Secrets of the Blue Cliff Record (eBook)

Translator'sIntroduction

TheBlueCliff Recordisa classic text of Zen Buddhism, specially designed to assist in the activationof dormant human potential. The core of this extraordinary work is a collectionof one hundred traditional citations and stories, selected by one of thegreatest masters for their Zen impact on the mind. These vignettes, known as gonganinChinese and koaninJapanese and English, are intended to foster specific perceptions and insightswhose absorption in experience enable the mind to work in a more coherent andcomprehensive manner than conventional education can produce.

JapaneseZen tradition speaks of seventeen hundred koans to represent the totality ofZen lore. In reality there are far more than seventeen hundred classical koansextant, as well as a cumulative body of commentary on more than one thousand ofthem. The reputation of the BlueCliff Record asan unrivaled classic in its field was thus established in a most rigorousatmosphere of spiritual inquiry.

Inits total spectrum of Zen teachings, the BlueCliff Record containssome of the most popular koans as well as some of the most obscure, withpragmatic comments and explanations by two of the greatest expositors of Zen.

TheBlueCliff Record wasso popular in China from the time of its first publication in the twelfthcentury that it was temporarily suppressed in the next generation becausepeople memorized it and repeated its sayings as slogans instead of absorbingthe living Zen meanings. Several versions continued to exist in manuscriptnonetheless, and a new, emended edition was published in the fourteenth century.

InJapan, where it has been a tool of Zen study for more than seven hundred years,the BlueCliff Record istraditionally called the foremost book of Zen. By far the greatest number ofsecondary commentaries on the BlueCliff Record asa total text were composed in Japan over the last few centuries.

Thecomplete text of the BlueCliff Record, translatedfrom the original Chinese, has now been available in English for nearly aquarter of a century. In spite of the difficulties inherent in a work like the BlueCliff Record, andin spite of the ready availability of less disconcerting approaches toreligion, psychology, and spirituality, the Western audience of this remarkableZen classic continues to grow.

Inthe years since the BlueCliff Record hasbeen available in English, many other traditional Zen texts have also beentranslated. A considerable context for this classic has thus been established,but authentic commentarial traditions on the text of the BlueCliff Record itselfhave hitherto been unavailable to the public, indeed unavailable even to themajority of specialists in the field.

Thepresent volume addresses this gap in the East-West transmission of Zen lorewith commentaries on the BlueCliff Record bytwo of the greatest Zen masters of early modern Japan, Hakuin Ekaku of theRinzai sect of Zen (1685–,1768) and Tenkei Denson of the Soto sect of Zen(1648–,1735).

Hakuinand Tenkei were two of the outstanding figures in the reformation of Zen inJapan during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Through their writingand teaching, both of them contributed to the revitalization of near-senileZen, each one emitting a brilliant burst of energy with a residual force ofuncommon power.

Thekoans forming the core of the BlueCliff Record wereoriginally selected by the great Chinese Zen master Hsueh-tou (980–,1052,pronounced Setcho in Japanese) and compiled into a...