Buddhist Catholic Contemplative Evangelical General Christian Hindu Jewish Latter-day Saint Muslim New Visions Progressive Christian

Beliefs

Topics

Columnists

Resource Library

Research Tools

Video

Podcasts

Thought Readers

Faith In Media Tracker

Newsletters

Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In Subscription Support

Follow Patheos

Home
Buddhist
A DREAM WITHIN A DREAM: A Brief Meditation on “Yangshan’s Sermon From the Third Seat”

A DREAM WITHIN A DREAM: A Brief Meditation on “Yangshan’s Sermon From the Third Seat”

Last updated on: August 24, 2014 at 9:10 am by James Ford

A DREAM WITHIN A DREAM: A Brief Meditation on “Yangshan’s Sermon From the Third Seat” 2014-08-24T09:10:15-07:00 James Ford

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

I have a friend who is an old Zen hand. Okay, lots of my friends are old Zen hands. This one has been engaged in the project for several decades, sat with most of the prominent teachers of our time, and has in fact completed the formal Harada Yasutani curriculum with one of them.

He and I are visiting the cases from the beginning one more time. It’s a leisurely affair, where we touch on the traditional points but we also use the cases as spring boards to discuss those often important aspects of how the rubber hits the road, how these insights into what the world and our own hearts really are like, manifest here and now, but which are usually not addressed in any detail as one proceeds through the many, many cases.

And yes, we do indulge a bit in Zen gossip. Not much of it terribly critical. These are our long time companions, often our dearest friends, certainly folk with whom we have shared a life time commitment to something very important, and so the gossip tends to be more that social grooming thing, where other apes pick off nits from one another, and we share a word or two about people we know in common. We, I think most all of us, like those things where we diverge, which, after all, are the ways we become interesting.

But at some point the conversation turned to one thing we both have encountered that was, is a bit disturbing. A lot of Zen practitioners, and even some teachers seem to think, at least rhetorically, that the “be here now” thing of Zen, the “this moment,” the “this very moment” of our way has something to do with cutting off all thought of past or future. Just this as in just this and nothing else.

That raised to mind a case from the Wumenguan, the great twelfth century anthology of koan, the Gateless Gate. Number twenty-five, “Yangshan’s Sermon from the Third Seat.” It’s brief, and goes like this.

Once in a dream the master Yangshan visited Maitreya in the Tusita heaven. He was led to the third seat in the great hall. As he sat a monk struck the sounding board and announced “the monk in the third seat will deliver today’s sermon.” Yangshan stood, struck the sounding board, himself, and said, “The truth of the great way is beyond the four propositions and transcends the one hundred negations. Listen. Listen.”

Yangshan Huiji was a Ninth century Chan master standing in the fifth generation from Daijian Huineng, a successor to the great Guishan Lingyou. He had studied with several teachers before finding Guishan, and had several awakenings. But it was with Guishan that it all came together.

Guishan was an heir of Baizhang Huaihai, and was known for his more gentle way, using symbols and metaphor more than the stick. So, for instance, when he saw the young Yangshan was ripe, he met him with a gentle pointing. Yangshan asked what is the Buddha’s true dwelling place? Guishan replied, “Consider the great mystery. Turn your attention to that boundless light. At the moment your thoughts about all this are exhausted, you’ve come to the source. Here you will find true nature is form and emptiness. Here the true Buddha manifests.”

No stick. No yell. Rather, words do the pointing. And for Yangshan at that moment, the right moment, the time of fulfillment. Or, perhaps the time of emptying. A time of stepping beyond clinging to form, or to emptiness, was at hand.

And with that he found himself standing in the Buddha realm.

So, in this story, a teacher steeped in a more gentle pointing, a use of image and metaphor to help the student on the way, he describes the heaven of the Buddha to come. In some sense, you. Me. The whole world suffering and yearning. Pointed to something very important.

Which brings us back to that thought that “this very moment” involves cutting off all thought, that this project somehow has nothing to do with past or future, the idea that “this” is an atom untouched by all that has gone on before or what will happen out of this moment.

Pure. Untouched.

In fact an awakening that has nothing to do with the past or the future is selling a bill of goods. This “awakening” is more like a brain disease, Alzheimer’s or some similar disorder where we are robbed of our past, and exist only in a constantly shrinking present until finally we forget to breathe. This has nothing to do with Zen.

I’m taken with where Yangshan stands in the flow of Zen’s history. He stands within the historic stream of the lineage, but just barely. Before Huineng it really is myth and hope and aspiration. The wisdom of Gautama and the high Indian logic meets a culture who wants to know who is your family. And both are pushing toward the great source, the place beyond the form and the empty. And from that place history flows, generations follow.

All connected in some strange and weird way.

Our invitation is to look. Is to listen. Is to attend.

