Ch’an Buddhism in China
Its History and Method
part 5
- Part 1 : Shen-Hui and the establishment of chinese Ch’an
- Part 2 : Hui-Neng, The so-called Sixth Patriarch
- Part 3 : The 7 schools in the eighth century
- part 4 : the great persecution
- part 5 : development of the Ch’an method
THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE METHOD OF CH’AN
The age of Ch’an as an epoch in the history of Chinese thought covered about four hundred years — from about A.D. 700 to 1100. The first century and a half was the era of the great founders of Chinese Ch’an — the era of dangerous thinking, courageous doubting, and plain speaking. All authentic documents of that period show that the great masters, from Shen-hui and Ma-tsu to Hsuan-chien and I-hsuan, taught and spoke in plain and unmistakable language and did not resort to enigmatic words, gestures, or acts. Some of the famous enigmatic answers attributed to Ma-tsu and his immediate disciples were undoubtedly very late inventions.
But as the Ch’an schools became respectable and even fashionable in intellectual and political circles, there arose monks and lay dilettantes who talked and prattled in the language of the Ch’an masters without real understanding and without conviction. There was real danger that the great ideas of the founders of the Ch’an schools were deteriorating into what has been called “ch’an of the mouth-corners” (k’ou-t’ou ch’an 口頭禪 ). Moreover Ch’an was rapidly replacing all other forms of Buddhism, and prominent Ch’an masters of the mountains were often called to head large city monasteries. They had to perform or officiate at many Buddhist rituals of worship demanded by the public or the State even though they might sincerely believe that there were no Buddhas or bodhisattvas. Were they free to tell their powerful patrons, on whom the institution had to rely for support, that “the Buddha was a murderer who had seduced many people into the pitfalls of the Devil”? Could there be some other subtle but equally thought-provoking way of expressing what the earlier masters had said outspokenly?
All these new situations, and probably many others, led to the development of a pedagogical method of conveying a truth through a great variety of strange and sometimes seemingly crazy gestures, words, or acts. I-hsuan himself was probably the first to introduce these techniques, for he was famous for beating his questioner with a stick or shouting a deafening shout at him. It was probably no accident that his school, the Lin-chi school, p. 21 played a most prominent part during the next hundred years in the development of the peculiar methodology of Ch’an instruction to take the place of plain speaking.
But this methodology with all its mad techniques is not so illogical and irrational as it has often been described. A careful and sympathetic examination of the comparatively authentic records of the Ch’an schools and of the testimony of contemporary witnesses and critics has convinced me that beneath all the apparent madness and confusion there is a conscious and rational method which may be described as a method of education by the hard way, by letting the individual find out things through his own effort and through his own ever-widening life-experience.
Broadly speaking, there are three stages or phases in this pedagogical method.
First, there is the basic principle which was stated as pu shuo p’o 不說破, “never tell too plainly.” It is the duty of the teacher never to make things too easy for the novice; he must not explain things in too plain language; he must encourage him to do his own thinking and to find out things for himself. Fa-yen 法演 (died 1104), one of the greatest teachers of Ch’an, used to recite these lines of unknown authorship:
You may examine and admire the embroidered drake.
But the golden needle which made it, I’ll not pass on to you.This is so important that Chu Hsi 朱熹 (1130-1200), the greatest Confucianist thinker and teacher of the twelfth century, once said to his students: “The school of Confucius and that of Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu left no great successors to carry on the work of the founders. But the Ch’an Buddhists can always find their own successors, and that is due to the fact that they are prepared to run the risk of explaining nothing in plain language, so that others may be left to do their own pondering and puzzling, out of which a real threshing-out may result.” One of the great Ch’an masters often said: “I owe everything to my teacher because he never explained anything plainly to me.”
Secondly, in order to carry out the principle of “never tell too plainly,” the Ch’an teachers of the ninth and tenth centuries devised a great variety of eccentric methods of answering questions. If a novice should ask some such question as “What is truth?” or “What is Buddhism?” the master would almost surely box him on the ear, or give him a beating with a cane, or retire into a stern silence. Some less rude teacher would tell the questioner to go back to the kitchen and wash the dishes. Others would answer questions with seemingly meaningless or strikingly meaningful paradoxes.
Thus, when the master Wen-yen 文偃 (died 949), founder of the Yun men School, was asked -*”What is the Buddha like?”
he answered: - “A dried stick of dung.”
(This is so profanely iconoclastic that Suzuki probably deliberately mistranslates it as “A dried-up dirt-cleaner,” which, of course is incorrect and meaningless.) Such an answer is not nonsensical at all; it harks back to the iconoclastic teachings of his spiritual grandfather, Hsuan chien, who had actually said: - “The Buddha is a dried piece of dung of the barbarians, and sainthood is only an empty name.”
Thus Liang-chia 良价 (died 869), one of the founders of the Ts’aoshan-Tungshan School 曹山, 洞山, when asked the same question, said quietly: “Three chin 斤 (about three pounds) of hemp,” which, too, is not meaningless if one remembers the naturalistic thinking of some of the masters of the earlier era.
