Ch’an Buddhism in China
Its History and Method
part 3
- 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 SEVEN SCHOOLS OF CH’AN IN THE EIGHTH CENTURY
What I have sketched above — Shen-hui’s challenge and attack against the school of “the Lord of the Law at the Two National Capitals of Changan and Loyang and the Teacher of Three Emperors,” his lifelong popular preaching of a new and simple form of Buddhism based on the idea of sudden enlightenment, his four-time banishment, and his final victory in the official recognition of his school as the True School — was historically not an isolated event, but only a part of a larger movement which may be correctly characterized as an internal reformation or revolution in Buddhism, a movement that had been fermenting and spreading throughout the eighth century in many parts of China, especially in the great South, from the western cities of Chengtu and Tzuchou to the eastern centers of Buddhism in Yangchou, Kiangning (Nanking), and Hangchow, from the mountain retreats in Hunan and Kiangsi to the southern regions of Shaochou and Kuangchou. Shen-hui himself was a product of a revolutionary age in which great minds in the Buddhist and Ch’an schools were, in one way or another, thinking dangerous thoughts and preaching dangerous doctrines.
Shen-hui was a political genius who understood the signs of the time and knew what to attack and how to do it. So he became the warrior and the statesman of the new movement and fired the first shot of the revolution. His long life, his great eloquence, and, above all, his courage and shrewdness carried the day, and a powerful orthodoxy was crushed. What appeared to be an easy and quick victory was probably due to the fact that his striking tactics of bold and persistent offensive attacks and his simple and popular preaching of more than two decades had already won for himself and his cause a tremendous following among the people and a large number of influential friends in intellectual and political circles. The poet Wang Wei, who wrote the earliest biographical account of Hui-neng at the time of Shen-hui’s exile, said in most unmistakable language that Hui-neng received from his teacher “the robe of the Patriarchs” and that the persecution of Shen-hui was an injustice. And Tu Fu 杜甫 (712-770), a friend of Wang Wei and the greatest poet of China, already had spoken of “the Ch’an of the Seventh Patriarch” in one of his longest poems. The cause of Hui-neng and Shen-hui, therefore, was already won long before its official establishment.
The time was ripe, therefore, for the success of the revolution. And the Stampede of the Ch’an schools to get on the band wagon was only further evidence that the victory was welcomed by the liberals, the radicals, and the heretics of the schools. To them, the victory must have meant a great liberation of thought and belief from the old shackles of tradition and authority.
What do we know of the dangerous thoughts of the age?
Before presenting the radical thinking of the Ch’an schools of the eighth century, it may be interesting to hear a severe critic who lived through the second half of that century and was greatly disturbed by the iconoclastic and revolutionary teachings of his day. I quote the following words from Liang Su 梁肅 (753-793), one of the prose masters of the age, and a devout follower of the old Ch’an of the T’ien-t’ai School 天台宗 which had had its heyday in the last decades of the sixth century under its founder, the great master Chih-i 智顗 (died 597), but which was burdened down by an encyclopedic scholasticism and was a declining school by the eighth century. “Nowadays,” said Liang Su, “few men have the true faith. Those who travel the path of Ch’an go so far as to teach the people that there is neither Buddha, nor Law (dharma) and that neither sin nor goodness has any significance. When they preach these doctrines to the average men or men below the average, they are believed by all those who live their lives of worldly desires. Such ideas are accepted as great truths which sound so pleasing to the ear. And the people are attracted by them just as the moths in the night are drawn to their burning death by the candle light. . . . Such doctrines are as injurious and dangerous as the devil (Maara) and the ancient heretics.” Such was an eyewitness testimony of the popularity of the dangerous thoughts of the Ch’an teachers of his time.
The learned monk Tsung-mi (died 841) devoted a lifetime to collecting the writings and recorded sayings of nearly a hundred teachers of Ch’an from Bodhidharma down to his own age. Unfortunately, his great collection, which he called “The Fountainheads of Ch’an,” has been lost. Only his “General Preface” containing his analysis and criticism of the schools has survived. In this preface (which is a little book by itself), he analyzed the “modern” Ch’an movement into ten principal schools, which he classified under three main movements:
- (1) Those that taught “the extinction of false thoughts by cultivating or controlling the mind” — that is, the schools of the old or Indian dhyaana.
- (2) Those that taught that “nothing is real, and there is nowhere to abide,” and that “there is neither Truth Law to bind us, nor Buddhahood to attain.” These include the school of the Ox-head Hill and the school of Hsi-ch’ien (Shih-t’ou).
- (3) Those that discarded all older forms of Ch’an and taught “a direct appeal to the mind or the nature of man.” This group includes the schools of Shen-hui and Ma-tsu.
In a very voluminous commentary on a tiny “suutra” — the Yuan-Chiao-Ching 圓覺經 (the Suutra of Perfect Enlightenment), which was most probably fabricated by Tsung-mi himself — there occurs a lengthy passage in which Tsung-mi lists the Seven Great Schools of Ch’an and gives a concise summary of the teachings of each. It is very remarkable that, of the seven only three may be called the old Ch’an, while the other four are distinctly revolutionary. Without following his arrangement of the order of the schools, I shall present the older schools first:
The three older schools were:
- (1) The Northern School of Shen-hsiu and his disciples, which Shen-hui had attacked as the Ch’an of gradual enlightenment.
- (2) A school in western China which practiced a peculiar way of pronouncing the one word “Fu” (Buddha) as the method of simplified contemplation.
