Yàoshān Ascends the Seat: How Can We Truly Benefit Living Beings?

Record of Going Easy, Case 7, in Brief

This case deals with a timely (and timeless) issue - how can we truly benefit living beings?

The drama kicks off like this: Yàoshān, our Zen master du jour, is invited to give a talk - a normal thing for a Zen master to do. Why? The practitioners in his community were suffering like living beings everywhere suffer and they hoped for some guidance, maybe even for a transformative moment as a result of the great master’s direct pointing.

Yàoshān lived from 745-828. He was a ninth-generation successor in China through Shítou. Yàoshān taught on Yàoshān (藥山, i.e., Medicine Mountain). His teaching tenure occurred during a period of the Táng Dynasty characterized not only by constant imperial intrigue and high-level murder plots, but also drought, flooding, big-time famine, all mismanaged due to government corruption.

If Yàoshān was asked to give a talk today with our present array of horrible happenings (and the troubling sense that all this is merely foreshadow), we can hear the community crying out, “Yàoshān, please, compassionately open the gates of liberation! You’ve found peace, please help us find peace too! Help! Help!”

The shouts, though, would be coming from a small group - it is reported in Zen texts that Yàoshān usually had between just ten-and-twenty students. Given that many dharma communities during the Táng had thousands of practitioners, Yàoshān’s was small. He was, you see, famously terse and we’re told that most people where unable to bear the hunger and cold at his place. It seems that he managed to scare off all but the most zealous students.

One translator notes that “hunger and cold” should probably be taken metaphorically, i.e., Yàoshān’s students hungered for verbal teachings (see below) and that they felt cold from Yàoshān’s lack of emotional availability (also see below).

I have my doubts. Maybe they were also literally hungry and cold.

Speaking of hunger and cold, here’s an example. Look!

舉

“For a long time Yàoshān had not ascended the seat. Superintendent Bái said, ‘For a long time the assembly has been thinking about you offering instruction. Please, Venerable, expound the dharma for the assembly.’

Yàoshān ordered the bell to be rung and the assembly gathered. Yàoshān ascended the seat, sat for a long time, got down from the seat, and returned to the abbott’s ten-foot square room.

Soon afterward, the Superintendent asked, ‘When invited, it is proper for a monk to speak to the assembly. Why didn’t you offer even one sentence?’

Yàoshān said, ‘The sutras have sutra teachers. The commentaries have commentary teachers. Why do you think this old monk is strange?’”

Ascend the seat. Sit silently. Descend the seat.

What? That’s all you’ve got? Shouldn’t you say some sassy and puzzling Zen words? Assign a kōan to your hungry and cold students? Chant a sutra and dedicate the merit to improve things (you know, prayers and thoughts)? How about getting active by making a public statement against government corruption, sign a petition, attend a demonstration?

Come on, man, take a stand!

Yàoshān just sat for a long time. And here we are on Medicine Mountain, yet that’s Yàoshān’s remedy for the suffering of all the many beings?

One thing to note is that in the past many bodhisattva practitioners understood the painful fact that the world was a near, if not total, shit-show, and unless we thoroughly awaken so we can function freely with great compassion, whatever we do to “help” may become part of the problem (and that’s one of the most difficult things about aspiring-bodhisattva work; i.e., you feel the pain of the world, but know that the essential problem [aka, greed, anger, and ignorance] can’t be resolved at the political or social-welfare level).

In addition, the subtle depth of practice required for profound transformation (for the benefit of all beings) requires enormous focus and devotion. One must be the person who, even when hit with a 2x4 upside the head, doesn’t turn from their focus. Even when hit with the awareness that we’re altogether complicit in this quagmire.

I recently asked Tess Beasley Roshi about this. I’ll post the full interview, “The Same Black Shows the Moon and Stars: An Interview with Tess Beasley Roshi,” next week. Here is her take on this conundrum (and see below for a clip of the interview):

“A friend of mine who’s a [Zen] teacher came to my house once. We also had a guest who was suffering and making a ruckus about it - mean and out of control. [My teacher friend] has this amazing penetrating gaze. The guest was spouting off and she did just exactly what Yàoshān did. She just kept with him and didn’t move and didn’t respond. She was just there. After not too long he got very quiet. Then he said, “I can really be an asshole sometimes.” Then he walked away. It is this ability to hold someone and allow them to have whatever they think they need or want and not respond.”

Tiāntóng’s Verse

A silly child agonizes over [play] money intended to stop them from crying.
A good team of horses chases the wind at just the shadow of the whip.
Clouds sweep the vast sky, a crane nests in the moon.
Cold clarity enters the bones, sleep doesn’t come.

About the first line of verse, Wànsōng says,

“Tiāntóng’s verse and my commentary are all about trying to stop your crying by using yellow leaves. This is because everyone is in a fever dream and not yet awake.
If you are sleeping lightly, with one call, you’re awake.
If you’re sleeping heavily, then if I shake you, you’ll startle awake.
Still, there is another type.
Even if I beat them, grab them, and pull them to their feet,
yet they keep talking on and on while still in their sleep.
Then they pull away.”

When you’re called, when you’re shaken, when you’re pulled to your feet - can you just be still and awake without pulling away and without pushing forward. If so, you might be embodying old Yàoshān and the transmission of the light has not died out.

Still, Yàoshān just sat for a long time. Beasley Roshi’s friend, mentioned above, just looked. Wànsōng is all up in our faces.

How can we truly benefit living beings?

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Meanwhile, at Vine of Obstacles Zen

For Yàoshān’s non-thinking kōan and Tetsugan Osho and my comments about the inner work of zazen, see: Fixedly Questioning Fixed Sitting. In this post for both free and paid subscribers, we dig into what Dogen taught about the inner method of zazen and how that might inform your practice now.

And What Are You Figuring To Do, Sitting There In Zen? that includes Katagiri Roshi saying, “I think you better awaken, because if you awaken you can confine going astray in life to a minimum.”

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