Taiping Huiqin

Taiping Huiqin was a Linji school master who taught at Taiping Temple during the Song dynasty. He is recorded in the lamp literature as a teacher of considerable skill whose encounters with students display the full range of Linji methods. His community attracted practitioners from across the region seeking instruction in the school's demanding style of practice.

Huiqin's teaching maintained the Linji tradition's insistence on direct personal experience as the only authentic basis for understanding. He refused to allow students to substitute intellectual comprehension for genuine realization, and his dialogues are marked by a relentless pressing that allowed no comfortable resting place. This quality of unceasing demand is the heart of the Linji approach to spiritual development.