Zen & Early Buddhism

This week we begin our study of passages selected from the Pali canon. The collections known as the Nikāyas, together with the Ahan Jing (Āgamas) of the Chinese Tripitaka, comprise the earliest stratum of the words and letters against which Zen declares its independence in a notorious saying attributed to Bodhidharma.

“A special transmission outside the scriptures;
No dependence on words and letters;
Direct pointing to a person’s mind;
Seeing into one's nature and attaining Buddhahood.”

The suttas of the Pali Canon are not scriptures at all, in the sense of literary compositions, but orally transmitted synopses of what several generations of the Buddha’s successors understood to be the teaching of their tradition’s founder. In their distinguishable strata of antiquity and variable terminology, the sutta collections represent an evolving interpretation of the Dhamma, a work-in-progress that was frozen in time when the formerly recited words were written down three (?) centuries after the Buddha’s death.

It is doubtful that Zen’s “special transmission” refers to an alternate oral tradition alone. The earliest Chan genealogies suggest something more mysterious and akin to shaktipat, whereby the contents of enlightenment, whatever they may be, are poured from one vessel into another “directly,” or passed like a flame from one lamp to another. Anyhow, it is a matter of some interest to students of Zen that the special transmission is nowhere mentioned in the Pali Tipitaka; that, on the contrary, the Buddha is depicted as stating his intention to make the whole of his Dhamma—“which shines when taught openly”—freely available to everyone; and that, on his deathbed, the Blessed One refused to name a successor on the grounds that his disciples already knew perfectly well what to do.

The translators of the Āgamas from various languages into Chinese did not fail to notice the differences of content, tone and style between the collection of early discourses and the much more voluminous, poetical and doctrinally diverse scriptures of the Mahāyāna. In the fifth and sixth centuries of the Common Era, those discrepancies provoked a flurry of attempts to systematically categorize and evaluate the scriptures (panjiao), and eventuated in the crisis that would give rise to the Chan movement in the period of the Sui-Tang transition.