지눌 전집 (Collected Works of Chinul — Founder of Korean Seon)

which abound in the texts. I have been fairly successful in this effort; but with some five hundred quotations, many of them cited by Chinul with little more reference than “the ancients say” or “the sūtras say,” there perforce remain many lacunae. Chinul’s magnum opus, Excerpts from the Dharma Collection and Special Practice Record with Personal Notes, is the only text for which a substantial body of explicative material is available, including the subcommentaries of the Yi dynasty scholiasts Yŏndam Yuil and Hoeam Chŏnghye, as well as the Sajip sagi, compiled by the Haein sa Lecture Hall under the direction of Yi Chi-gwan. For the rest of Chinul’s works there is nothing comparable. The scholar should also be warned that Chinul’s citations often differ in minor details from the passages in the extant recensions of the texts; with all such differences, I translate following Chinul’s citation while referring the reader to the location of the comparable passage in present editions of the scriptures. In order to maintain continuity of style and consistency in my equivalencies for Buddhist technical terms, I have translated anew all quotations from sūtra and commentarial materials.

I have tried as much as possible to simplify the presentation of the translations. At the publisher’s request, the use of brackets, very much in vogue in modern critical translations, has been minimized by permitting the implied subject or predicate of a terse classical Chinese sentence to appear unbracketed in the translation. I have been careful to add only the minimum of information necessary to clarify a passage, however, and feel that whatever shortcomings there may be from the standpoint of strict philological accuracy are more than compensated for by the resulting fluidity of the translation. In addition, I have limited the use of diacriticals in the transcription of Asian languages. For Chinese, I have followed the Modern Language Association guidelines for simplification of the standard Wade-Giles system. For Korean, I have tried to apply the same criteria and transcribe, for example, won rather than wŏn, the breve being redundant in this case. Finally, following Library of Congress practice, I have hyphenated the names of lay Koreans and use the better known transcription in cases where this differs from the standard transliteration (e.g., Rhi Ki-yong instead of Yi Kiyŏng).

Since there is not available in European languages even the briefest survey of Korean Buddhist history, I have felt it necessary in the Introduction to outline the development of the tradition before Chinul in order to provide a historical and philosophical context for his discussions. There I focus especially on elements of importance in the maturation of Chinul’s thought. This survey should provide a perspective that will allow the reader to appreciate Chinul’s contribution in the translated texts which follow. I have deliberately tried to keep the introductory discussion of Chinul’s thought simple, given the nature of the material. I hope that this effort will make the