21Yunyan Sweeps the Ground雲巖掃地

Introduction 示眾

脫迷悟，絕聖凡，雖無多事。立主賓，分貴賤，別是一家。量材授職，即不無；同氣連枝作麼生會？

Once you're free of delusion and awakening, holy and ordinary fall away too. Not much left to do. And yet you set up host and guest, mark off noble from common: that's a whole separate household. Sizing up the timber, handing out the jobs, there's still such a thing as that. So how do you understand two branches off the same trunk?

雲巖掃地次，道吾云：「太區區生。」巖云：「須知有不區區者。」吾云：「恁麼則有第二月也。」巖提起掃箒云：「這箇是第幾月？」吾便休去。玄沙云：「正是第二月。」雲門云：「奴見婢殷勤。」

Yunyan was sweeping the ground. Daowu said, "Working awfully hard, aren't you."

Yunyan said, "You should know there's someone who isn't working hard."

Daowu said, "Then there's a second moon."

Yunyan held up his broom and said, "Which moon is this?"

Daowu let it drop.

Xuansha said, "That's exactly the second moon."

Yunmen said, "The servant watching the maid bend over backwards."

Verse 頌

借來聊爾了門頭，
得用隨宜即便休。
象骨巖前弄蛇手，
兒時做處老知羞。

Borrowed a moment, and the front gate gets swept;
used as the day needs, then set down again.
At Elephant Bone Crag, the snake-handler's trick.
What he managed as a boy, the old man blushes to recall.

Pointer

Yunyan and Daowu were dharma brothers, students of the same teacher, fond of testing each other. The trap is "the second moon." In old Buddhist usage, press on your eyeball and you see two moons, the real one and a phantom double, and the phantom stands for anything secondary or derivative, not the genuine article. So when Yunyan says "someone isn't working hard," pointing past his sweating body to the still, true self, Daowu pounces: aren't you conjuring a fake second moon by splitting yourself in two? Yunyan's comeback, holding up the broom and asking "which moon is this?", refuses the whole real-versus-fake frame, since the broom in his hand is just the broom in his hand. The later one-liners from Xuansha and Yunmen are rival scorecards, Xuansha saying Yunyan still snagged on "second," Yunmen's crack about servants groveling saying both brothers tried far too hard to outdo each other.