The Zen Experience

Author: Thomas Hoover

Pages: 581,311 Pages

Audio Length: 8 hr 4 min

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THE ZEN EXPERIENCE

Library Journal called it, “The best history of Zen ever written.”

The truth of Zen has always resided in individual experience rather than in theoretical writings. To give the modern reader access to understanding of this truth, THE ZEN EXPERIENCE illumines Zen as it was created and shaped by the personalities, perceptions, and actions of its masters over the centuries.

Beginning with the twin roots of Zen in Indian Buddhism and Chinese Taoism, we follow it through its initial flowering in China under the First Patriarch Bodhidharma; its division into schools of “gradual” and “sudden” enlightenment under Shen-hsui and Shen-hui; the ushering in of its golden age by Hui-neng; the development of “shock” enlightenment by Ma-tsu; its poetic greatness in the person of Han-shan; the perfection of the use of the koan by Ta-hui; the migration of Zen to Japan and its extraordinary growth there under a succession of towering Japanese spiritual leaders.

Rich in historical background, vivid in revealing anecdote and memorable quotation, this long-needed work succeeds admirably in taking Zen from the library shelves and restoring its living, human form.

BOOKS BY THOMAS HOOVER

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THE

ZEN

EXPERIENCE

Thomas Hoover

SIGNET, SIGNET CLASSICS, MENTOR, PLUME, MERIDIAN AND NAL BOOKS are published in the United States by The New American Library, Inc., 1633 Broadway, New York, New York 10019.

First Printing, March, 1980

23456789

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Bibliography Zen Buddhism—History. Priests, Zen—Biography.

ISBN 0-452-25228-8

www.thomashoover.info

Key words:

Author: Thomas Hoover

Title: The Zen Experience

Zen History, Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, Zen History, Seng-Chao, Tao-sheng, Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Kuo Hsiang, Nagarjuna, Seng-chao, Tao-Sheng, Bodhidharma, Hui’ko, Seng-Ts’an, Tao-hsin, Fa-jung, Hung-jen, Shen-hsiu, Hui-neng, Ma-tsu, Huai-hai, Nan’chuan, Chao-Chou, P’ang, Han-shan, Huang-po, Lin-Chi, Rinzai, Soto, Tung-shan, Ts’ao-shan, Kuei-shan, Yun-men, Fa-yen, Ta-hui, Eisai, Dogen, Hakuin

PERMISSIONS

Selections from Zen and Zen Classics, Vols.I and II, by R.H.Blyth (Tokyo: The Hokuseido Press, copyright © 1960, 1964 by R.H.Blyth, copyright © 1978 by Frederick Franck), reprinted by permission of Joan Daves.

Selections from Cold Mountain by Han-shan, Burton Watson, trans. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), reprinted by permission of publisher.

Selections from The Recorded Sayings of Layman Pang, Ruth Fuller Sasaki et al., trans.(New York: John Weatherhill), reprinted by permission of publisher.

Selection from A History of Zen Buddhism by Heinrich S.J.Dumoulin, Paul Peachey, trans.(New York: Pantheon Books, 1962), reprinted by permission of publisher.

Selection by Ikkyu from Some Japanese Portraits by Donald Keene (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1979), reprinted by permission of author.

Selections from Essays in Zen Buddhism by D.T.Suzuki (New York: Grove Press), reprinted by permission of publisher.

Selection from The Sutra of Hui-neng, Price and Wong, trans.(Boulder: Shambala Publications), reprinted by permission of publisher.

Selections from The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, Philip Yamplosky, trans.(New York: Columbia University Press), reprinted by permission of publisher.

Selections from The Zen Master Hakuin by Philip Yamplosky (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), reprinted by permission of publisher.

Selections from The Golden Age of Zen by John C.H.Wu (Taipei, Taiwan: Hwakang Book Store), reprinted by permission of author.

Selections from The Zen Teaching of the Hui Hai on Sudden Illumination by John Blofeld (New York: Samuel Weiser, 1972), reprinjted by permission of publisher.

Selections from Zen Master Dogen by Yoho Yukoi (New York: John Weatherhill), reprinted by permission of publisher.

