Tongxuan's 100 Chan Questions

Abstract This book presents a bilingual version, with translations and commentary, of an important but obscure multi-authored collection of gong’an cases known as Tongxuan’s 100 Chan Questions (Tongxuan baiwen 通玄百問), which features pithy question-and-answer exchanges followed by terse poetic remarks. This thirteenth-century text, which is included in the supplementary Buddhist canon (Xu zangjing vol. 67, no. 1312), was composed by several leading figures of the Caodong Chan Buddhist school, who were part of an important sublineage that was located in Beijing and supported by the emerging Mongol rulers. The collection thus represents the literary production of a crucial though lesser-known phase of Caodong history based in a branch situated in the northern territories that thrived at the dawn of the Yuan dynasty. The text of Tongxuan’s 100 Chan Questions discloses numerous key aspects of Caodong discursive accomplishments reflecting the school’s philosophy concerning how Chan practice is often based on a rhetoric of minimalism, or an exceptionally concise and cryptic writing style. This technique is particularly suited to cultivating a manner of contemplative training based on the notion of pragmatism, or the application of a thoroughgoingly nondual standpoint to examples of everyday decision-making that require clear moral judgments.