But the novice in all probability would not understand. So, he retires to the kitchen and washes the dishes. He is puzzled and feels ashamed of his failure to understand. After some time, he is told to leave the place and try his luck elsewhere. Here he begins the third stage of his education — the third and most important phase of the pedagogical method, which was called hsing-chiao 行腳 “traveling on foot.”
Those critics who call the Ch’an method irrational and mystical and, therefore, “absolutely beyond the ken of human understanding,” are men who fail to appreciate the great educational value of this third phase, which consists of sending the learner traveling from one hill to another, from one school to another, studying under one master and then another. Many of the famous Ch’an masters spent fifteen or twenty or thirty years in traveling and studying under many well-known masters.
Let me cite what Chu Hsi said in deep appreciation of the value of “traveling on foot” in the Ch’an schools. The great leader of the Neo-Confucianist movement was sick in bed and was approaching his death, which came only a few months later. One of his favorite mature disciples, Ch’en Ch’un 陳淳 had come to visit him and spend a few days at his school. One evening, Chu Hsi in his sickbed said to the visitor:
Now you must emulate the monk’s method of hsing-chiao (traveling on foot). That will enable you to meet the best minds of the empire, to observe the affairs and conditions of the country, to see the scenery and topography of the mountains and rivers, and to study the historical traces of the rise and fall, peace and war, right and wrong, of the past and present governments. Only in that way may you see the truth in all its varied respects. . . . There was never a sage who knew nothing of the affairs of the world. There was never a sage who could not deal with novel and changing situations. There was never a sage who sat alone in meditation behind closed doors. . . .
Let us return to our traveling novice, who, as a monk, travels always on foot carrying only a stick, a bowl, and a pair of straw sandals. He begs all the way for his food and lodging, often having to seek shelter in ruined temples, caves, or deserted houses by the roadside. He suffers the severities of nature and sometimes has to bear the unkindness of man. He sees the world and meets all kinds of people. He studies under the great minds of the age and learns to ask better questions and have real doubts of his own. He befriends kindred souls with whom he discusses problems and exchanges views. In this way, his experience is widened and deepened, and his understanding grows. Then, one day, he hears a chance remark of a charwoman, or a frivolous song of a dancing girl, or smells the quiet fragrance of a nameless flower — and he suddenly understands! How true, “the Buddha was like a piece of dung”! And how true, “he is also like three pounds of hemp”! All is so evident now. “The bottom has dropped out of the bucket”: the miracle has happened.
And he travels long distances back to his old master, and, with tears and with gladness at heart, he gives thanks and worships at the feet of his good teacher, who never made things easy for him.
This is what I understand as the pedagogical method of Chinese Ch’an.
This was what Chu Hsi understood when he sang:Last night the spring floods swelled the water in the river.
Today the huge ship floats, as if it were feather-weighted.
What could not be pulled or pushed before,
Now moves on freely in the middle of the river.Was this Ch’an illogical and irrational and beyond our intellectual understanding?
I shall let Fa-yen, the great Ch’an master of the eleventh century, answer this question.
Fa-yen one day asked his audience, “What is the Ch’an in my place?”
And he told this story, which both Nukariya and Suzuki have translated before,
and which I now render as follows:
- There was a man who made his livelihood by being an expert burglar.
He had a son who saw his father growing old
and decided that he should learn a trade, so that he might support his parents in old age.
One day the son said, “Father, teach me a trade.”
The father said, “Good.”
That night, the expert burglar took his son to a big house where he made an opening in the wall, and both entered the house and came to a large cabinet.
The father opened the lock of the cabinet, and told his son to get inside. As soon as the son got in, the father closed the door of the cabinet and replaced the lock securely.
The father now made quite a noise to arouse the people in the house. He then left the house by the same way he had come in, and went home.
The men and women in the great house were aroused from their sleep. They searched the house and found the big hole in the wall. But nothing apparently had been stolen.
Meanwhile, the boy in the locked cabinet was puzzled:
“Why did father do this to me?”
Then he realized that his problem was to get out.
So, he imitated the sound of mice gnawing and tearing clothes.
Very soon a lady heard the noises and told a maid to open the cabinet and look into it with a candle.
As soon as the cabinet was opened, the boy put out the light, pushed the maid away, and rushed to the hole in the wall. He got out and ran for his life.
He was pursued by the men from the house. On the way, he picked up a stone and threw it into a pond, making a noise as if a body had fallen into the water. The men stopped to search the pond for the burglars body. The boy took a bypath and ran home.
When he saw his father, he shouted:
“Father, why did you lock me in that cabinet?”
The father said:
“Don’t ask silly questions. Tell me how you got out.”
When the son had told him how he escaped and got back, the father nodded his head and said:
“Son, you have learned the trade.”
“That,” added the Master Pa-yen, “is Ch’an in my place.”
That was Chinese Ch’an at the end of the eleventh century.
- Part 1 : Shen-Hui and the establishment of chinese Ch’an
- Part 2 : Hui-Neng, The so-called Sixth Patriarch
- Part 3 : The 7 schools in the eighth century
- part 4 : the great persecution
- part 5 : development of the Ch’an method
Hu Shih
Philosophy East and West, Vol.. 3, No. 1 (January, 1953), pp. 3-24
© 1953 by University of Hawaii Press, Hawaii, USA
– Source www.thezensite.com
