NOTES ON CHAN: PART I

THE TERM “CHAN”

It is a contraction of the compound “chan’na” , which is

in turn a transliteration of the Sanskrit word “Dhyåna,”
meaning “meditation.”

In Japanese the term “Chan” is pronounced “Zen”; in Korean:

“SÌn”; in Vietnamese, “Thiãn”).

Thus, Chan or Zen appears to present itself, in its very

name, as a school or tradition of Buddhism which gives
special emphasis to the practice of “meditation” over and
above other forms of Buddhist practice.

CHAN’S CLASSICAL SELF CHARACTERIZATION IN

FOUR LINES

[Note: The themes encapsulated in these 4 dicta are fund

in the earliest Chan literature but the actual formula is rather
late. It first appears in Muan Shanqing’s gloss on
the term “singular transmission” (danquan ) in his Zuting
shiyüan (Chrestomathy from the Patriarchs’ Halls,
in ZokuzØkyØ/Xuzangjing 113:132a), a work which was
not compiled until 1108.]
 (Chn: jiaowai biejuan / Jpn: kyØge betsuden)

(Chn: buli wenzi / Jpn: fury¨ monji)

(Chn: zhizhi renxin / Jpn: jikishi ninshin)

(Chn: jianxing chengfo / Jpn: kenshØ jØbutsu)

A special transmission outside the

[scriptural] teachings,

Does not set up (or depend upon) words

and letters,

Points directly at the human mind,

Buddhahood attained by seeing one’s own

nature.

Note especially the claim of experiential “immediacy” in this

classic Chan self-characterization, and its corollary claimsof
autonomya nd superiority vis à vis the rest of Buddhism
A. Sixth Century Beginnings.

The age of Bodhidharma[tåra] ( / [ ]

Putidamo[duoluo]) and his disciples, most notably Huike
(487-593) and Tanlin (506-574) — all active in northern
China during the late N & S Dynasties period (i.e, N. Wei,
N. Qi, & N. Zhou dynasties)

Representative sources: the Bodhidharma Anthology, a.k.a. the

Long Scroll (most notable therein: the Two Entrances & Four
Practices with Tanlin’s preface thereto containing a very brief
biography of Bodhidharma, and the Records, which consist
essentially in dharma-talks attributed to Bodhidharma).

Important themes:

The Entrance of Principle ( liru)

Wall-gazing ( biguan), i.e. impassability (

ningzhu, “the coagulated state”) and sudden (all at
once) realization, rooted in the Tathågatagarbha
(rulaizang ) doctrine of the intrinsic buddhahood
of all beings — clearly derived from the
Tathågatagarbha canon, e.g., the Ír¥målå S¨tra (the
scripture in which Tanlin specialized), and yet
presented as independent of scriptures.

Realization by way of knowing (gnosis) and being.

 The Entrance of Practice ( xingru)

“Requiting Injury” (baoyuan ), “Following

Conditions” (suiyuan ), “Non-seeking” (wu suoqiu
), “According with the Dharma” (chenfa )
— all of which comprise a kind of gradual, morally
aware and morally earnest practice.

Realization by way of doing.

Note the presence, even in this earliest Chan corpus, of a

fundamental tension between realization as something
“always & already attained” — miraculously “given,” and
only to be known or acknowledged (“mysteriously tallied
with” mingfu ) — and realization as something to be
conscientiously, effortfully pursued in actual, concrete,
particular, imperfect circumstances — the one more or
less independent of doctrinal or scriptural study, the other
deeply implicated therein.

Note also the apparent indebtedness of earliest Chan

(perhaps better understood as “proto-Chan”) to the
La∫kåvatåra S¨tar (Lengqie abatuoluo bao jing
— T 670) in Guˆabhadra’s ,
Qiunabatuoluo, 394-468) 4 scroll translation — this being
yet another text of essentially Tathågatagarbha purport.

