Koan Zen: Eisai, Hakuin, and the Shout

Rinzai (Chinese Linji) is the other great school of Japanese Zen, brought from China by Eisai in the late twelfth century and named for the fierce Tang-dynasty master Linji, remembered for the shout and the blow as means of jolting a student past conceptual thought. Its hallmark is koan practice: the disciplined contemplation of a paradoxical case, "the sound of one hand," the mu of Zhaozhou's dog, pressed in formal interviews with the master until the student's ordinary discursive mind gives way to a sudden breakthrough (kensho).

The tradition was systematised into a rigorous curriculum of koans by Hakuin (1686-1769), who revived a flagging Japanese Rinzai and whose lineage stands behind nearly all present-day Rinzai teachers. Historically Rinzai was the Zen of the warrior class and of the "Five Mountains" (Gozan) monasteries, and through them it profoundly shaped Japanese arts, ink painting, the tea ceremony, garden design and poetry, so that its influence reached far beyond the meditation hall.