Selections from Original Teachings of Ch'an Buddhism by Chang Chung-yuan (New York: Vintage, 1969), reprinted by permission of publisher.

Selections from Zen-Man Ikkyu, a dissertation by John Sanford, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, reprinted by permission of author.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Heartfelt thanks go to Dr. Philip Yampolsky of Columbia University, who reviewed the manuscript in draft and clarified many points of fact and interpretation.I also am indebted to the works of a number of Zen interpreters for the West, including D.T.Suzuki, John Blofeld, Chang Chung-yuan, and Charles Luk.In cases where this finger pointing at the moon mistakenly aims astray, I alone am responsible.

CONTENTS

Preface to Zen

Taoism: The Way to Zen

Lao Tzu

Chuang Tzu

Kuo Hsiang: A Neo-Taoist

The Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove

The Buddhist Roots of Zen

The Buddha

Nagarjuna

Kumarajiva

Seng-chao

Tao-sheng

The Synthesis

PART I.THE EARLY MASTERS

1.Bodhidharma: First Patriarch of Zen

2.Hui-k'o: Second Patriarch of Zen

3.Seng-Ts'an, Tao-hsin, Fa-jung, and Hung-jen: Four Early Masters

4.Shen-hsiu and Shen-hui: "Gradual" and

"Sudden" Masters

5.Hui-neng: Sixth Patriarch and Father of Modern Zen

PART II.THE GOLDEN AGE OF ZEN

6.Ma-tsu: Originator of "Shock" Enlightenment

7.Huai-hai: Father of Monastic Ch'an

8.Nan-ch'uan and Chao-chou: Masters of the Irrational

9.P'ang and Han-shan: Layman and Poet

10.Huang-po: Master of the Universal Mind

PART III.SECTARIANISM AND THE KOAN

11.Lin-chi: Founder of Rinzai Zen

12.Tung-shan and Ts'ao-shan: Founders of Soto Zen

13.Kuei-shan, Yun-men, and Fa-yen: Three Minor Houses

14.Ta-hui: Master of the Koan

PART IV. ZEN IN JAPAN

15.Eisai: The First Japanese Master

16.Dogen: Father of Japanese Soto Zen

17.Ikkyu: Zen Eccentric

18.Hakuin: Japanese Master of the Koan

19.Reflections

Notes

Bibliography

THE ZEN EXPERIENCE

The sole aim of Zen is to enable one to understand, realize,

and perfect his own mind.

Garma C.C.Chang

PREFACE TO ZEN

Lao Tzu, Buddha, Confucius

Some call it "seeing," some call it "knowing," and some describe it in religious terms. Whatever the name, it is our reach for a new level of consciousness. Of the many forms this search has taken, perhaps the most intriguing is Zen. Growing out of the wisdom of China, India, and Japan, Zen became a powerful movement to explore the lesser-known reaches of the human mind.Today Zen has come westward, where we are rediscovering modern significance in its ancient insights.This book is an attempt to encounter Zen in its purest form, by returning to the greatest Zen masters.

Zen teachings often appear deceptively simple.This misconception is compounded by the Zen claim that explanations are meaningless.They are, of course, but merely because genuine Zen insights can arise only from individual experience.And although our experience can be described and even analyzed, it cannot be transmitted or shared.At most, the "teachings" of Zen can only clear the way to our deeper consciousness.The rest is up to us.

Zen is based on the recognition of two incompatible types of thought: rational and intuitive.Rationality employs language, logic, reason.Its precepts can be taught.Intuitive knowledge, however, is different.It lurks embedded in our consciousness, beyond words.Unlike rational thought, intuition cannot be "taught" or even turned on.In fact, it is impossible to find or manipulate this intuitive consciousness using our rational mind—any more than we can grasp our own hand or see our own eye.

The Zen masters devised ways to reach this repressed area of human consciousness.Some of their techniques—like meditation—were borrowed from Indian Buddhism, and some—like their antirational paradoxes—may have been learned from Chinese Taoists.But other inventions, like their jarring shouts and blows, emerged from their own experience.Throughout it all, however, their words and actions were only a means, never an end.

That end is an intuitive realization of a single great insight—that we and the world around are one, both part of a larger encompassing absolute.Our rational intellect merely obscures this truth, and consequently we must shut it off, if only for a moment.Rationality constrains our mind; intuition releases it.

