Shanglan Lingchao

Lingzhao (靈照, fl. early 9th c.), traditionally treated as the daughter of the lay Chan adept Pang Yun ("Layman Pang"), is one of the very few women preserved in the early Tang lamp records as an awakened practitioner in her own right rather than as a wife or mother of a male teacher^[1]. The *Pángjūshì Yǔlù* (the recorded sayings of Layman Pang) preserves a number of her exchanges with her father and other contemporaries that the lamp records and later Chan literature treat as full Chan dialogues^[2].

The most-quoted of these is the three-way exchange on the difficulty of practice: Pang Yun says it is "difficult, difficult, difficult — like spreading ten *dou* of sesame seed over a tree-top"; his wife answers that it is "easy — like touching feet to the ground on getting out of bed"; and Lingzhao closes the exchange with "Neither difficult nor easy: on the tips of the hundred grass-blades, the meaning of the Patriarchs"^[3]. Lingzhao is also remembered for the story of her death, in which she sat at her own seat and entered *parinirvāṇa* before her father — leaving him to remark that "my daughter was always quick"^[2].