Jingqing Daofu

Jingqing Daofu was a student of Xuefeng Yicun who established a community in the Jingqing region. He appears in several koan collections and his exchanges with students demonstrate the incisive and direct style he inherited from Xuefeng. One of his famous teaching devices was the use of questions about everyday phenomena—sounds, colors, the weather—to point students toward immediate experience.

In a well-known exchange, a monk asked Jingqing about the sound of raindrops. Jingqing said, "Don't get it wrong." The monk asked what he meant. Jingqing said, "It's easy to get into the weeds but hard to get out." This teaching about the difficulty of hearing the world as it actually is—without the overlay of concepts and interpretations—reflects the Xuefeng lineage's emphasis on the gap between direct experience and the mind's commentary on it.