47Yunmen's Dharma-Body

Introduction 垂示

天何言哉，四時行焉；地何言哉，萬物生焉。向四時行處，可以見體；於萬物生處，可以見用。且道：向什麼處見得衲僧？離却言語動用、行住坐臥，併却咽喉唇吻，還辨得麼？

Does Heaven speak? Yet the four seasons run their course. Does the earth speak? Yet the ten thousand things are born. Watch the seasons turn, and you see the essence. Watch things come to birth, and you see it at work. So tell me: where do you get a clear look at a real monk? Strip away talk, gesture, action, all coming and going, all sitting and lying down. Clamp the throat shut, seal the lips. Can you still tell what's what?

僧問雲門：「如何是法身？」門云：「六不收。」

A monk asked Yunmen, "What is the dharma-body?"
Yunmen said, "The six don't catch it."

Verse 頌

一二三四五六，
碧眼胡僧數不足。
少林謾道付神光，
卷衣又說歸天竺。
天竺茫茫無處尋，
夜來却對乳峯宿。

One two three four five six.
The blue-eyed foreign monk can't count that high.
They say Shaolin passed it to Shenguang, but that's a lie:
he rolled up his robe and went home to India, so they tell it.
India is vast, vast, and nowhere to be found.
Last night he turned back and bedded down on Breast Peak.

Pointer

The "dharma-body" is one of the loftiest abstractions in Buddhism: ultimate reality itself, the formless truth running through everything, as opposed to any flesh-and-blood body. The monk wants Yunmen, that famously curt tenth-century master, to define it. "The six" are the six senses (the usual five plus the mind), the whole apparatus you'd reach for to grasp anything at all. Yunmen's answer says the dharma-body slips every one of them, so the very tools the monk is using to ask are the tools that guarantee he'll miss. The verse drags in Bodhidharma, the blue-eyed foreigner who supposedly carried Zen to China, then waves off the legend that he passed it down and went home; the truth was never in India or in any pedigree. Last night it bedded down on Breast Peak, which is to say wherever you happen to be standing.