No Questions, No Answers
Leland Shields, March 2026
Someone asked, “What is the fundamental teaching?” Master Yunmen said, “No question, no answer!” (section 30)
App, Urs. Zen Master Yunmen: His Life and Essential Sayings (p. 46). Shambhala. Kindle Edition.
This is taken from Urs App’s translation titled, Zen Master Yunmen: His Life and Essential Sayings. No question no answer. We can get lost in the simple statement, but it’s easier to rest in it when we’re not thinking of it as a general principle. It’s not a teaching or a command; it is a generous response to a sincere question. Yunmen’s response is for us to take through skin and into bone, and to see, to hear, and not know. Ears don’t know what to make of this, but bones do.
Susan Murphy released a book a few years ago titled, A Fire Runs Through All Things: Zen Koans for Facing the Climate Crisis. In it, she deftly takes our ancient koan stories to life in today’s world, demonstrating that seeing through them breaks open the beating heart of all we see and hear. In two sentences, she introduces koans this way:
Every koan brings the mind to a stop in order to glimpse what stays obscured and unseen in the forward rush of intensely narrow human knowings. Every koan is a life-restoring heresy to the type of mind that works by carving what is seamless into opposable parts.
Murphy, Susan. A Fire Runs Through All Things: Zen Koans for Facing the Climate Crisis (p. 14). Shambhala. Kindle Edition.
Bringing Yunmen together with Susan’s words:
…“What is the fundamental teaching?” … “No question, no answer!” (section 30)
App, Urs. Zen Master Yunmen: His Life and Essential Sayings (p. 46). Shambhala. Kindle Edition.
Koans, and teishos too, are selling water by the river. Better yet, they are selling water while standing in the river. No question, no answer is the splash in our face so we can recognize water everywhere around us, rather than to narrowly see what we already know. Koans and talks are each redundant, and only helpful as they inspire us to see what’s around us all the time.
Last month, my wife and I were talking and drinking coffee, and the low light of early morning was on the side of Lili’s face. The shadow cast on the wall next to her showed a remarkably distinct outline of her face, changing as she turned her head slightly as she talked. There was something about the simplicity of the silhouette – when I looked back at Lili I saw the beauty of her face anew, no longer taking it for granted. Before the shadow, I hadn’t realized that I wasn’t really looking at my wife.
If I bring it home and listen to music with no question and no answer, I can hear each trumpet note and drumbeat for itself. While we often talk about following our breath, to do so with no question and no answer, is to avoid any implication that “following” requires that there is breath and one who follows it, and to avoid implications that there was a breath before this breath, and there will be more breaths to come. Folding into, and falling into breath, leaves only breath. Recognizing breath includes the sound of it now and air movement in or out now. In that recognition, any question, any answer is extra just hhhhwwww.
We can do all we’re doing with questions and answers. Instead, release questions and answers.
Just breath is practice, and simultaneously just breath is full engagement in a diaphragm expanding, only that.
It is too distant to apply no questions, no answers to music unless at this moment, we are listening to music. I’ve spent some time reading through this talk already, so you can trust me when I say there’s no need when listening to me today, for you to chase questions or seek answers in these words. Take the silence in the play of words and receive, and that’s enough. Start now; don’t wait until sitting in the s stillness of a period of zazen. Don’t even wait until chanting the four vows; Yunmen’s gift is here through what we don’t do and what we don’t bring. It’s here in our receptivity.
It may be natural to take this story of someone and Yunmen and consider it to be definitive as it stands alone, to make a plaque of it to nail to the wall. It turns out there are many stories of Yunmen getting asked a question and responding with ways that play with us, and that play with answers and questions. I’ll offer one of them here.
Someone once asked Master Yunmen, “Since ancient times, the old worthies have transmitted mind by mind. Today I ask you, master: What method do you use?”
The master said, “When there’s a question, there’s an answer.”
The questioner continued, “In this case, it isn’t a wasted method.”
The master said, “No question, no answer.”(Compiled by Satyavayu, Treasury of the Forest of Ancestors)
Is that all there is to it? Transmission is a question and an answer? If so, then I can ask a question and I’m done; I can go home and have a beer. Or is it no question and no answer? If so, then I can keep my mouth shut, and abandon all curiosity. Neither of these is very satisfying.
When there is lightning, there is thunder. a flash in the sky is not lightning. Rumbling on a stormy night is not thunder. Talk of thunder and lightning is thin without the soaking rain and echoing hills. Carrying away the answer is no more fruitful than bottling lightning.
Each line of this second story of Yunmen speaks for itself. The second line is, “When there’s a question, there’s an answer…” See this as this, and see that as that. Then in the fourth line, “No question, no answer.” What does this leave us – with or without a question, with or without an answer? This too, is a question. Stepping back, what’s immediately apparent is that there is no resting in the “there is answer and there is question.” There is no resting in that there is no answer and no question.
