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Huangbo said, “You’re all gobblers of brewers dregs. If you run around like this, where will you meet today? Haven’t you figured out that in the whole country there is not a single Chan teacher?”

Someone stepped forward and asked, “But what about all those places where people are guiding students and leading gatherings?”

Huangbo said, “I didn’t say no Chan, only no Chan teachers.”

—Blue Cliff Record Case 11

Huangbo originated this expression, “gobblers of brewer’s dregs,” which became a popular saying in reference to people whose practice imitated what they had read in texts and what they heard from teachers, but never making it their own by integrating it into their lives. The literal meaning is that you eat what’s left over from making rice wine, and then think that you have had a taste of the real thing.

Huangbo’s warning for going on pilgrimage seeking wisdom was something he had learned from experience. Like most young monks, following his ordination, Huangbo went looking for a teacher. Finding the right teacher never comes easy, but he met a woman who suggested the person he was looking for was Mazu. Mazu was the dharma heir of the Sixth Patriarch’s dharma heir, Huairang, and was living a thousand kilometers to the southeast. By the time Huangbo got there, Mazu had died. Although Mazu was gone, his dharma heir Baizhang was a mere two days’ walk away. This happened in their first meeting:

Baizhang said to Huangbo, “Magnificent, imposing, where have you come from?”
Huangbo replied, “Magnificent, imposing, from the mountains.”
Baizhang asked, “Magnificent, imposing, why have you come?”
Huangbo replied, “Magnificent, imposing, not for anything else.”

It is said that Huangbo was seven feet tall, but I don’t think that’s what Baizhang was referring to when he said, “Magnificent, imposing.” When Huangbo replied, “Magnificent, imposing,” I think he was talking about everything. Everything is magnificent and imposing if we get out of the way of our thinking. Especially the thinking that says that we lack something and need to get it from someplace outside ourselves.

Yunmen was born fourteen years after Huangbo’s death, but the spirit of Huangbo was more than alive in him. He took Huangbo’s “brewer’s dregs” and pushed it beyond the beyond when he said,

“You’re making pilgrimages all over the place, studying Chan and asking about the Dao. Let me ask you: What have you managed to learn in all those places? Try presenting that!”

Then he said,

“In the meantime, you cheat the Master in your own house. Is that all right? When you manage to find a little slime on my ass, you lick it off, take it to be your own self, and say: ‘I understand Chan, I understand the Dao!’ Even if you manage to read the whole Buddhist canon—so what!?”

Deshan, the expert on Diamond Sutra texts which he pulled around in a cart, said upon his realization,

I will never doubt any more what the old master has said to me.

He was not talking about Longtan, the teacher who blew out Deshan’s candle, allowing him to see the light. He was talking about the “old master,” the “Master in your own house” who is reading these words.

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—David