[At the request of a
fellow student who wishes me to say more about the circumstances in which Chan was
born, I move forward in time with dizzying speed, from the Buddha’s India to
the epoch of the translations of Buddhist texts into Chinese. Although the key events of a millenium can
barely be summarized in 5,000 words, perhaps the outline will be helpful.]
1
In the culture of Chan/Zen, no legend carries more weight
than the story of the patriarchal succession, the transmission of the flame of
transcendental wisdom from one enlightened master to the next. A lot depends
upon the factuality of that ancestral line, not least the contemporary Zen
Master’s direct link to the Dharma’s ancient source in the person of Shakyamuni
himself. On the strength of that alleged connection, Zen masters ancient and
modern have successfully claimed the inheritance of no less than the whole of
the true and authentic Buddha-dharma. The matter of Zen’s actual history, as
opposed to the stories Zen tells about itself, is of much more than academic
interest for Western students of Zen in our own time. It is implicated in problems
such as male domination and abuse of authority, as well as the paramount
questions of the nature and function of The Transmission, an institution that
has received far less discussion within the community of Zen practitioners than
is warranted.
To make the kind of grandiose claims that Zen makes about
itself takes a lot of chutzpa given early Chan’s relative lack of well-defined
doctrinal and practical teachings that might give flesh and bone to the
ineffable “sudden enlightenment beyond words and letters.” The assertion that a
line of individuals owns Buddhahood is breathtaking when one considers that in
the dark days before the Song dynasty (960-1279 CE) there was, so far as we
know, scant evidence of Bodhidharma himself. The sole document attesting to his
presence in
China, The Record of the Buddhist Monasteries of Luoyang (547 CE), mentions a foreign-born visitor to Chang-An,
then the capital, who greatly admired the temples he viewed there. During that
same period there is no mention of a line from the Buddha to Bodhidharma; only
the flimsiest of support for a link between Bodhidharma and the founding of
Shaolin Monastery; and, apart from conflicting genealogies, no evidence connecting
Bodhidharma to the various candidates for membership in the crucial line of
early Chinese patriarchs. Yet out of such poor materials a few Tang dynasty
biographers constructed an edifice of narrative strong enough, despite its
stairways to nowhere and its blank corridors, to endure up to the present. How
did they bring it off? They did it by skillful use of tropes drawn from
Buddhist and Daoist tradition, plus prodigious quotation from the very sutra literature
made redundant by the purported existence of the patriarchal line itself.
[1] And
somehow they convinced even their rivals to give tacit approval to the project.
Among scholars of Chan and the more thoughtful practitioners
of Zen, the dubious ontological status of the patriarchal succession has been
the elephant in the dojo for decades. A generation of academic writers that
includes Bernard Faure and John McCrae has more than once tiptoed tantalizingly
close to the flimsy screen behind which the inventors of Chan sat like so many
Wizards of Oz, without ever directly challenging the veracity of the Chinese
writers. By their respectful silence scholars of Buddhism have lent credence to
the myth of an actual Chan lurking somewhere in the historical background of
the texts—not the serene, gradually-attained dhyāna-samādhi of Indian Buddhism, but the sudden, wordless or
slangy, in-your-face, Three Stooges kind. It fell to Alan Cole to perform the
task of disrobing the patriarchs. He has done so with wit, courage and skillful
erudition. The main thrust of his very entertaining book is to examine the biographical
texts against the historical and literary background of Sui and Tang China in which
the prototypical Chan Masters made their first appearance.
Every student of Zen knows that Bodhidharma, founder of the
Chinese line, eschewed scholarship, assiduously avoided the limelight, lived in
a cave and declined opportunities to improve his status, going so far as to speak
disrespectfully to the Emperor. The best-known of the early Chan masters, the
Sixth Patriarch, Huineng, is depicted a naïf, an illiterate bumpkin who took
employment on the fringes of society in the manner of a Daoist sage. However,
the extant literary evidence suggests that the early patriarchal succession as
it has come down to us is the product of competing factions within the Tang
monastic establishment. For the student of Zen, Alan Cole and others provide
the scholarly data necessary to understand the process by which Shaolin
Monastery, among others, strove to establish itself as the epicenter of Chinese
Buddhism by embroidering upon a myth, namely, the Transmission of perfect
Buddhahood, from mind to mind, down through the ages from Shakyamuni to your
neighborhood Zen Master. While the story, with its backdrop of religious
rivalries and dynastic warfare, is not devoid of romance, it fatally undermines
the standard literary account in which Bodhidharma came from the West, faced
the wall for nine years, took up residence at Shaolin Monastery and taught the
monks kung-fu.