We can carry either or both, question and no question, answer and no answer, in a bucket to take with us. When the straps of the bucket fail, all is lost; all is lost.
In thirteenth century Japan, there were three nuns that founded a convent and offered Zen to nuns and lay disciples. A young woman named Chiyono was employed to serve the community; she was from a prominent family, but herself uneducated and could not read the sutras. After many years of service, she sneaked into the main hall and observed nuns, lay men, and lay women, young and old, sitting all night in the moonlight, applying themselves single-mindedly to the way. Chiyono wept seeing even those living the casual lives of lay people who applied themselves in ways she could not.
Days later she asked an older nun whether Chiyono, as she was – not smart, of humble birth, and illiterate – could possibly attain the way of the Buddha. The nun warmly and enthusiastically responded that it didn’t matter whether she was of high or low birth, literate or not, lay or not; if true to her aspirations, she can follow the way of the Buddha…and by the way, there’s nothing to attain! The nun added (and I quote):
According to the ancient worthies, the teachings of the sutras are like a finger pointing to the moon. The words of the patriarch are like a key that opens a gate. If one looks directly at the moon, there is no need for a finger. If the gate has been opened, there is no use for a key. A priest who is familiar with ten million scriptures uses not a single character word in zazen.
Addiss, Stephen; Lombardo, Stanley; Roitman, Judith; Arai, Paula. Zen Sourcebook: Traditional Documents from China, Korea, and Japan (p. 175). Hackett Publishing Company, Inc. Kindle Edition.
Everything conspires so that we’ll look directly at the moon, at the shadow of a face, hear the tone of the bell resonating in every corner of the room, feel the bite of cold air, and the dismay at my own wandering mind. Artists throughout time had their way in this conspiracy; Michelangelo sculpted a larger-than-life David with precision. In the 17th century Netherlands, Vermeer painted “The Music Lesson,” of an unremarkable scene with girl and piano teacher, and in the painting, there is a painting on the wall showing an unremarkable scene – it was this scene here at Camp Samish, as a matter of fact.
To another later question of Chiyono’s, the nun advised that doing anything with her thoughts other than letting them expire on their own was like using blood to wash out a blood stain.
The nun speaks to you and me here – we’ve gotten so much benefit and protection from our thoughts that it’s compelling to use them, just as we always do. But the nun and Susan Murphy both tell us that the thoughts take us back to the “intensely narrow human knowings.” There is nothing wrong with thoughts; they’re just the wrong tool for an open mind.
Chiyono took in the words of the kind nun and thought this to herself:
With this practice as my companion, I have only to go about my daily life. If I wake practicing and go to bed practicing, what hindrance can there be?
(Ibid, p. 177)
Chiyono finished that quote with a rhetorical question, “…what hindrance can there be?” Any one of us could offer some ideas there, and I’m sure Chiyono waded through distractions of her own. But with persistence, what we call hindrances become steps on the path that we will see differently tomorrow. Persistence requires trust in ourselves, the path, and that the ancestors have not deceived us.
The nun and Chiyono shared many rich exchanges, before the record offers us this paragraph:
In the eighth lunar month of the following year, on the evening of the fifteenth, the full moon was shining. Taking advantage of the cloudless night sky, [Chiyono] went to draw some water from the well. As she did, the bottom of her bucket suddenly gave way and the reflection of the moon vanished with the water. When she saw this she instantly attained great realization. Carrying the bucket, she returned to the temple.
(Ibid, p. 178)
In the absence of the bright, pervasive, discriminating light of the sun, the soft light of the moon illuminates shapes while leaving mystery in indistinct lines and in the shadows. Something is seen, and much is unknown.
Befitting their nature, the bamboo straps could hold no more and released; their containment of the wood bucket failed. Water gave itself to gravity and flowed down without interference. Chiyono, looking directly at the moon, watched it wash away. Nothing of this could be otherwise. No bucket, no moon, and nothing missing in the sky above or the ground below.
In the poem she wrote about this experience, she said:
With this and that I contrived
And then the bottom fell out of the bucket.
Where water does not collect,
The moon does not dwell.(Ibid p. 178-9)
Another translation of the same poem is rendered this way:
With this and that I tried to keep the bucket together, and then the bottom fell out. Where water does not collect, the moon does not dwell.
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Also, there is no place where water dwells. After the collapse of the bucket, it ran into the ground, weaving around rock and soil to return to the bottom of the well, only to be drawn up again in a bucket, never losing its vitality to respond nimbly to its nature and circumstances. We can be grateful for this zazen that helps us to share that nimbleness sometimes.
All the valuable conversations between the nun and Chiyono filled her bucket. All our stories and the words of our ancestors bind us for a time if we hold them in mind. Without them, there is no moon, and no pointing finger, no hindrance, and nothing to be hindered. Already there is no bottom.
Without our stories, lightning flashes a question and thunder rumbles a reply. Without words, like “questions” and “answers,” lighting is lightning without question; thunder is unmistakenly thunder.