The irony is that the person glimpsing this moment of higher consciousness, this Oneness, encounters the ultimate realization that there is nothing to realize.The world is still there, unchanged.But the difference is that it is now an extension of our consciousness, seen directly and not analytically.And since it is redundant to be attached to something already a part of you, there is a sudden sense of freedom from our agonizing bondage to things.

Along with this also comes release from the constraints of artificial values.Creating systems and categories is not unlike counting the colors of a rainbow—both merely detract from our experience of reality, while at the same time limiting our appreciation of the world's richness.And to declare something right or wrong is similarly nearsighted.As Alan Watts once observed, "Zen unveils behind the urgent realm of good and evil a vast region of oneself about which there need be no guilt or recrimination, where at last the self is indistinguishable from God."And, we might add, where God is also one with our consciousness, our self.In Zen all dualities dissolve, absorbed in the larger reality that simply is.

None of these things is taught explicitly in Zen.Instead they are discovered waiting in our consciousness after all else has been swept away.A scornful twelfth-century Chinese scholar summarized the Zen method as follows: "Since the Zen masters never run the risk of explaining anything in plain language, their followers must do their own pondering and puzzling—from which a real threshing-out results."In these pages we will watch the threshing-out of Zen itself—as its masters unfold a new realm of consciousness, the Zen experience.

TAOISM: THE WAY TO ZEN

Taoism is the original religion of ancient China. It is founded on the idea that a fundamental principle, the Tao, underlies all nature. Long before the appearance of Zen, Taoists were teaching the superiority of intuitive thought, using an anti-intellectualism that often ridiculed the logic-bound limitations of conventional Chinese life and letters. However, Taoism was always upbeat and positive in its acceptance of reality, a quality that also rubbed off on Zen over the centuries. Furthermore, many Taoist philosophers left writings whose world view seems almost Zen-like. The early Chinese teachers of meditation (called dhyana in Sanskrit and Ch'an in Chinese) absorbed the Taoist tradition of intuitive wisdom, and later Zen masters often used Taoist expressions.It is fitting, therefore, that we briefly meet some of the most famous teachers of Chinese Taoism.

LAO TZU

One of the most influential figures in ancient Chinese lore is remembered today merely as Lao Tzu (Venerable Master). Taoist legends report he once disputed (and bettered) the scholarly Confucius, but that he finally despaired of the world and rode an oxcart off into the west, pausing at the Han-ku Pass—on the insistence of its keeper—to set down his insights in a five-thousand-character poem. This work, the Tao Te Ching (The Way and the Power), was an eloquent, organized, and lyrical statement of an important point of view in China of the sixth century B. C. , an understanding later to become an essential element of Ch'an Buddhism.

The word "Tao" means many, many things—including the elan vital or life force of the universe, the harmonious structuring of human affairs, and—perhaps most important—a reality transcending words.Taoists declared there is a knowledge not accessible by language.As the Tao Te Ching announces in its opening line, "The Tao that can be put into words is not the real Tao."

Also fundamental to the Tao is the unity of mind and matter, of the one who knows and the thing known.The understanding of a truth and the truth itself cannot be separated.The Tao includes and unifies these into a larger "reality" encompassing both.The notion that our knowledge is distinguishable from that known is an illusion.

Another teaching of the Tao Te Ching is that intuitive insight surpasses rational analysis.When we act on our spontaneous judgment, we are almost always better off.Chapter 19 declares, "Let the people be free from discernment and relinquish intellection . . .Hold to one's original nature . . .Eliminate artificial learning and one will be free from anxieties."¹ The wise defer to a realm of insight floating in our mind beyond its conscious state.

