The Gateless Gate

The Gateless Gate is Ma Mingqian's second novel after The Hidden Monk, published in 2016 by Century Wenjing and Shanghai People's Publishing House. The story begins with a puzzling break-in at the Nezu Museum in Tokyo: not a single exhibit is missing, yet on a workbench in the underground storage room there appears a nearly indistinguishable copy of River and Sky in Evening Snow, by the Southern Song Zen monk-painter Muqi. What does the nameless intruder want? The traces he deliberately leaves behind seem like a hint, there and yet not there. The protagonist Song Hancheng and others follow these clues through mountain temples and villages across Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Fujian and Jiangxi, and a forgotten episode in Sino-Japanese monastic history from the Song-Yuan transition gradually surfaces: facing the threat of the Mongol southward advance, successive generations of Southern Song Zen monks undertook arduous and secret efforts to preserve the Dharma lineage, and large numbers of Song monks crossed the sea one after another to spread the teaching in Japan. The turmoil beyond the mountains and the peace within them mirror each other; the original face of Zen in China gradually emerges, and how is that seemingly unsolvable "Gateless Barrier" to be broken? The book is complex in structure and rich in historical sources, interweaving fact and fiction in collage, advancing through a prologue, main narrative and a seven-day "travel journal," with an excerpt from The Conduct of Master Xinwen and two letters appended at the end. It combines the tension of a mystery novel with the texture of field research notes, and critics have called it the first "hidden-seeker novel" from mainland China.