This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Before Yunmen Wenyan became known for answers a single syllable long, he trained under two teachers article one's account of his "one word barriers" style never names. The first was Muzhou Daoming, remembered in Chan encounter tradition for an exchange abrupt enough that it reportedly injured Yunmen's leg in a doorway, itself an early lesson in the same confrontational teaching style Yunmen would later make his own signature. The second was Xuefeng Yicun, one of the most influential Chan teachers of the era, under whom Yunmen continued his training before striking out to found a teaching seat of his own.
That seat was a monastery on Mount Yunmen in Shaozhou, in what is now Guangdong province, the same site preserved in this atlas as Yunmen Monastery, and it gave the resulting Yunmen school, one of Chan's traditional Five Houses, its name. Yunmen was born in Jiaxing, in what is now Zhejiang province, and died in 949.
The line from an injured leg in a doorway to a compressed, single word teaching style later koan compilers drew on for the Blue Cliff Record is not a straight one, but Chan tradition treats the abruptness of Yunmen's early training under Muzhou as the seed of the abruptness his own students would later face from him.