Linji Yixuan c. 810 – 866

Linji Yixuan was a Chinese Chan Buddhist master of the late Tang dynasty and the founder of the Linji school, the dominant Chan and later Zen lineage in China, Korea, and Japan. After training under Huangbo Xiyun, he established his teaching seat at the Linji monastery in Hebei, from which the school takes its name. His sayings, gathered after his death by his disciples in the Record of Linji, are celebrated for their fierce, paradoxical style and for the famous shouting and beating with which he addressed students who clung to concepts. The Japanese branch of his school was founded by Eisai, and the Linji-Rinzai tradition shaped East Asian Buddhism for over a thousand years.

Linji Yixuan, known in Japanese as Rinzai Gigen, was born in the early ninth century in Cao prefecture in modern Shandong. He entered the monastic order as a young man, mastered the vinaya, abhidharma, and sutras, and then turned to Chan, training under Huangbo Xiyun in the lineage descending from Mazu Daoyi through Baizhang Huaihai. After a famous breakthrough under the encouragement of Huangbo and the ancient master Dayu, he received Huangbo's transmission and around 851 settled at the Linji cloister on the Hutuo River near Zhenzhou in northern Hebei.

His teachings survive in the Linji lu, the Record of Linji, compiled by his disciple Sansheng Huiran and later edited into its standard form during the Song. The text is the foundational scripture of the Linji house and one of the most influential works in the entire Chan and Zen tradition; its discourses, encounter dialogues, and 'pilgrimage' chapter set the literary template for Chan recorded sayings.

Linji is famous for the shout, the stick, the four shouts, the schemes of guest and host and the four classifications, the doctrine of the 'true person of no rank' who comes and goes through the gates of the face, and the iconoclastic injunction that if you meet the Buddha on the road you should kill him. He died in 866 and was given the posthumous title Chan Master Huizhao; his line became one of the Five Houses of Chan and the dominant tradition of Japanese Zen.