Lin-chi I-hsüan (Jap., Rinzai Gigen), d. 866/67; Chinese Ch’an (Zen) master; a student and dharma successor (hassu) of the great master Huang-po Hsi-yun (Jap., Ōbaku Kiun) and the master of Hsing-hua Ts’ung-chiang (Jap., Kōke Zonshō) and Pao-chou Yen-chao (Jap., Hōju Enshō ). At the time of the great persecution of Buddhists from 842 to 845, he founded the school named after him, the Lin-chi school (Jap., Rinzai school) of Ch’an (Zen). During the next centuries, this was to be not only the most influential school of Ch’an but also the most vital school of Buddhism in China. With the Sōtō school, it is one of the two schools of Zen still active in Japan. In the tradition of Ma-tsu Tao-i (Jap., Baso Dōitsu), his “grandfa ther in Zen,” Lin-chi made use of such supportive means as the sudden shout ho! (Jap., katsu!) and unexpected blows o f the stick (shippei, kyosaku) as well as of the flywhisk (hossu). Of these he was best-known for his use of the shout (regarding his classification of the shout into four types, katsu! and bōkatsu!).
With Lin-chi’s style of Zen training, which represents in many regards a synthesis of the methods of his predecessors in dharma, the development that received its decisive impetus from Hui-neng, the sixth patriarch, came for all practical purposes to completion. This is the development that from the Chinese form of Dhyāna Buddhism produced the unmistakably distinct school of Ch’an (Zen), contrasting sharply with the orthodox Buddhist schools. The single new element in methodology that entered Zen after Lin-chi was the kōan (also kanna Zen, Yun-men Wen-yen, Ta-hui Tsung-kao), and it is particularly the Rinzai school that preserved all the traditional elements of training. We encounter Lin-chi, who had twenty-one dharma successors, in examples 20 and 32 of the Pi-yen-lu. His sayings and teachings have been preserved in the Lin-chi-lu (Jap., Rinzai-roku), “Record [of the words] of Lin-chi” (English translation: Irmgard Schloegl, The Record of Rinzai (London 1975].)
In example 32 of the Pi-yen-lu, a (for Lin-chi) typical mondō, we find “The head monk Ting asked Lin-chi, “What is the great meaning of Buddha’s dharma?” Lin-chi came down from his seat, grabbed him, hit him with his hand, and pushed him away. Ting stood there stunned. The monk next to him said, “Head Monk Ting, why don’t you prostrate?” Ting, as he prostrated, experienced profound enlightenment.
Lin-chi came from Nan-hua in what is now the province of Shantung. He entered a Buddhist monastery as a boy and devoted himself to study of the Vinaya school and the sūtras. In his early twenties, however, he began to feel an urgent need to grasp the deep meaning of the scriptures through his own experience. He set out on the easily two thousand-kilometer long pilgrimage to the south of China in order to seek instruction from a master of the Southern school of Ch’an. Eventually he arrived at the monastery of Huang-po, where for about three years he lived as a monk among many others and visited the public dharma discourses of Huang-po. Mu-chou Ch’en tsun-nu (Jap., Bokushū Chinsonshuku), who was then acting as the head monk in Huang-po’s monastery, recognized the potential of young Lin-chi and advised him to try to seek out Huang-po for dokusan. The experiences that Lin-chi then had, which eventually led to his enlightenment are reported in Master Yuan wu’s introduction to example 11 of the Pi-yen-Lu.
After his enlightenment Lin-chi trained further under Huang-po. Later he returned to the north, where he was invited to settle at Lin-chi monastery, the name of which later was applied to him. Here he soon gathered monks and lay people around him, whom he led on the way of Zen. Little is known of Lin-chi’s dharma successors, which may well be due to the political and social chaos in northern China at the end of the T’ang period and in the Five-Dynasty period, and may also be an aftermath of the above-mentioned repression of Buddhism.
The great masters of Ch’an and Zen have always attempted to cover their traces, and in these uneasy times it may have seemed more than ever appropriate to the dharma successors of Lin-chi not to be publicly known. Some of them, e.g., the Recluse of T’ung-feng Mountain (encountered in example 85 of the Pi-yen lu, lived as hermits and had few or no students. Since the framework of formal monastic and clerical organization was never essential for the Zen transmission “from heart-mind to heart-mind” (inshin-denshin), the Zen tradition survived the time of repression better than any of the other Buddhist schools in China. It continued as an undercurrent and resurfaced powerfully after a few generations, becoming in the Sung period the predominant religious tradition. The Rinzai school, which assimilated all the still-living lineages of Zen besides that of Sōtō Zen, also gradually declined in China after the 12th century, but before it did, it was brought to Japan, where it continues up to the present day.
Source: The Encyclopedia of Eastern Philosophy and Religion: Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Zen. Shambhala Publications, Inc.
Books on Lin-chi I-hsüan
External links