection of Chan biographies, partly in protest that the official lives of eminent monks had left him out. By the end of the Song the house itself had been absorbed into the Linji line.