Perhaps you’re familiar with that image called the “Flammarion engraving.” While it looks like a woodcut, it is in fact an engraving, showing a man in a robe and with a staff on his knees. He has pushed his way, at least his head and shoulders and a hand, past the phenomenal world, where he sees the great cosmic machinery that lies beyond what we normally think of as what is. I believe the image of “the other side” is derived from Ezekiel’s images of heavenly realms.

Another use of metaphor. Another invitation to look. to listen. to attend.

And another.

In recent months I’ve found myself caught up on occasion in a makyo. Makyo are those visions that in Zen are sometimes considered “diabolic interference.” Certainly one of the stock lines from a Zen teacher when a student describes visions of images or voices or smells out of the ordinary is “Don’t worry, this will pass.” And that’s more than good advice. It appears people who get stuck in those images, who believe them as some literal revelation follow a path that does no one any good. (Often it is suggested several religions might be traced to such makyo.)

In my community makyo is respected. Not as the thing in itself, but as something that occurs naturally along the way, when the world we think is the real world is disrupted. Its an important moment, or rather, these are important moments.

A moment of ripeness.

If we’re willing they allow us new directions.

Listen.

Often awakening experiences are accompanied by makyo. And one needs to be able to sort these things. Another of those reasons it is good to have companions and spiritual directors who have walked this way before.

Anyway, in my makyo, there is a scene very much like the Flammerian engraving. But as my, and it is my head, pokes through what is there is not a bunch of gear works. Rather it is a riot of life. Everything is connected by green shoots, growing, roiling, connecting ants and other animals and rocks and dirt and planets and stars. Me. You. Each rising out of the great web of a mother tree’s roots and tendrils, existing for its time, and then falling back to the tree.

Words.

Images.

Listen.

Don’t cling. Don’t follow in some abstruse analysis.

Just listen.

And.

Cutting off is not cutting off the images that rise in the mind, either as representing the world as it is manifesting in the ways that allow us to walk and engage, nor, in the great metaphorical sense of our minds working, where words and emotions are actually not different things. Rather it is cutting off the mind road. The image arises. We don’t need to follow it.

Don’t cling to that which is passing.

(And it turns out everything, every thing, is passing…)

I don’t need to analyze it all. Not as part of this particular project of finding my own heart and my own place. Your heart. Your place.

In his comment on the twenty-fifth case, the editor Wumen composes a poem. In Robert Aitken’s translation it goes,

In broad daylight, under the blue sky,
He preached a dream in a dream.
Absurd! Absurd!
He deceived the entire assembly.

This is the great invitation.

Listen. Listen. Absurd! Absurd!

This is the just this moment.

The whole of our past, our immediate history, our losses and gains, our loves, our failures, all of it is there, is here. And it stretches even farther back, to our parents dreams and hopes, failures and successes. And it continues on to the birth of the stars themselves. And it extends forward. Every action. Every thought. Every feeling, plays out in ways in which we can barely dream.

All of it connected, like the tendrils of the great mother tree. Buds and branches. Roots and flowers.

One.

Really, not even one.

Boundless.

Listen.

Our successes. Small and great.

Absurd.

Our failures. All of them. Our bitter memories. Our crushed hopes.

Everything.

The whole great mess.

Just this.

Just.

This.

