Zhènzhōu Línjì Huìzhào chánshī yǔlù 鎮州臨濟慧照禪師語錄
Recorded Sayings of Chán Master Huìzhào of Línjì at Zhènzhōu
compiled (jí 集) by 慧然 Huìrán (i.e. Sānshèng Huìrán 三聖慧然) — traditionally ascribed; received recension edited by Yuánjué 宗演 Zōngyǎn, Northern Sòng, Xuānhé 2 (1120)
About the work
The Línjì lù 臨濟錄 — one of the most influential recorded-sayings (yǔlù 語錄) collections in the Chán tradition, and the single most consequential document of the Línjì school founded by 義玄 Línjì Yìxuán (d. 866). The received one-juan text comprises the “Upper Hall Discourses” (shàngtáng 上堂), “Presented to the Assembly” (shìzhòng 示眾), “Examining Instruction” (kānbiàn 勘辨) — the question-and-answer encounter section — and a brief “Pilgrimage Record” (xíngyóu 行由) with a funerary xíngzhuàng 行狀 appendix. It is the locus classicus for the defining apparatus of the Línjì school: the sānxuán sānyào 三玄三要 (“three mysteries and three essentials”), sìliàojiǎn 四料簡 (“four procedures of selection”), sìbīnzhǔ 四賓主 (“four host-guest relations”), and the pedagogic use of the shout (hē 喝) and stick (bàng 棒).
Abstract
The composition history of the Línjì lù is among the most carefully studied questions in Chán philology, and its practical upshot is that the transmitted text is not a Táng document in any straightforward sense. The earliest strata of material attributed to Línjì Yìxuán circulated in the late ninth and tenth centuries in miscellaneous form. Shorter Línjì selections appear in the Zǔtáng jí 祖堂集 (KR6q0002, 952), the Jǐngdé chuándēng lù 景德傳燈錄 (KR6q0003, 1004), and the Tiānshèng guǎngdēng lù 天聖廣燈錄 (KR6q0004, 1036). The first stand-alone yǔlù edition is the Sìjiā yǔlù 四家語錄 (KR6q0266) recension of the mid-eleventh century, in which Línjì’s sayings were bound together with those of Mǎzǔ, Bǎizhàng, and Huángbò. The received one-juan recension was reorganised, expanded, and reissued by the Línjì-school monk Yuánjué 宗演 Zōngyǎn in Xuānhé 宣和 2 (1120) — this is the decisive editorial act, and the point after which the text’s structure is stable. The Taishō witness (T 1985) descends from that Xuānhé 1120 recension through a Yuán-dynasty Dàdū reprint prefaced by Línquán 從倫 Cónglún.
The traditional attribution of the compilation to Línjì’s dharma-heir Sānshèng Huìrán 三聖慧然 is embedded in the tradition from an early date and is retained in the canon’s attribution line, but modern scholarship (most forcefully Albert Welter) has argued that the coherence and rhetorical polish of the received text reflect the editorial hand of the Sòng compilers rather than a ninth-century disciple’s notes. On this reading the persona of “Línjì” in the received text is substantially a Sòng-period construction — a deliberate sharpening of the Línjy school’s self-image at a moment when it was consolidating institutional dominance over the other Chán houses.
Dynasty and dating here therefore follow the received-recension principle: 宋, Xuānhé 2 (1120), with the catalog meta’s 唐 attribution understood as referring to the notional Táng-era subject rather than to the transmitted text. The Línjì line treated by the text is in turn one of the dominant filiations of later East Asian Buddhism: through Xīnghuà 存獎 Cúnjiǎng and subsequently Fényáng 善昭 Shànzhāo and Shíshuāng 楚圓 Chǔyuán, and then via Huánglóng 慧南 Huìnán and Yángqí 方會 Fānghuì, the Línjì school structured nearly all later Chán, Korean Sŏn, and Japanese Rinzai transmission.
Translations and research
- Ruth Fuller Sasaki, tr., The Record of Linji, ed. Thomas Yūhō Kirchner (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press / Kuroda Institute, 2009). The definitive English translation, with Sasaki’s and Iriya Yoshitaka’s philological apparatus revised and completed by Kirchner; supersedes Sasaki’s 1975 First Zen Institute edition.
- Burton Watson, tr., The Zen Teachings of Master Lin-chi: A Translation of the Lin-chi lu (Boston: Shambhala, 1993; rev. Columbia UP, 1999). Readable translation without scholarly apparatus.
- Albert Welter, The Linji lu and the Creation of Chan Orthodoxy: The Development of Chan’s Records of Sayings Literature (Oxford UP, 2008). The standard modern monograph on the text’s redaction history; argues forcefully for the Sòng construction of “Línjì.”
- Yanagida Seizan 柳田聖山, Rinzai-roku 臨濟錄 (Tōkyō: Daizō shuppan, 1972; rev. ed. Iwanami, 1989). The foundational modern critical edition and study.
- Iriya Yoshitaka 入矢義高, Rinzai-roku 臨濟錄 (Tōkyō: Iwanami shoten, 1989). Annotated Japanese translation with philological commentary.
- Yanagida Seizan, “The ‘Recorded Sayings’ Texts of Chinese Ch’an Buddhism,” tr. John R. McRae, in Early Ch’an in China and Tibet, ed. Whalen Lai and Lewis Lancaster (Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press, 1983), 185–205. Classic overview of the genre with the Línjì lù as its paradigmatic exemplar.
- Jeffrey L. Broughton with Elise Yoko Watanabe, The Record of Linji: A New Translation of the Linjilu in the Light of Ten Japanese Zen Commentaries (Oxford UP, 2013). Translation framed against the premodern Japanese commentarial tradition (Dōchū, Mujaku, Kassan et al.).
Other points of interest
The “killing” metaphors — 逢凡殺凡、逢聖殺聖 “if you meet an ordinary person, kill the ordinary person; if you meet a sage, kill the sage,” and 逢佛殺佛、逢祖殺祖 “if you meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha; if you meet a patriarch, kill the patriarch” — so familiar from twentieth-century Zen popular reception have their canonical locus here. Their reception history, from Sòng Chán commentaries through Japanese Rinzai to Western Zen, is itself a major sub-topic in modern Chán studies.