My son and I visited our neighborhood bookstore recently (shop at local, independent bookstores!) and I found this neat book worth mentioning called The Blue Cliff Record, translated by David Hinton.

The Blue Cliff Record, known in Chinese as the Bìyán Lù (碧巖錄) is actually a pretty old text in the Chinese Chan (Zen) tradition, and is a collection of Koans compiled in the year 1125 by Yuanwu Keqin (圓悟克勤, 1063–1135).¹ Obviously, the koans themselves were older and handed down over time, and appear in other collections, but the Blue Cliff Record is a kind of “selected wine list” of koans. The Blue Cliff Record was compiled during the Song Dynasty in China, which while politically unstable due to the Mongols, was a cultural high-water mark of Chinese Buddhism and especially the Chan tradition. Not surprisingly, Japan’s Zen tradition imported much from this time period as well.

This is not the first time I’ve studied koans, though.

In my youth, when I first explored Zen, I had a copy of the Gateless Gate by Mumonkan, and my religion studies teacher in high school assigned us each a koan to solve in class. Of course, none of us actually solved them, but it was a fun exercise. But as with my studies in Zen, I gradually forgot about it until recently, so it’s like coming back full circle after more than 30 years (!).

But what the heck are koans?

“Koans” are more properly called Gōng-àn (公案) in Chinese. The word “kōan” is how those Chinese characters are pronounced in Japanese, and this term is more widely known to Westerners.² Koans are cryptic dialogues, often between a master and student, and widely used in the Lin-ji school of Chan Buddhism. As we saw in my recent post, Lin-ji is predominant in China, but also spread to neighboring countries, and in Japan’s case it became both the Rinzai and Obaku sects (albeit different centuries). Temples such as Kenninji and Ryoanji are examples of famous Rinzai temples in Japan. The Soto Zen tradition doesn’t rely on them as much, but inherits the same collections, as it is desecnded from the Cao-dong (not Lin-ji) school in China.

David Hinton in his foreword on the Blue Cliff Record explains that the key to understanding a Koan is to see it like a kind of public law case. When law students review famous court cases, they have to review the nature of the complaint, evidence presented, the judge’s decision, past precedence, etc. If you’re not a law student, this is hard. But if you’ve been practicing law for a long time, immersed yourself in it, then you see it with a different eye.

In the same way, Mr Hinton writes, a Koan is like a “public sangha case”. The “sangha” is one of the Three Treasures of Buddhism, and means the Buddhist community at large. So, these are public sangha cases for students to review, contemplate, and so on.

The truth is, when you read a Koan for the first time, it basically makes no sense whatsoever. You might think you get it, then you gradually realize that you really don’t. Then it gets under your skin, and bothers you enough that you might stick with it, until maybe one day, you look at it and you think “duh, of course!”

But also, some “public sangha cases” will resonate with you more than others, or at different times in your life.

Since I don’t participate in any Zen communities at present, I decided to do a little experiment. The Blue Cliff Record has exactly 100 cases in it, and being a giant nerd, I decided to pick one at random as my koan to contemplate. I took 2d10 dice from my Dungeons and Dragons set. Then, I briefly prayed to Kannon Bodhisattva and Shakyamuni Buddha and rolled the dice. I got koan #20 which David Hinton translates as “Dragon-Fang Meditation Clapper”:

When he was a monk traveling, Dragon-Fang Mountain asked Kingfisher Shadowed-Emergence: “What is the ch’i-weave mind [意] Bodhidharma brought from the West?”

“Pass me the clapper to announce meditation,” said Shadowed-Emergence.

Dragon-Fang passed the wooden clapper to Shadowed-Emergence, who swung it and struck Fang a blow.

“You can strike me all you want,” hissed Dragon-Fang, “But there’s still no ch’i-weave mind for Bodhidharma to bring from the West.”

Traveling years later, after his awakening under Fathom Mountain, Dragon-Fang asked Purport Dark-Enigma: “What is the ch’i-weave mind Bodhidharma brought from the West?”

“Pass me the meditation cushion,” replied Dark-Enigma, who swung it and struck Fang a blow.

“You can strike me all you want,” hissed Dragon-Fang, “But there’s still no ch’i-weave mind for Bodhidharma to bring from the West.”

Translation by David Hinton

Confusing? Yes. Mr Hinton takes the unusual approach of translating the monks’ names into English, hence “Dragon-Fang” and “Shadowed-Emergence”, etc. so it takes a bit of getting used to. The term “ch’i-weave mind” (意)³ takes 2 pages to explain at the end of the book, and I can’t do it justice, but for simplicity here I will crudely summarize it as the Big Mind, as opposed to one’s normal everyday mind.

Even so, this koan doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. I think I get it, but do I really get it?

I suppose time will tell…

Namu Shakamuni Buddha
Namu Amida Buddha
Namu Kanzeon Bosatsu

¹ Pronounced like “yuen-wu kuh-cheen”

² Many Buddhist terms in Japanese are just local pronunciations of Chinese-Buddhist words (often from Hokkien dialect, not Mandarin, due to its proximity to the Japan islands). This same trend happens with Korean-Buddhist words, Vietnamese-Buddhist words, and so on. If this sounds strange, consider religious words in English. They are often derived from Latin, for obvious reasons, but the pronunciation gets muddled over many generations, especially since they were often filtered through Middle-French (via conquering Normans). This is how religious ideas and words spread.

3 This Chinese-character is used in such Japanese words as:

• 意味 – imi or “meaning”
• 意識 – ishiki or “consciousness”
• 注意 – chūi or “caution”
• 用意 – yōi or “to prepare or provision something”

…. you get the idea. It’s used a lot, but kind of abstract too.