Yaoshan and Yunyan
Yaoshan Weiyan (751-834) was born in Jiangzhou, now in Shanxi Province. Growing impatient with a strict observance of the Vinaya rules as a method of gaining enlightenment, he approached Shitou Xiqian for guidance, who sent him off to study with Mazu. No separate record of Yaoshan’s teachings exists, and what little we know of his biography is found only in the recorded conversations with his students. These are however among the most popular in zen history, commented upon by successive generations of teachers in China and Japan.
Yaoshan’s celebrated successor was Yunyan Tansheng (780-841), the teacher of Dongshan Liangjie. After becoming a monk at the age of 16, he went to Shimen Shan in Hongzhou to study with Mazu’s disciple Baizhang Huaihai. After 20 years with Baizhang, Yunyan went to Lizhou to practice with Yaoshan, who seems from the recorded conversations to be insatiably curious about Baizhang’s teaching style. Eventually leaving Yaoshan, Yunyan withdrew to a stone cave on Yunyan Shan—Cloud Crag Mountain—not far from modern Chang Sha in Hunan Province.
The teachings of Yaoshan and Yunyan as reported in the Song histories convey the commonly accepted doctrines of emptiness, thusness, and Buddha-nature. There it is mentioned also that Dongshan’s teaching of the Five Ranks was obtained from Yunyan.This is by no means implausible, since graphic or symbolic representations of the modes of interaction between absolute and relative have a long history in China, and the impulse to translate this into Buddhist terms arose long before Dongshan. Yunyan’s dates (780-841) correspond exactly to those of the Huayan patriarch Zongmi, who also defined and developed graphical representations of five stages of phenomenal evolution, which he organized in the context of Huayan philosophies.