RINZAI (LINJI) SCHOOL
14 videos • 796 views • by Zen Buddhism Europe The Linji school, is a school of Zen Buddhism named after Linji Yixuan. It took prominence in Song China, spread to Japan as the Rinzai school and influenced the existing Nine mountain schools of Korean Seon. As the founder of the Linji school (in Japanese, Rinzai), Linji plays a key role in the history of Zen. After his enlightenment, Linji had many exchanges with Huangbo in which he came off ahead as often as not. It is also interesting that many of the interactions involved the manual labor of the monastery, an indication of the significance of work in Chan life. Doing ordinary things without effort Linji's major concern seems to have been that his students resist intellection. Linji himself was able to speculate philosophically while still a natural man, using conceptual thought only when it served his purpose. But perhaps his students could not, for he constantly had to remind them that striving and learning were counterproductive. The problem, he believed, was that too many teachers had started "teaching" and explaining rather than forcing students to experience truth for themselves. And finally, in his old age, Linji became something of a monument himself, a testing point for enlightenment in a world where true teachers were rare. He even complained about it. Linji's contribution Linji also brought to Chan was a analytical inquiry into the relationship between master and pupil, together with a similar analysis of the mind states that lead to enlightenment. He seems remarkably sophisticated for the ninth century, and indeed we would be hard pressed to find this kind of psychological analysis anywhere in the West that early. Linji has been called the most powerful master in the entire history of Chan, and not without reason. His mind was capable of operating at several levels simultaneously, enabling him to overlay very practical instruction with a comprehensive dialectic. He believed in complete spontaneity, total freedom of thought and deed, and a teaching approach that has been called the "lightning" method because it was swift and unpredictable. He was uncompromising in his approach. Linji's school prospered, becoming the leading expression of Chan in China as well as a vital force in the Zen that later arose among Japan's samurai. And his dialectical teachings became the philosophical basis for later Zen, something he himself probably would have deplored. (Later teachers seem to have given Linji's categories more importance than he actually intended, for he professed to loathe systems and was in fact much more concerned with enlightenment as pure experience.)