B. The Seventh Century: Lineage Creation.

If Chan’s origins are to be found in the lives and teachings

of Bodhidharma, Huike, and Tanlin then the next major
chapter in the history of its early formation is the story of
the monks Daoxin (580-651) and Hongren (638-
689). These two came later to be designated, respectively,
the 4th and 5th patriarchs of Chan, but in their own times
and immediately thereafter they were identified chiefly as
the leading figures in what was originally a group of Buddhist
ascetics known as the “East Mountain” (Dong shan )
community

Note: East Mountain, a.k.a. Mt. Huangmei

[Yellow Plum Mountain], is one of a pair of mountains
known jointly as “Twin Peaks” (Shuangfeng shan
) located in a remote region of what is today easternmost
Hubei province.

Daoxin was a monk from Henan who is said to have

spent much of his early career in various monasteries in
southern China (e.g., Mt. Lu , in Jiangxi ) acquiring
a broad familiarity with a number of different Buddhist
traditions. He was familiar, for example, with the
Prajñåpåramitå (Perfection of Insight) canon — from which
he drew some important themes, like “one practice samådhi”
(yixing sanmei ) — and also with Pure Land
Buddhism. However, in his own teaching later in life at
East Mountain he gave special emphasis to the extended and
intensive practice of seated meditation, as distinct from
scriptural or doctrinal study and other modes of Buddhist
practice. Such empahsis on seated meditation was the chief
focus also of his foremost disciple Hongren. The East
Mountain community began as a small group but came soon
to be famous for the rigor and authenticity of its practice
and so, despite it remote location, by the seventh through
the ninth decades of the seventh century was regularly
attracting large numbers of students and gaining a truly
national reputation.

It is important to note the absence of any hard evidence

indicating that Daoxin and Hongren saw themselves as heirs
to Bodhidharma and Huike; nor is there any evidence to
suggest that Daoxin had ever been a disciple of Sengcan
. Indeed, Sengcan — the so-called “third patriarch” — is
essentially a cypher, a mere name in a list about whom we
know nothing and who may have been virtually created later
when Chan was constructing its foundation myth and needed
some link between Huike and Daoxin The identity he came
later to have, including his alleged authorship of the Xinxin
ming (The Believing Mind Inscription), is a later
invention .

[The East Mountain community even attracted students

from abroad, like the Korean Monk PÌmmang
(Chn: Falang) who has recently been proposed by Robert
Buswell as possibly the true author of a famous work
entitled the Vajrasamådhi S¨tra (Jin’gang sanmei jing
). If Buswell’s hypothesis is correct then this
important text, closely related to the Dashengqixinlun
(Mahåyåna Awakening of Faith) and thus
belonging also to the Tathågatagarbha tradition, must
also be counted — together with the works in the
Bodhidharma Anthology — as belonging to the basic archive
of proto-Chan — see R. Buswell, The Formation of
Ch’an Ideology in China and Korea, Princeton UP, 1989.]

Toward the very of the 8th century, particularly during the

reign of Empress Wu ( , r. 685-705), the high repute
of the East Mountain community earned some of its members
national recognition, high official honors, and valuable court
patronage. Thus it was that the monk Shenxiu (606?-706),
one of Hongren’s foremost students, was invited to the capitals
(Chang’an & Luoyang ) in the year 700 to receive
the personal veneration of the empress and to be installed as
a leading metropolitan prelate. At the beginning of the 8th
century Shenxiu surely ranked as one of the most esteemed
and influential monks in China. His teachings, recorded in
some of the texts discovered in the Dunhuang archives, reflect
fidelity to the heritage of Daoxin and Hongren but also
some influence from Huayan Buddhism (an important
ingredient of which was the tathågatagarbha doctrine)
and from Tiantai .

