The Garden of Flowers and Weeds: A New Translation and Commentary on The Blue Cliff Record

Advance praise for The Garden of Flowers and Weeds

"How wonderful to have a new translation of the one hundred koans of The Blue Cliff Record. Matthew Juksan Sullivan’s translation is exceptionally clear and reads well. His commentaries on each koan honor the tradition while making each koan relevant to everyday life in the twenty-first century. Highly recommended for all Zen practitioners and those interested in Zen teaching." — Zen Master Richard Shrobe, author, Don’t-Know Mind: The Spirit of Korean Zen and Elegant Failure: A Guide to Zen Koans

"These commentaries are original, authentic, and insightful—a valuable addition to what is so far available. I appreciated the direct, personal, and emotionally honest voice. No speaking gnomically from on high! The Garden of Flowers and Weeds will fill a major gap in what’s available to students." — Zen Master Barry Magid, founding teacher, Ordinary Mind Zendo; author, Nothing Is Hidden: The Psychology of Zen Koans

"The Blue Cliff Record is the major collection of koan narratives in the Zen Buddhist tradition, and Matthew Juksan Sullivan has spent many years contemplating the meaning and significance of each of the one hundred cases or, as he puts it in the commentary to #81, searching in the weeds for the Elk of Elks who escapes every arrow. With its concise but highly informative and illuminative historical comments and contemporary reflections on the koans, in addition to a useful introductory essay, this book will be of great interest to all teachers and practitioners of Zen who wish to learn more about the classic writings, regardless of their particular style of training."

— Prof. Steven Heine, author, Chan Rhetoric of Uncertainty in the Blue Cliff Record: Sharpening the Sword at the Dragon’s Gate

"I cannot slander him and say he walks with the ancients. I cannot praise him and say he does not walk with the ancients. Matthew Juksan Sullivan writes from an intimacy with the fundamental matter to encourage the reader to read that way too. The core is to inquire into the self, to shamelessly do as a reader what my new brother Matthew does as a writer. Hui Neng indicated that when regarding the sutras you should let them read you, rather than you reading them. Here is a guided opportunity to do the same with The Blue Cliff Record." — Zen Master Jok Um (Ken Kessel), guiding teacher, New Haven Zen Center, Hwa Um Sa-Orlando Zen Center, Gateless Gate Zen Center, and Cypress Tree Zen Group

A well-researched book which tries to make this collection of koans accessible and relevant to a wider public. It also succeeds in bringing the freshness and immediacy of Chan/Seon/Zen. — Martine Batchelor, translator, The Way of Korean Zen; author, Women in Korean Zen; co-author, What is this?

"Old Zen Buddhist stories are confusing! These short dialogues and slices of life from ancient China, called koans, have been baffling Zen students for centuries. And that’s kind of the point. They’re meant to express a special sort of logic that develops from years of meditative practice. Even so, often modern English-language commentaries on the koans just add confusion on top of confusion. Not so with Matthew Juksan Sullivan’s book The Garden of Flowers and Weeds. He provides clear, straightforward commentaries that explain the references to ancient literature that we in the West have not been exposed to and helps make sense of these stories without destroying the poetry and mystery of them. I highly recommend this book for anyone wanting to study the Zen koan literature." — Brad Warner, author, Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies and the Truth About Reality

"A gift from a Korean Zen lineage, these Blue Cliff Record koans are succinctly rendered, pared down to gleaming white bones in life-giving commentaries. Through the clear eyes and deft hands of Zen Master Matthew Juksan Sullivan, you will meet yourself in koan after koan, each one challenging you to enter the portals of your very own life as only you can. The Zen Ancestors’ heart wisdom rendered here is a sharp blade, cutting through thick layers of self-absorption and propelling you into the immediacy of benefitting the lives around you." — Wendy Egyoku Nakao, Abbot Emeritus, Zen Center of Los Angeles; co-author, The Book of Householder Koans: Waking Up in the Land of Attachments

"Matthew Juksan Sullivan, using an accessible twenty-first-century approach, shows us that a ‘don’t-know mind’ is our original nature and rests at the heart of our all-too-brief sojourn on this planet. Sullivan compassionately demonstrates that our attempt to secure the everchanging phenomena that characterize our life as both fruitless and pointless.

If you consider yourself a sincere student of ‘What am I?’ this book is destined to be a valuable resource tool on your journey. — Zen Master Ji Haeng (Thomas Pastor), founder and Abbot, Zen Center of Las Vegas

The Garden of Flowers and Weeds: A New Translation and Commentary on The Blue Cliff Record © 2021 by Matthew Juksan Sullivan

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without the consent of the publisher except in critical articles or reviews. Contact the publisher for information.