If I am reading the texts aright, the genealogists of the
Tang knew that they were playing fast and loose with history. Moreover, they undoubtedly
caught each other in any number of egregious falsehoods, yet refrained from pointing
out each other’s transgressions. That failure forces upon us a fairly obvious
point. If it is possible for us, who live at a great remove in space and time
from the Tang Dynasty writers, to see through their tricks, how much easier
must it have been for the Buddhist establishment of the day to detect the successive
erasures and substitutions. Yet, no one came forward to blow the whistle or, if
anyone did, his protests have been expunged from the record. On the contrary, competing
monastic factions raced to add their own embellishments to the evolving
narrative. It was as if, with the publication of the earliest living-buddha
bios
[2]
and the entries for Bodhidharma and Huike in
The Encyclopedia of Emminent Monks, lightbulbs had appeared above
the heads of the most ambitions Buddhists in
China. Here, at last, in the person
of the fully enlightened man, was the basis for establishing a Buddhist Papacy
and enthroning an infallible authority in the flesh. It hardly mattered whether
or not the actual Bodhidharma had been a practitioner of meditation, had visited
the vicinity of
Shaolin
Temple, met the Emperor
or even existed. He was an idea whose time had come.
There was, in pre-Tang China, a pressing need for a Buddhist
institution with sufficient authority to act as a counterweight to the power of
the ever-contested imperial throne, and for a person of unquestionable
religious authority—a powerful Other—who, from a position of relative equality
and independence, could advocate for the economic and social interests of the
monastic community. It is not hard to imagine how a central or at least
prominent Buddhist agency, might be seen by the Emperor’s court as a step
forward in bureaucratic efficiency. It had the additional advantage of serving
as a source of legitimacy for new or unstable governments. The prospect of
greater political clout and economic stability was a powerful reason for the
Buddhist establishment to cooperate in a literary scam of this magnitude.
Successive writers of bogus biographies had no motive to expose their immediate
predecessors as long as there was a chance that their own lineages were still
in the running. Each genealogist in turn merely altered the narrative and built
upon it, revising the list of ancestors to bump a previous claimant and install
his guy as the reigning Father. (The standard list of the first six patriarchs
does not become a settled matter until the 8th century.) If the
Buddhist monks of the Tang were not already primed by circumstance to seize
upon and develop the notion of a living Buddha almost as soon as it appeared,
we are at a loss to explain how those creative genealogists got away with the
most stupendous fraud in the history of Chinese Buddhism.
2
Politics was not the only inducement to turn a blind eye to
the dissembling of the genealogists. To get a more detailed picture of the
cultural forces that worked to favor the adoption of Chan—a child of uncertain
parentage who would normally be shunned by respectable people—we must look back
to the formative period of the second through the fifth centuries C. E., during
which the Buddhist scriptures made their way into China via Central Asia, in a
trickle at first and then in a torrent. By the early fifth century, the
Buddhist community was in possession of a great many important sutras and
treatises, among them a redaction of the early Buddhist scriptures known in
Sanskrit as Agamas. The definitive translations of the Mahayana sutras had been
completed, and the schools of speculative Indian Buddhism, such as the Madhyamaka,
Yogacara and Tathagatagarbha, were well represented. A scholarly monk of the
period would have found himself cast adrift upon a dauntingly broad and
disparate sea of texts, all of them assumed to be the teachings of the Buddha
or derived from them with varying degrees of plausibility. If he were diligent,
intelligent and sensitive to stylistic nuance, he would have noticed that the
straightforward and pedestrian style of the Agamas was very different from the
poetical and dramatic sophistication—not to mention the hyperbole, bombast and
flagrant self-promotion—of the vaipulya
(“expanded” or "extensive”) sutras. And if, as a number of important
Mahayana scriptures state, the highest wisdom is too profound and subtle to be
grasped by even the most accomplished of bodhisattvas, then the entry-level
devotee might be forgiven for wondering of what use such teachings could be to
her. More troubling, however, was the stressful if subtle dissonance amongst
the doctrines propounded by representative texts of the Great Vehicle itself.
