Zen Culture Part 4

_[Disciples] may think they can expedite the attainment of their goal of tranquilisation by entirely suppressing the activities of the mind system. This is a mistake . . . the goal of tranquilisation is to be reached not by suppressing all mind activity but by getting rid of discriminations and attachments. . . .3

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This text, together with the Taoist ideas of the T'ang Chinese, became the philosophical basis for early Ch'an. Indeed, traditional Zen owes much of its lighthearted irreverence to the early Taoists, who combined their love of nature with a wholesome disregard for stuffy philosophical p.r.o.nouncements, whether from scholarly Confucianists or Indian _sutras_.

The Taoists were also enemies of attachments, as exemplified by an admonition of the famous Chuang Tzu, the fourth-century B.C. Taoist thinker who established much of the philosophical basis for this uniquely Chinese outlook toward life:

_Do not be an embodier of fame; do not be a storehouse of schemes; do not be an undertaker of projects; do not be a proprietor of wisdom. . .

. Be empty, that is all. The Perfect Man uses his mind like a mirror-- going after nothing, welcoming nothing, responding but not storing.4

_Bodhidharma, pract.i.tioner of "wall-gazing" meditation, probably knew nothing of Taoism, but he seems to have sensed correctly that China would provide a home for his Buddhism of nonattachment. The Chinese of the Tang era (618-907) did indeed find in his teachings a system remarkably congenial to their own thousand-year-old philosophy of _tao_, or The Way. Even the practice of _dhyana_, or meditation, resembled in a sense the Chinese tradition of the ascetic, solitary hermit, musing on the essence of nature in a remote mountain retreat.

Whether Ch'an was really Buddhism masquerading as Taoism or Taoism disguised as Buddhism has never been fully established: it contains elements of both. But it was the first genuine merging of Chinese and Indian thought, combining the Indian ideas of meditation and nonattachment with the Chinese practice of nature reverence and nature mysticism (something fundamentally foreign to the great body of Indian philosophy, either Hindu or Buddhist).

The Third Patriarch after Bodhidharma was also a wandering mendicant teacher, but the Fourth chose to settle in a monastery. This introduction of monastic Ch'an coincided roughly with the beginning of the T'ang dynasty, and it brought about a dramatic rise in the appeal of Ch'an to the Chinese laity. It made the new faith respectable and an acceptable alternative to other sects, for in the land of Confucius, teachers who wandered the countryside begging had never elicited the respect that they enjoyed in India. Before long, the Fourth Patriarch had a following of some five hundred disciples, who constructed monastery buildings and tilled the soil in addition to meditating on the _sutras_. The ability to combine practical activities with the quest for enlightenment became a hallmark of later Zen, accounting for much of its influence in j.a.pan.

The Fifth Patriarch, Hung-jen (605-675), continued the monastery, although at another spot, which was to be the location of an historic turning point in the history of Ch'an. Out of it was to come the Sixth Patriarch, Hui-neng (638-713), sometimes known as the second founder of Chinese Ch'an, whose famous biographical treatise, The Sutra of Hui- neng, is revered as one of the holy books of Zen. In this memoir he tells of coming to the monastery of the Fifth Patriarch as an illiterate but precocious youth, having been spiritually awakened by happening to hear a recitation of the Vajracchedika Sutra, better known as the Diamond Sutra. He made the mistake of revealing his brilliance and was immediately banished by the Fifth Patriarch to pounding rice, lest he embarra.s.s the more experienced brothers and be in peril of his safety. According to his account, he lived in obscurity for many months until one day the Fifth Patriarch called an a.s.sembly and announced that the disciple who could compose a stanza which would reveal an understanding of the essence of Mind would be made the Sixth Patriarch.

All the monks a.s.sumed that the leading scholar of the monastery, Shen- hsiu, would naturally win the contest, and all resolved not to bother composing lines of their own. The story tells that Shen-hsiu struggled for four days and finally mounted his courage to write an unsigned verse on a wall corridor at midnight.

_Our body is the Bodhi-tree,

And our mind a mirror bright.

Carefully we wipe them hour by hour,

And let no dust alight.5

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This verse certainly demonstrated the concept of the mind's nonattachment to phenomena, but perhaps it showed an attachment of the mind to itself. In any case, it did not satisfy the Fifth Patriarch, who recognized its author and advised Shen- hsiu privately to submit another verse in two days. Before he had a chance, however, the illiterate Hui-neng, between sessions of rice pounding, chanced along the hallway and asked that the verse be read to him. Upon hearing it, he dictated a stanza to be written next to it.