Hardcover ISBN 978-1-948626-49-1

eBook ISBN: 978-1-9-48626-50-7

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data:

Names: Yuanwu, 1063-1135, author. | Sullivan, Matthew Juksan, translator.

Title: The garden of flowers and weeds : a new translation and commentary

on the Blue Cliff record / Matthew Juksan Sullivan.

Other titles: Bi yan lu. English

Description: Rhinebeck : Monkfish Book Publishing Company, 2021. | Includes

bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021017443 (print) | LCCN 2021017444 (ebook) | ISBN

9781948626491 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781948626507 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Yuanwu, 1063-1135. Bi yan lu. | Koan--Early works to 1800.

Classification: LCC BQ9289 .Y8213 2021 (print) | LCC BQ9289 (ebook) | DDC

294.3/443--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021017443

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021017444

Book and cover design by Colin Rolfe

Front cover painting by Sengai Gibon (仙厓 義梵, 1750–1837)

Monkfish Book Publishing Company

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Mounting the podium, the master said,

"If I were to raise the matter of the teachings of Zen,

weeds would emerge ten feet high around the Dharma Hall."

The Jingde Records of the Transmission of the Lamp, Book 10

Dedicated to my three teachers:

Hwasun Yangil Sunim, Lama Tara, and Lama Shenphen

And to Amo, without whom this book could not have been written.

