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Dinesh club

Posted: 29 Apr 2024

Taken: 29 Apr 2024

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The mummy of Master Yunmen (1928 photo)

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 Dinesh
Dinesh club
Although the monastery at Mt. Gate-of-the-Clouds is now waking up to renewed greatness it underwent many centuries of neglect and decay. When the great Japanese researcher of Buddhism Daijo Tokiwa (Tokiwa's family was affiliated with the Ōtani Branch 大谷 of Jōdō Shinshū 淨土真宗, and he became a priest at the age of 17. At the age of 29 he graduated with a degree in philosophy from the Imperial University of Tōkyō. Over the next years he taught at secondary and postsecondary schools, including ones associated with the Shin, Tendai, and Nichiren Sects. He also held positions at Shin temples and seminaries.) www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q17500602 visited it in 1927, it consists of only a few dilapidated buildings. In his report the great scholar complained that the one remaining monk did not have the slightest idea of its great history and could not even name the master who founded it. In addition to discovering the mummy of Master Yunmnen and some door plates, Professor Tokiwa stumbled on two other very important remnants of the monastery;’s illustrious past: two st9one slabs, or stelae, each the size of man, standing abandoned in the corner. Engraved on these stelae, which have since been set into the monastery court’s walls, are inscriptions dating from 959 to 964 (ten and fifteen years after Y7nmen’s death). They are the most important sources for Yunmen’s biogra0hy and also describe the original appearance of the monastery . ~ xiv Preface

If the participants at Yunmen’s funeral had been stunned that the corpse of the master looked as if it were alive, they were soon to experience still greater wonders. The second stone inscription states tht the seventeenth year fromm Yunmen’s death the master appeared to the magistrate Ruan Shaozhuang in a dream and instructed him to open his grave. When it was opened, the master’s body was found unchanged except that its hair and finger- and t toe nails had grown longer. The eyes were half open and glistered like pearls, the teeth sparkled like snow, and a mysterious glow filled the whole room. Several thousand monks and lay persons are said to have witnessed this.

By imperial edict the mummy of Yunmen was brought with great ceremony into Guangzhu, the capital, where it was honored for an entire month – even by the current ruler Liu Chang, who had more sympathy for Daoism. This last of the rulers of the Southern Han empire also bestowed a posthumous honorary title upon the master and gave the monastery at the foot of mt. Yunmen the name it earns to this day: Chan Monastery of Great Awakening. The mummy was returned to Yunmen monastery, where it remained for more than one thousand years. Having disappeared in the Mid-1970s during the Cultural Revolution, it must at this point be considered lost. ~ Page 31
4 weeks ago. Edited 4 weeks ago.
 Dinesh
Dinesh club
MASTER YUNMEN
4 weeks ago.

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