Zen masters have had rather bad press of late, what with the series of sex scandals at American Zen centres and the shocking revelations in some recent histories about the fascism, militarism, and even rabid anti-Semitism of some of the leading Zen masters of twentieth-century Japan. Official apologies have been issued, public mea culpas have been uttered – it has all made Zen begin to look suspiciously like an ordinary run-of-the-mill religion and the claims of Zen masters to moral and spiritual superiority seem as spurious as those of any garden-variety cult guru.

This is especially significant because, as Steven Heine and Dale Wright point out in their preface, from the very beginning Zen made much of its masters: ‘In contrast to most other forms of Buddhism, sacred literature in Chan or Zen consists of religious biographies, or stories about the lives of Zen masters’ (p. v). These biographies, which emerged first in late Tang and early Song China, ‘valorised’ the masters to such an extent that they ‘created, in effect, a new kind of Buddhism, and a novel image of enlightenment that held inspirational power for centuries’ (p. v). Masters are so important to Zen because of its leading idea of the transmission of enlightenment ‘from mind to mind’, from master to student. Thus, the religious authority of any particular school of Zen, its ‘seal of authenticity’, depends to a very large degree on the authenticity of its masters’ ‘enlightenment’.

One issue that inevitably arises in any scholarly study of this sort is the difficulty of distinguishing between ‘the master of hagiographic legend’ and what might be called the ‘real-life person’ or perhaps ‘the master of historical reality’. Although it is obviously far more difficult to distinguish between the two when one is dealing with someone who lived, say, in the eighth rather than in the twentieth century, a number of the authors here in fact attempt this daunting task and do a very convincing job of it. Mario Poceski's chapter, for instance, is exemplary in this respect. Dealing with the major Chan Master Baizhang Huaihai (J. Hyakujō Ekai, 749–814), Poceski identifies ‘three key hagiographic transmutations of Baizhang's religious persona: paradigmatic Chan iconoclast, patron saint of Chan monasticism, and sophisticated teacher of Chan doctrine and contemplative practice’ (p. 4).