Dàhuì Pǔjué chánshī yǔlù 大慧普覺禪師語錄
Recorded Sayings of Chán Master Dàhuì Pǔjué
compiled (biān 編) by 蘊聞 Xuěfēng Yùnwén, presented to the throne from Jìngshān Néngrén chányuàn 徑山能仁禪院 in Qiándào 7.3 (March/April 1171); printed by 德潛 Dé Qián at the Dōngchán Bào’ēn Guāngxiào chán sì 東禪報恩光孝禪寺 in Fúzhōu and inserted into the Pílú canon 毘盧大藏 in Qiándào 8.1 (January/February 1172)
About the work
The thirty-juan recorded-sayings collection of Dàhuì 宗杲 Zōnggǎo (1089–1163) — the central text of Southern-Sòng Chán and the most systematic exposition in the canon of the kànhuà 看話 (“keyword meditation”) method that Zōnggǎo codified in controversy with the Cáodòng master Hóngzhì 正覺 Zhèngjué. Encompasses upper-hall sermons, informal instruction (xiǎocān 小參), dharma-talks to individual named officials and monks (pǔshuō 普說, fǎyǔ 法語), cremation verses, verses on old cases (sònggǔ 頌古, niāngǔ 拈古), correspondence, and prose miscellany. The received Taishō recension distinguishes this thirty-juan yǔlù (No. 1998A) from the separately reprinted Dàhuì Pǔjué chánshī shū (KR6q0024), a letter-only companion that circulated as a distinct text from at least the Southern Sòng.
Abstract
The text is the single largest and most influential yǔlù in the Sòng canon. Its materials span Zōnggǎo’s full teaching career: the mature Jìngshān and Yùwáng pulpit sermons; the letters and exchanges with the major literati and court figures of the high Shàoxīng era (張九成 Zhāng Jiǔchéng, 呂本中 Lǚ Běnzhōng, Lǚ Jūrén 呂居仁, 大器 Liú Dàqì, and others); the long pǔshuō expositions that are the locus classicus for the kànhuà method in which a student is directed to hold up a huàtóu 話頭 — Zhàozhōu’s 無 (wú) is the exemplary case — and work through the doubt it generates; and the polemics against “silent-illumination Chán” (mòzhào chán 默照禪) directed at Hóngzhì’s pedagogy. A final block of verse and cremation verses closes the collection.
Dating follows the received-recension principle rigorously: notBefore 1171 (Yùnwén’s memorial), notAfter 1172 (Pílú-canon printing). Dynasty 宋, specifically Southern Sòng, per the catalog. The content — Zōnggǎo’s teaching career — spans ca. 1125–1163; the compilation’s editorial history is wholly posthumous, with Yùnwén working from his own contemporaneous notes and from earlier partial editions. A pre-1171 circulation is plausible: the text mentions that sections were “already in book form” (jiē yǐ chéng shū 皆已成書) when Yùnwén gathered them, suggesting that copies of the smaller ten-juan yǔlù and possibly parts of the guǎnglù had been circulating among Zōnggǎo’s students during the decade between his death in 1163 and the 1171 submission.
The text’s subsequent circulation was prodigious. A Shàoxīng-era abridged ten-juan yǔlù seems to have circulated before Yùnwén’s thirty-juan compilation. From the early Kamakura period it circulated widely in Japan, where it was the single most consequential Southern-Sòng Chán text for the formation of Rinzai koan practice. The Taishō witness descends through the Sòng 《東禪等覺藏》 and subsequent canon editions (Yuán, Míng, Jiāxīng), with variant witnesses collated in the Taishō apparatus.
Translations and research
- Miriam Levering, Dahui Zonggao (1089–1163): The Image Created by His Stories About Himself and by His Teaching Style, and her extensive article work (e.g. “A Monk’s Literary Education: Dahui’s Friendship with Juefan Huihong,” CHUNG-HWA BUDDHIST JOURNAL 13, 2000; “Dahui Zonggao and Zhang Shangying: The Importance of a Scholar in the Education of a Son Master,” Journal of Chinese Religions 41.1, 2013).
- Jeffrey L. Broughton and Elise Yoko Watanabe, tr., The Letters of Chan Master Dahui Pujue (Oxford UP, 2017) — a complete annotated English translation of the Dàhuì shū (KR6q0024), overlapping at its edges with the yǔlù material here.
- Morten Schlütter, How Zen Became Zen: The Dispute over Enlightenment and the Formation of Chan Buddhism in Song-Dynasty China (Kuroda / UH Press, 2008) — the definitive modern account of the kànhuà / mòzhào controversy for which this text is the primary source.
- Robert Buswell, “The ‘Short-cut’ Approach of K’an-hua Meditation: The Evolution of a Practical Subitism in Chinese Ch’an Buddhism” in Peter Gregory, ed., Sudden and Gradual (Hawai’i, 1987), 321–77.
- Ishii Shūdō 石井修道, Sōdai zenshūshi no kenkyū 宋代禅宗史の研究 (Tōkyō: Dai-tō, 1987); Araki Kengo 荒木見悟, Daie sho 大慧書 (annotated Japanese translation of the letters).
- Yanagida Seizan, Iriya Yoshitaka, and Kagamishima Genryū have extensive Japanese-language studies and partial translations of the yǔlù.
Other points of interest
Yùnwén’s submission memorial is one of the most carefully wrought pieces of Southern-Sòng yǔlù para-textual writing. It frames Zōnggǎo’s teaching in simile — “like using a finger to point at the moon: the finger and the moon have nothing to do with each other, but once you know what the finger points to, you know where the moon is” — and explicitly compares the transmission of Zōnggǎo’s recorded sayings to the imperial acceptance of 道原 Dàoyuán’s Jǐngdé chuándēng lù (KR6q0003) into the canon under 真宗 Zhēnzōng. The memorial is therefore not merely procedural but an attempt to secure for Dàhuì’s corpus a canonical legitimacy equivalent to the foundational lamp-record of the early eleventh century.