Taoists also questioned the value of social organization, holding that the best government is the one governing least and that "the wise deal with things through non-interference and teach through no-words."² Taoists typically refused to draw value judgments on others' behavior. Lao Tzu asks, "What is the difference between good and bad?"³ and concludes, "Goodness often turns out to be evil."⁴ There is complete acceptance of what is, with no desire to make things "better." Lao Tzu believed "good" and "bad" were both part of Tao and therefore, "Even if a man is unworthy, Tao will never exclude him."⁵ If all things are one, there can be no critical differentiation of any part. This concentration on inner perception, to the exclusion of practical concerns, evoked a criticism from the third-century-B. C. Confucian philosopher Hsun Tzu that has a curiously modern ring of social consciousness. "Lao Tzu understood looking inward, but knew nothing of looking outward. . . . If there is merely inward-looking and never outward-looking, there can be no distinction between what has value and what has not, between what is precious and what is vile, between what is noble and what is vulgar."⁶ But the refusal of Lao Tzu to intellectualize what is natural or to sit in judgment over the world was the perfect Chinese precedent for Ch'an.

CHUANG TZU

The second important figure in Taoism is the almost equally legendary teacher remembered as Chuang Tzu, who is usually placed in the fourth century B.C., some two centuries after Lao Tzu.An early historian tells that once Chuang Tzu was invited to the court to serve as a minister, an invitation he declined with a typical story: An ox is selected for a festival and fattened up for several years, living the life of wealth and indulgence—until the day he is led away for sacrifice.At that reckoning what would he give to return to the simple life, where there was poverty but also freedom?

In Chuang Tzu's own book of wisdom, he also derided the faith in rationality common to Chinese scholars. To emphasize his point he devised a vehicle for assaulting the apparatus of logic—that being a "nonsense" story whose point could only be understood intuitively. , There has yet to be found a more deadly weapon against pompous intellectualizing, as the Ch'an Buddhists later proved with the koan. Chuang Tzu also knew how quickly comedy could deflate, and he used it with consummate skill, again paving the way for the absurdist Zen masters. In fact, his dialogues often anticipate the Zen mondo, the exchanges between master and pupil that have comic/straight-man overtones.

In this regard, Chuang Tzu also sometimes anticipates twentieth-century writers for the Theater of the Absurd, such as Beckett or Ionesco.Significantly, the Columbia scholar Burton Watson suggests that the most fruitful path to Chuang Tzu "is not to attempt to subject his thoughts to rational and systematic analysis, but to read and reread his words until one has ceased to think of what he is saying and instead has developed an intuitive sense of the mind moving beyond the words, and of the world in which it moves."⁷This is undoubtedly true.The effect of comic parody on logic is so telling that the only way to really understand the message is to stop trying to "understand" it.

Concerning the limitations of verbal transmission, Chuang Tzu tells a story of a wheelmaker who once advised his duke that the book of ancient thought the man was reading was "nothing but the lees and scum of bygone men."The duke angrily demanded an explanation—and received a classic defense of the superiority of intuitive understanding over language and logic.

I look at the matter in this way; when I am making a wheel, if my stroke is too slow, then it bites deep but is not steady; if my stroke is too fast, then it is steady, but does not go deep.The right pace, neither slow nor fast, cannot get into the hand unless it comes from the heart.It is a thing that cannot be put into words; there is an art in it that I cannot explain to my son.That is why it is impossible for me to let him take over my work, and here I am at the age of seventy, still making wheels.In my opinion, it must have been the same with the men of old.All that was worth handing on died with them; the rest, they put into their books.⁸

Chuang Tzu's parable that perhaps best illustrates the Taoist ideal concerns a cook who had discovered one lives best by following nature's rhythms. The cook explained that his naturalness was easy after he learned to let intuition guide his actions.This approach he called practicing the Tao, but it is in fact the objective of Zen practice as well.

Prince Wen Hui remarked, "How wonderfully you have mastered your art."The cook laid down his knife and said, "What your servant really cares for is Tao, which goes beyond mere art.When I first began to cut up oxen, I saw nothing but oxen.After three years of practicing, I no longer saw the ox as a whole.I now work with my spirit, not with my eyes.My senses stop functioning and my spirit takes over."⁹

What he described is the elimination of the rational mind, which he refers to as the senses, and the reliance upon the intuitive part of his mind, here called the spirit.He explained how this intuitive approach allowed him to work naturally.

