Zhǐyuè lù 指月錄
Record of the Finger Pointing at the Moon
compiled by 瞿汝稷 (Qú Rǔjī, 1548–1610), late Míng (preface 1602)
About the work
A 32-juan late-Míng Chán anthology by the literatus Qú Rǔjī, drawing principally from the lamp records (Jǐngdé chuándēng lù (KR6q0003), Wǔdēng huìyuán (KR6q0012)) and from individual recorded-sayings literature, organised by lineage from the seven buddhas of the past through the Sòng masters. The title — “Record of the Finger Pointing at the Moon” — invokes the standard Chán image for a teaching that points beyond itself; the work is consciously a teaching anthology rather than a comprehensive lineage record.
Abstract
Qú Rǔjī (字 元立, 號 洞觀, native of Chángshú 常熟) was a major late-Míng official and lay Chán practitioner, serving as Vice Director of the Ministry of Works (工部主事) and other senior positions. His selection principles for the Zhǐyuè lù foreground Chán teaching content over genealogical comprehensiveness: from each lineage figure he extracts the most pedagogically useful dialogues, demonstrations, and verses, omitting biographical and institutional detail. The result is a Chán reader rather than a lamp record proper, more usable for practitioners than for historians.
The work circulated widely from its 1602 publication onward and was an important transmission vector for Chán teaching content into the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Chinese literati world. A contemporary Qing continuation (Xù zhǐyuè lù 續指月錄, KR6q0024) extends the genealogy through the Yuán, Míng, and early Qīng.
Translations and research
No complete English translation. Selected passages have been translated in popular Chán anthologies (Thomas Cleary etc.). Modern critical edition: Lǚ Yǒuxiáng 呂有祥 (ed.), Zhǐyuè lù (兩湖印書社, 1990s); the Jiāxīng-canon text is the standard scholarly basis.
The work is treated in surveys of late-Míng lay Chán: Jiang Wu, Enlightenment in Dispute (OUP, 2008); Beata Grant’s studies of late-imperial lay Buddhism. Hú Shì 胡適 in his autobiography records the Zhǐyuè lù as the source of his earliest Chán understanding.
Other points of interest
The work’s conscious framing as a teaching anthology (rather than a genealogical record) gave it an unusually broad readership among Míng-Qīng literati and made it a major channel through which Chán content reached lay Chinese learning culture.