This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Before he became known for the shout and the paradox, Linji Yixuan spent years training under the master Huangbo Xiyun, the teacher whose own tutelage produced the founder of one of Chan's Five Houses. Only after that long apprenticeship did Linji establish his own teaching seat at Linji Monastery in Zhenzhou, in what is now Hebei province, the base from which the school bearing his name took shape.
He was born in Caozhou, in what is now Shandong province, a fact absent from article one's account of his teaching style and its later textual history. His death is dated with unusual confidence: 866 CE, recorded by Chan biographical convention and preserved in the Linji Lu compiled after his death. His birth is a different matter entirely. No source records when Linji Yixuan was born. Standard reference works give his life only as a range with no birth year attached, and any year offered, including one sometimes cited around 810, reflects nothing more than a conventional placement consistent with a teaching career mature enough to found a school before 866, not an actual recorded date.
That asymmetry, a firmly dated death against an unrecorded birth, is itself characteristic of how much of early Chan biography survives: a movement's ending point, marked by a monastery's own record keeping, often outlasts its beginning by centuries in the documentary record.