Daowu Yuanzhi

Daowu Yuanzhi (道吾圓智, 769–835) was the Dharma heir of Yaoshan Weiyan and the teacher of Shishuang Qingzhu, holding one of the two main lines of descent from Yaoshan alongside his fellow-student Yunyan Tansheng^[1]. He spent most of his teaching career at Mount Daowu in Tanzhou (modern Hunan); the *Jǐngdé Chuándēng Lù* preserves a dense set of encounter dialogues between Daowu and Yunyan, often read as the two heirs sharpening each other's understanding of their teacher's "non-thinking" style of practice^[2].

The most influential of these exchanges is the dialogue on the bodhisattva of compassion preserved as Case 89 of the *Blue Cliff Record* and Case 54 of the *Book of Serenity*: Daowu asks, "What does the Bodhisattva of Great Compassion use so many hands and eyes for?" Yunyan replies, "It is like someone reaching back in the night for a pillow"; Daowu answers, "I understand," and Yunyan presses him to say what he has understood^[3]. The exchange — read by both Caodong and Linji commentators as a teaching on action without deliberation — became one of the most cited dialogues in the koan literature, and Daowu's line through Shishuang Qingzhu carried the Yaoshan stream into the late ninth century^[4].