The Veneration Of Yunmen's Mummy

I'm finally reading the paperback version of Urs App's "Zen Master Yunmen" and was very surprised to find out that Yunmen's mummified remains were put on display for over a 1000 years:

...in the seventeenth year from Yunmen's death the master appeared to the magistrate Ruan Shaozhuang in a dream and instructed him to open his grave. When it was opened, the master's body was found unchanged except that its hair, fingernails, and toenails had grown longer. The eyes were half open and glistened like pearls, the teeth sparkled like snow, and the mystical glow filled the whole room. Several thousand monks and laypersons are said to have witnessed this..

Talk about insults - no wonder the Yunmen school failed. How is the creation of a cult of personality, manifested physically by the exhumation and veneration of a corpse, an act itself inspired by the ravings of a crazed magistrate, consistent with "a coin lost in the river is found in the river?" How does this comport with disdain for "th[e] bunch of windbags who gulp down other people's pus and slobber, can recall heaps and loads of rubbish, and display their donkey lips and horse mouths everywhere, boasting 'I can ask questions in five or ten alternative ways'?"

Baizhang seems to have hit it on the head - no doubt never imagining the need to dissuade self-avowed Chan monks from literally raising a corpse to a position of adoration:

But now if you seek Buddha, seek enlightenment, or seek anything, existent, nonexistent, or otherwise, this is called carrying excrement in, it is not called carrying excrement out. Now if you create an idea of Buddha, create an understanding of Buddha, as long as there is anything envisioned, anything sought, it’s all called the excrement of fabricated conceptualizations. It’s also called rough speech, and it is called dead words. As it is said, "The great ocean does not retain a dead corpse."

Imagine Yunmen coming back as a ghost and seeing the sum-total body of his life's work excreted onto a dais in the form of his own mummified corpse.

I saw a video yesterday of people being asked to identify Ukraine on a map - several pointed to Australia.

What hope is there!?

Submitted August 12, 2022 at 10:27PM by Gasdark https://ift.tt/FYts9vf