Contents

Introduction

Notes on the Text

Acknowledgments

Pronunciation Guide

The One Hundred Cases

with commentary and notes

1st Case: The Emperor Asks Bodhidharma

2nd Case: Zhaozhou’s Ultimate Path

3rd Case: Great Master Ma Is Ill

4th Case: Deshan Carries His Pack

5th Case: Xuefeng Calls Out the Search Party

6th Case: Yunmen’s Every Day Is a Good Day

7th Case: Huichao Inquires About the Buddha

8th Case: Cuiyan’s Eyebrows

9th Case: The Gates of Zhaozhou

10th Case: Four Shouts for Muzhou

11th Case: Huangbo’s Dreg-Swilling Bozos

12th Case: Dongshan’s Three Pounds of Flax

13th Case: Baling’s Silver Bowl

14th Case: Yunmen’s Appropriate Statement

15th Case: Yunmen’s Upside-Down Statement

16th Case: Jingqing Pecks the Egg

17th Case: Sitting with Xianglin

18th Case: The National Teacher’s Seamless Monument

19th Case: Juzhi Raises One Finger

20th Case: Longya Asks Around

21st Case: The Lotus of Zhimen

22nd Case: Xuefeng’s Turtle-Nosed Snake

23rd Case: Baofu and Changqing Find the Mystic Peak

24th Case: The Grinder Walks Away

25th Case: The Hermit of Lotus Flower Peak Answers Himself

26th Case: Baizhang’s Wonderful Affair

27th Case: Yunmen’s Golden Wind

28th Case: The Nirvana Master Explains It to Death

29th Case: Dasui’s World-Ending Fire

30th Case: Zhaozhou’s Big Radishes

31st Case: Magu Shakes His Staff

32nd Case: An Audience with Linji

33rd Case: Zifu Draws a Circle

34th Case: Yangshan Descends into the Weeds

35th Case: The Dialogue of Mañjuśrī and Wuzhao

36th Case: Changsha Returns to the Temple

37th Case: Panshan’s Triple World

38th Case: Fengxue’s Iron Ox

39th Case: Yunmen’s Golden-Haired Lion

40th Case: Nanquan Points to a Flower

41st Case: Touzi’s Great Death

42nd Case: Layman Pang’s Perfect Snowflake

43rd Case: Dongshan’s Heat and Cold

44th Case: Heshan Beats the Drum

45th Case: Zhaozhou’s Canvas Jacket

46th Case: Jingqing Hears Raindrops

47th Case: Yunmen’s Body of Reality

48th Case: Tea at Zhaoqing Temple

49th Case: Xuefeng’s Gold-Scaled Fish

50th Case: Yunmen’s Bowl and Bucket

51st Case: Yantou’s Last Word

52nd Case: The Bridge of Zhaozhou

53rd Case: Baizhang’s Wild Ducks

54th Case: Yunmen and the Monk Stretch Their Hands

55th Case: Daowu Won’t Say

56th Case: Qinshan and the Arrow

57th Case: Zhaozhou Alone Is Honored

58th Case: Zhaozhou Doesn’t Have an Answer

59th Case: Zhaozhou Quotes the Whole Saying

60th Case: Yunmen’s Staff Became a Dragon

61st Case: Fengxue’s Speck of Dust

62nd Case: Yunmen’s Hidden Gem

63rd Case: Nanquan Killed the Cat

64th Case: Zhaozhou Walks Away

65th Case: A Hindu Man Questions the Buddha

66th Case: A Monk Gets Huang Chao’s Sword

67th Case: Mahāsattva Fu Explains the Diamond Sūtra

68th Case: Yangshan Burst Out Laughing

69th Case: Nanquan Stops Halfway

70th Case: Baizhang Fears for His Heirs

71st Case: Baizhang Searches the Distance

72nd Case: Baizhang Is Bereft

73rd Case: Great Master Ma’s Permutations of Assertion and Denial

74th Case: Jinniu Breaks into a Dance

75th Case: Wujiu’s Unjust Beating

76th Case: Changqing and Baofu Discuss Donations

77th Case: Yunmen’s Cake

78th Case: Sixteen Bodhisattvas Enter the Bathhouse

79th Case: Touzi and the Buddha’s Voice

80th Case: Zhaozhou’s Newborn

81st Case: Yaoshan’s Elk of Elks

82nd Case: Dalong’s Flowers on the Hillside

83rd Case: Yunmen’s Exposed Pillar

84th Case: Vimalakīrti’s Dharma Gate of Nonduality

85th Case: The Hermit of Paulownia Tree Peak Receives a Visitor

86th Case: Yunmen and the Radiance Within

87th Case: Yunmen’s Medicine and Disease

88th Case: Xuansha’s Ailments

89th Case: Daowu and the Person Reaching for a Pillow

90th Case: The Wisdom of Zhimen

91st Case: Yanguan’s Rhinoceros Fan

92nd Case: The World-Honored One Ascends the Podium

93rd Case: Daguang Breaks into a Dance

94th Case: The Śūraṅgama Sūtra’s Not-Seeing

95th Case: Changqing Lectures with a Spare Head

96th Case: Zhaozhou’s Turning Phrases

97th Case: The Diamond Sūtra’s Crimes of Past Lives

98th Case: Master Tianping on Pilgrimage

99th Case: The National Teacher Answers the Emperor

100th Case: Baling’s Blown Feather Sword

Appendix A – How to Meditate

Appendix B – Name Conversion from Pinyin to Wade-Giles

Appendix C – Lineage Charts of Teachers in The Blue Cliff Record

Bibliography

Glossary

Index

Introduction

The Blue Cliff Record is the preeminent book of Zen Buddhism. It is a thousand-year-old collection of stories, commentaries, and poetry from the classical age of Zen in China. Although it is a massive tome, at its core are one hundred brief dialogues or cases (often known in English as koans). In these stories, we meet the ancient masters as they struggle with the paradox at the heart of Zen: how to teach spiritual awakening when spiritual awakening is nothing that can be taught.

The present work is a commentary on the one hundred cases contained in The Blue Cliff Record. My goal isn’t to solve the koans or uncover their hidden meaning. Rather, I hope to equip the reader so that he or she can enter the stories and enjoy their world as much as I do. The language in these stories is often arcane and the actions of the ancient masters seem bizarre. However, things become a little less arcane and bizarre if we understand the historical context. Once the cases are demystified, it is easier to appreciate their ingenuity, beauty, and fun. More importantly, it is easier to use them as guides for life and meditation.

My Zen Master and His Disciple

The true engine of this book is the appreciation I have for my teacher, Hwasun Yangil Sunim, whose teachings permeate this work. As a Zen Master in the Korean tradition, he traces his teaching lineage in a direct line back to Yuanwu Keqin (1063–1135), one of the two authors of The Blue Cliff Record.

Sunim told me to write a commentary on The Blue Cliff Record shortly after meeting me. Like most of the commands he gives to his students, it was made in passing and without further instruction. He never followed up on his directive, which was also typical. He may have forgotten about it. However, I took the task to heart and began researching and writing. After a few years of work, when I tried to inform him that my manuscript was well underway, he interrupted me with a wave of his hand and said, "No, no. I told you that I’m the one writing about The Blue Cliff Record." This gave me pause. But by this point in our relationship, I knew that sometimes ignoring his words was the best way to honor them and I kept to my task.

Over the fifteen years that it took to complete the commentary, Yangil Sunim ordained me first as a Dharma Teacher and then as a Zen Master. He did this despite the fact that I’m uncertain he’s ever heard any of my lectures on Zen Buddhism. He is studious in avoiding them. Even now, when he invites me to his temple to assist with a meditation retreat or to help commemorate a special event, he leaves the room before I start to deliver my dharma talk. I think he naps. I suppose that from his side, too, there is an understanding that it is best to ignore each other’s words. As the Tao Te Ching says, The Way that can be spoken is not the eternal Way.

