The Blue Cliff Record: History, Cases and Translations

By Tim Yu, Founder & Editor · Published 1 November 2026

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The Blue Cliff Record (Chinese Biyan lu, Japanese Hekiganroku; Taishō no. 2003) is a Song-dynasty Chan (Zen) collection of 100 koan cases. The poet-monk Xuedou Chongxian (980–1052) chose the cases and wrote a verse on each; the teacher Yuanwu Keqin (1063–1135) lectured on them, adding introductions, running remarks and prose commentary. Its oldest dated documents are a postface of 1125 and a preface of 1128.

In Japan it “came to be recognized in the Rinzai Zen schools as the foremost of Zen texts, one of the main sources used in the meditative study of Zen lore,” in the words of its translator Thomas Cleary (BDK English Tripiṭaka 75, 1998, p. 1). For koans in general and how they are worked with, see Zen koans.

What is the Blue Cliff Record?

The CBETA catalogue credits the book in two phrases: 重顯頌古, Chongxian’s verses on old cases, and 克勤評唱, Keqin’s commentary. Xuedou’s verses came first. Yuanwu, born eleven years after Xuedou died, lectured on them, and his lectures became this book.

The two men came from different houses of Chan. The Dharma Drum authority database places Xuedou in the Yunmen school and Yuanwu in the Linji school’s Yangqi branch, as an heir of Wuzu Fayan. On those two records, the book joins a Yunmen poet’s verses to a Linji teacher’s commentary.

The name is harder to pin down. The monk Puzhao’s preface says Yuanwu taught the cases “when he was dwelling at the Blue Cliff” (trans. Cleary, p. 5). The Dharma Drum record has him staying at a Biyan (Blue Cliff) cloister, and the first fascicle’s heading places the lectures at the Lingquan cloister on Mount Jia (Jiashan) in Lizhou, near Li in Hunan as the German translator Wilhelm Gundert’s title page has it. The Tang master Jiashan Shanhui (d. 881) described his mountain with a couplet ending on a bird alighting “before the blue cliff” (碧巖前), as the Jingde chuandeng lu records. Whether the title echoes that couplet, none of the sources used here says.

When was it written? The dated documents

The book’s own documents do not give one date. The postface by Guan Youwudang, dated 1125, says Yuanwu explained Xuedou’s verses at Chengdu and then again at Jiashan and Daolin: three times, in different words, with one meaning. His disciples wrote the lectures down.

Puzhao’s preface, dated 1128, says that “Companions on the Way compiled it into a volume” (p. 5). CBETA dates the work 1125, the year of Guan’s postface. Gundert, on the title page of his 1967 version, dated the writing to Jiashan between 1111 and 1115.

How each case is built

Cleary’s introduction (p. 4) sets out five parts:

1. An introduction by Yuanwu (垂示; Yamada Kôun’s “Instruction”).
2. The story itself, “brought up” (舉) from older lore, with Yuanwu’s short remarks set between its lines.
3. Yuanwu’s commentary on the story.
4. Xuedou’s verse, again with Yuanwu’s interlinear remarks.
5. Yuanwu’s commentary on the verse.

By our count of the Taishō text, 79 of the 100 cases open with an introduction and 21 do not. Yamada translates the one for case 1:

Xuedou himself sometimes breaks into a story. In case 4 he adds, “Completely exposed” (勘破了也), and Yuanwu notes that in the assembly such a remark is called 著語, “an added comment” (trans. Cleary, pp. 31–32). Commenting on Xuedou’s verse for case 1, Yuanwu writes that “usually verses on ancient stories just explain Chan in a roundabout way,” before showing Xuedou confronting the story, “saying right off” that the holy truths are empty (trans. Cleary, p. 17).

Case 1: Emperor Wu and Bodhidharma

The first case is the meeting of Bodhidharma with Emperor Wu of Liang. Its opening exchange, “Vast emptiness, nothing holy,” is quoted on Zen koans. The emperor then asks who is facing him; Bodhidharma says he does not know, and when the emperor fails to understand, he crosses the Yangtze to the kingdom of Wei.

The Chinese is four characters and then two: 對朕者誰 and 不識. Aitken points out that the emperor “uses the imperial ‘me,’ a pronoun reserved for the Son of Heaven.” Translators part company on both lines:

不識 has no subject. Cleary leaves it out; Aitken and Yamada supply an “I”. The case then goes on without Bodhidharma. The emperor consults his adviser, Master Zhi, who answers, in Yamada’s translation:

Zhi names Bodhidharma as Avalokiteshvara, and the emperor, too late, wants him brought back.

What Yuanwu’s commentary adds

The exchange about merit, which the Bodhidharma page leads with, is not in the case. Yuanwu tells it in his commentary: the emperor asks what merit there is in building temples and ordaining monks, and Bodhidharma says, “There is no merit” (無功德; p. 13). Yuanwu then quotes his own teacher on the case’s central phrase:

Yuanwu also doubts the story’s chronology: “According to tradition, Master Zhi died in the year 514, while Bodhidharma came to Liang in 520 … This must be a mistake in the tradition” (此必是謬傳; p. 15). He sets the problem aside, since “all that is important is to understand the gist of the matter.” What historians make of the legend is on the Bodhidharma page.

