The Tip of a Hundred-Foot Pole

Hang Ruan, a senior dharma teacher at Ocean Light Zen Center in Seattle, has translated and commented on the Chinese characters that appear next to each case in The Whole World Is A Single Flower. This book is now available in PDF format here.

Message from Zen Master Hye Mun (Barry Briggs):

When Zen Master Seung Sahn published The Whole World Is A Single Flower in 1992, he transmitted 365 precious gemstones to Zen practitioners around the world. The cases, along with their questions and commentaries, create the opportunity to attain the most precious gift of all: don’t know mind.

A set of Chinese characters accompanies every case in WWSF but since I can’t read Chinese, I never understood that these characters offered us yet another view into the world of the kong-an. Now, thanks to Hang Ruan’s The Tip of a Hundred-Foot Pole, English speakers have a new resource for investigating each case. And every one of us can gain new appreciation for the depth of Dae Soen Sa Nim’s teaching.

Hang provides a literal translation of the characters and then renders them into colloquial English. He also provides information on the origins of the phrases and where they appear in the Zen tradition. Hang’s scholarship and insight reveals yet another beautiful face of these wonderful stories. May you benefit from this work.