Yangil Sunim is a powerful and profound teacher. I am grateful for every day that I get to spend in his company. Given his importance to this book, I wish I could provide a complete sketch of Yangil Sunim, but despite my nearly twenty years with him, I have only a hazy understanding of his biography. He is diligently careless in giving out such information and takes pains to ensure it is as contradictory as possible. He was born in 1934 (or so) in Korea and, as a young man, was ordained as a celibate monk in the predominant school of Korean Buddhism, the Jogye Order. He studied under several teachers with mixed results before finally becoming a disciple of Wol Ha Sunim.

Wol Ha Sunim was the Grand Zen Master of Tongdosa, one of the three major temples in Korea, and would later go on to serve as the Supreme Patriarch of the Jogye Order. Having Wol Ha Sunim accept him as a pupil is itself evidence of Yangil Sunim’s promise. Under his tutelage, Yangil Sunim distinguished himself and was eventually invested with the title of Zen Master. This is an official recognition by the teacher of the student’s understanding of Zen and his authorization to teach others about meditation. 

In 1986, Yangil Sunim came to Canada. He’s given a half dozen different explanations for the move, ranging from a desire to leave Korea after a tragic mountain-climbing accident, to the necessity of fleeing a movie starlet who had fallen in love with him. His official biography on his website says that he emigrated at the request of his master to spread the seeds of Dharma in the West. That has the advantage of conventionality, being the same reason that most Asian-born teachers give for relocating to North America. I suspect Sunim was simply eager to evade the rigmarole that accompanied being a Zen Master in a large and bureaucratic hierarchy like the Jogye Order.

In Toronto, he found free scope to pursue the Way as he saw it. For the first few years, this involved learning English in night school, driving a taxi during the day, and eating the charitable meals offered in church basements. All the while, he was ministering to the Korean community in Toronto—a task that culminated with him opening his first temple in a (then) rundown part of town. The building sat across the street from a psychiatric hospital and had once been a bank. Yangil Sunim made his office in the vault, complete with a gigantic iron door. That was where I met him.

In parallel with his Korean parish, Yangil Sunim started teaching Zen meditation to English speakers. Unlike a lot of other Buddhist teachers, he was determined to keep his congregation small. Big temple, big headache, he would often say. His method for keeping things manageable was two-pronged: first, he engaged in almost no advertising, relying mainly on walk-ins. Given the location of his first temple, this resulted in a high prevalence of students struggling with mental health issues. Yangil Sunim always demonstrated unlimited patience with such students, going so far as to let one troubled man kick him out of his own temple for a period of time. That, however, is the only group of people he has unlimited patience for, which leads me to the second prong of his attack on popularity.

Yangil Sunim’s teaching style is best described as centrifugal. All the force of his substantial personality is engineered to compel you to figure things out for yourself. It’s a challenging environment. By turns he is generous and demanding, compassionate and uncompromising. Often, I saw students drift away or leave in a huff. In fact, I left in a huff (twice). But those who stick around or circle back know they are lightning-strike lucky. Yangil Sunim holds an unfiltered insight into the Zen teachings. He transmits the Buddha’s mind seal. And by keeping things small and informal, he gives his students direct access to it and an opportunity to absorb it for themselves.

The Austere Beauty of The Blue Cliff Record

Yangil Sunim was the one who introduced me to the stories of The Blue Cliff Record and showed me how they are meaningful in a modern world. This is not an obvious insight. The stories in the Record do not portray situations familiar to the people of today, even people interested in Zen Buddhism. Meditation is barely mentioned at all. Doctrine and philosophy are absent. Nor is there any reference to well-known Buddhist ethics like nonviolence or compassion. Only one woman is mentioned by name. Common experiences of day-to-day living are also avoided: there are no discussions of coping with stress, managing anger, or self-improvement.

Indeed, The Blue Cliff Record is the antithesis of a self-help book. It seems more of a self-frustration book. Flipping through it, the reader finds a transcript of gnomic pronouncements and verbal duels between Zen adepts who are eager to demonstrate whose grasp of enlightenment is more transcendental. Failure oft comes with a physical beating. 

Yet for all its absurdity, The Blue Cliff Record is perhaps the best single work in any language for seeing the heart of Zen. To appreciate why, it is essential to understand the history and evolution of Buddhism in China.

Buddhism Hits China—China Hits Back

Buddhism originated roughly around the 500 BCE as the spiritual practice taught by Gautama, a prince of the Shakya clan of Northern India. Because of his sublime insights and accessible teaching style, he attracted many followers and they called him the Enlightened One or the Buddha. As a historical figure, today we often call this man Shakyamuni (Sage of the Shakyas). Shakyamuni taught that anyone could become spiritually awakened if they followed a regime of meditation and morality. He framed this path as a release from suffering: our false views and selfish desires keep us trapped in saṃsāra (the wandering), which is the endless cycle of birth, hardship, sickness, death, and rebirth. Insight into the true nature of things ends this suffering and is called nirvāṇa (the quenching). Once a person attains nirvāṇa, they live out their life in peace and are free from the trouble of reincarnation once they die. (It is a testimony to how difficult life was in Iron Age India that the most ambitious outcome a visionary like Shakyamuni could imagine was freedom from being reborn.)