A good cook changes his knife once a year because he cuts, while a mediocre cook has to change his every month because he hacks.I've had this knife of mine for nineteen years and have cut up thousands of oxen with it, and yet the edge is as if it were fresh from the grindstone.There are spaces between the joints.The blade of the knife has no thickness.That which has no thickness has plenty of room to pass through these spaces.Therefore, after nineteen years, my blade is as sharp as ever.¹⁰

Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu did not see themselves as founders of any formal religion.They merely described the obvious, encouraging others to be a part of nature and not its antagonist.Their movement, now called Philosophical Taoism, was eclipsed during the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-A.D.220) in official circles by various other systems of thought, most particularly Confucianism (which stressed obedience to authority—both that of elders and of superiors—and reverence for formalized learning, not to mention the acceptance of a structured hierarchy as part of one's larger social responsibility).However, toward the end of the Han era there arose two new types of Taoism: an Esoteric Taoism that used physical disciplines to manipulate consciousness, and a Popular Taoism that came close to being a religion in the traditional mold.The first was mystical Esoteric Taoism, which pursued the prolonging of life and vigor, but this gave way during later times to Popular Taoism, a metaphysical alternative to the comfortless, arid Confucianism of the scholarly establishment.

The post-Han era saw the Philosophical Taoism of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu emerge anew among Chinese intellectuals, actually coming to vie with Confucianism. This whole era witnessed a turning away from the accepted values of society, as the well-organized government of the Han era dissolved into political and intellectual confusion. Government was unstable and corrupt, and the Confucianism which had been its philosophical underpinning was stilted and unsatisfying. Whenever a society breaks down, the belief system supporting it naturally comes under question. This happened in China in the third and fourth centuries of the Christian era, and from it emerged a natural opposition to Confucianism. One form of this opposition was the imported religion of Buddhism, which provided a spiritual solace missing in the teachings of Confucius, while the other was a revival among intellectuals of Philosophical Taoism.

KUO HSIANG: A NEO-TAOIST

In this disruptive environment, certain intellectuals returned again to the insights of Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu, creating a movement today known as Neo-Taoism. One of the thinkers who tried to reinterpret original Taoist ideas for the new times was Kuo Hsiang (d. ca. 312), who co-authored a major document of Neo-Taoism entitled Commentary on the Chuang Tzu. It focused on the important Taoist idea of wu-wei, once explained as follows: " . . . to them the key concept of Taoism, wu (literally, nonexistence), is not nothingness, but pure being, which transcends forms and names, and precisely because it is absolute and complete, can accomplish everything. The sage is not one who withdraws into the life of a hermit, but a man of social and political achievements, although these achievements must be brought about through wu-wei, 'nonaction' or 'taking no [unnatural] action.' ^1,11

This concept of wu-wei has also been described as abstaining from activity contrary to nature and acting in a spontaneous rather than calculated fashion.In Kuo Hsiang's words:

Being natural means to exist spontaneously without having to take any action. . . .By taking no action is not meant folding one's arms and closing one's mouth.If we simply let everything act by itself, it will be contented with its nature and destiny.(12)

Kuo Hsiang's commentary expanded on almost all the major ideas of Chuang Tzu, drawing out with logic what originally had been set in absurdism.Criticizing this, a later Ch'an monk observed, "People say Kuo Hsiang wrote a commentary on Chuang Tzu.I would say it was Chuang Tzu who wrote a commentary on Kuo Hsiang."¹³ Nonetheless, the idea of wu-wei, processed through Buddhism, emerged in different guise in later Ch'an, influencing the concept of "no-mind."

THE SEVEN SAGES OF THE BAMBOO GROVE

Other Chinese were content merely to live the ideas of Neo-Taoism.Among these were the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, men part of a larger movement known as the School of Pure Conversation.Their favorite pastime was to gather north of Loyang on the estate of one of their members, where they engaged in refined conversation, wrote poetry and music, and (not incidentally) drank wine.To some extent they reflected the recluse ideal of old, except that they found the satisfaction of the senses no impediment to introspection.What they did forswear, however, was the world of getting and spending.Although men of distinction, they rejected fame, ambition, and worldly station.

