Secrets Of The Blue Cliff Record

The Blue Cliff Record is a classic text of Zen Buddhism, designed to assist in the activation of dormant human potential. The core of this extraordinary work is a collection of one hundred traditional citations and stories, selected for their ability to bring about insight and enlightenment. These vignettes are known as gongan in Chinese and koan in Japanese. Secrets of the Blue Cliff Record is a fresh translation featuring newly translated commentary from two of the greatest Zen masters of early modern Japan, Hakuin Ekaku (1685–1768) of the Rinzai sect of Zen and Tenkei Denson (1648–1735) of the Soto sect of Zen. This translation and commentary on The Blue Cliff Record sheds new light on the meaning of this central Zen text.

The Blue Cliff Record is a classic text of Zen Buddhism, designed to assist in the activation of dormant human potential. The core of this extraordinary work is a collection of one hundred traditional citations and stories, selected for their ability to bring about insight and enlightenment. These vignettes are known as gongan in Chinese and koan in Japanese. Secrets of the Blue Cliff Record is a fresh translation featuring newly translated commentary from two of the greatest Zen masters of early modern Japan, Hakuin Ekaku (1685–1768) of the Rinzai sect of Zen and Tenkei Denson (1648–1735) of the Soto sect of Zen. This translation and commentary on The Blue Cliff Record sheds new light on the meaning of this central Zen text.

"This book provides an innovative, critical textual and literary analysis, in light of Song dynasty (960-11279) Chinese cultural and intellectual historical trends, of the Blue Cliff Record, the seminal Chan/Zen Buddhist collection of commentaries on one hundred gongan/koan cases long celebrated for its intricate and articulate interpretative methods"--

Groundbreaking new translation of key Zen Buddhist text whose intention is to awaken dormant human potential.

Zen Letters presents the teachings of the great Chinese master Yuanwu (1063–1135) in direct person-to-person lessons, intimately revealing the inner workings of the psychology of enlightenment. These teachings are drawn from letters written by Yuanwu to various fellow teachers, disciples, and lay students—to women as well as men, to people with families and worldly careers as well as monks and nuns, to advanced adepts as well as beginning students. A key figure of Zen history, Yuanwu is best known as the author of The Blue Cliff Record. His letters, here in English for the first time, are among the treasures of Zen literature.

“Revisiting these 100 classic case studies, Rothenberg enlivens the process, and if he returns one to translations from the original, if his practice deepens another’s practice, so much the better.” –from the foreword by Sam Hamill, editor and translator of the Essential Chuang Tzu “It is astonishing how thousand year old riddles are brought here to evocative poetic life. David Rothenberg converts them into contemporary verbal music, and arcanum, a profound secret, a mystery without intellectual solution.” –Frederick Franck, author of The Zen of Seeing and The Buddha Eye This vividly poetic version of the classic 12th century Zen treasurehouse, the Blue Cliff Record, breathes new life into its extraordinary collection of one hundred koans, ingeniously devised from contemplations, insight, and enlightenment. “Rothenberg’s adaptation of the Blue Cliff Record is that rare thing, a work of art that is also useful. It is a bracing as a dive into a cold spring.” –Mark Rudman, winner of the National Book Critics’ Circle Award for Poetry. Poet, writer, philosopher, and musician, David Rothenberg is a contributing editor at Parabola magazine and founding editor of Terra Nova, the award-winning journal of deep ecology. The author of Hand’s End and Sudden Music, his writing is featured in the anthologies The Best Spiritual Writing 1999 and The Soul of Nature.

"This book is a complete translation with my interpretative comments of the eloquent yet enigmatic verses commenting on one hundred cases composed in 1038 by the master Xuedou Chongxian (980-1052). A representative of the Yunmen branch of Chan that he helped revive and bring to prominence during the Northern Song dynasty (960-1127), before its impact declined with the fall of the capital in Kaifeng, Xuedou demonstrates a unique literary flair for explicating gong'an that is evident in numerous writings included in his recorded sayings. In particular, Xuedou's 100 Odes to Old Cases (,C. Xuedou baize songgu, J. Setchō hyakusoku juko) is recognized as the seminal discourse that has greatly influenced the way stories of former teachers (guze) have been appreciated and appropriated for the past thousand years. This text, which became the basis for the Blue Cliff Record that is also cited in my translations, continues to exert a profound impact on the overall legacy of East Asian Buddhist intellectual history and religious literature. Xuedou's verses reflect the author's unique capacity for taming through elegance the undisciplined and deluded minds of followers struggling with self-imposed obstacles to discern reality and thereby discover inner peace. He cites extensively multiple Chan sources, uses extensively irregular meter to disrupt the reader's expectations, and evokes unusual allusions to Chinese lore while often interjecting personal comments or lyrical imagery that goes beyond a reliance on doctrine"--

A tour-de-force guide to Zen Master Dogen’s most subtle and sophisticated philosophical premises: that being and time are inseparable. “Impermanence is time itself, being itself—yet time and being are not at all as we imagine them to be. To really understand and fully embrace this point is to live in a radically different world—a world of awakening, inclusion, and love. Zen Master Dogen frames the teaching on impermanence explicitly as a teaching about time—and all of Dogen’s profoundly poetic teachings flow from his seminal understanding of time, as expressed in Uji (Being-Time), the famous—and famously difficult—essay in his masterwork, Shobogenzo. In Uji, Dogen teaches that time itself, being itself, is luminous awakening. It is all-inclusive, all-elusive, ultimately healing, and eternal. In this book, Shinshu Roberts does full justice, as does no other book I know of, to Dogen’s words. She offers interpretation of Uji only after careful consideration and marshaling of many sources—and offers simple everyday examples to illustrate points that seem at first abstruse. If this text causes you to doubt your most cherished concepts about your life, it will have done its work.” —from the Foreword by Norman Fischer Being-Time thoroughly explores Dogen’s teaching on how we practice as Buddhas by understanding the relationship between being and time as it is—and as we perceive it to be. Using Dogen’s Shobogenzo Uji (The True Dharma Eye, Being-Time), Shinshu Roberts offers a twofold analysis of this teaching: the meaning of the text and practice with the text, giving examples how we apply Dogen’s complex teaching to our daily lives.