Whose voice ends the verse?

Xuedou’s verse on case 1 ends with a performance: the master looks to right and left and asks whether the patriarch is here. In Yamada’s translation:

Cleary prints these lines inside the verse, and Yuanwu’s commentary treats the question as Xuedou’s own device (p. 18). Yamada’s teisho gives the narrating words to someone else: “the ‘master’ means Master Setchô, for here speaks another monk who inserted this.”

Other cases readers meet

Some cases, by Cleary’s BDK titles:

• Case 6, “Every Day Is a Good Day”: Yunmen asks for a word about the days after the fifteenth, and answers himself.
• Case 19, “One Finger Chan”: whenever Juzhi (Cleary’s “Judi”) was asked anything, he raised one finger. The story of the boy whose finger Juzhi cut off is told in Yuanwu’s commentary, not in the case.
• Cases 33 and 69, Zifu’s and Nanquan’s circles: told on the ensō page.
• Case 84, “Vimalakirti’s Door of Nonduality”: from the Vimalakirti Sutra; the case ends with two remarks by Xuedou, “What did Vimalakirti say?” and “Completely exposed” (trans. Cleary).
• Case 97, “The Diamond Sutra’s Scornful Revilement”: the case is a passage of the Diamond Sutra on being reviled by others.

Did Dahui burn the Blue Cliff Record?

The story is that Yuanwu’s heir Dahui Zonggao (1089–1163) destroyed the book. It is told in a reprint’s prefaces and postfaces, dated 1300 to 1317, 137 to 154 years after Dahui’s death, and in an undated notice printed with them. None of them dates the burning, and they do not agree on what was destroyed:

Xiling alone tells the confession: pressed in Dahui’s room, a student admitted that he had memorised his answers from the Blue Cliff Collection and had no real awakening, and Dahui, fearing that later students would prize words over the root, burned it. Making the book and burning it, Xiling concludes, came from one intention. Dahui’s own approach to koans comes up on satori and kenshō.

On the prefaces’ own account, the book was not lost. Fang Hui reports in 1300 that Zhang Mingyuan of Yuzhong “rekindled the dead ashes and reprinted it” (p. 6; Cleary’s “Zhang Hui Mingyuan”), and Zhou Chi writes in 1305 that Zhang was carving new blocks. Xiling says Zhang had obtained a manuscript of the latter volume, a printed edition from Xuetang and a Sichuan edition, and corrected their errors.

The Blue Cliff Record in Japan

Cleary states that the book “was first brought to Japan by the great Zen master Dogen Kigen” (p. 1). Steven Heine treats Dōgen’s copy as a legend: Dōgen “supposedly copied” the “One Night Blue Cliff Record” with the help of the Hakusan deity just before leaving China. The question, Heine notes, “has been much debated”: the late date of the story in Dōgen hagiographies tends to refute it, yet a manuscript held for centuries by the Sōtō school has been inspected by D. T. Suzuki and others, though it differs from standard versions in the order and some wording of its cases (Philosophy East and West, 2004, p. 1). For Dōgen himself, and the book he wrote mainly in Japanese, see the Shōbōgenzō.

In the Rinzai school, BDK America writes, the book “is held in extremely high regard as a model text for instruction in the practice of Chan/Zen.” G. Victor Sōgen Hori, writing on the phrase book used in Rinzai koan practice, traces one of its phrases to the commentary on case 38 (Nanzan Bulletin, 1999, p. 55). When that curriculum took its present shape is taken up on Hakuin.

Cleary’s Secrets of the Blue Cliff Record (Shambhala, 2000) translates Japanese comments on the book by Hakuin (1686–1769) and by Tenkei Denson (1648–1735), whom Heine, summarising Kagamishima Genryū, calls a Tokugawa-era scholar “known for his early but idiosyncratic commentary on the Shobogenzo” (Japanese Journal of Religious Studies, 1994, p. 56).

The Blue Cliff Record and the other koan collections

The Gateless Gate (Wumenguan, Mumonkan) has 48 cases, each with a comment and a verse by Wumen Huikai, and prefaces dated 1228. The Book of Equanimity (Congrong lu, Shōyōroku) has 100 cases, with verses by Hongzhi Zhengjue and commentary by Wansong Xingxiu, both of the Caodong school in the Dharma Drum database, and a preface dated 1224. Both are introduced on Zen koans, with how Rinzai and Sōtō use koans differently.

English translations

How to start reading

Begin with case 1 in two translations side by side. Read the story, then Xuedou’s verse, and only then Yuanwu’s commentary. Puzhao’s preface carries the book’s own warning: if “you get stuck on the phrases and sunk in the words, you won’t avoid exterminating the Buddha’s race” (p. 5). The cases are worked on with a teacher, alongside zazen. For the wider library, see Buddhist scriptures and Zen Buddhism.