The Gateless Gate

The Gateless Gate (Wumenguan) is a thirteenth-century collection of forty-eight Chan koans compiled by the master Wumen, each pairing a terse encounter or question with his pointed commentary and verse.

The koans — "Does a dog have Buddha-nature?", "What was your original face before your parents were born?" — are not riddles to be solved by reasoning but devices to exhaust the discriminating mind until it breaks open into direct insight. The "gate" is gateless because there was never a barrier except one's own conceptual grasping.

With the Blue Cliff Record it is one of the two central koan anthologies of Zen, a working manual for the practice of awakening beyond thought.