The old woman selling rice cakes

ChanlaywomanWoman in the recordUnnamed in the recordAlso: 婆子

School: Chan

The woman selling rice cakes on the road who stopped Deshan Xuanjian with a question from the Diamond Sutra. The record gives her no name. Levering counts her among the nameless women of the Chan stories who confound the monks they meet.

Stories

Deshan and the rice cakes

teaching story

Deshan Xuanjian had spent his life on the Diamond Sutra. He carried a commentary on it. When he heard that teachers in the south were saying that this very mind is Buddha, a teaching outside the scriptures, he set out to refute them.

Sources

Xuedou Chongxian 雪竇重顯 (verses); Yuanwu Keqin 圜悟克勤 (commentary), Biyan lu 碧巖錄 (Blue Cliff Record) (1125), Taishō T.2003 · link
Miriam L. Levering, The Dragon Girl and the Abbess of Mo-shan: Gender and Status in the Ch’an Buddhist Tradition (1982), Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 5.1 (1982), pp. 19–35 · link

Checked against sources 2026-10-31 by pipeline/opus@c0eea00. Report an error.