The Letters of Chan Master Dahui Pujue

The Letters of Chan Master Dahui Pujue offers a complete annotated translation, the first into English, of a Chan Buddhist classic, the collected letters of the Southern Song Linji Chan teacher Dahui Zonggao (1089-1163). Addressed to forty scholar-officials, members of the elite class in Chinese society, and to two Chan masters, these letters are dharma talks on how to engage in Buddhist cultivation. Each of the letters to laymen is fascinating as a document directed to a specific scholar-official with his distinctive niche, high or low, in the Song-dynasty social-political landscape, and his idiosyncratic stage of development on the Buddhist path. Dahui is engaging, incisive, and often quite humorous in presenting his teaching of "constantly lifting to awareness the phrase (huatou)," his favored phrases being No (wu) and dried turd. Throughout one's busy twenty-four hours, the practitioner is not to perform any mental operation whatsoever on this phrase, and to "take awakening as the standard."
This epistolary compilation has long constituted a self-contained course of study for Chan practitioners. For centuries, Letters of Dahui has been revered throughout East Asia. It has exerted a formative influence on Linji Chan practice in China, molded S

Jeffrey Broughton is Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at California State University, Long Beach.

Abbreviations

Introduction

Epistolary Chan
A Brief Biography
The Editing of Dahui's Letters
Confucianism and the Chan Gongfu of Dahui
Dahui's Diagnosis of Scholar-Officials' Stumbling Block in the Study of Chan
Two Perverse Chan Teachings According to Dahui
Dahui's Gongfu of Huatou Practice
What Not to Do in Huatou Practice
Recurring Motifs in Dahui's Gongfu
The Audience(s) for Dahui's Collection Correct Dharma-Eye Depository and the Letters
Mujaku Dochu's Commentary Pearl in the Wicker-Basket
Two Korean Commentaries: Hyesim and "Korean Anonymous"
A Commentary by a Meiji-Period Rinzai Master
Influence of Dahui's Letters in China
Influence of Dahui's Letters in Korea
Influence of Dahui's Letters in Japan
Three Hanging Scrolls

Chan Master Dahui Pujue's Letters
Chan Master Dahui Pujue's Letters Volume Two
Five-Mountains Reprint Edition of Dahui Pujue chanshi shu

Bibliography