The early so called,
Dunhuang manuscripts, and traditional Chan records include an amazing variety
of different formulations starting with its earliest phase, and it seems
evident that a great deal of experimentation was taking place.
The tow leading teachers of that period Daoxin
and Hongren spent exactly a half-century, from 624 to
674, in the same monastic complex in Huangmei
("Yellow Plum," Hubei Province) and it is not unreasonable to include
the following, Shenxiu's quarter century, from 675 to
701, at the not-too-distant Jade Spring Temple (Yuquansi,
in Jingzhou, which overlaps both Hubei and Hunan Provinces)
in this phase as well. Matters become more complex with the explosion of Chan
into the two imperial capitals of Chang'an and
Luoyang during the eighth century.
The hagiographical
nature of the Bodhidharma who was thought to have arrived from India in south
China by sea sometime in or before 479; and brought the first Chan teachings to
north China before 495, perhaps by 480 or so, remains very unclear. Indeed, his
hagiography is a particularly good example of the fluidity of legendary Chan
imagery. This can be seen on most, if not all, reference listed in
chronological order. Not only does the image of Bodhidharma as Chan patriarch
become increasingly detailed over time, but new motifs effectively substitute
for earlier ones, changing the very quality of the image as religious icon.
547 Said to have been
from Persia and was 150 years old when he arrived in Luoyang sometime during
the years 516-26.
645 Described as a
Brahman monk from south India who arrived in south China during the Liang
dynasty (420-79); Huike's arm is said to have been
cut off by bandits/rebels.
667 Depicted
transmitting the Lankavatdra Sûtra
to Huike.
689 Listing of the
succession from Bodhidharma to Huike, Sengcan, Daoxin, and Hongren.
ca. 710 Identified
with Shaolin Temple on Mt. Song; story of Huike
cutting off his own arm; Bodhidharma described as dying voluntarily by poison,
then as seen at the Chinese border on his way back to India, leaving an empty
grave.
ca. 715 Described as
the third son of a Brahman king of south India; identified as second patriarch
after Gunabhadra, translator of the Latikävatâra Sûtra.
730 Story of meeting
with Emperor Wu; said to transmit robe to Huike after
the latter cut off his own arm.
758 or shortly after
Specifically labeled "first patriarch"; transmitted the Diamond Sûtra to Huike.
801 Described
reciting a "transmission verse" before death.
952 Occurrence of the
"pacification of the mind" dialogue with Huike.
988 Said to have
"faced the wall" in meditation.
ca. 1200
"Relics" (sartra, from a cremated
body…, venerated by the "Daruma school" in Japan.
1224 Reference to how
he "faced the wall for nine years.."
Thirteenth century
Association of Shaolin Temple with martial arts.
1642 Attribution of a
martial arts book to Bodhidharma.
Presentations of
Bodhidharma's biography that are unreasonably detailed-such as the Encyclopedia
Britannica's entry for him (written by Heinrich Dumoulin) that identifies him
as a "native of Conjeeveram, near
Madras"-exemplify the third rule of Zen studies: "Precision implies
inaccuracy." Rather than the stark contrast of true/false, of course, it
is the overall fabric of creativity within which the hagiography developed that
is most impressive.
In fact, if we looked
at the matter more closely, we would see that the evolution of Bodhidharma's
image functions as a veritable index to the evolution of Chan itself. That is,
if we could do analytical cross-sections at different points in time, we would
see that the members of the Chan school were reformulating Bodhidharma's
identity to fit their own conceptions of religious sagehood
in each particular age; each substantive reconfiguration thus implies a
qualitative change in the religious identity of Chinese Chan.
This is a dynamic
process that continues into the present, of course: A 1992 Taiwanese movie
account of Bodhidharma's life shows him not only sitting rock-solid in
meditation-a full nine years without moving a muscle! -but also as a
miraculously gifted martial artist catching arrows in his teeth and flying
through the air, his legs churning in the manner of Crouching Tiger, Hidden
Dragon! The modem martial arts cinema tradition has remade the image of
Bodhidharma according to its own needs, just as the medieval Chan tradition
did. The results are different, but the process is basically unchanged.
In other words, both
medieval Chinese Chan factions and modem martial arts schools have created
images of Bodhidharma to fit their own conceptions of enlightened sagehood. These imagined sages serve the need felt by each
faction or school for a primal figurehead to personify and thus legitimate its
particular style of spiritual and athletic training. To accept any one of the
various hagiographical images of Bodhidharma as accurate would be to choose
only one legendary image out of a series of continuous change. On the one hand,
to tell any version of Bodhidharma's hagiography is to present a Sunday-school
image of Chan. Doing so is of course acceptable for participants within the
tradition itself, but to present such simplistic stories as historically
accurate in works of historical narration is an indefensible commission of the
"string of pearls" fallacy. On the other hand, it would be even more
egregious to deny the religious and cultural significance of the hagiographical
process as a whole, to fixate on the technical accuracy of the images of
Bodhidharma produced by generation after generation of Chinese practitioners.