Shakyamuni Buddha set out the path from saṃsāra to nirvāṇa in methodical detail over the course of thousands of oral lectures. After he died, his students assembled to recollect, systemize, and preserve his teachings. At first, this was done solely by memory, but over the course of several hundred years, these teachings were committed to writing in documents called sūtras. Due to the passage of time, many of Shakyamuni’s words were effaced or embellished. Some of the sūtras we possess today can probably be traced back to the historical Buddha, but many others were written long afterwards and were slipped into the canon to respond to the changing needs of the community. The body of all Buddhist learning, including the sūtras and other scriptures, is collectively known as the dharma.

For Shakyamuni, a core teaching was that renunciation of worldly affairs was necessary to develop ethical discipline and pursue nirvāṇa. He ordained his followers as monks and nuns, and this celibate congregation is what Buddhists call the sangha or assembly (although over time, the sangha has often come to connote all Buddhist practitioners, both ordained and lay). In the following centuries, Buddhism evolved and diversified as the sangha grew and spread beyond India.

Nowhere was the diversification of Buddhism more kinetic than when it arrived in China, probably sometime shortly after the birth of Christ. The dharma transformed Chinese society and China transformed the dharma. For instance, unlike ancient India, China did not have a firm cultural belief in reincarnation. As a result, the notion that nirvāṇa is a final termination of cyclical birth and death had less resonance; it gradually gave way to the view that enlightenment is actually a return to an original state of harmony with the inner rhythm of the universe, something the Chinese called the Tao or the Way.

There were other areas of friction and transformation. The value that Confucian society placed on filial piety meant that many people looked down on monkhood, a calling that required the postulant to renounce his or her family name. In consequence, Chinese Buddhism had to find new ways of embracing the laity and giving them a way to pursue the Buddha’s path.

To overcome these challenges, Chinese Buddhists began to formulate different approaches to teaching the dharma. Over time these different approaches hardened into sects, and even the sects began to subdivide as competition grew for converts, royal patronage, and attention.

The Origins of Zen

Zen Buddhism was one of these sects. Zen means meditation, and during its origins in the Sui dynasty (581–618 CE) and early Tang dynasty (618–906), it was an informal movement emphasizing silent meditation above other forms of Buddhist practice like sūtra study, strict adherence to monastic vows, and devotional worship. This meditation-heavy approach meshed well with the native Chinese philosophy of Taoism, and soon Zen began attracting adherents among both householders and monastic Buddhists. With popularity came imperial favor, temples, and abbacies. By the time the Tang dynasty gave way to the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period (907-960), and finally the Song dynasty (960–1279), Zen formed itself into a distinct school and began to dominate Chinese Buddhism.

The Zen adepts of this period were fearless in pursuing the radical implications of a tradition rooted in wordless and conceptless meditation. They were deeply moved by passages in the sūtras where the Buddha responds to unhelpful questions with silence. Ultimately, they determined there are insights about one’s true self that cannot be communicated in a straightforward manner through lectures, sūtras, or learning.

Their core insight was that each and every one of us is already the Buddha if we can only wake up to this fact. However, this awakening must be experienced for oneself or not at all. This ethos is summed up in the three slogans of Zen: 

do not establish words and letters

directly point to the human mind

see one’s nature and become a Buddha

Enlightenment is like a full moon in the night sky. Words and teachings are a finger pointing at that moon—they are not bad in themselves, but too many people focus on the finger rather than what the finger is pointing at. They ask: Is the finger straight? Is it a nice finger? Is it pointed in the right direction? Enough of that, said the Zen Buddhists: just look directly at the moon.

The leaders of the Zen movement began to view themselves as transmitting an especially pure understanding of the dharma. They also believed this understanding could only be communicated nonverbally by a Zen Master to his student in a mind-to-mind connection like one lamp passing a flame to the wick of another. The notion of this so-called dharma transmission had an important corollary: lineages were created as Zen Masters adopted disciples and these disciples then passed the inherited dharma to a new generation. Soon practitioners were developing structures like family trees, complete with family names, revered ancestors, heirs, and collateral lines. (I have set out the two traditional family trees of all the teachers appearing in The Blue Cliff Record at Appendix C.)

