Secrets of the Blue Cliff Record

Secrets of the Blue Cliff Record - Thomas Cleary

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 (known as gongan in Chinese and koans in Japanese and English) that have been selected for their ability to bring about insight and enlightenment. Though The Blue Cliff Record has been available in English for many years, authentic traditions of commentary on the text have been unavailable to the public, indeed unavailable even to most specialists in the field—until now. This new work by Thomas Cleary fills the gap in the East-West transmission of Zen lore with commentaries by two of the greatest Zen masters of early modern Japan, Hakuin Ekaku of the Rinzai sect of Zen (1685–1768) and Tenkei Denson of the Soto sect of Zen (1648–1735). Hakuin and Tenkei were two of the towering figures in Zen during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This new translation of The Blue Cliff Record featuring their newly translated commentary is sure to shed new light on the meaning of this central Zen text.