The two great kōan collections of the Song dynasty, the Blue Cliff Record and the Gateless Gate, barely mention Juefan Huihong, and a Chan reference book compiled in 1108 leaves him out altogether. Yet he is one of the few Chan monks of any age whose collected works survive whole: thirty scrolls, close to 1,700 poems and 600 pieces of prose. The silence had a reason. Chan had come to describe itself as a transmission that does not rely on words and letters, and Huihong openly professed what he called wenzi Chan, "lettered Chan", which had no appeal for those who read that formula strictly.
He came to it by way of the scriptures. Born into the Peng family in Junzhou, in northwestern Jiangxi, he lost both parents young and took the tonsure in 1084. In 1089 he went to the capital, Bianjing, for the monastic examinations, and stayed four years studying Yogācāra treatises, the Buddhist analysis of mind, with Xuanmi, a master of monastic discipline who sat on the court's translation committee. Only then, in 1092, did he turn to Chan, under Zhenjing Kewen, a teacher of the Huanglong branch of the Linji line, who gave him transmission in 1099. By 1105 his name as a poet-monk and interpreter of Chan was made, and Zhang Shangying, a scholar-official and patron of Chan, had him appointed abbot in his home region.
The next thirteen years cost him. His friends were the conservative men of letters whom Emperor Huizong censured for opposing the reforms of Wang Anshi, and Huihong shared their fate: he lost his robe, was imprisoned more than once, north and south, and was exiled to Hainan island. He spent the time writing commentaries on the scriptures, among them the Nirvana Sutra and the Diamond Sutra; none survives. On Hainan he found an old copy of the Śūraṃgama Sūtra, and his commentary on it is one of only two of his commentaries that survive. After his release from a prison in Nanchang in 1118 he settled in Hunan. There he compiled a history of eighty-four Chan teachers of the Jiangxi and Hunan region and wrote the Zhizheng zhuan, the book that makes his case. Its first comment says that the heart of Chan cannot be seen in words, and cannot be seen apart from them either. Scripture and the sayings of the masters therefore explain each other, and the book reads them side by side.
His book on poetry, the Lengzhai yehua ("Evening Talks from a Cold Studio"), is among the earliest reliable accounts of the poet Huang Tingjian, whom he had met as a young monk, and Han Ju, a poet of the same Jiangxi circle, wrote the inscription for his stupa when he died in 1128. Miriam Levering, a historian of Song Chan, has written on the friendship between Huihong and the young Dahui Zonggao, the Linji master who later taught monks and officials to hold a single phrase from an old kōan.
Five centuries later three of the great Ming masters, Yunqi Zhuhong, Hanshan Deqing and Zibo Zhenke, read his works as proof that the scriptures and Chan belong together, and Zibo named him as an inspiration for printing a new Buddhist canon. Chinese émigré monks brought that canon to Japan and with it renewed interest in him; in 1710 Kakumon Kantetsu, the abbot of a Sōtō Zen temple, completed a commentary on every piece in his collected works, poems included. Historians of Chan now lean on his biographies to reconstruct the lineages of his own century.