The Gateless Gate and The Blue Cliff Records, both compiled in Sung dynasty China, are the best known and most frequently studied collections of koans, or mind problems. The strange verbal paradoxes called koans have long been used in Zen training to help students attain a direct realization of truths inexpressible in words. The two works translated in this book, Mumonkan, or the Gateless Gate, and Hekiganroku, or The Blue Cliff Records, are brought together by Katsuki Sekida with the same fresh and pragmatic approach that made his Zen Training so successful. In these new translations with original commentaries, he applies insights gained from a lifetime of Zen practice and his familiarity with western as well as eastern ways of thinking to make him an ideal interpreter of these texts.