Case 14 - Yun Men’s Appropriate Statement
A
monk asked Yun Man, “What
are the teachings of a whole lifetime?”
Yun
Men said, “An
appropriate statement.”
(Read BCR commentary
completely)
Reflections
Yun
Men appears in cases six and eight of the
Blue Cliff Record. He was the
successor of Hsueh Feng, and he’s the guy who, in Case eight,
asked questions
and answered them himself. This teaching form is known as tai-yu, or “substitute
sayings,” in which you answer a question
posed by yourself on behalf of your audience, or else you supply an
answer to a
question or saying of an earlier Master, substituting for a speechless
monk in
a story; Yun Men also originated pieh-yu,
or “alternative saying,” a reply or remark given as
an alternate to another in
a story, or an alternate reply to one of his self-posed self-answered
questions.
So
let’s see what we have here.
The
simplicity of this case beguiles me. The first part
of the koan has the question,
What
are the teachings of a
whole lifetime?
The
second part is Yun Men’s response,
An
appropriate statement.
But
is Yun Men answering the monk’s question or
commenting on it? I think he is answering the question. Otherwise as a
comment
he would have said, “An appropriate question.”
Yun
Men does not say, as he could have, that the
teachings of a lifetime are the teachings that Shakyamuni gave during
his
forty-nine years of teaching. Instead, Yun Men gives the teachings
themselves
in his response, “An appropriate statement.”
Yun
Men is thereby saying that the teaching Shakyamuni
gave us during his forty-nine years of teaching are “an
appropriate statement.”
Or, “upaya.”
“Skillful means.” The
teaching of the Lotus Sutra. The
teaching of the Mahayana. The teaching of the Bodhisattva. The teaching
of one
word. The teaching of One. One response. One thought. Which is no
thought. An
appropriate statement.
Generally
speaking, in koan study, the question of the
disciple is the relative and the response of the Master is the
absolute.
Notice, however, I use the qualifier “generally,”
for it ain’t necessarily so.
Sometimes students or disciples try to fox their teachers by asking a
question
in terms of the absolute even though the question may sound as though
it were
in the relative. These are some of the threads in this koan you need to
explore. One way of doing this is to work with the koan from varied
points of
view. So consider the question of the monk from the point of view of
the
relative. Look at the question from the point of view of the absolute.
You can
also look at the question from the point of view of neither the
relative or the
absolute. What would this point of view be?
The
same process applies to the answer. There are,
therefore, many configurations possible. The question could be
relative, the
answer absolute. The question could be absolute, the answer absolute.
The
question could be absolute, the answer absolute. The question could be
relative, the answer relative. The question could be both
absolute/relative,
and the answer could be both absolute/relative. The question could be
neither
absolute nor relative, and the answer could be neither absolute nor
relative.
What would this be? So you see you have many hours of dizzying zazen
when you
explore this koan.
“What
are the teachings of a whole lifetime?” As you
noticed in the reading of the commentary by Yuan Wu, the phrase
“teachings of a
whole lifetime,” refers to Shakyamuni Buddha—refers
to his teaching career of
forty-nine years. Therefore, looked at from the point of view of the
relative,
the monk is asking what teachings did Shakyamuni Buddha present during
his
lifetime. So, the question could be rephrased as, “How would
you sum-up the
lifetime teachings of Shakyamuni Buddha?” The answer Yun Men
gave is,
An
appropriate statement.
Now,
is Yun Men’s answer in the relative or the absolute?
Back to the meditation pillow with this one. If it’s relative
Yun Men could
simply be giving the answer to the question, i.e. a summing-up of the
teachings
of Shakyamuni Buddha, in one word—that word being
“appropriate,” or “upaya,”
or “skillful means.” If Yun
Men’s response is the absolute then what does it mean? Back
to the pillow!
I
wonder if Yun Men could mean that the monk’s question
is inappropriate! A few more sessions on the pillow could then take us
to Shakyamuni’s
commentary on his own teaching career. He said he never taught
anything! So,
Yun Men turns the koan upside-down, with his appropriate statement,
which now
becomes most appropriate indeed.
These
are two of the streams that can be followed in this
koan. There are many others. You are challenged to kayak up and down
each
stream the koan may take you.
What
is singularly missing from this koan is the usual
epilogue, namely, that after the Master’s instruction or
response, the
disciple, or student receives a realization, a kensho
experience—becomes enlightened. We must understand that the
major objective of these mondos, or
dialogues between disciple and Master in the koan collections is to jar
the
student into realization. Somehow get the student to realize, find, his
or her
true self. Or, enlightenment. Very often, as I mentioned, koans end
with such a
declaration of enlightenment. And sometimes, the koans end with the
statement
that the student didn’t get it. There is neither in this
koan. It just ends,
appropriately, inappropriately! We don’t know, if the monk
got it or not. So,
my question to you all is do you get it? What do you get? It must be
clear that
Yun Men was not speaking to posterity. He would have had no idea that
this
snippet of a dialogue between him and a monk would be investigated
thousands of
years later. No, Yun Men was talking to that monk. His response was
appropriately designed to jar that monk to a realization, Looking at the koan in
this way what is Yun
Men saying?
And
why is there no commentary on whether or not he
succeeded?
Can
it be that Yun Men is speaking both in absolute and
relative terms at the same time? Is he telling the student that his
question is
totally inappropriate? Because Shakyamuni Buddha never taught anything?
Because
there are no teachings? Is he also saying that the teachings are
“upaya.”
“Appropriateness.” “Skillful
Means.” Are both true? Are both untrue?
So
with all of this
dust in your eyes, how do you present this case?
How
would you make an
appropriate statement?
What
is your appropriate
statement?
Is
there such a thing as an
appropriate statement?
What
are the teachings of
your lifetime?
Or
do these so-called
teachings shift and change and permute and alter and develop and grow
and ebb
and flow?
Finally,
is there such a
thing as teaching?
A
monk asked Yun Men, “What
are the teachings of a whole lifetime?”
Yun
Men said, “An
appropriate statement.”