Paul Copp

Most famously, seals became guiding figures of practice in the Chan tradition—better known in the West by its Japanese name, Zen—in which received metaphors, such as “mind seal” (xinyin) and “seal of approval” (yinke), framed the ideal spiritual careers of monks, especially in their relationships with their teachers and with the traditional past. The awakened mind of the teacher, it was said, was like a seal recreating its image perfectly in the person of the disciple, a process—in which seal impression becomes in turn seal matrix —repeated from generation to generation, and constituting a key aspect of the tradition’s self-understanding.

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Originally published in Seals—Making and Marking Connections across the Medieval World, edited by Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak. The Medieval Globe, vol. 4.1. Arc Humanities Press, Leeds, 2018. Reproduced here with thanks.