14Yunmen's One-Word Teaching

僧問雲門：「如何是一代時教？」雲門云：「對一說。」

A monk asked Yunmen, "What is the teaching of the Buddha's whole lifetime?"
Yunmen said, "One word, fit to the moment."

Verse 頌

對一說，
太孤絕。
無孔鐵鎚重下楔。
閻浮樹下笑呵呵，
昨夜驪龍拗角折。
別，別！
韻陽老人得一橛。

One word, fit to the moment,
utterly alone, cut clean.
Into a hammer with no hole he drives the wedge.
Under the world-tree, laughing out loud.
Last night the black dragon's horn snapped off.
Hold on, hold on.
The old man of Shaoyang got one peg.

Pointer

Yunmen Wenyan (864–949), the Five Dynasties master with the fastest tongue in Chan, specialized in answers a syllable long that shut a question down and split it open in the same beat. The monk asks the big one: sum up everything the Buddha taught across an entire life. Both honest exits are mined. Say something specific and you have shrunk a lifetime to a slogan; say "it is beyond words" and you are just ducking. Yunmen's reply, literally "facing one, speak," means a real teaching is not a fixed doctrine but the single right thing said to this person at this instant. The verse heaps on impossible images, a hammer with no hole to take a wedge, a dragon's horn snapped clean off, to say he did the thing that should not be doable. "The old man of Shaoyang" is Yunmen naming himself. Notice the answer is built to be re-aimed: the right word changes with who is standing there.