_There is no Bodhi-tree,

Nor stand of a mirror bright.

Since all is void,

Where can the dust alight_?6

The story says that all were amazed, and the Fifth Patriarch immediately rubbed away the stanza lest the other monks become jealous.

He then summoned Hui-neng late at night, expounded the Diamond Sutra to him, and presented him with the robe and begging bowl of Bodhidharma-- together with advice to flee south in the interest of safety.

Thus Hui-neng became the Sixth Patriarch, began the Southern school of Ch'an, which would later be transmitted to j.a.pan, and established the Diamond Sutra as the faith's primary scripture. And so it was that the Lankavatara Sutra of Bodhidharma, a rich moral and spiritual treatise, was replaced by the more easily understood Diamond Sutra, a repet.i.tive and self- praising doc.u.ment whose message is that nothing exists:

_notions of selfhood, personality, ent.i.ty, and separate individuality, as really existing, are erroneous--these terms are merely figures of speech. . . . Develop a pure, lucid mind, not depending upon sound, flavor, touch, odor, or any quality . . . develop a mind which alights upon no thing whatsoever.7

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With this _sutra_ as text, the Southern Ch'an masters turned ever farther away from intellectual inquiry, since even the mind itself does not exist. (It has even been suggested that the biography of the founder of Southern Ch'an was revised in later vears to render him as unschooled and illiterate as possible, the better to emphasize the later Ch'an's contempt for scholars and scholars.h.i.+p.)

By the time of Hui-neng's death, China was basking in the cultural brilliance of the Tang dynasty. Oddly enough, the sect of Southern Ch'an, which was at odds with the intellectual life of the T'ang, was the Buddhist sect most prospering. The T'ang became the golden age of Ch'an, producing the vast majority of great Zen thinkers as well as the cla.s.sic techniques for teaching novices. Perhaps the fact that Ch'an was outside the mainstream of Chinese culture during the T'ang period contributed to the independent character of its teachers; during the later Sung dynasty, when Zen became fas.h.i.+onable among scholars and artists, few dynamic teachers were to be found.

The main objective of the Ch'an teachers was to inculcate a basically Taoist view of the world using a Buddhist framework. Such famous Taoists as Chuang Tzu had long demonstrated the irrelevance of logical inquiry into the mind through the use of absurdist stories which confounded conventional understanding. To this the Ch'an teachers added the Buddhist teaching that the mind cannot understand external reality because it is itself the only reality. The hand cannot grasp itself; the eye cannot see itself; the mind cannot perceive itself. Quite obviously, no amount of logical introspection can elicit this truth; therefore the mind must abandon its pointless questing and simply float with existence, of which it is merely an undifferentiated part.

But how can such a truth be taught? Teaching ideas is the transmission of logical constructions from one mind to another, and the essence of Zen is that logical constructions are the greatest impediment to enlightenment. In answer, the Zen masters took a page from the Taoists and began using nonsense conundrums, later known as _koan_, as well as frustrating question-and-answer sessions, known as _mondo_, to undermine a novice's dependence on rational thought. A new monk would be presented with an illogical question or problem by the head of a monastery, who would then monitor his response. (Examples might include: Why did Bodhidharma come from the West, that is, from India to China? Does a dog have Buddha-nature? What was your face before your mother was born?) If the novice struggled to construct a response using logical thought processes, he faded; if he intuitively and nondiscursively grasped the truth within the _koan_, he pa.s.sed.

This pa.s.s-or-fail technique differentiated Ch'an from all previous Buddhist sects; Ch'an allowed for no gradual progress upward in the spiritual Therarchy through the mastery of rituals. In the early days of the Tang dynasty, when the number of initiates was small, the great masters of Ch'an directly tested the non-rational understanding of novices; in the later years of the Sung dynasty it was necessary to develop a more impersonal procedure, such as handing out the same _koan _to a number of novices during a lecture. The more effective exchanges between the old T'ang masters and their pupils began to be reused by later teachers in the Sung, who had neither the genius to create new challenges for their novices nor the time to tailor-make a special problem for each new face appearing at the monastery. Out of this there was gradually canonized what are now the cla.s.sic _koan _of Zen. Late in the Tang and early in the Sung period the _koan_ themselves began to be written down and used as the scriptures, resulting in a catalog said to number around seventeen hundred today. The _koan_ is a uniquely Zen creation, a brilliant technique developed by the T'ang masters for transmitting a religion which revered no scriptures and had no G.o.d. It appears nowhere else in the vast literature of world mysticism.