We can get a feel for the situation by briefly examining a few such problem
areas.
It is fair to say that, by the time Buddhism got a foothold
in China,
it had already undergone drastic changes. Early Buddhism is characterized by a
clear goal, namely, the permanent cessation of discomfort by escape from the
round of renewed existence; a single key concept, causal-conditionality; and a
relatively straightforward course of moral, emotional and cognitive training
aimed at bringing about liberation. In the hands of the Great Vehicle’s
proponents, the Path vanishes into a vast, dark forest of literary devices,
abstractions and metaphors. Free-standing texts promise the rewards formerly
conferred by training. Faith and devotion, minor if necessary virtues in the
early days, become paramount.
Let us begin our very brief tour of the Mahayana literature
by noting its most conspicuous feature, namely, the absurdity and topsy-turvyness
of the overall mindscape it establishes, in which the Path is turned around, so
that the disciple begins at the end or discovers that the end is really the
beginning and vice-versa, or that there is really no path at all because there
is no attainment of enlightenment and nothing to be attained. In Mahayana World,
practice has merged with awakening, difference is identity, effect collapses
into cause or precedes it, and what was once attained gradually—or was it?—has
become instantaneous. The stage is now set for the entrance of a discipline—or
is it?—that institutionalizes paradox and outright nonsense. Everything you know is wrong. And that’s
not all! It turns out that what Indians regarded as mainstream Buddhism for a
millennium was not true Buddhism, or at least not the whole story. In fact, the
Buddha was not really a human being. In any case he has (note the present
tense) not one body but three. Or else everything
is the body of the Buddha. Each person is responsible for her own actions,
unless she chooses to make the Buddha responsible for them, as in the Pure Land
teachings. And so on.
Chinese Buddhists of course did what bewildered folks of all
religions do when confronted with difficulties of this kind. They sought a
solution to the problem of scriptural inconsistency in the scriptures
themselves. There were several reasons why that approach would come up short.
The transition from early Buddhism to the Mahayana was not just a matter of
superior doctrines and practices supplanting inferior ones. Nor was there a
single agenda that unified the post-Agamic sutras that were brought together in
the Chinese Buddhist canon. Its authors did not intend for the Mahayana
literary corpus to turn out the way it did. Let us recall that, although “The
Great Vehicle” is the rubric by which we now designate all texts that exhibit
certain doctrinal or literary features, the individual sutras began their
careers as unrelated documents that appeared higgledy-piggledy over several
hundred years in various parts of India. We know little of the
process by which the proponents of those diverse sutras gradually coalesced
into a self-conscious movement. There is, however, ample internal evidence that
the content of many of the Mahayana texts was intended to undermine and
pre-empt the authority of those monks (and we must suppose that there were
many) who persisted in regarding the new texts as forgeries and the
proto-Mahayanists as parvenus if not heretics. According to the traditions of
mainstream Buddhism, the Dharma of the Buddha is preserved by means of the
speech and actions of the Sangha, who not only remember and recite the words of
the Buddha but exemplify and realize the teachings in the course of their
training. As against the orally transmitted discourses of the Agamas, the
Mahayana vaipulya sutras are literary
compositions whose authors attempt to relocate the authority of the Three
Treasures to the texts themselves, thereby doing an end-run around their
conservative monastic brethren. The supramundane, atemporal setting of the
Mahayana sutras, replete with a universal Buddha, myriads of bodhisattvas and a
host of celestial beings, made it easier for the authors to liberate religion
from such worldly constraints as dependence upon tradition. Chinese intellectuals,
steeped in reverence for the written word, were predisposed to co-operate in
that literary transfer of wealth.
