translated by Katsuki Sekida
The Gateless Gate and The Blue Cliff Record, both compiled in Sung dynasty China, are the best known and most frequently studied collections of koans. The strange verbal paradoxes called koans have long been used in Zen training to help students attain a direct realization of truths inexpressible in words. Katsuki Sekida brings together the two works translated in this book, Mumonkan, or the Gateless Gate, and Hekiganroku, or The Blue Cliff Record, with the same fresh and pragmatic approach that made his Zen Training so successful.
In these new translations with original commentaries, he applies insights gained from a lifetime of Zen practice and his familiarity with western as well as eastern ways of thinking to make him an ideal interpreter of these texts.
Paperback, 418 pages