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雲門示眾云：「古佛與露柱相交，是第幾機？」自代云：「南山起雲，北山下雨。」

Yunmen addressed the assembly: "An ancient buddha and a temple pillar are intimate. What level of working is that?" Then he answered himself: "On South Mountain clouds rise; on North Mountain rain falls."

Verse 頌

南山雲，
北山雨，
四七二三面相覩。
新羅國裏曾上堂，
大唐國裏未打鼓。
苦中樂，
樂中苦，
誰道黃金如糞土？

Clouds on South Mountain,
rain on North Mountain.
The twenty-eight and the six, face to face.
In Silla the talk was already given;
in great Tang the drum has yet to sound.
Joy within the pain,
pain within the joy.
Who says gold is no better than dirt?

Pointer

Yunmen (864–949, Five Dynasties) liked one-liners that go off like charges, and here he plants one. A "temple pillar" is just a wooden post holding up the hall, the deadest, most ordinary object he can point at, so when he says an "ancient buddha," the most exalted thing imaginable, is intimate with a plain pillar, he is deliberately welding the highest to the lowest and daring you to rank it: which level of attainment is that? Then he discards his own question and answers with weather, clouds rising over one mountain, rain falling on another, two separate peaks behaving as one connected system, no ladder of levels anywhere. In the verse the "twenty-eight and six" are the legendary ancestors, twenty-eight in India and six in China, gazing at each other across the centuries, and Silla and Tang are Korea and China, the point being that distance and sequence quietly collapse. The closing line flips a pious cliche, since monks are supposed to treat gold like dirt, by teasing that maybe you have the worth of things exactly backwards. So go ahead and grade it.