Modern readers encounter the *Record of Linji* through a thick veil of linguistic and cultural distance. The work emerges from Tang‑dynasty Chinese Buddhism, expressed in classical and vernacular Chinese that is rich in idiom, wordplay, and technical terminology. Many of its key terms—especially those concerning mind, Buddha, and enlightenment—carry layered meanings that resist straightforward translation, so different renderings can give sharply different impressions of Linji’s voice and intent. The text also assumes familiarity with a world of imperial institutions, monastic protocols, Confucian and Daoist discourse, and the broader Buddhist landscape. Without that background, Linji’s barbed remarks about other specialists or schools, and his allusions to earlier masters and scriptures, can easily be misunderstood or simply pass unnoticed.

The very form of the *Record* further complicates matters. Rather than a systematic treatise, it presents a collage of sermons, dialogues, and brief incidents, often preserved without clear chronology or narrative framing. These episodes arose in specific encounters with particular students, so they do not line up neatly into a single doctrinal system. For readers seeking a continuous argument or a step‑by‑step path, the fragmented, episodic structure can feel disorienting, and seemingly contradictory statements may appear irreconcilable if their situational character is overlooked. Scholarly efforts to distinguish historical report from later editorial shaping also face real limits, leaving a degree of interpretive uncertainty that modern readers must simply live with.

Linji’s teaching style itself is perhaps the most jarring element. He employs shouts, abrupt physical actions, insults, and paradoxical or deliberately shocking phrases such as “kill the Buddha,” all aimed at undermining attachment to concepts and external authorities. To sensibilities formed by linear reasoning and polite religious discourse, this can look like aggression, anti‑intellectualism, or even nihilism, rather than a carefully honed pedagogical method. Many of the exchanges later functioned as kōan, devices for training rather than vehicles for discursive explanation; when approached as logical arguments or moral lessons, they can seem arbitrary or nonsensical. The text consistently privileges direct, non‑conceptual realization over analytical understanding, which can frustrate those who come to it primarily as literature, philosophy, or theology.

Finally, the *Record* presupposes a living context of practice that most readers do not share. It arose within a rigorous monastic environment of meditation, discipline, and close teacher–student interaction, and many passages assume a working knowledge of Mahāyāna doctrines such as emptiness, no‑self, and Buddha‑nature, as well as familiarity with other Chan figures and practices. Approaching the work without that experiential and doctrinal grounding increases the risk of misreading Linji’s iconoclasm as simple rejection rather than skillful means. The combination of cultural distance, linguistic subtlety, non‑linear form, and an anti‑conceptual thrust means that the *Record of Linji* resists being reduced to a tidy set of ideas; it continually pushes the reader back toward a more immediate, and therefore more demanding, mode of engagement.