Xuedou Chongxian

The hundred verses for which Xuedou Chongxian is remembered are not in his recorded sayings. The Ming edition of the record, the one modern readers use, left them out, and they survive as the frame of another man's book: in the 1110s Yuanwu Keqin, a Chan master of the following century, lectured on them to the monks of Jiashan in Hunan, and the lectures became the Blue Cliff Record. Each verse is Xuedou's comment on an old case, a remembered exchange between earlier masters. What Xuedou did with those cases, both in the verses and in the sermons his disciples kept, is the reason he matters.

He came to Chan by way of scholarship. Born in 980 at Suining in Sichuan to a wealthy family that followed Confucian learning, he was ordained at a cloister in Chengdu after his parents died, and he heard lectures on the commentary that Zongmi, a ninth-century scholar-monk, wrote on the Sūtra of Perfect Enlightenment. Then he went to Zhimen Guangzuo, a master in the line of Yunmen Wenyan, and stayed five years. His funerary inscription tells how the awakening came: he put a question to his teacher, Zhimen struck him with a fly whisk, and struck him again before he could answer. Later, as head monk at a temple in Chizhou, he lectured on "Prajñā Is Not Knowing", an essay by Sengzhao, a disciple of the translator Kumārajīva in the early fifth century.

After teaching at Cuifeng monastery near Suzhou, he was invited by a local official to the Zisheng monastery on Mount Xuedou, near Mingzhou, today's Ningbo, and spent thirty-one years there. The house of Yunmen, four generations old, revived under him, and Chinese Buddhist histories call him its restorer. The Song court gave him the title Mingjue, "bright awakening". He died in 1052.

His method treats the words of the old masters as moves in a game still being played. In the record he raises a case, often one of Yunmen's, and then judges it, or says what the monk should have answered, or supplies an answer of his own. The verses do the same thing in poetry, with an allusion where a lecture would put an argument. The claim behind both is that an old exchange is not scripture to be explained but a situation the reader has to meet, and that a commentator's job is to send the reader back into it. Writing in 1223, Wansong Xingxiu, a master of the Caodong line, paired Xuedou with Hongzhi Zhengjue, the master of his own line whose verses he was explaining, as the Li Bai and Du Fu, the two great Tang poets, of Chan verse. He added that those who praised Xuedou's literary gifts had gathered the flower and missed the fruit.

That tension followed the verses into Yuanwu's book. Chan tradition tells that Yuanwu's heir Dahui Zonggao burned the printing blocks of the Blue Cliff Record, alarmed at monks who talked too cleverly about the cases; the book was printed again around 1300 and became, in Japan, the foremost text of Rinzai Zen. Xuedou's own record went to Japan too, where in the fourteenth century Shūhō Myōchō, the founder of Daitoku-ji in Kyoto, took up its passages one by one and added remarks of his own.