Several of the greatest masters of the T'ang developed their own schools of Ch'an, and the two most successful--the Lin-chi (j.a.panese Rinzai) and the Ts'ao-tung (j.a.panese Soto)--were later transmitted to j.a.pan. The Rinzai school pursued a technique of "sudden" enlightenment; the Soto school, "gradual" enlightenment. These terms can be misleading, however, for sudden enlightenment may require more time than gradual. The gradual school taught that by sitting in meditation (j.a.panese _zazen_) for long periods of time--kept awake by thras.h.i.+ngs if necessary--one's mind slowly acquires a detachment from the

world of false reality perceived by one's discriminating senses and thus achive enlightenment. It is a slow, c.u.mulative process. By contrast, the sudden school de-emphasizes _zazen _in favor of study of _koan_. The student struggles with _koan_, building up a kind of hopeless tension which may last for years, until at last his logical processes suddenly short-circuit and he attains enlightenment.

Pract.i.tioners of the sudden school also use shouts and beatings to jolt novices out of their linear, sequential thought patterns. Students of the gradual school are also invited to study _koan_, and those in the sudden school are encouraged to practice _zazen_, but each school believes its own approach is best.

Although the latter T'ang era saw the persecution of Buddhism in China, with the coming of the Sung dynasty, Ch'an basked in the official encouragement of the court. The _koan _of T'ang masters were compiled and stuThed, while the _sutras_ of orthodox Buddhism suffered from neglect. But the real future of Ch'an Buddhism was to lie with the j.a.panese. In the latter part of the twelfth century a j.a.panese Tendai monk named Eisai (1141-1215), concluding that j.a.panese Buddhism had become stagnant and lifeless, journeyed to China to learn the developments that had taken place during the years that j.a.pan had isolated herself. He naturally went to a T'ien-t'ai monastery, which had been the source of so much j.a.panese Buddhism, but there he discovered Chinese Buddhists immersed in Ch'an. The new faith seemed a healthy answer to j.a.panese needs, and on a second visit he stuThed Ch'an until he received the seal of enlightenment. A fully accredited Zen master, he returned to j.a.pan in 1191 to found the first Rinzai temple, on the southern island of Kyushu.

Although his introduction of a new sect inspired the customary opposition from the Tendai monks on Mt. Thei, the new faith challenging the usefulness of scholars.h.i.+p found a receptive audience among the newly emergent warrior cla.s.s. Basically illiterate, the warriors often felt themselves intellectually inferior to the literary aristocracy, and they were delighted to be informed that a scholarly mind was an impediment rather than an a.s.set in life. They also found Zen's emphasis on the quick, intuitive response agreeably in accord with their approach to armed combat. Eisai soon found himself invited to head a temple in Kyoto and later in the new warrior capital of Kamakura.

Perhaps his most practical move was the composition of a treatise designed to win for Zen a place in the hearts of the nationalistic military establishment and at the same time to conciliate the Tendai monks on Mt. Thei. In his Propagation of Zen for the Protection of the Country he described Zen as follows:

_In its rules of action and discipline, there is no confusion of right and wrong. . . . Outwardly it favors discipline over doctrine, inwardly it brings the Highest Inner Wisdom.8

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Although it may seem paradoxical that a pacifist religion like Zen found immediate favor with the rough warrior cla.s.s of j.a.pan, it had an obvious appeal. As Sir George Sansom has explained it,

_For a thoughtful warrior, whose life always bordered on death, there was an attraction, even a persuasion, in the belief that truth comes like the flash of a sword as it cuts through the problem of existence.

Any line of religious thought that helped a man understand the nature of being without arduous literary stuThes was likely to attract the kind of warrior who felt that the greatest moments in life were the moments when death was nearest.9

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The j.a.panese warriors were captured by the irreverent, anti- scholastic qualities of Rinzai, with its reliance upon anecdotal _koan _and violent jolts of enlightenment. Thus the ruling warriors of j.a.pan began studying _koan_, even as the peasantry at large was chanting praises to Amida and the Lotus Sutra.