The Blue Cliff Records/Biyan Lu 碧巖錄 are a collection of one-hundred cases or koans with commentaries. It and another collection, The Gateless Gate (or Mumon’s Barriers 無門関), which is a collection of forty-eight cases, were popular among Zen/Chan practitioners as well as the educated elite when they were first published. Even today they are popular with intellectuals who want to try their hand at solving the various cases with no success as we might expect.
All these cases are more like barriers 關 than open gates 無門 to anyone who attempts to solve them with discursive thought which depends on reasoning rather than intuition. No matter how clever they are, and no matter how long they try, they can’t convert these barriers into an open gate. It won’t work.
Some of the problem seems to come from not understanding the importance of the huatou 話頭 which can be roughly defined as the source of words and thoughts which is, itself, ineffable and unthinkable. It is also transcendent and most fundamental. When the adept goes beyond words and thought he or she enters the realm of the huatou. Unfortunately, current translations of The Blue Cliff Records render huatou with “before sound” (case seven). Another renders huatou with “unvoiced”! An older translation by R.D.M. Shaw, and maybe a better one, renders huatou with “Pre-Voice.” His translation includes more text as to what huatou means.
Personally, I don’t think present day Zen masters have a clue as to how koans actually work because I don’t think any of them have had kenshō by which the huatou is disclosed which means that all the koans are answered. In fact, all the cases in the texts earlier mentioned are constructed from the huatou, it is their foundation.
This brings up another problem. If one’s teacher has not had kenshō I seriously doubt that the student will ever have the good fortune to understand koans and even less, solve a single koan. I know I piss of a lot of Zennists with my bold talk. But with a little common sense does anyone believe the Chinese were so stupid as to devise these cases so they could be answered by discursive thought? Frankly, I was amazed to find each and every case I read and studied to have the huatou somewhere in the koan. In other words, the koan always alludes to the huatou, while the barrier nature of the koan blocks our intuition by getting us to use discursive thought which is all that we know. No, the Chinese weren't stupid — they were brilliant! These cases show how inadequate discursive thought is in Zen.
How does ‘The Blue Cliff Records’ differ from ‘Zen Flesh, Zen Bones’?
Posted by: Coyote | April 04, 2019 at 02:52 AM