Constance Kassor’s review for Buddhadharma:
The Chinese Chan tradition emphasizes the study of “public cases” or gong’ans (called
koans in Japanese Zen). These are succinct sayings or encounters involving earlier masters, designed to be studied and deeply contemplated by students. Over the
centuries, gong’ans and their accompanying commentaries were compiled into various
anthologies. One such seminal work is the Gateless Barrier, a collection of 48 gong’ans
compiled by the Chinese master Wumen Huikai (1183-1260). Renowned for its brevity
and clarity, the text serves as a cornerstone for meditative practice. While its
prominence waned in China, the Gateless Barrier eventually grew in popularity in
Japan, where it became a key text in the Soto and Rinzai traditions. Today, this work
remains influential, with more than a dozen English translations available.
Readings of the Gateless Barrier, edited by Jimmy Yu, offers a fresh and multifaceted
exploration of this important text. Through ten essays by a diverse group of scholars
and practitioners, the book examines the Gateless Barrier from a range of perspectives,
weaving together historical, cultural, and literary analyses. These essays highlight the
text’s significance over time, enriching our understanding of its importance and its role
in meditative practice.
This book serves as a resource for both beginners and seasoned students of gong’an
literature. It begins with a concise and accessible introduction to the history of
Buddhism, Chan, and gong’an literature. It concludes with an annotated translation of
the Gateless Barrier, a brief survey of some of the other major English translations of
the text, and a detailed cross-referencing guide to help readers navigate various
interpretations of the text.
The Gateless Barrier is innovative and influential, and Readings of the Gateless Barrier
explores this innovation and influence, showing the different ways that the work has
been read, understood, and experienced over time.
[Please note that the text from which this excerpt derives makes use of footnotes and diacriticals; these are not represented in this excerpt.]
Excerpt:
What Is a Gong’an?
Gong’an literally means “public case.” The term comes from Tang dynasty (618–907) civil court documents, referring to legal cases that must be resolved by a magistrate. Chan masters drew on this judicial metaphor to refer to the “cases” of certain past Chan masters and practitioners who had realized awakening. Just like magistrates who reviewed, scrutinized, and passed judgment on legal cases, Chan masters started to compile and comment on the short sayings and encounters of earlier masters and practitioners. Their commentary, like the magistrate’s verdict, evaluated the most salient point of or catalyst for those awakening experiences, giving readers pointers of insight and inspiring them to take up these cases as their own objects of meditative investigation. The compilations of the cases together with the comments are called gong’an collections.
Gong’an collections emerged during the Northern Song dynasty (960– 1279), specifically around the twelfth century, but the literary form is complicated and can be traced back to the tenth century. The circumstances that led Chan writers to collect and collate anecdotes and sermons of past practitioners may have something to do with the collapse of the great Chinese Tang dynasty, in order to preserve the teachings of important masters and to identify a particular pattern of their awakening experiences or encounters to the Buddhist truth.
In this sense, gong’an collections are really anthologies of excerpted “encounters,” of recorded interactions between Chan masters and their students found in discourse records and genealogical literature.
These two genres included sermons and conversations about Chan. By the tenth century, many Chan masters’ discourse records already included a subgenre of texts called “verses on old [cases]” (C. songgu), which can be seen as a direct precursor to the gong’an collections of the twelfth century. This suggests that by the tenth century, the practice of commenting on earlier Chan masters’ stories was already recognized as important. History has consistently shown that by the time ideas are committed to written texts, they have typically been circulating orally for a long time. The likelihood of an early phase of oral tradition within Chan cannot be overlooked.
The Structure of Gong’an Collections
As a literary phenomenon, gong’an collections are complicated, with multiple layers of comments sometimes by different masters—suggesting that their readers, who would have been Chan adepts, were expected to know the contexts of these stories, master a core repertoire of Chan texts, and display their mastery by being able to refer to them and perhaps by writing commentaries on them. This means that gong’an collections were part and parcel of an educated elite tradition in Chan, as some of the chapters in this volume show, akin to secular learning. For reasons that are detailed in chapter 2, the Gateless Barrier is an exception to this multilayer commentarial structure; it is straightforward, containing the root cases and one set of comments on them by Chan master Wumen Huikai (1184–1260).
