Unmon's Ancient Buddha and the Exposed Pillar

Engo's commentary on the case

Master Unmon produced more than eighty teachers. More than seventy years after his death, his reliquary was opened and his body reportedly appeared as before.³ His view was clear and his mechanisms swift. His posed, alternative, and proxy sayings were directly solitary and steep. This case is like fire struck from stone or lightning—appearing and vanishing like spirit and ghost. Library Master Qing asked whether the whole scriptural canon contains speech like this. People now work through emotional interpretation: Buddha is teacher of the three realms and compassionate father of four kinds of birth, so why would an ancient buddha meet a pillar? Understood that way, one never finds it. Others call it “singing out from within nothing.” A lineage teacher's speech cuts off consciousness, emotional measure, birth and death, and Dharma objects. Entering the proper position, not one dharma remains. The moment you reason, hands and feet are tangled. Let mind and environment be one, unmoved by liking, disliking, right, or wrong. Then saying “exists” works, “does not exist” works; having a mechanism works, having none works. Here each beat is the command. My late teacher Wuzu said, “Great Unmon was timid after all. This mountain monk would simply have answered: the eighth mechanism.” Unmon asked which mechanism; for the moment he wrapped up what was directly present. When a monk asked the meaning, Unmon said, “One sash cord costs thirty cash.” He possessed an eye that settles heaven and earth. Because no one understood, Unmon later answered himself with South Mountain cloud and North Mountain rain, opening an entrance for later students. Setchō lifts precisely Unmon's place of settling heaven and earth. Start calculating or reveal an edge and you miss it face to face. He wants us to trace Unmon's house principle and clarify its severe mechanism. With South Mountain cloud and North Mountain rain, Setchō fits the cap to the head and trims the sail to the wind, adding a note on a sword edge. He makes the twenty-eight Indian and six Chinese patriarchs behold one another face to face. Do not misunderstand: this already verses the whole question about buddha and pillar. The rest cuts open a road and makes entangling vines to reveal Setchō's intent: “In Silla he has already ascended the hall; in Great Tang the drum has not yet been struck.” At the place where lightning turns and stars fly, he says joy within suffering and suffering within joy. Setchō has piled seven treasures and eight jewels here. Thus the final line: “Who says gold is like dung and soil?” He borrows it from Chanyue's “The Road Is Hard,” which says that high mountains and deep seas cannot be measured, warns against shallow and frivolous companions, and invokes the broken friendship of Zhang Er and Chen Yu. “The road is hard—look for yourself.” Do not let the land be broad and the people few, Jizō of Yunju.