The next chapter in this story of the formation of a “Chan

School” story in the year 732. On January 15 of that year
the monk Heze Shenhui (670-762), then in his
62nd year, addressed a large group of monks and laymen
assembled at the Dayun si (Great Cloud Monastery)
in the town of Huatai located just northeast of the
secondary Tang capital of Luoyang (Honan Province).
His sermon was recorded by a lay disciple presumably present
at the assembly and has been preserved for us among the
Dunhuang manuscripts under the title, Putidamo nanzong ding
shifei lun (Treatise Establishing
What is True and What is False in the Southern Lineage of
Bodhidharma).

This sermon was a bombshell — a deliberately provocative

and quite harshly worded challenge to the Chan establishment
of the day. Shenhui claimed nothing less than that the
current Chan establishment — consisting chiefly of disciples
of the then so-called “Sixth Patriarch,” Shenxiu — was
illegitimate and that its teachings were heresies that had
profoundly distorted Bodhidharma’s “special transmission.”

Now in his own day, I repeat, Shenxiu was regarded as the

true and foremost successor of Hongren, i.e., as genuine the
Sixth Patriarch. When he arrived in Luoyang in 676, having
earlier left the “Eastern Mountain” community of his teacher
Hongren, he quickly gained great fame and generous imperial
support. For the next 30 years, until his death in 706, he
enjoyed the status of one of China’s most revered and
influential Buddhist monks. His personal success as a prelate
meant, in effect, a significant transformation in the character,
or at least the public image, of Chan. What had been a
relatively obscure, “provincial” community of monks who
stressed meditation and experience above all other components
of Buddhism, and who stood apart from the then
ecclesiastically dominant traditions of learnèd Buddhism,
became itself a stanchion of the metropolitan Buddhist
establishment.

Shenhui’s bold claim (or outrageous presumption, depending

on one’s point of view) was that Shenxiu was not the true
“Sixth Patriarch.” Rather, he said, that honor belong to his
own (i.e., Shenhui’s) teacher, a thitherto obscure monk named
Huineng (638-713). Huineng, Shenhui asserted, had
been secretly chosen by Hongren as the latter’s true heir
after showing himself to be spiritually superior to the heir-
presumptive, Shenxiu. After receiving the secret transmission
(marked by the gift of Hongren’s robe and begging-bowl,
which had been passed down from Bodhidharma), he then
immediately left East Mountain and traveled south, to the
region of Canton from which he had originally hailed, to
preside over the Baolin si (Monastery of the Grove
of Treasures) in the district of Caoxi (Caoqi) . There,
Shenhui further claimed, Huineng kept alive the true heritage
of Bodhidharma, and there Shenhui studied with him. One
should note especially that in asserting that Huineng was the
true Sixth Patriarch Shenhui was in effect also claiming that
he himself was the Seventh Patriarch.

Shehui called Huineng’s and his own Chan lineage the

“Southern School.” Shenxiu’s teaching and successors he
dubbed the “Northern School.” (Note: this was Shenhui’s
terminology; his opponents did not use such labels.)

In his incendiary sermon Shenhui made essentially two kinds

of claims against the so-called “Northern School.” First, he
made what we might call ecclesiological argument, an argument
concerning churchly authority — viz., the argument that
Shenxiu and his successors had usurped the patriarchal
succession, that they had not really been chosen by Hongren
as his true heirs. Secondly, he made a doctrinal claim —
that the Northern School had fundamentally and disastrously
misunderstood the nature of meditation or Chan practice.
The Northern School, he said, conceived of meditation as a
MEANS of mental purification whereby one could
GRADUALLY (jian ) achieve the GOAL of enlightenment.
But this, he said, was not what Bodhidharma and his true
successors such as Huineng had actually taught. Rather, the
true patriarchs held that the very distinction between MEANS
and GOAL is itself a product of the ignorant, discriminating
human intellect, that true meditation is not mere mind-craft,
and that enlightenment comes only SUDDENLY (dun ),
when one has had an all-at-once insight into the true nature
of oneself and of all things.