These replacement families were another way in which Zen adapted itself to Chinese sensibilities. During the Tang dynasty, a Zen Master’s influence was measured by how many dharma heirs he created. Most of these heirs were other ordained monks, but the dharma could also be transmitted to laymen and nuns. Although the family trees that tradition has handed down to us seem straightforward, it is important for modern readers to recognize that Zen lineages can be deceptive. Monks of the Tang dynasty were itinerant, and they often took on many teachers over the course of their travels. Nailing down exactly which master enlightened a particular student is a fraught affair and different texts yield different answers. Only during the transition to the Song dynasty did Zen monks begin to prioritize clear and certain lineages. This was because the dharma family was now seen by patrons as an important source of prestige. A renowned ancestor (a patriarch) bequeathed an aura of authenticity to a Zen Master’s teaching. Modern scholarship has shown that during the Song, many Zen writers fudged the historical record in order to claim this or that patriarch for their own family.

As dharma families developed, Zen Buddhists also began to retroject the idea of lineage back through time, establishing a chain of filiation stretching back to Shakyamuni Buddha himself, who was viewed as the first Zen Master. Shakyamuni passed on his inner understanding to his acolyte Mahākāśyapa, who passed on this same inner understanding to his heir Ānanda, etc., etc., down to the present. This history may be unrecorded in the traditional sūtras, but how could they have recorded something so subtle and mysterious? As another slogan proclaims, Zen was a special transmission outside the scriptures.

Thus, the transmission of an inner awakening lies at the heart of Zen. But this foundational principle left a problem: how do you teach your disciple about a wordless experience? And how do you ensure your disciples understood it? Perhaps the greatest insight of the Zen Buddhists of the Tang and Song was to realize that this conundrum is not a true difficulty. In modern parlance, the problem of communication is a feature and not a bug. Striving to teach the unteachable is itself an expression of the Buddha mind.

Cake and Other Zen Teaching Techniques

Over the course of the Tang and Song dynasties, the Chinese Zen Masters developed an evolving array of techniques for passing on their unique understanding of Buddhism. They viewed enlightenment as a liberation from false dualities. As a result, they looked for ways of smashing the ego-centered habits of the rational mind. At first this was, predictably enough, a meditation-based endeavor. However, for some of the most radical teachers, meditation alone seemed too gradual and passive—they wanted a sudden and explosive interruption of normal cognition. Although such teachers never abandoned meditation as the foundation of Zen practice, they stressed the need for something beyond meditation to snap the practitioner out of saṃsāra.

A crucial pioneer among these radicals was the monk Mazu Daoyi, also known as Great Master Ma (709–788). His surviving teachings show that he possessed a special genius for blending conventional Buddhist lessons with strange paradoxes like Ordinary mind is the Way. Tradition also tells us that in order to go beyond mere meditation, he began using nonsensical actions to shock his students out of their habitual thinking. In the midst of his teachings, he would twist noses, call out a monk’s name when he least expected it, or bellow like a baseball umpire shouting strike! By the end of his life, Great Master Ma had a forest of students and was the most illustrious prelate of his day. He was survived by one hundred and forty-one dharma heirs, and his descendants (sometimes known as the Hongzhou school) would go on to found the ascendant Zen families in China, Korea, and Japan.

The power of Great Master Ma’s dharma is evident in the teachers that followed in his wake. Like him, they were trailblazers of imagination and tremendous personal magnetism. Two leading figures were Zhaozhou Congshen (778–897) and Linji Yixuan (d. 866). They were a study in contrasts.

Zhaozhou was remarkable for his verbal inventiveness. His ability to spar with his students and overturn their assumptions singled him out as one of the most skilled Zen instructors of any age. His teachings were supple and slippery. In the words of a later Zen Master, Zhaozhou could pick up sideways and use upside down, go against the flow or go with the flow. He was also quite funny and did much to flavor Zen with a sense of humor which lives on even now. (One of his recorded sayings reads: A monk asked the Master, What is a true statement? Zhaozhou replied, Your mother is ugly.)

Linji has a more severe reputation. Unlike Zhaozhou, he enthusiastically adopted Great Master Ma’s use of loud shouts and physical blows to shock his students into an awareness of the present moment. He did much to conventionalize these practices in Zen monasteries. He and his followers dropped the elevated language expected of religious teachers in medieval China, opting instead for a coarse and direct vernacular. This innovation helped to popularize Zen and freed it from the chains of formal, decorous expression. It is recorded that Linji’s last words before he died were to call his loyal pupil a blind ass.

Collectively, these teachers and their circle created a new way of transmitting the dharma through what we now call encounter dialogues. Long, ceremonial lectures were pushed aside in favor of brief encounters with students. The Master might hold court in the dharma hall (before the assembly), or he might be in a more intimate setting like his chambers, or he might even be caught in the middle of a walk. A monk poses a question about the higher truths of Buddhism, and the teacher flips the question on its head, knocking out the habitual thinking and hopefully surprising the student into some sort of insight. A striking example is this saying of Zhaozhou:

A monk asked, What is meditation?

