Linji’s blows and shouts are best understood as deliberate, compassionate techniques rather than expressions of anger or punishment. They function as skillful means aimed at interrupting the student’s ordinary, conceptual mind. When a shout or a strike erupts at a critical moment, it undercuts the tendency to retreat into analysis, commentary, or scriptural quotation, and instead confronts the student with a raw, unmediated moment of experience. In this way, his methods are not arbitrary violence, but carefully timed interventions designed to open a crack in habitual consciousness.

These unconventional acts also target the deep attachment to words, doctrines, and images of “Buddhism” itself. Linji saw that many students clung to teachings, masters, and even the idea of enlightenment as external objects to be grasped. By responding with a shout or a blow when a student expected a refined discourse, he overturned those expectations and forced the student to stop leaning on borrowed understanding. The shock of his response exposed any reliance on external authority and redirected attention to the living insight that cannot be captured in formulas.

At the same time, these methods served to test and reveal the student’s actual realization. Because the responses were unpredictable and cut across conventional decorum, they made it difficult for a student to hide behind rehearsed answers or polite spiritual behavior. A genuine response, free of calculation, might emerge only when the usual strategies of pleasing the teacher or displaying knowledge had been stripped away. In this sense, beating and shouting became a kind of mirror, reflecting whether the student remained trapped in dualistic thinking or had begun to taste a more direct awareness.

Underlying all of this is Linji’s commitment to sudden awakening and immediate presence. The jolt of a shout or a strike pulls attention out of past and future, away from abstract speculation about enlightenment, and into the vividness of the present moment. Rather than encouraging gradual accumulation of concepts or techniques, he used these sharp methods to dramatize that what is sought is already here, prior to every idea about it. His “no-method” teaching is thus expressed through these very methods: temporary expedients meant to reveal the mind that is free from all expedients, the awakened nature that needs no ornament of words or rituals.