Uncategorized

Previous Post

August 22, 2014

Teddy Gets a Ride

Next Post

August 25, 2014 The Great Moon Hoax

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category A Christmas Carol Abolitionist African-American Ahmadiyya Alan Watts Aldous Huxley Allen Ginsberg Amedkar Jayanti American politics American Zen Anaheim Zen Sangha Anglican Annie Besant April Fool Armageddon Art and Religion artificial intellegence Atheist Awakening B R Ambedkar Barlaam & Josaphat Beatnik Between Bhagavad Gita Bible biography birthday bodhisattva Bodhisattva Precepts Book burning Book of Common Prayer Book of Mormon Brahmo Samaj Buddha Buddhism Buddhist Buddhist Lord's Prayer Butterflies Calendars cartoons cat ChatGPT Chicken Tortilla Soup choices Christian atheism Christian mysticism Christian origins Christian Science Christian Zen Christianity Christianity and Buddhism christmas Christmas Truce Christopher Isherwood Church of Later Day Saints Cinco de Mayo circus covenant critical thinking culture D. T. Suzuki Dalit Buddhism Daniel Defoe Desert Fathers and Mothers dharma talk Dogen Donald Trump Dongshan's Five Ranks Dorothy Day dream Duty Easter ecology Edwin Arnold emptiness Empty Moon Zen Network Episcopal Church Eternal Now Ethics evolution existentialism Faith fantasy Fathers Day film film review fire Five Ranks Folk music food Form and emptiness Four Seals Francis of Assisi Francis Xavier Free thinker friendship George MacDonald Gerald Heard Glenn Taylor Webb God Good Friday Gospel of Gospel of Mark Gospel of Thomas grace Graduate Theological Unioin Graduate Theological Union Guanyin H R Blyth Hakuin Ekaku Hanamatsuri Hanukkah Harada Yasutani Zen Heart Sutra Henry David Thoreau Hermann Hesse Hinduism History and Religion history of religion Holy Spirit home Hospitality Icon Ides of March Isaac Newton Islam Islamic mysticism Jack Kerouac James Luther Adams Jiddu Krishnamurti Joan of Arc Johannes Gutenberg John Donne joke Judaism justice karma kensho King James Bible koan Koun Yamada Kyoto School Lewis Carrol Liberal Christianity Liberal Religion Life Plan Community Liminal literature Literature and Religion Liturgy Lord's Prayer Love Mahatma Gandhi Mahayana Martin Luther King Jr Mary Baker Eddy Mary Magdelene Mary Oliver Mayflower Compact Meditation memories memory metaphor money money and religioin Mormons Mother's Day movie review mysticism mythic Neighborhood Unitarian Universalist Church New Thought Nichiren Buddhism Nonduality not knowing Omar Khayyam Pacific School of Religion pagan Palm Sunday Passover peace Pentecost perennialism Phantastes Philip Kapleau philosophy Pilgrimage poetry Poetry and Religion politics Prayer Precepts Printing Press prophecy prophetic spirituality psychology Pure Land Queer religion queering religion Quietism Ram Mohan Roy rebirth recipe Relationships and religion religion religion and history Religious syncretism Resistance Retirement Retreat review Rissho Kosei Kai Ritual Robert Aitken Roshi Robert Ingersoll Rohatsu Romani religion Rosie the Riveter saints samadhi SanboZen Sangha Satyagraha science science and reigion science and religion science fiction seminary sermon Sesshin Sex and Religion Shinran Sikh Sikh tradition silence Social Justice Socially Engaged Buddhism Society and religion Soto Zen soul spiritual community spiritual practice Spirituality Sufism Suicide superstition Taoism Television Teresa of Avila Thanksgiving theological schools Theosophy Thomas Merton Time Transcendentalism Transcendentalist Trinitarian Trinity Uncategorized unitarian Unitarian Christianity Unitarian Universalist Universalism Vajrayana Vedanta Walking war Willa Cather William Ellery Channing wisdom women and religion women in religion World Teacher Writing zazen Zen Zen Center Zen inspired retriement zen meditation Zen Precepts Zen women

Select a Month September 2026 August 2026 July 2026 June 2026 May 2026 April 2026 March 2026 February 2026 January 2026 December 2025 November 2025 October 2025 September 2025 August 2025 July 2025 June 2025 May 2025 April 2025 March 2025 February 2025 January 2025 December 2024 November 2024 October 2024 September 2024 August 2024 July 2024 June 2024 May 2024 April 2024 March 2024 February 2024 January 2024 December 2023 November 2023 October 2023 September 2023 August 2023 July 2023 June 2023 May 2023 April 2023 March 2023 February 2023 January 2023 December 2022 November 2022 October 2022 September 2022 August 2022 July 2022 June 2022 May 2022 April 2022 March 2022 February 2022 January 2022 December 2021 November 2021 October 2021 September 2021 August 2021 July 2021 June 2021 May 2021 April 2021 March 2021 February 2021 January 2021 December 2020 November 2020 October 2020 September 2020 August 2020 July 2020 June 2020 May 2020 April 2020 March 2020 February 2020 January 2020 December 2019 November 2019 October 2019 September 2019 August 2019 July 2019 June 2019 May 2019 April 2019 March 2019 February 2019 January 2019 December 2018 November 2018 October 2018 September 2018 August 2018 July 2018 June 2018 May 2018 April 2018 March 2018 February 2018 January 2018 December 2017 November 2017 October 2017 September 2017 August 2017 July 2017 June 2017 May 2017 April 2017 March 2017 February 2017 January 2017 December 2016 November 2016 October 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010 May 2010 April 2010 March 2010 February 2010 January 2010 December 2009 November 2009 October 2009 September 2009 August 2009 July 2009 June 2009 May 2009 April 2009 March 2009 February 2009 January 2009 December 2008 November 2008 October 2008 September 2008 August 2008 July 2008 June 2008 May 2008 April 2008 March 2008 February 2008 January 2008 December 2007 November 2007 October 2007 September 2007 August 2007 July 2007 June 2007 May 2007 April 2007 March 2007 February 2007 January 2007 December 2006 November 2006 October 2006 September 2006

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

Who was cast into a pit by his brothers?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Daniel Joseph Moses Jacob