Padmavajra works in the ordination team at Padmaloka Retreat Centre: I first encountered the classic of Ch’an literature known as THE BLUE CLIFF RECORD nearly 20 years ago, in a review by Sangharakshita, founder of the Western Buddhist order. He described it as "a world in which Buddhism matters, is the only thing that matters, and in which people are prepared to go to any lengths in order to attain — and transmit — ‘the profound anti-mysterious principle of Enlightenment’."

The book looks harmless enough. In its English translation it has a nice, shiny, deep blue dust jacket with a bit of calligraphy - a classical design, nothing flashy. But once one begins to read it seriously and consistently, in the right kind of mindfulness, it shakes us to the very core. It looms up out of the mist like a mile-high cliff face. There are no handholds. It is cold, silent, and steep. Very steep.

It consists of 100 kung-an (koans) or ‘public cases’, originally compiled by a master named Hsueh Tou Ch’ung Hsien (980-1052), who wrote a verse on each case — a cryptic verse pointing the way for his disciples contemplate. About 60 years after Hsueh Tou’s death, another master, Yuan Wu, gave a series of talks elucidating each case and Hsueh Tou’s verses. The cases, the verses, and the elucidations together comprise THE BLUE CLIFF RECORD, so called after the Blue Cliff monastery on Mt. Chia in Hunan where Yuan Wu delivered his talks.

That sounds tidy - a book in which we can read stories about Enlightened masters and then read edifying poems and talks by other masters explaining them. But this is no trendy book about Zen, full of consoling platitudes about our being Buddhas already. If we are tempted to waffle about "the light within", here is Master Yun Men’s challenge:

"Everyone has a light: when you look at it, you don’t see it and it’s dark and dim. What is everybody’s light?" Silence! He answers the question himself. "The kitchen pantry and the main gate".

THE BLUE CLIFF RECORD is full of challenges. Last summer I read the entire book on a long retreat, on a mountain in Spain. After a day of meditation, ritual, and study, before sleeping, with cicadas for background music, I read until my eyes grew heavy, and then sank into dreams that shook me. Sometimes I woke with a phrase echoing through the cave of the mind. One morning it was: "Mahasattva Fu expounds the scripture."

This was the title of the kung-an and commentary I had read the night before. Mahasattva Fu, an old mountain-dwelling hermit, came to town selling fish to support himself, and Emperor Wu, a great patron of Buddhism, summoned him to the court to expound the Diamond Sutra see Mahasattva Fu in a patched robe and the court in their finery waiting for an edifying exposition of Buddhist philosophy. The old hermit slowly made his way to the front of the hall, mounted the teaching throne and shook the desk in front of him. I don’t imagine he smiled. He just the desk and left. Another monk explained to the astonished Emperor that Mahasattva Fu had just expounded the Diamond Sutra … thoroughly.

I felt as if Mahasattva Fu had been there in my troubled dreams, showing me that the Diamond Sutra was not a book to verbalize about, but diamond-hard reality itself, smashing my ideas about self, world, life… Buddhism: shaking those ideas to their foundations. Very disturbing!

"The Path has no byroads: one who stands upon it is solitary and dangerous. The truth is not seeing or hearing: ‘words and thoughts are far removed from it. If you can penetrate through the forests of thorns and untie the bonds of Buddhahood and Patriarchy, you attain the land of inner peace, where all the gods have no way to offer flowers, where outsiders have no gate to spy through. Then you work all day without ever working, talk all day without ever talking; then you can unfold the device of "breaking in and breaking out" and use the double-edged sword that kills and brings to life, with freedom and independence." — from 16th Case: Ching Ch’ing’s "Man in the Weeds".

Yet this is the realm that — on a good day — I aspire to reach. I want to wake up one morning and know for sure that I do not know anything, not because I have read the wrong information, but because reality has come and smashed all assumptions, all borrowed ideas. On a good day I court such devastation, for it is, I believe, the beginning of liberation.