The Mahayana texts are not shy about revealing themselves to
be the sole source of absolute truth and the proper focus of veneration, praise
and meditation. All benefits come, not from the Buddha in his new role as a
pitchman for the text, or from the Sangha, but from the sutra itself, which
serves as a stand-in for the Dharma. Faith in the saving power of Mahayana
texts is not to be confused with the reliance of early Buddhists on the word of
the Buddha as it had been passed down by recitation. The expanded sutras of the
Great Vehicle, although tricked out in the familiar conventions of the Buddha’s
discourses (“Thus have I heard,” etc.), do not focus on clarifying the Buddha’s
liberating vision and the methods by which it can be realized. Rather, in the
manner of infomercials they announce themselves to be self-sufficient,
free-standing entities and direct causes of Enlightenment. Having been given
lives of their own, more than a few of the Mahayana sutras proclaim that this
very book—not the Buddha or the Dharma or the Sangha—possesses powers of
protection, healing and even salvation. The announcement by a character in a
given text, that the text contains and embodies the highest truth, even when
the exact nature of that truth is far from obvious, was sufficient to make it
an effective talisman and object of worship. Had there been only one such
sutra, the story of Mahayana World might have had a happy ending. But,
confronted with a gaggle of texts all vying for one’s utmost devotion–“Read this
sutra, recite this sutra, copy this sutra, bow to this sutra!”—how was a person
to choose between so many final words? In the absence of a fully awakened being
to adjudicate the sutras’ competing claims of religious ultimacy, interpret
their extravagant language, and explain their abstruse concepts, Chinese
Buddhism was a free-for-all of sutra cults and their associated philosophical
schools. To refrain from relying upon words and letters in such circumstances is
no more than prudent.
Let us make note here of a curious feature of time and
history as described by the Mahayanists. According to the standard explanation
for the relatively recent appearance of Mahayana literature, the most perfect
teachings of the Buddha were hidden from the world for centuries because they
could not be understood by the people of the Buddha’s day. Now they are
revealed! But wait a minute. The theory of the Decline of the Dharma—a variant
form of the Golden Age theme common to civilizations and widespread among
Mahayanists—declares that the Buddha’s contemporaries were far more gifted in
every way than the people of later epochs. Indeed, since the Buddha’s day there
has been little else but decay. We will soon enter the Age of the Disappearance
of the Dharma, the Buddhist Kali-yuga, if we are not already there. True, we
are all originally or essentially Buddhas, for all the good it does us.
Nevertheless, before we can attain nirvana—hold on a sec! We’re actually not going to do that—we are required to
master the eight transcendental virtues and ascend through bodhisattva’s course
of ten or more levels, depending upon who’s counting, and that could take
innumerable kotis of kalpas. Yet those selfish Hinayanists only have to work
their way through the four easy stages of arhatship. Now, tell me, brothers and
sisters. Has enlightenment come closer or moved farther away?
Matters of such great import could not simply be left to
sort themselves out. The task of Chinese Buddhist scholars was, therefore, to
impose hierarchical order upon the mass of doctrines and texts. From the fifth
century onwards systems of classification and ranking (panjiao) proliferate apace. But whose criteria would win the day? The Lotus Sutra declares itself to
occupy the top position. Fans of the Avatamsaka
would make a case that their favorite text is a record of what the Buddha
taught immediately after awakening and is therefore foundational. The Pure Land
school, which has an enormous following, insists that we ought to rely on the Buddha
Amitabha to save us because to slog one’s way through countless lifetimes of
spiritual practice is neither necessary nor even possible. Then there’s the
Prajnaparamita-Madhyamaka faction avidly touting an anti-dualistic viewpoint
that is no viewpoint and a practice that is no practice. You pays your money,
you takes your choice.