Most other gong’an collections produced during the Northern Song period were quite complicated. For example, the Blue Cliff Record (C. Biyan lu; J. Hekigan roku), published in 1128 by Yuanwu Keqin (1063–1135), consists of root prose and verse commentary on a collection of 100 stories originally compiled by Chan master Xuedou Chongxian (980–1052). On top of this original material, Yuanwu provided a set of secondary prose and verse commentaries on Xuedou’s prose and verse comments. In this sense, the Blue Cliff Record resembles a collaborative work of commentaries.
To each of Xuedou’s original root cases, which are simple and short, a prelude by Yuanwu serves as a pointer for the reader. After each root case, Yuanwu provides a prose commentary and then the verse commentary, as well as a subcommentary on his own verse commentary. Moreover, interspersed with Xuedou’s root cases, in both his prose and verse comments, are additional interlinear notes by Yuanwu. These notes, or annotations, are known as “capping phrases.” Thus, the Blue Cliff Record consists of a complex of multilayered comments. Resembling a scriptural exegesis, this and other similarly intricate gong’an collections—such as the Record of Serenity (C. Congrong lu; J. Shōyō roku), published several years earlier in 1224 and consisting of 100 root cases by Chan master Hongzhi Zhengjue (1091–1157) with comments on them by Wansong Xingxiu (1166–1246)—invites readers to treat these works as objects of literary study.
Unlike a typical Chinese scriptural exegesis, gong’an comments, in both prose and verse form, do not explicitly explain or reify any Buddhist concepts. Instead, they read more like transcripts of vernacular, layered conversations. In the more complex gong’an collections such as the Blue Cliff Record, the initial conversation is between Xuedou, the compiler of the root cases, and Yuanwu, the commentator on Xuedou’s root cases. A second discursive layer is added involving Yuanwu in a conversation with himself via his own comments! Finally, a third conversational layer is between Yuanwu and the audience, as he provides pointers to insights.
Gong’an Comments as Source of Authority
Gong’an collections are taken by Chan practitioners to be equally as authoritative as traditional Buddhist scriptures and commentaries because they embody stories of awakening experiences. This authority is also forged through its production in literary, institutional, and ritual dimensions that are built into the gong’an.
The literary structure of gong’an comments, for example, always positions the Chan master compiler as the voice of awakening, equal to (and sometimes surpassing) the authority of the Buddha, passing magisterial judgment on the anecdotes of earlier masters. That is to say, it is the compiler who always has the last word, commenting on the words and actions of former worthies. Consider case 6 in the Gateless Barrier, wherein Wumen comments on Śākyamuni Buddha holding up a flower and Mahakasyapa smiles in response:
He turned the noble into the lowly and sold dog meat and advertised it as mutton, proclaiming it marvelous. If the whole assembly had smiled, how would the Buddha have passed on the treasury of the true dharma eye? If Mahakasyapa had not smiled, how would the Buddha have transmitted the treasury of the true dharma eye? If you say that the treasury of the true dharma eye can be transmitted, then the old golden-faced man would just be deceiving villagers. If you say that it cannot be transmitted, then why did he approve of Mahakasyapa? (see p. 255)
In this story, Wumen draws a simile between transmitting the “true dharma eye” to Mahakasyapa, acknowledging the latter’s awakened perception of the deeper significance of the Buddha’s holding up a flower, to selling dog meat as mutton. Essentially, Wumen makes the Buddha out to be a charlatan, selling something as one thing despite it really being another. What’s so marvelous about mutton? In fact, there is nothing special about dog meat or mutton—both are just meat. The point is not to declare which meat is better, but to eat one’s fill. It is only in delusion that one sees mutton as better than dog meat. If one attaches to the expedient means of Śākyamuni or Wumen, then one misses the point, mistaking the finger pointing as the moon.
