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Dongshan held a memorial service in front of Yunyan’s portrait and told the portrait story again.                                                                                               
A student asked Dongshan, “What did Yunnan mean by, ‘Just this, this!’?”
Dongshan said, “At the time, I almost misunderstood what my teacher really meant.”                                            The student said, “I wonder whether Yunyan really knew what he was talking about.”
Dongshan said, “If he didn’t know, why would he have bothered to say anything? If he did know, why was he willing to say it like that?”

—Book of Serenity Case 49

I think it would be helpful to know what the “portrait story” is:

Dongshan had been studying with Yunyan for a while and was thinking about leaving.
Yunyan said, “If you leave, it will be difficult to see each other again.”
Dongshan said, “It will be difficult not to see each other.”
As Dongshan was about to go, he asked, “After your death, if people ask whether I have your portrait, how should I respond?”
After a long pause, Yunyan answered, “Just this, this!”
Dongshan sighed.
Then Yunyan said, “Reverend Liang, now that you have taken on this great matter, you must consider it carefully.”
But Dongshan continued to have doubts. Later as he crossed a stream he saw his reflection in the water and awakened to Yunyan’s meaning. Then he wrote this verse:

Don’t look elsewhere, far from yourself,
Now I’m walking alone, but I meet him everywhere,
Now he’s exactly me, now I’m not him,
You have to understand this way to join with what is.

The first koan in the Book of Equanimity came to join in the conversation with the portrait koan. That first koan goes like this:

One day, the World-Honored One ascended to the rostrum. Manjusri struck the white gavel and said, “Contemplate clearly the Dharma of the King of the Dharma. The Dharma of the King of the Dharma is just this!” The Buddha then stepped down from the rostrum.

This koan with Dongshan and Yunyan is an example of an 8th century Chan teacher echoing the teaching of the Buddha, some thirteen centuries earlier. While I was at the Koko An Zendo in Honolulu, Aitken Roshi sometimes invited a professor from the University of Hawaii philosophy department to come and talk. His name was David Kalapuhana, and his field of interest was what he called “Original Buddhism,” what others call Theravada.

What interested Aitken Roshi was Kalapuhana’s feeling that Chan, and later Zen, were movements back towards the original teachings of the Buddha. A lot happened to Buddhism in those thirteen centuries between Shakyamuni and Dongshan and Yunyan, yet Yunyan went back to the beginning to summarize his teachings for Dongshan.

Feels to me like our way of practicing goes back beyond the Buddha into the time before Daoism or Confucianism or the pyramids in Egypt and South America. It’s as old as human consciousness, a way of working with that burden and blessing.

—David Weinstein

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David Weinstein Roshi, Director of Rockridge Meditation Community