The doctrine of skillful means (Skt. upāya) might seem at first glance to be a solution to the problem
of accommodating novel and apparently incongruous ideas. (“Hey, it’s all
good!”) The Lotus Sutra’s breezy,
different-strokes-for-different-folks pragmatism is reassuringly tolerant and a
good fit with the consumer orientation of the global marketplace in the 21st
century. However, it turns out that there is a subtle downside to it. By
seeming to license any and all expedients, the doctrine of skillful means
devours its own significance. There is a real problem here for the average
bodhisattva-wannabe. Short of realizing within myself the total knowledge of
complete, unsurpassable awakening—and at just this point Bodhidharma enters stage
West and commences to bat his eyelashes—how can I ever be sure that I’ve
graduated from skillful enticements to the Real Thing? In upāya we have yet another backhanded repudiation of distinctively
Buddhist dogma. With expediency elevated to a guiding principle, the boundaries
of an already fuzzy and ever-shifting religious terrain become all but
impossible to define, much less navigate. Buddha-Dharma expands to a point at
which it ceases to be distinguishable from non-Buddhist teachings. The doctrine
of Skillful Means also poses the danger that one might do nearly anything with
minimal justification. Oops!
As if all that were not enough, Chinese pilgrims returned from
India
with the bad news that Mahayanists were not even close to the majority among
the Buddhist monks, a fact that can hardly have encouraged confidence in the
authenticity of the teachings. However, for the vast majority of Chinese
Buddhists, with their deep attachment to books, it was already far too late to
turn back. Therefore, from the sixth century onward, the intellectual energies
of the monastic community were bent to the task of finding a way to overcome
these difficulties. Two strategies proved to be the most fruitful.
The first was to devise a conceptual schema that reconciled,
or at least concealed the differences between the various scriptural and
scholastic traditions of Indian and Chinese Buddhism. That task was almost
always accomplished by a combination of narrative—a story in which the Buddha
taught the ultimate truth but, because no one could understand it, hid it away,
to be found when people were ready for it (never mind that such a time had
already come and gone)—and a system of ranking whereby every teaching, Buddhistic
or not, has a place in a hierarchy of doctrine and can be taught when suited to
the spiritual capacities of the intended audience. As we might expect, each
school put its own favorite teaching at the top of the list. Despite the heroic
efforts of Chinese Buddhist scholars, notably those of the Tientai lineage
whose system of classification was widely adopted, they could not lay to rest
or explain away the Mahayana’s numerous and bewildering inconsistencies. Many
nagging questions remained. “Which teaching is the final teaching, or ultimate
truth? How do we recognize it? Says who? And, seeing as we live a thousand years
and half a world away from the source, how can we ever be sure we’ve got it
right?”
The second strategy was to rewrite history and to finesse
established doctrine in such a way as to guarantee the complete authority and
unimpeachable authenticity of Chinese Buddhism in the person of the Great
Lineage Master. Perhaps the earliest examples of this ploy are Guanding’s multiple
literary re-creations of his teacher Zhiyi, the renowned abbot of Mt. Tientai.
The best known example is that of Bodhidharma, who was portrayed as “pouring”
his own complete enlightenment, in shaktipat-like direct transmission, into
Huike and his many lines of Chinese successors.
3
The invention of the Chan patriarchy, and with it the legend
of The Transmission, killed two birds
with one stone. It was a way to save Chinese Buddhism in general, and the Great
Vehicle in particular, from doubts and internal chaos. It accomplished that
singular feat by means of a person, a savior who embodied the essence of
Buddha-dharma. At the same time, it undercut the authority of scripture and
once again made the Sangha the focus of veneration and merit, while conferring
the lion’s share of religious power upon those monks who could convince others
that they possessed the legacy of Bodhidharma and the all-encompassing
authority that came with it.
As long as there was only one patriarch at any given moment,
the succession could be strictly controlled and—in theory—the imperial throne
could aggrandize and legitimize itself through a relationship with a single
man, and vice-versa; hence, the efforts of the biographers to float the notion
of a one-at-a-time patriarchy. In the event, the game of literary Capture the
Flag was fiercely contested, and it soon became clear that no single
community—not even so rich and well-connected a monastery as Shaolin—could
maintain a monopoly on living buddhas. Patriarchs multiplied apace despite the
best efforts of rivals to discredit them so that, after a century or so of
literary skirmishing, several lines were sufficiently well-established to
subdivide into sects and schools. (A similar sequence of events was to play
itself out, with much the same result, when the tulku, or Incarnate Buddha appeared with the ascendancy of the
Karmapa in 13th-century Tibet.) The tracking, fleshing out
and rationalizing of the history and teachings of Chan and Zen would occupy
scholars up to the present.