The Master said, It is nonmeditation.

The monk said, What is nonmeditation?

The Master said, It lives! It lives!

Encounter dialogues like this would go on to form the basis of The Blue Cliff Record.

A further development in Zen teaching techniques came in the next century with Yunmen Wenyan (864–949). Here was a teacher who combined the popularity of Great Master Ma, the verbal playfulness of Zhaozhou, and the austerity of Linji. However, Yunmen’s special contribution was to compress the already terse Zen lessons into single words or phrases. Known as Yunmen’s one-word barriers, they were so dense as to admit no rational interpretation whatsoever. When a monk asked Yunmen What is the teaching that transcends the Buddhas and the Patriarchs? he replied, Cake. Zhaozhou’s responses might stand you on your head, but you were at least still on the earth. Yunmen’s responses pulled you inside out and shot you to Mars.

Getting It in Writing—the Rise of Koans

In the Tang dynasty, the young Zen sect was enjoying its first flowering. Besides Zhaozhou, Linji, and Yunmen, there were hundreds of other Zen adepts who were spurring and jostling each other into finding new ways of conveying the inconceivable dharma. Nor was the emergence of Zen an isolated phenomenon. At this time, other Chinese approaches to Buddhism were also blossoming (like the Pure Land school, the Flower Garland school, and the Tiantai school). It was an explosion of creativity not unlike the golden age of Athens under Pericles or London during the reign of Elizabeth I.

Like all golden ages, it was not sustainable. Rebellion, war, and lawlessness destabilized the latter years of the Tang rulers, giving rise to a short but bloody interregnum called the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period (907–960). Temples were looted, patronage dried up, and recruitment floundered, especially in the North of China. If there was a downside to the emerging technique of encounter dialogues, it was that its success was dependent on the ingenuity and personal charisma of the teacher. These dialogues had flourished in a time when monks moved freely from temple to temple and could meet teachers face to face. But as travel became more dangerous and teachers thinned out, the splendid ferment of the Tang Buddhists was harder to keep up.

Zen innovated once again thanks to the genius of Yunmen. He and his successors launched the practice of raising the old cases. Unlike earlier teachers, they did not merely give their own spontaneous answers to the inquiries of students but would lecture on encounter dialogues from the past. They would comment on them, praising the brilliance of one statement, criticizing another as inferior, or offering their own alternative answers. Frequently, they would deliver a capping phrase—a brief comment inserted into the dialogue itself to cast it into a new light. The traditional curriculum of sūtra study was deemphasized to make way for these mini lectures. During the Tang, a student had to travel to a Zen Master in person to benefit from his teaching. In Yunmen’s system, a student could meet a master vicariously by discussing his old encounter dialogues.

The encounter dialogues had once been an oral tradition, as monks traveled and gossiped. As Yunmen’s innovations took hold, monks began to record the sayings of their teachers and ancestors in notebooks. Soon, these notes were being collected and collated in lineage histories and books of recorded sayings (yǔlù in Chinese). The earliest transcription of encounter dialogues we still possess is a book called The Anthology of the Patriarchs’ Hall, published in 952. The Recorded Sayings of Great Master Ma and Linji were other early examples, soon to be followed by similar collections for Zhaozhou and Yunmen.

Books of recorded sayings fused together different elements of Chinese society in order to create something entirely new. They combined elements of ancient Confucian texts (like the Analects or the Mencius) in which a savant is portrayed sharing his wisdom in a close circle of disciples. Like the Taoist classic the Zhuangzi, Zen’s recorded sayings rely on witty exchanges and conversational paradoxes to get at a higher truth. Modern researchers have also shown how yǔlù were influenced by the popular, mass-produced books of the Song dynasty, such as joke books and detective fiction. The result was that the yǔlù were not just a verbatim account of Zen conversations, but were sophisticated works of art. Today there is a lively scholarly debate about how much the scribes who wrote down the yǔlù revised or even invented the words of the old masters. In my view, there is enough glory to go around. Historical evidence demonstrates that figures like Great Master Ma were brilliant teachers, and there is just as much evidence that the anonymous monks who compiled their sayings were pithy and profound writers in their own right.

Chinese society pivoted during this time and this accelerated Zen’s move from an oral to a written culture. With the end of the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, the new Song Emperors had to stabilize their war-riven country. Their solution was to promote culture and sophistication at the expense of the feudal, warrior-based mindset of the past. Technology lent a hand with the rise of wood block printing. These changes created a new level of literary sophistication among Chinese elites. They rejected the elaborate and somewhat tedious language of the past, instead developing a taste for writing that was natural, earthy, and spontaneous. With their unfiltered and impromptu style, the encounter dialogues in the yǔlù were a perfect match for this new culture, and soon became popular among both monks and householders.

