YAMADA MUMON was born in the mountainous Aichi Prefecture of Japan in 1900. While attending high school in Tokyo, reading Confucius turned him toward the deeper questions about life. He began exposing himself to Christian and Buddhist teachers, entering a Zen monastery at the age of 19. Mumon later met his primary teacher, Seki Seisetsu Roshi, and moved into Tenryu-ju monastery, where he served the master until his death in 1945. In his fifties, Mumon became a master in his own right, serving as abbot of Shofuku-ji Temple in Kobe, where he taught both Japanese and Western students and eventually established an international network of disciples. Known for his curiosity and for his many writings on Zen, he passed away in 1988. NORMAN WADDELL, born in Washington, D.C., in 1940, is the authoritative English translator of works by and about Hakuin. He taught at Otani University in Japan for over thirty years and was editor of the Eastern Buddhist Journal for several decades. He has published more than a dozen books on Japanese Zen Buddhism and is one of the finest translators of sacred texts of our time.