Urs App, an eminent Swiss scholar of Buddhism who has spent a number of years teaching in Kyoto, here delivers a thorough presentation of the Chan (Chinese Zen tradition) as exemplified in one of its most distinguished proponents, Yunmen Wenyan (c. What does being a person actually mean? Zen Master Yunmen: His Life and Essential Sayings, Urs App (Shambhala, July 2018) Indeed, as the introduction points out, we can’t know whether the original listeners could make any more sense out of many of them than we can now. Yunmen was a master of koans, those short, pithy and often baffling sayings through which the great Zen teachers express their teachings. It was, apparently, Yunmen who coined the phrase “every day is a good day”, too this line may well contain the essence of Buddhism, as long as we remember that every day is also a bad day or neither good nor bad. “Once the Master asked, ‘What is the question that lays it all out?’ In place of the asked monk, Yunmen answered, ‘Whack the monk next to me.’”Īnd so it goes, the enigmatic answers, the whacking and insults, another Zen master confounding clerical ignorance with what looks like obfuscation and deliberate ambiguity.
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