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WorkDahui Zonggao

大慧普覺禪師語錄

(lit.: Recorded Sayings of Chan Master Dahui Pujue)

Sermons and letters of the Chan master who taught busy officials to fix their doubt on a single word.

by Dahui Zonggao707 passages held

  • Chinese, the original language
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First published
(published posthumously)
Original language
Chinese

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Overview

Writing to a court official, Dahui Zonggao said that leading seventeen hundred monks at Jingshan and living under supervision as an exile in Hengzhou had been one and the same to him; the letter is one of many in this record of his teaching, which his disciple Yunwen compiled and presented to the throne. Abbot of Jingshan near Hangzhou and the leading Linji teacher of the Southern Song, he was banished in 1141 and not pardoned until 1155, and many of his students could reach him only by letter. Beside the letters the record gathers his sermons from the abbot's seat, beginning with his first in Lin'an in 1137, his verses on old teaching stories, and the public talks that officials and a court lady requested. Its single argument is a method. Take one word from an old story — Zhaozhou's wu, "no", given when a monk asked whether a dog has the Buddha-nature — and hold it, day and night, with the full weight of your doubt, until the doubt breaks. Dahui aimed it at men with offices and families who could not retreat to a monastery. He aimed it against the teachers he called the heretical Chan of silent illumination, who, he said, told troubled officials to make their minds cold ash and dead wood; he records campaigning against them in Fujian in the 1130s. Historians dispute whether he meant Hongzhi Zhengjue, the Caodong abbot most associated with silent illumination: the two were colleagues, and Hongzhi made no reply to the criticism and sent food to Dahui's monastery when it ran short. The letters travelled on as a book of their own across East Asia and shaped meditation in the Korean Sŏn school. A complete English translation of the letters, by Jeffrey Broughton with Elise Yoko Watanabe, appeared in 2017.

Key concepts

What is kanhua, watching the phrase?

Kanhua is Dahui's method of meditation: take one critical phrase, the huatou, from an old teaching story, and keep your attention on it at all times, without interpreting it. The phrase he gives most often is Zhaozhou's wu, no. Its purpose is not to reach an answer but to gather all of a person's thinking into one point until that point gives way.

What is a huatou?

A huatou, literally the head of a saying, is the single word or line of a teaching story that carries its whole charge: in the story of Zhaozhou's dog, the word no. Dahui separates it from the rest of the story so that the student holds only the point where explanation stops, not the narrative around it.

What does doubt mean in Dahui's teaching?

Doubt here is not suspicion of a doctrine but an intense, felt not-knowing that the huatou provokes and the student deliberately keeps alive. Dahui wants it to fill a person's waking hours, at tea and at meals, in quiet and in noise. When it is pressed far enough it breaks all at once, and that breaking is awakening.

What is silent illumination, and what did Dahui object to?

Silent illumination is a style of meditation that sits without an object, trusting the mind's own clarity to show itself. Dahui called its followers heretical and pictured them sitting for years in a ghost cave: in his view they mistook a calm mind for an awakened one and told troubled people to make their minds like cold ash. He insisted that awakening is the only rule.

Why does Dahui say the bodhi mind is the mind of loyalty?

The bodhi mind is the resolve to reach awakening for the sake of all beings. Writing to officials, Dahui says it is the same in substance as the loyal and righteous mind that serves the state: the names differ, the mind is one. The point is that an official need not leave his duty to practise; the energy of a good minister is the energy practice needs.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

One Word and a Great Doubt

Asked whether a dog has Buddha-nature, Zhaozhou said no. Why holding that single word with all one's doubt, without reasoning about it, should break a person open is the method Dahui stakes everything on.

Dahui's instruction is narrow on purpose. Take up the word wu, no, and look at it day and night; do not add a comment, do not reason it out, do not grasp it where it is raised or where the mouth opens. The doubt it produces is not a problem to solve but a pressure to be borne until it bursts, and then birth and death are cut through. His own bamboo stick serves the same end: call it a stick and you clash with it, refuse to and you turn your back.

  • koan practice
  • koans
  • direct realization
  • conceptual thought
  • nonconceptuality
  • awakening
  • direct experience

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Chan in the Noise

Most of Dahui's students ran offices, courts and households and could not withdraw to a monastery. Whether awakening can be pursued in the middle of business, and must be, is what his letters argue.

Chan is not in quiet places and not in noisy ones, Dahui writes, not in thinking and not in daily affairs, and yet none of them may be abandoned. He tells officials to stick two questions on the tip of their nose, where they came from at birth and where they go at death, and carry them through tea and rice like a debt they cannot pay. Preferring quiet to noise, he warns, is destroying the world in order to find what is real; noise is where effort counts.

  • ordinary life
  • practice
  • spiritual practice
  • liberation
  • attachment
  • compassion
  • impermanence

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Against the Ghost Cave

Dahui fought two errors at once: sitting in silence as if calm were awakening, and explaining the old stories until nothing was left to see. Why both kill the practice, and what the teacher owes the student instead, is his polemic.

He pictures the followers of silent illumination sitting year after year in a ghost cave, and the clever students who sift each phrase for its meaning as people trapped in the same dark from the other side. Against both he sets awakening as the only rule: there is no other technique in learning the way. Officials who know the classics and histories by heart, he notes, are as stuck as monks who know the sutras: both can answer any question, and neither can drop thinking.

  • meditation
  • interpretation
  • language
  • teaching
  • skillful means
  • chan buddhism
  • emptiness

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Within this work

passages held
707
distinct concepts
460
by passages held, corpus-wide
#97

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “language” and “nonduality”.
Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 28 pairings. 75 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
ConceptPaired conceptShared passages
languagenonduality35
awakeninglanguage33
chan buddhismlanguage31
awakeningmeditation30
awakeningnonattachment28
awakeningnonduality27
koanslanguage26
meditationnonattachment22
awakeningchan buddhism21
chan buddhismnonduality21
languagenonattachment20
languageteaching20
chan buddhismkoans19
meditationnonduality18
awakeningkoans15
chan buddhismteaching14
koansnonattachment13
awakeningteaching11
chan buddhismmeditation11
nondualityteaching10
chan buddhismnonattachment9
koansnonduality9
nonattachmentnonduality9
languagemeditation8
koansmeditation7
nonattachmentteaching6
koansteaching3
meditationteaching1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

  1. 1172 大慧普覺禪師語錄 you are here ZH
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