Modern research, based on the Dunhuang Chan manuscripts,

demonstrates that the image of Shenxiu and the “Northern
School” which Shenhui constructed was largely a straw-man.
Shenxiu and his disciples, for example, in fact also advocated
sudden enlightenment. Nevertheless, in time, Shenhui’s straw-
men and his claims against them were accepted. Huineng
would come to be regarded as the true Sixth Patriarch. His
“Southern School” would come to be regarded as orthodox
Zen, and the so-called “Northern School,” ever after
condemned as “gradualist,” would pass into oblivion.

The classical version of this tale is told in a text known as

the Liuzu tanjing (The Platform Scripture of the
Sixth Patriarch), a work which took shape around the year
780, i.e., several decades after Shenhui launched his attack.
It has a complicated history, but for our purposes it is especially
important as a canonization of Shenhui’s claims.

Shenxiu’s poem:

shen shi puti shu xin ru mingjing tai shishi qin fushi mo shi you zhenai

The body is the bodhi-tree;

The Mind is like a clear mirror.
At all times we must strive to polish it,
And must not let dust collect upon it.
Shenhui’s poem:

puti ben wu shu mingjing yi wu tai foxing chang qingjing hechu you chenai

Bodhi originally has no tree;

The mirror also has no stand.
Buddha nature is always clean and pure;
Where is there room for dust?

C. The Emergence of “Classical Chan.”

What may properly be called “classical” Chan, as distinguished

from early or proto- Chan, begins with what is labelled the
“third generation” after Huineng — specifically with Mazu
Daoyi ( , 709-788) and Shitou Xiqian ( ,
700-790). It was these two teachers, in fact, who generated
all the major lines of Chan that were to flourish during the
Five Dynasties, Song, and later periods in China — as well
as all the major lines of SÌn in medieval and later Korea and
all the forms of Zen found in medieval and later Japan.

Thus, of the so-called “Five Houses” of classical Chan the

houses of Guiyang ( ) and Linji ( ) descended from
Mazu, whereas the houses of Caodong ( ), Yunmen (
), and Fayan ( ) derived from Shitou Xiqian. By the
time of the transition from N. Song to S. Song (i.e., by
around the first quarter of the 12th century) three of these
five houses had withered or been absorbed by the others and
only Caodong (Jpn: SØtØ) and Linji (Jpn: Rinzai) continued
to develop, each producing several sub-lineages of its own.

In all of this, however, it is important to note that both

Mazu and Shitou seem actually to have had only the most
tenuous connections with Huineng. There work may have
been more in the nature of creation than of transmission. To
be sure, each was said to have been a disciple of a disciple of
Huineng but the intervening figures in both lines — Qingyuan
Xingsi ( , 660?-740?) in Shitou’s case and Nanyue
Huairang ( , 677?-744?) in Mazu’s — are really very
obscure individuals about whom virtually knowthing is known.
Thus, it may well be that descent from Huineng was not so
much a fact as it was an ideological claim asserted by Mazu,
Shitou, and their heirs in an effort to appropriate or create
for themselves a venerable and congenial heritage. That is to
say, despite all the “lineage rhetoric” of the later Chan tradition,
the discontinuities between classical Mazu/Shitou Chan and
the proto-Chan traditions of Shenhui, Shenxiu, Hongren,
Daoxin, and Bodhidharma may well outweigh any continuities.

Ironically, although it was Shenhui who was most responsible

for the exaltation of Huineng as “sixth patriarch,” his “Heze”
lineage was itself quickly overshadowed by Mazu’s and Shitou’s
lines and died out after only a few generations. Its last
major representative, Guifeng Zongmi ( , 780-841),
was actually quite hostile to the sorts of Chan fostered by
Mazu and Shitou. However Zongmi’s judgments, forcefully
expressed in the surviving General Preface ( Duxu) to his
inextant Chan Anthology ( Chanyuan zhuquan ji —
literally, Collection of Various Discourses from the Fonts of Chan),
were not honored by later history.