The Blue Cliff Record碧巖錄

The Blue Cliff Record (Chinese: Bìyán Lù; Japanese: Hekiganroku) is the oldest and most revered of the great kōan collections. Its core is one hundred cases chosen and set in verse by Xuedou Chongxian early in the eleventh century; a century later Yuanwu Keqin wrapped each case in an introduction, a running prose commentary, and biting interlinear notes, and the whole was published around 1125.

This edition gives the core of each case — Yuanwu's introduction (垂示), the case itself (本則), and Xuedou's verse (頌). Yuanwu's long prose commentary and his interlinear "capping phrases" are left out for now; they are the scholarly apparatus, and they roughly quintuple the length.

The original text is public domain (from the Taishō Tripiṭaka), set in our own punctuation. The translations and pointers are released under CC0.