Contemporary study of the Record of Linji tends to treat it not as a timeless outpouring of “crazy wisdom,” but as a carefully shaped product of late Tang and Five Dynasties Chan. Scholars emphasize that the text was compiled decades after Linji’s death and likely bears the imprint of later editors working within Linji-school circles, who used it to consolidate lineage identity and authority. Rather than reading it as a verbatim transcript, research approaches it as a composite yulu, a “recorded sayings” text that reflects specific institutional, doctrinal, and political concerns. This historical-critical lens situates Linji’s voice amid monastic competition, debates with other Buddhist schools, and the need to articulate a distinct Chan identity.

At the same time, the Record is read as a highly crafted literary and rhetorical performance. Its encounter dialogues, sermons, shouts, blows, and insults are understood as stylized pedagogical theater—shock tactics designed to unsettle fixed views rather than mere outbursts of spontaneity or madness. Linji’s fierce language and paradoxical statements are interpreted as skillful means that deconstruct attachment to concepts, scriptures, and religious formalism, while still operating within a framework that values vinaya, ritual, and learning. In this way, the text is seen as both critiquing and creatively using inherited Buddhist forms.

Doctrinally, contemporary scholarship tends to temper romantic images of Linji as a purely antinomian champion of sudden enlightenment. Themes such as the “true person of no rank,” “no mind,” and “killing the Buddha” are read less as blanket rejections of doctrine and more as polemical strategies that reframe ongoing Mahāyāna concerns with emptiness, non-duality, and the nature of awakening. Linji’s emphasis on direct, unmediated experience is thus placed in dialogue with broader Chinese reinterpretations of Madhyamaka and Yogācāra, rather than treated as an isolated or uniquely Zen invention. His radical rhetoric is seen as working to restore immediacy of insight without discarding the larger Buddhist heritage.

Finally, modern interpreters explore how the Record has been received and reimagined within later Rinzai traditions and global Zen discourse. Linji’s teachings are often given psychological or existential inflections, with notions like the “true person of no rank” read as pointing to non-egoic awareness or authentic subjectivity. At the same time, some scholars critique earlier romanticized portrayals and translations that lifted Linji out of his historical setting, seeking instead to re-situate the text within East Asian intellectual and religious history. Through these converging lines of inquiry, the Record emerges as historically situated, literarily constructed, and pedagogically strategic, yet still a living source for contemplative reflection.