Teachers soon began writing down their comments on the old cases, and these commentaries joined the cases themselves as a popular way of discussing Zen. Some commentaries were rendered in prose and others in traditionally structured Chinese poetry. People even began to comment on each other’s commentaries. In the first half of the Song dynasty, a whole new literature was developing around encounter dialogues. The success of these books among merchants, landowners, and even Emperors was a prime factor in making Zen the dominant school of Buddhism in China.

The encounter dialogues or ancient cases began being called gōngàn (or, as they are better known in English, koans). The word means public case or precedent and in China referred to the decision of a judge in the criminal courts. Indeed, koan literature imitated many elements of a legal case. Within the dialogue, the enlightened Master sits in judgment of a student’s understanding. The student’s crime is often to ask a question. The question might be straight (What is the essence of the Buddha’s teaching?) or a little cocky (What goes beyond the Buddha’s teaching?). The master might then pronounce a verdict (You are a thief and a fraudster), mete out corporal punishment (I give thirty blows of the staff), or exercise mercy (I spare you thirty blows). Similarly, a Zen commentator reviews the original teacher’s ruling like a court of appeal reviews the decision of a lower court. But unlike a court, where the legal system was meant to uncover crime and punish the guilty, the Zen koan was designed to uncover the nonverbal dharma.

Standing in the Shoes of the Master

It may seem strange that a library of koan literature developed in a tradition that instructed its followers not to establish words or letters. Isn’t this replacing one kind of scripture with another?

Koans are in a different category than sūtras and other kinds of writing. They do not give the student information or preserve knowledge. Rather, they invite us to stand where the ancients stood and experience what they experienced when they uttered the words in the encounter dialogues. The point isn’t to ruminate intellectually on the meaning of the case or solve it like a riddle. The teacher’s words are an expression of an enlightened mind. Since that mind transcends rational thought, rational thought is no help in understanding the dialogue. The reader must smash his or her normal process of cognition against the koan. Only then will the wordless dharma break out of the words in the case.

It is also important to recognize that there has always been a gap between what Zen says and what Zen actually does. As Zen Master Caoshan (840–901) once said, Officially, not even a needle is admitted. Privately even a horse and cart can pass. The rhetoric of the tradition can be severe: no sūtras, no doctrine, no mysticism! In practice, Zen is still a form of Buddhism. From the medieval era up to the present, Zen monks have studied sūtras, learnt doctrine, and performed devotional activities like prayer and offerings. It is true that at various points in history there have been a few Zen iconoclasts who railed against any reliance on reading, but most Zen teachers from East Asia are more flexible and less fanatical. This liberal approach is especially prevalent in the Korean tradition in which I practice.

Many koans can only have an impact when one understands the background of sūtra study, doctrine, and devotional activities that all monks took for granted back in medieval China. A good example is the most famous koan in Zen Buddhism:

A monk asked Zhaozhou, Does even a dog have Buddha nature?

Zhaozhou said, "Wú."

Wú can be translated as no, nothing, or no, it doesn’t. Zhaozhou’s brief reply can only be fully appreciated when it is read against preexisting Buddhist doctrine. Since the introduction of the Nirvāṇa Sūtra into China in the mid-fifth century, it was (and still is) an essential axiom of Zen that all sentient beings possess Buddha nature—they are originally enlightened and need only recognize this fact in order to become awakened. Indeed, Linji taught that belief in Buddha nature was the foundation of all practice. Some Zen Masters even linked a faith in Buddha nature to enlightenment itself.

If one didn’t know about this important creed, Zhaozhou might be taken to be offering a straightforward if somewhat nihilistic worldview. In fact, Zhaozhou used one little wú to flip Buddhist orthodoxy on its head. It’s like the Pope declaring that Jesus only saves right-handed women. The radical, almost blasphemous odor of this wú for Zhaozhou’s contemporaries cannot be underestimated. That is precisely where its power lies.

Of course, even if you understand this background, it doesn’t explain what Zhaozhou was trying to say. Was he jettisoning all Buddhist theology? Was he preaching a sermon about emptiness? Was he trying to be contrarian? Was he messing with the monk’s mind? There is only one way to know: you must stand in Zhaozhou’s shoes and experience that wú as if you spoke it yourself. That is the Buddha’s mind seal.

Xuedou and the Origins of The Blue Cliff Record

All this history is reflected in The Blue Cliff Record. Like Zen itself, it did not come into being all at