Let us stop briefly and pay our respects to the account
given in the Mahāparinibbāna-sutta (D.16),
which on the face of it forecloses on the very possibility of a genuine
esoteric Buddhism. According to that relatively early text, the Buddha declined
to name a successor, insisted that he has withheld nothing, and urged his disciples
merely to practice what he had already taught them. It is fairly obvious that
contemporary students of Chan and Zen, in their zeal to appreciate and
appropriate a uniquely Chinese cultural artifact, overlook a curious feature of
zen “history.” The received version of events has the lineage of truth-holders
begin with the Shakyan Buddha and flow unbroken from him to Mahākaśyapa and
thence through 90 or so other people down to the present day. Yet nowhere in
the very substantial trove of texts that made their way from India to China is there made mention of such
a line. Even if we suppose that the Indian dhyana
masters comprised an esoteric lineage with a very low profile, it is surely
improbable that they would have left no literary or epigraphical traces
whatsoever. In any case, once the line reached China, that shyness was soon
abandoned. It is clear that the Chinese people who encountered the Dhyāna
masters were unable to hold their tongues as well as the Indians before them
had done, though it is a tad odd that they held off for several centuries
before broadcasting the good news. A foreign monk named Bodhidharma is believed
to have arrived in China
in the early fifth century. He was not identified as the living link between
the Buddha and the Chinese patriarchs until the late 7th century. If
we are to believe the biographers, he and his successors did their best to
avoid fame and fortune, a trait they shared—along with naturalness, spontaneity
and a fondness for retirement—with their Daoist counterparts. And yet, by the
Tang era, Bodhhidharma’s legacy was the happening thing, with monastic centers
and teachers competing for ownership of the transmission, and a healthy if
contrived rivalry between Northern and Southern, sudden and gradual, silent and
noisy Chan.
4
As described by the inventors of Chan, the succession of
Chinese Buddhas is an explicitly esoteric tradition, not dependent upon words and
scriptures, leastwise not the words and scriptures of mainstream Buddhism.
There are obvious advantages to that kind of religious status. The benefits of
emerging into the light of history, after a long period of deliberate
concealment, include unimpeachable authenticity, the power of exclusion, a
monopoly on truth, and the cachet of belonging to the very best club. If you
can make it fly, the esoteric vehicle delivers a very good return on a modest
investment. The master of esoteric lore devalues exoteric religion with the
aim of vesting himself with the sole authority over that very religion, while
at the same time denying access to true knowledge except through initiation by
himself and his “legitimate” successors. By repudiating dependence upon scripture,
and asserting sole ownership of genuine gnosis/salvation, the esoteric
community immunizes itself against accusations of heterodoxy based on standard
interpretations of (because now superseded) formerly authoritative texts.
In the case of Chan, the whole of verbal, contemplative and
liturgical Buddhist tradition is believed to be present—
solely present—in the body of the master. Buddhist esotericism
privatizes enlightenment and confers exclusive intellectual property rights
upon lineage holders even as it promotes the view that everyone is
fundamentally or originally awake. That one-to-one transfer of power has a
curious consequence, to wit,
it doesn’t
matter in the least what the Zen Master says, because his inheritance, like
that of his predecessor, had nothing to do with either practice or attainment,
much less about listening to the Buddha’s words and training oneself in accord
with them
[3] Is
it any wonder that the patriarchs uttered so much inspiring blather and so
little in the way of practical advice? In this connection it bears mentioning
that the creators of an esoteric “tradition” can say whatever they like about
it without fear of contradiction. It is secret, after all. The only flaw in the
plan is that anybody else can also make whatever statements they please
regarding the form or content of the secret doctrine, simply by claiming
membership in the club. Who can prove him a liar? That is just what happened in
the case of Chan.