- (3) The school of Chih-hsin, a fellow student with Shen-hsiu and Hui-neng, and the later school founded by Chih-hsin’s disciples at the Ching-chung Monastery 淨眾寺 in Chengtu.
It was the tradition of these schools to simplify Ch’an to three sentences:
- “Don’t recall the past;
- don’t contemplate the future;
- don’t forget the path of wisdom.”
It was from the last-named Ching-chung School that the famous Ma-tsu came.Even in this group of older schools, there was a clear tendency to break away from Indian dhyaana practice and work out their own simplified form of contemplation.
- (4) The fourth school was that of the Pao-t’ang Monastery 保唐寺 at Chengtu, founded by the monk Wu-chu 無住 (died 774), who came out of the Ching-chung School and started a quite radical school of his own, in which “all forms of Buddhist religious practice — such as worship, prayer, repentance, recitation of the sutras, painting the image of the Buddha, and copying Buddhist scriptures — were forbidden and condemned as foolish.” This school inherited the “three sentences” from the mother school, but changed the third to read: “Don’t be foolish.” And to them “all thought, good or evil, is foolish and idle.” “No thought, no consciousness — that is the ideal.”
- (5) The fifth school, to which Tsung-mi himself claimed allegiance, was that of Shen-hui, which, as already noted, renounced all Ch’an practices and believed in the possibility of sudden enlightenment. Tsung-mi was very fond of quoting Shen-hui’s dictum: “The one word ‘Knowledge’ is the gateway to all mysteries.” That sentence best characterizes Shen-hui’s intellectualistic approach. In his Discourses, he frankly said: “Here in my place, there is no such thing as ting 定 (samaadhi, quietude), and nobody talks of concentration of the mind.”
“Even the desire to seek bodhi (enlightenment) and achieve nirvaa.na is foolish.”
- (6) The sixth school was the Ox-head Hill School, an old school based on the philosophy of the Praj~naapaaramitaa Suutras and the Maadhyamika School of Naagaarjuna. Under its new leaders in the eighth century, notably Hsuan-su 玄素 ( died 752 ) and Tao-ch’in 道欽 (died 792), the school seemed to have become openly nihilistic and even iconoclastic. Tsung-mi says this school taught that “there is neither Truth [Law] to bind us, nor Buddhahood to attain.” “Even if there be a life better than nirvaa.na, I say that that too is as unreal as a dream.” Hsuan-su’s biographer told this story: A butcher notorious for his great cruelty heard him speak and was moved to repentance. Hsuan-su accepted him and even went to his house and took meals with his p. 16 family. Tsung-mi says this school holds that “there is neither cultivation, nor no-cultivation; there is neither Buddha, nor no-Buddha.”
- (7) The seventh school was the great School of Tao-i 道一 (called Ma-tsu because of his family name Ma, died 788). Ma-tsu taught that “the Tao is everywhere and in everything. Every idea, every movement of the body — a cough, a sigh, a snapping of the fingers, or raising of the eyebrows — is the functioning of the Buddha-nature in man. Even love, anger, covetousness and hate are all functionings of the Buddha-nature.” Therefore, there is no need of a particular method of cultivation. “Let the mind be free. Never seek to do good, nor seek to do evil, nor seek to cultivate the Tao. Follow the course of Nature, and move freely. Forbid nothing, and do nothing. That is the way of the ‘free man,’ who is also called the ‘super-man.'” According to Tsung-mi, this school also holds that “there is neither Law to bind us, nor Buddhahood to attain.”
These are the schools of Chinese Ch’an as Tsung-mi knew them in the early years of the ninth century. The Pao-t’ang School was openly iconoclastic and even anti-Buddhistic. The three others were equally radical and probably even more iconoclastic in their philosophical implications.
One of Ma-tsu’s famous disciples, T’ien-jan 天然 (died 824) of Tanhsia 丹霞 (Tanka in Japanese), was spending a night at a ruined temple with a few traveling companions. The night was bitterly cold and there was no firewood. He went to the Hall of Worship, took down the wooden image of the Buddha, and made a comfortable fire. When he was reproached by his comrades for this act of sacrilege, he said: “I was only looking for the `sariira (sacred relic) of the Buddha.” “How can you expect to find `sariira in a piece of wood?” said his fellow travelers. “Well,” said T’ien-jan, “then, I am only burning a piece of wood after all.”
Such a story can be properly understood only in the light of the general intellectual tendencies of a revolutionary age. Professor Nukariya, in The Religion of the Samurai, twice quoted this story to show that Chinese Zen was iconoclastic. But Suzuki says: “Whatever the merit of Tanka from the purely Zen point of view, there is no doubt that such deeds as his are to be regarded as highly sacrilegious and to be avoided by all pious Buddhists.
Those pious Buddhists will never understand Chinese Ch’an. And they will never understand another disciple of Ma-tsu’s, the lay scholar P’ang Yun 龐蘊, who left this famous dictum:
- “Do empty yourselves of everything that exists, and never reify anything that exists not.”
This is truly a wonderful saying which is as sharp and as destructive as the famous “Occam’s razor”:
Entities should not be unnecessarily multiplied.” Old P’ang’s dictum, “Never reify (shih) anything that exists not,” may be called “P’ang’s razor” or the razor of Chinese Ch’an, with which the medieval ghosts, the gods, the bodhisattvas and the Buddhas, the four stages of dhyaana, the four formless states of samaadhi, the six divine powers of the attained yoga practitioner, etc., were to be cut off and destroyed.That is the Chinese Ch’an of the eighth century, which, as I have said before, is no Ch’an at all, but a Chinese reformation or revolution within Buddhism.
- 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