There is a story that one of the Seven Sages, a man named Liu Ling (ca.221-330), habitually received guests while completely naked.His response to adverse comment was to declare, "I take the whole universe as my house and my own room as my clothing.Why, then, do you enter here into my trousers."¹⁴

It is also told that two of the sages (Juan Chi, 210-63, and his nephew Juan Hsien) often sat drinking with their family in such conviviality that they skipped the nuisance of cups and just drank directly from a wine bowl on the ground.When pigs wandered by, these too were invited to sip from the same chalice.If one exempts all nature—including pigs—from distinction, discrimination, and duality, why exclude them as drinking companions?

But perhaps the most significant insight of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove was their recognition of the limited uses of language.We are told, "They engaged in conversation 'til, as they put it, they reached the Unnameable, and 'stopped talking and silently understood each other with a smile.'"^1S

THE BUDDHIST ROOTS OF ZEN

There is a legend the Buddha was once handed a flower and asked to preach on the law.The story says he received the blossom without a sound and silently wheeled it in his hand.Then amid the hush his most perceptive follower, Kashyapa, suddenly burst into a smile . . .and thus was born the wordless wisdom of Zen.

The understanding of this silent insight was passed down

through the centuries, independent of the scriptures, finally emerging as the Chinese school of Ch'an, later called Zen by the Japanese.It is said the absence of early writings about the school is nothing more than would be expected of a teaching which was, by definition, beyond words.The master Wen-yu summed it up when he answered a demand for the First Principle of Ch'an with, "If words could tell you, it would become the Second Principle."

This version of Zen's origin is satisfying, and for all we know it may even be true.But there are other, considerably more substantive, sources for the ideas that came to flower as Ch'an.Taoism, of course, had plowed away at the Confucianist clutter restraining the Chinese mind, but it was Buddhism that gave China the necessary new philosophical structure—this being the metaphysical speculations of India.Pure Chinese naturalism met Indian abstraction, and the result was Ch'an.The school of Ch'an was in part the grafting of fragile foreign ideas (Buddhism) onto a sturdy native species of understanding (Taoism).But its simplicity was in many ways a re-expression of the Buddha's original insights.

THE BUDDHA

The historic Buddha was born to the high-caste family Gautama during the sixth century B.C.in the region that is today northeast India and Nepal.After a childhood and youth of indulgence he turned to asceticism and for over half a decade rigorously followed the traditional Indian practices of fasting and meditation, only finally to reject these in despair.However, an auspicious dream and one final meditation at last brought total enlightenment.Gautama the seeker had become Buddha the Enlightened, and he set out to preach.

It was not gods that concerned him, but the mind of man and its sorrowing.We are unhappy, he explained, because we are slaves to our desires.Extinguish desire and suffering goes with it.If people could be taught that the physical or phenomenal world is illusion, then they would cease their attachment to it, thereby finding release from their self-destructive mental bondage.

The Buddha neglected to set down these ideas in written form however, perhaps unwisely leaving this task to later generations.His teachings subsequently were recreated in the form of sermons or sutras.In later years, the Buddhist movement split into two separate philosophical camps, known today as Theravada and Mahayana.The Theravada Buddhists—found primarily in southeast Asia, Sri Lanka, and Burma—venerate the early writings of Buddhism (known today as the Pali Canon) and tend to content themselves with practicing the philosophy of the Buddha rather than enlarging upon it with speculative commentaries.By contrast, the followers of Mahayana—who include the bulk of all Buddhists in China, Japan, and Tibet—left the simple prescriptions of the Buddha far behind in their creation of a vast new literature (in Sanskrit, Tibetan, and Chinese) of complex theologies.Chinese Ch'an grew out of Mahayana, as of course did Japanese Zen.

NAGARJUNA

After the Buddha, perhaps the most important Buddhist figure is the second-century A.D.Indian philosopher Nagarjuna.Some call him the most important thinker Asia has produced.According to Tibetan legends his parents sent him away from home at seven because an astrologer had predicted his early death and they wished to be spared the sight.But he broke the spell by entering Buddhist orders, and went on to become the faith's foremost philosopher.

Today Nagarjuna is famous for his analysis of the so-called Wisdom Books of Mahayana, a set of Sanskrit sutras composed between 100 B.C.and A.D.100.(Included in this category are The Perfection of Wisdom in 8,000 Lines, as well as the Diamond Sutra and Heart Sutra, both essential scriptures of Zen.)Nagarjuna was the originator of the Middle Path, so named because it strove to define a middle ground between affirmation of the world and complete negation of existence.

