"Yu was from Jinling and worked as a donut-maker. She used to visit Langya Chi, the Zen Master, and ask him questions along with everyone else. The Zen Master gave her Linji’s saying, “The true person has no rank,” and she kept it with her while she worked. One day a beggar passed by singing “The Delights of Lotus Flowers”: “If you haven’t heard the song, how can you find the Lake?” Just hearing these words, she had a great awakening.
She threw her donut pan onto the ground. “Have you gone crazy?” asked her husband. “This isn’t your business,” she said and went off to see Langya. From a distance, it was obvious to him that she had found realization. “What is the true person of no rank?” he asked.
Straight away she said, “The person of no rank has six arms and three heads, and is working furiously, smashing Flower Mountain into two with one blow. For ten thousand years the flowing water doesn’t know the spring.” Yu the donut-maker became famous after this."
Yu was with her koan no matter where she was. The song, like the broomstick that hit Hakuin, doesn’t have anything to do with the content of the awakening, and actually she doesn’t mention any particular thoughts that describe what she has discovered. Instead, she herself starts to talk in the language of koans. (It may be worth mentioning that more than one woman’s awakening story has involved disparaging treatment of domestic implements.)
-John Tarrant (born 1949) is a Western Zen teacher, director of the Pacific Zen Institute (pacificzen.org) which has centers in California, Arizona, and Canada. He teaches and writes about the transformation of consciousness through the use of the Zen koan and trains koan meditation teachers. Tarrant is from Australia, he came from an old Tasmanian family and grew up in the City of Launceston on Bass Strait.
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