Name Yunfen, style Yuzhao, sobriquet Xiaotang. Of the Wu clan of Jingling; his father Yan was a district licentiate and his mother, of the Xu clan, was widowed early and kept a lifelong fast, reciting the Lotus daily — the boy would stand beside her with folded hands and listen, and vowed to become a monk to repay her. His mother assented; his clan did not, and forced him to marry. AT TWENTY HIS WIFE DIED and he was free at last. He was tonsured under the Dharma Master Xuancui at Liantai monastery in Yingzhou and took full precepts from the Vinaya master Sanmei. In the chaos of the dynastic collapse he hid on Mt Yuquan in Jingnan and studied the sutras three years, until a passage in the Lotus — the great white ox, 'stout and strong, its pace level, swift as the wind' — stuck in him. An elder told him: 'Master the whole canon and you are still caught in the fish-trap. If the sage's mind is not penetrated, you will not escape birth and death. Chan flourishes in the south. What is a pair of straw sandals to you?' He set out — and at his own gate found his mother dying, and stayed to nurse her and bury her before going. He met TUIWENG [HONGCHU] on the road in the spring of 1650. On New Year's Day 1651, during an intensive seven-day retreat, he came forward and bowed; Tuiweng struck him; he made to speak and Tuiweng struck him again: 'Are you trying to make Buddhism out of it?' — and at that word he was through. He offered Li Bai's poem as his verse of attainment, and Tuiweng laughed: 'I rejoice with you. Today you have reached your home village.' He held Qianming on Lushan from 1657, then Chicheng, Guangxian, Tongquan, Zizhi and Dongyan, and finally revived HONGSHAN BAOTONG BAOGUO monastery at Ezhu at the governor's request. When a monastery's officers proved unruly he simply shook out his robe and left: 'I have cut open my belly and gouged out my heart for them morning and evening and cannot alter their habits. I am ashamed of my thin virtue. I dare not learn to be a viper clinging to its den.'
References: DILA Authority A014466
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