Literally, “Chan of observing the key phrase.” It is a form of meditation practice that contemplates the crucial phrase or “punch line” (huatou) of a gong’an, such as the “no” (wu) in the gong’an of “Does a dog have Buddha-nature?” The most famous advocate of this kanhua Chan was Dahui Zonggao, the Chan master of the Linji school in the Song dynasty. Using the gong’an (“public cases”) or guze (“old examples”) of encounter dialogues from the stories of those great Chan masters of the Tang dynasty as a means to challenge students and trigger their enlightenment became a fashion in various Chan schools, even before the time of Dahui. From the early 11th century, the Song Chan masters had already started to compile various gong’an collections, or anthologies, with their own commentaries to facilitate the use of gong’an for instructing students. While the kanhua Chan could be seen as a further development of the Song gong’an practice, and Dahui’s teacher Yuanwu Keqin might be regarded as a precursor of the kanhua Chan, recent study of Dahui reveals that his kanhua Chan was distinctive from all previous forms of gong’an practice in a number of ways.
Dahui was the first Chan master to teach his students to contemplate intensively a single word or phrase (huatou) of a gong’an in kanhua practice. He also introduced a corresponding method of contemplating the huatou, which focuses on a student’s doubt generated by the huatou and emphasizes that, by shattering the doubt, a person can be led to the great moment or experience of enlightenment. Although Dahui’s kanhua Chan shared with his precursors the intuitive and non-conceptualizing way of using gongan, for Dahui, meditation on huatou had become the only practice that could lead to enlightenment and therefore was almost exclusive to all other Buddhist practices. Some scholars have seen Dahui’s kanhua Chan as a reaction to the formalizing tendency of Chan in the Song. It has also been viewed as the culmination of a long process of evolution in Chan, which extended Chan’s subitist rhetoric to pedagogy and practice. Some more recent studies suggest, however, that the success of the Caodong school’s silent illumination approach in elite circles presented a great challenge to the Linji school and became an underlying cause for Dahui’s development of the kanhau Chan.
Dahui did express his criticisms of several heretical tendencies in Chan. Among them was his attack on the silent illumination Chan (mozhao Chan) of the Caodong school, which culminated in Dahui’s contemporary, Hongzhi Zhengjue. Dahui discredited the silent illumination Chan’s treatment of stillness and sitting meditation as an end in itself, rather than a means, and held its de-emphasis on the actualizing of inherent enlightenment (benjue) as simply canceling out enlightenment. Many of Dahui’s criticisms were eloquent and influential, but they were not all accurate or without exaggeration. For instance, Dahui seemed right when he criticized the tendency to abandon all uses of words. However, the silent illumination Chan did not completely forsake all words. The fact that Hongzhi himself was the author of poetic commentaries on 100 gong’an cases is just one of the many noticeable examples showing the silent illumination Chan’s more sophisticated attitude toward the use of words. On the other hand, not all historical materials confirm the sectarian-political reasons for Dahui’s attack on the silent illumination Chan. There were reports of the good relationship between Dahui and Hongzhi even after Dahui’s attack, just as there were other reports of the good relationship between the masters of Caodong and Linji during the Song, which limits political interpretations about the competing schools and masters.
Many of the sayings of Linji Yixuan collected in the Linji Lu sound very radical and iconoclastic if not blasphemous. The most famous among these sayings is the following: “If you meet a Buddha, kill the Buddha (fengfo shafo). If you meet a patriarch, kill the patriarch (fengzu shazu). If you meet an arhat, kill the arhat. If you meet your parents, kill your parents. If you meet your kinfolk, kill your kinfolk. Then you will attain liberation, being not entangled with things.” It is common sense that killing is not ethical in the entire Buddhist tradition. However, if the reader understands the context of this saying, killing is symbolic and cannot be understood literally. It is a kind of language that the figure Linji uses to shock his students away from their unnecessary attachment to any external things, including those things under names such as Buddha, patriarch, arhat, and so forth. The purpose is to help students avoid being tied by new ropes even if these ropes are from the teachings of Buddhas and patriarchs, since the teachings are just provisional expedients and cannot be substantialized and reified. Any attachment to them creates new bondage and does not help to liberate. The students cannot realize their enlightenment by seeking after external things, including Buddhas and patriarchs.
This is the traditional interpretation. It cannot be ignored that these sayings of Linji, and almost the entire Linji Lu, sound more iconoclastic than many other Chan masters’ sayings in the Tang period and became popular in Song Chan. The iconoclastic approach was too radical for the Buddhist Middle Way even though it often involved correct criticisms of institutions. Chan iconoclastic sayings were in fact parasitic on Chan institutions, including all its teachings; this was particularly true of Linji Chan. The advantage of viewing these sayings as a kind of linguistic strategy, as a kind of shock therapy, or as a kind of innovative rhetoric is that it could reconcile the use of these sayings with the fact that the Linji school continued to make use of its institutions and became stronger rather than demolishing them. After all, Linji himself did not call for the actual destruction of Chan institutions.