78Yunmen's Sesame Cake雲門餬餅

Introduction 示眾

絻天索價，搏地相酬。百計經求，一場懡㦬。還有知進退、識休咎底麼？

Name a sky-high price, get paid back in dirt. Scheme a hundred ways to close the deal and end up red-faced, empty-handed. Is anyone here who knows when to press and when to fall back, who can tell good luck from bad?

僧問雲門：「如何是超佛越祖之談？」門云：「餬餅。」

A monk asked Yunmen, "What is the talk that goes beyond the buddhas and the ancestors?"
Yunmen said, "Sesame cake."

Verse 頌

餬餅云超佛祖談，
句中無味若為參。
衲僧一日如知飽，
方見雲門面不慚。

"Sesame cake" — talk beyond the buddhas and the ancestors.
No flavor in the words, so how do you chew them?
The day a monk at last feels full,
he sees Yunmen's face and feels no shame.

Pointer

Yunmen Wenyan (864–949, of the Five Dynasties, not the Tang) ran one of the great Chan houses and was famous for answers of a single word that leave nothing to climb. The monk wants the talk that tops every buddha and ancestor who ever lived, the ultimate above-it-all teaching. Yunmen names a sesame cake: cheap street food, the most ordinary thing within reach. The defect is built into the question, which assumes the highest truth has to arrive as some rarefied special saying, and the cake refuses that assumption flat. The verse calls the words flavorless on purpose; there is nothing exotic to taste, and chewing on the plain thing anyway instead of holding out for something grander is where the case actually lives. Yunmen does the same trick with a flatbread in his sound-and-form talk (case 82).