The two-stage
structure of Song-dynasty Chin genealogies resembles that of domestic family genealogies
during the same period, which also tend to begin with monolineal
successions followed by a cascade of subdivisions. See Johanna M. Meskill, "The Chinese Genealogy as a Research
Source," esp. 14.3-47; and Patricia Ebrey,
"The Early Stages in the Development of Descent Group Organization."
Early-twentieth-century
studies of Chan had a major impact in shaping how most English-language
writings interpret the cultural and intellectual transitions from the
North/South Dynasties period (220-589) to the Song dynasty, that is, from the
third through the thirteenth centuries. Conversely, those standard
interpretations of the contours of Chinese intellectual history for the same
lengthy period have profoundly influenced how writers describe the Chan tradition.
There has been a palpable circularity at work, with historians of China
building comprehensive theories based in part on a romanticized image of Chan,
and apologists for Chan buying into those theories because they served the
missionary agenda. Our understandings of Chinese Buddhism, Chinese intellectual
and religious history, and Chan itself have been impoverished as a result.
The fallacies and
contradictions deriving from this circularity are starkly apparent in the
writing of Heinrich Dumoulin. His work is an extreme but representative
example, which has become the sourcebook for countless popular and semischolarly accounts.
In fact since Chan
also differs from Indian Buddhism in fundamental ways, would it also be the
case that the Chan "enlightenment experience" differed from the
Indian one?
Even without assuming
that we could access the actual experiences of real individuals, it would be
useful to compare for example the descriptions of bodhi in Indian philosophical
texts with those of enlightenment experiences in Chan texts. Where the former
describe the ultimate goal in terms of wisdom and transcendence, Chinese
texts tend to a greater emphasis on realizations of the interdependence of all
things.
Or one might examine
whether the rhetoric ofsanyata is used differently in
Indian and Chinese texts, with the former being used to obliterate worldly
distinctions, and the latter being used in effect to reify them. (The "originary enlightenment" theories of medieval Japanese
Buddhism seem to fit this latter case.)
if there was
something approximating a climax paradigm to Song-dynasty Chan, this could only
be known by looking at how Chan evolves in later periods and in other contexts.
To change metaphors, my claim is that Song-dynasty Chan represents the primary
lens through which subsequent developments in Chan were understood, whether
those developments took place in China, Korea, Japan, or even the modern, non-Asian world. Therefore, in order to appreciate the true
dimensions of the "Song-dynasty climax paradigm" we would have to
evaluate the dynamics of evolution and transmission that govern Chan in later
times and other places. To the extent that the study of Chan/Sôn/Zen/ Thien as a whole has
been based on the mistaken romanticism and simplistic thinking manifested so
clearly in writing about Chinese Chan, we will have to rework our most
cherished theories about these later times and other places as well. What were
the constraints -and possibilitiesplaced on the
tradition as it developed in post-Song China, or in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam?
If participants in the tradition in those cultures looked through the lens of
Song-dynasty Chan, what exactly did they see? In answering this question we
will have to consider how the participants in those cultures saw themselves,
their own pasts, and the role of Buddhism in their lives. The avenues of
inquiry are virtually endless-such exciting possibilities for future research,
so many different ways of seeing through Zen.
Mostly scholars have
worked on one or the other, the non-Hàn peoples from
the first millennium B.C.E. onward and the introduction and evolution of
Buddhism from the first century B.C.E. onward. But to date no one has
systematically considered the interrelationship between them. A common pattern
has been to invoke the rhetoric of sinification
without applying any significant analysis of its historical realities. This
statement applies to Peter Gregory's excellent study of Zôngmi
and Tang-dynasty Buddhism, Tsung-mi and the Sinification of Buddhism, which, in
spite of the title, never addresses the conceptual issues or broader processes
involved. Robert Sharf, Coming to Terms with Chinese
Buddhism (esp.p. 77-132), provides some very
provocative comments regarding the "process that logically precedes the
intentional adaptation and domestication of Buddhism by Chinese
apologists" (p.98), which he refers to as the "hermeneutics of sinification" (p.132), but he does not consider the
actual historical dynamics involved. However participants in East Asian
Buddhism were also active contributors to the dynamics of sinification.
But Song-dynasty Chan
represents the primary lens through which subsequent developments in Chan were
understood, whether those developments took place in China, Korea, Japan, or
even the modem, non-Asian world. And to the extent
that the study of Chan/Sön/Zen/ Thien
as a whole has been based on the mistaken romanticism and simplistic thinking
manifested so clearly in writing about Chinese Chan, one would have to
rework most previous theories about these later times and other
places as well. What were the constraints-and possibilities placed on the
tradition as it developed in post Song China, or in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam?
If participants in the tradition in those cultures looked through the lens of
Song-dynasty Chan, what exactly did they see? In answering this question we
will have to consider how the participants in those cultures saw themselves,
their own pasts, and the role of Buddhism in their lives.
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