Before we take leave of the esoteric-exoteric dichotomy,
let’s briefly review the complex relations between the Chan establishment’s
perennial declaration of independence from words and letters, on the one hand,
and its perennial reliance upon the scriptures of the Great Vehicle on the
other. As noted, Zen, like all esoteric traditions, is protected by the
breastplate of personal gnosis. You cannot debunk what you haven’t
experienced—what, by definition, you can’t
experience except by becoming part of the line, a process that necessarily
entails casting aside any doubts you may have about the authenticity of the
succession, among other things. Nevertheless, from the earliest days the
proponents of Zen have employed selective quotations from Mahayana scriptures
in support of their claims and as a kind of second-hand content. The main
themes of the most frequently-quoted sutras and treatises would later become
the doctrinal basis of Zen orthodoxy, and Zen the funhouse mirror-image of the
Great Vehicle’s lofty and somewhat bewildering doctrines. Thus, the first thing
to be noted is the dependence of Chan’s authors upon the very sutras whose
authority they hoped to usurp by the novel stratagem of causing a Buddha to
appear once again in the world.
Although Chan/Zen depended upon the Mahāyāna, it also
rescued the Mahāyāna in the sense that devotees no longer needed to fret over
inconsistencies of doctrine and practice, or concern themselves with questions
of authority. The inventors of Chan gave Chinese Buddhists a living Buddha who
could assuage doubts and provide interpretations of unimpeachable correctness,
or at least the promise thereof, even as the wobbly, latter-day Buddhism was
unified by the presence and charisma of the patriarch. Finally, Chan/Zen
superseded Mahayana to the extent that the sutras and schools were made superfluous
by the activities of the Buddhas right here in our midst. Or so the story was
meant to go.
5
“But,” someone will say, “Surely all that has nothing to do
with real Zen.” And there is a real Zen, by which I mean Zen
culture, Zen practice, and Zen communities, a stunning fact that brings us up hard
against the most extraordinary aspect of this altogether fascinating phenomenon.
There can be no doubt that there were people practicing all sorts of
contemplative exercises, aimed at both concentration and insight, from a very early
period in China,
and it is possible that Bodhidharma himself taught a kind of dhyāna-cultivation. However, in the
early meditation texts that have come down to us there is nothing to suggest
the range of bizarre interactions—gnomic utterances, shouts and blows—of the
kind recounted in the great gongan
collections of “classical” Chan. The rough-and-tumble of Dharma Combat still
lay well in the future when the Shaolin stele was carved and legends of
Bodhidharma composed. Nevertheless, if Chan was for decades a literary creation
only, it soon became a religious, social, and cultural institution. Buddhist and Daoist
contemplatives alike greeted the prospect of new technology with
enthusiasm. The creation and persistence of Zen myth and “history” was the
catalyst for the transformation of Indian Buddhist self-cultivation into a
uniquely Chinese contemplative spirituality that incorporated elements of
Buddhist and Daoist praxis into a marvel of life imitating art.
[1] For the fascinating details of the process, I refer
the reader to Alan Cole, Fathering Your
Father: the Zen of Fabrication in Tang Buddhism, Berkeley,
2009, University
of California Press. See
also, Wendi Adamek, The Mystique of Transmission:
On an Early Chan History, 2007, Columbia University Press. Works by Jeffrey
L. Broughton (The Bodhidharma Anthology)
and J. C. Cleary (Zen Dawn) also
contain much about early Chan that is useful.
[2] Few Western students of Zen are familiar with Zhiyi,
Xinxing and Faru, the sixth- & seventh-century prototypes for the Chan
Master/Patriarch, the men whose biographers were the pioneers of both
patriarchy and Zen. The main thrust of Cole’s narrative is to show how the
familiar and widely accepted list of the first six Chinese
patriarchs—Bodhidharma, Huike, etc.—is not the reflection of an historical
reality but the trophy awarded to the victors in a series of hard-played games
of combat genealogy and alternative history.
[3] Did the
sixth Patriarch really need the Fifth in order to wake up? Read the Platform Sutra and decide for yourself!
For more information about the origins and permutations of that important
document, see “The History and Practice of Early Chan” in M. Schlutter and S.
F. Teiser, eds., Readings in the Platform
Sutra, 2012, Columbia University Press.
