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WorkYunmen Wenyan

Yunmen kuangzhen chanshi guanglu

The monks' record of a Chan master who answered in a single word, and answered for them when they fell silent.

by Yunmen Wenyan177 passages held

  • Chinese, the original language
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Original title
雲門匡真禪師廣錄
Original language
Chinese

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Overview

A story told in Chan circles from the early twelfth century says that Yunmen Wenyan forbade his monks to write down what he said, and that some of them made robes of paper and noted his words on them as soon as they heard them. Whatever the truth of that, Yunmen wrote no book. This is a recorded-sayings collection in three fascicles, compiled by his disciple Shoujian from the talks and exchanges of a master who taught for decades at the monastery he built on Mount Yunmen, in the far south of China, under the protection of the kings of Southern Han. His first recorded sermon lists the scholastic schemes of the day — the three baskets of scripture, the Tiantai school's ranking of the Buddha's teachings into periods and kinds — grants that each has its place, and tells the monks that mastering them still leaves them a world away from the matter in hand. The rest of the record shows what he offered instead: 320 exchanges in which monks ask what the Buddha is and receive a household object, a single word or a rebuke; sayings from his private room; and some 290 instructions in which he put a question to the assembly and, when no one answered, gave the answer in their place. It ends with an account of his years of wandering, the memorial he sent the king when he was dying, and his last instructions to his monks. A preface dated 1076 shows the record already in print, and the oldest complete text is the one Yuanjue Zongyan of Gushan, near Fuzhou, re-edited around 1120, about the time the record of the ninth-century Chan master Linji appeared. The monk-historian Juefan Huihong put Yunmen in the first fascicle of his collection of Chan lives, partly in protest that the official biographies of eminent monks had left him out. Eighteen cases of the Blue Cliff Record turn on his words.

Key concepts

What is an encounter dialogue?

It is a short recorded exchange in which a monk puts a question to the master and the master answers at once, often with a word, an object or a blow. The first part of the record holds over three hundred of them. They are not lessons with a moral attached: each one is a test of whether the questioner can meet the answer where it lands, rather than file it away.

What is a substitute answer in Yunmen's record?

It is an answer Yunmen gave in place of his monks. He would put a question to the assembly, and when nobody spoke, or someone answered badly, the record notes "he answered in their place" and gives his line. Hundreds of these survive. Asked what to say about the days after the fifteenth of the month, the hall was silent, and he supplied the reply himself: every day is a good day.

What does "a transmission outside the teachings" mean?

It is the Chan claim that awakening is passed from person to person rather than learned from scripture. Yunmen states it as a puzzle in his first sermon: if the matter lay in words, the Buddha's teachings in their three baskets and twelve divisions are full of words, so why speak of a transmission outside them at all? He does not reject the scriptures; he denies that knowing them is the same as seeing for oneself.

What does Yunmen mean when he asks monks for "your own self"?

He means what is doing the seeing and hearing right now, as opposed to any idea a monk holds about it. He asks for it bluntly, often by pointing at something else: "The lantern is yourself. Holding your bowl and gulping rice, the rice is not yourself." The jolt is deliberate. A monk who has a doctrine of the self ready is shown that the doctrine is one more thing he is looking at.

What is "medicine and sickness cure each other"?

It is an old Chan saying that every teaching is a remedy for a particular confusion, and that a remedy kept after the cure becomes a new sickness. Yunmen raises it and pushes it further: if the whole earth is medicine, which part of it is you? A teaching about emptiness cures attachment to things, and then the attachment to emptiness needs curing in turn.

Themes of the book

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

An Answer in One Word

A monk asks what the Buddha is and gets a sesame cake, a dried stick of dung or a single syllable. Whether such an answer refuses the question or settles it is what the reader has to decide.

Yunmen's replies are short on purpose, and their shortness is the teaching. Asked which of the Buddha's three bodies preaches, he says one word, "Essential"; asked what goes beyond buddhas and patriarchs, he says "Sesame cake", and when the monk protests that this has nothing to do with it, he agrees. An explanation would hand the questioner another idea to hold. The blunt object hands him nothing, and leaves him facing the fact that he went looking for the answer somewhere other than where he stood.

  • language
  • chan dialogue
  • encounter dialogue
  • conceptual thought
  • language and meaning
  • paradox
  • koan
  • teaching methods

Enter a dialogue

Eating Rice, Wearing Clothes

Asked for a way in, he says to eat gruel and eat rice. Whether awakening lies anywhere but in the plain day is the question he keeps pressing.

Yunmen points at lanterns, pillars, the kitchen and the monastery gate, and at the day itself: when he asks the assembly what to say about the days after the fifteenth of the month and nobody answers, he answers for them, every day is a good day. Ordinary does not mean easy, though. Someone who has really got it, he says, talks all day without moving the lips and eats all day without touching a grain of rice, and even that, he adds, is still talk at the gate.

  • ordinary life
  • ordinary experience
  • everyday life
  • direct experience
  • direct realization
  • perception
  • nonduality
  • emptiness
  • impermanence
  • self

Enter a dialogue

Past the Three Baskets

He grants every scripture and scheme its place and still says that mastering them leaves a monk a world away. What a person must find out for themselves, and why borrowed words cannot carry it, is at stake.

His first sermon lists the canon in its three baskets and the Tiantai ranking of the Buddha's teachings, then asks why, if the matter lay in words, a transmission outside the teachings was ever needed. He mocks monks who collect sayings and travel to famous teachers, says that clever questioning only wins a slippery tongue, and would rather they woke up than carried the scriptures under their heels. Even his last instructions keep to it: no weeping and no mourning clothes, because those who leave home should not imitate the world.

  • scripture
  • knowledge
  • understanding
  • teaching
  • discernment
  • authenticity
  • spiritual practice
  • chan practice
  • practice
  • awakening

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held
177
distinct concepts
137
by passages held, corpus-wide
#379

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: “chan buddhism” and “language”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 23 pairings. 83 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
chan buddhismlanguage49
chan buddhismdirect experience29
direct experiencelanguage26
languagespiritual practice20
chanlanguage17
chan buddhismspiritual practice16
chan buddhismnonduality14
languagenonduality14
chan dialoguelanguage13
chanspiritual practice12
conceptual thoughtlanguage7
direct experiencespiritual practice6
conceptual thoughtspiritual practice5
chanconceptual thought3
chan buddhismconceptual thought3
chan dialoguedirect experience3
conceptual thoughtnonduality3
direct experiencenonduality2
nondualityspiritual practice2
chandirect experience1
channonduality1
chan dialogueconceptual thought1
chan dialoguenonduality1

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. Yunmen kuangzhen chanshi guanglu (雲門匡真禪師廣錄) you are here ZH
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