Wumen says, “If Mahakasyapa had not smiled, how would the Buddha have transmitted the treasury of the true dharma eye?” Smile or no smile, what does it matter? How can any gesture definitively express the truth of awakening? In truth, awakening as freedom is already present; it is nothing special—like dog meat or mutton. However, awakening needs to be recognized. If one realizes awakening, something that is already present and available to all, would one make a thing out of it? From that awakened perspective, would one privilege awakening as a special experience over other experiences? Would awakening be unique and apart from delusion, if delusion is not real? Would there still be a need to “have passed on the treasury of the true dharma eye”?
Gong’an commentary pushes the practitioner to question and deconstruct conventional values people place on experiences and things. Awakening is a source of authority in the gong’an commentary. The Chan masters’ authority comes from their position as commentators.
The Northern Song period was a time when many Chan masters and students engaged in reading, studying, commenting, and passing judgment on gong’an collections. It was part of the institution of Chan monasticism. The commenting itself occurred ritually as part of the Chan master’s instructions to the monastics. The compilation and production of gong’an collections secured the Chan master commentator’s special status. The widespread circulation of their comments through gong’an collections, and the practitioners’ study of them, further affirmed their authority. All of this contributed to instituting the Chan master as the living truth of awakening.
The Gateless Barrier
The Gateless Barrier by Wumen is the third of the three most famous Chinese gong’an collections. Different from the two described above, it arguably became one of the most influential and beloved gong’an collections because of its terseness and simplicity. Its aim and function appear to be very different. It does not include the elaborate literary features found in the Blue Cliff Record, and it does not contain expanded or interlinear commentaries on various aspects of the original cases. Instead, the Gateless Barrier is geared toward meditation practice.
The Gateless Barrier consists of forty-eight original cases of past Chan masters’ sayings, compiled by Chan master Wumen himself, followed by his own instructions for how to engage with them. The instructions come in both prose and verse form, but the articulation is quite different from that found in the Blue Cliff Record and the Record of Serenity insofar as Wumen’s comments intentionally aim to arouse a strong sense of existential wonderment and questioning in the reader, as he suggests in his comments on the first case.
Some modern scholars believe that Wumen first collected forty-eight old cases and then attached verses to them, and only later added the prose comments, thereby creating a gong’an collection. If that was indeed the process by which the text as we now have it came into existence, then we could perhaps view it as structurally similar to the original songgu “old cases” literature, having at its core a collection of old cases with attached verses, and the further addition of a prose comment—e.g., such as master Xuedou’s root cases and verses or Hongzhi’s root cases and verses, which later became the Blue Cliff Record and the Record of Serenity, respectively. However, Wumen states in his preface that he used these cases during a monastic retreat that he led at the Longxiang Monastery in the Dongjia region (present-day Wenzhou) in 1228. If we take this to be true, then the function and nature of these forty-eight cases, with his comments, are very different than the literary production of songgu, the Blue Cliff Record, and the Record of Serenity.
There is no explicit record of how Wumen used these gong’ans to teach his disciples, but there are indications in his preface and prose comments that he expected them to focus their minds with meditative effort on the gong’ans or specific passages therein. According to Wumen, the gong’an cases are meant to be engaged with through one’s “whole being” as an embodied practice, and particular phrases ought to be at the front and center of one’s attention “day and night” without interruption. This suggests that the Gateless Barrier, unlike the Blue Cliff Record and Record of Serenity, was conceived from the start as an aid to meditative practice. In this sense, perhaps the Gateless Barrier cases are not meant to be read or studied at all. Rather, they are meant to be engaged with, embodied, and realized.
Excerpted from Readings of the Gateless Barrier edited by Jimmy Yu. Copyright (c) 2025 Columbia University Press. Used by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.