Reality, said Nagarjuna, cannot be realized through conceptual constructions, since concepts are contained inside reality, not vice versa. Consequently, only through the intuitive mind can reality be approached. His name for this "reality" beyond the mind's analysis was sunyata, usually translated as "emptiness" but sometimes as "the Void."(Sunyata is perhaps an unprovable concept, but so too are the ego and the unconscious, both hypothetical constructs useful in explaining reality but impossible to locate on the operating table.)Nagarjuna's most-quoted manifesto has the logic-defying ring of a Zen : "Nothing comes into existence nor does anything disappear.Nothing is eternal, nor has anything any end.Nothing is identical or differentiated.Nothing moves hither and thither."

As the Ch'an teachers interpreted the teaching of sunyata, the things of this world are all a mental creation, since external phenomena are transient and only exist for us because of our perception.Consequently they are actually "created" by our mind (or, if you will, a more universal entity called Mind).Consequently they do not exist outside our mind and hence are a void.Yet the

mind itself, which is the only thing real, is also a void since its thoughts cannot be located by the five senses. The Void is therefore everything, since it includes both the world and the mind. Hence, sunyata

As a modern Nagarjuna scholar has described sunyata, or emptiness, it is a positive sense of freedom, not a deprivation

"This awareness of 'emptiness' is not a blank loss of consciousness, an inanimate space; rather it is the cognition of daily life without the attachment to it. It is an awareness of distinct entities, of the self, of 'good' and 'bad' and other practical determinations; but it is aware of these as empty structures."¹⁶

The Zen masters found ways to achieve the cognition without attachment postulated by Nagarjuna, and they paid him homage by making him one of the legendary twenty-eight Indian Patriarchs of Zen by posthumous decree.

KUMARAJIVA

The Indian missionary who transmitted the idea of Emptiness to China was Kumarajiva (344-413), a swashbuckling guru who, more than any other individual, was responsible for planting sophisticated Mahayana Buddhist ideas in Chinese soil.Before telling his story, however, it may be well to reflect briefly on how Buddhism got to China in the first place.

Although there are records of a Buddhist missionary in China as early as A.D.148, historians are hard pressed to find the name of an out-and-out native Chinese Buddhist before sometime in the third century.Buddhism, which at first apparently was confused with Taoism, seems to have come into fashion after the Neo-Taoists ran out of creative steam.Shortly thereafter, around A.D.209, intelligible Chinese translations of Indian Mahayana sutras finally began to become available.

There were many things about Buddhism, however, that rubbed Chinese the wrong way.First there were the practical matters: Buddhism allowed, if not encouraged, begging, celibacy, and neglect of ancestors—all practices to rankle any traditional Chinese.Then there were fundamental philosophical differences: Buddhism offered to break one out of the Hindu cycle of rebirth, something the Chinese had not realized they needed; and Indian thought was naturally geared to cosmic time, with its endless cycles of eons, whereas the Chinese saw time as a line leading back to identifiable ancestors.Early missionaries tried to gain acceptability for Buddhism by explaining it in Taoist terms, including stretching the two enough to find "matching concepts" or ideas with superficial similarity, and they also let out the myth that the Buddha was actually Lao Tzu, who had gone on to India after leaving China.

When barbarians sacked the Northern Chinese center of Loyang in the year 313 and took over North China's government, many of its influential Confucianist scholars fled to the south.These emigres were disillusioned with the social ideas of Confucianism and ready for a solace of the spirit.Thus they turned for comfort to Buddhist ideas, but using Neo-Taoist terminology and often treating Buddhism more as a subject for salon speculations than as a religion.By translating Buddhism into a Neo-Taoist framework, these southern intellectuals effectively avoided having to grapple with the new ideas in Buddhist metaphysics.

In North China, the Buddhists took advantage of the new absence of competing Confucianists to move into ruling circles and assume the role of the literate class.They preached a simple form of Buddhism, often shamelessly dwelling on magic and incantations to arouse interest among the greatest number of followers.The common people were drawn to Buddhism, since it provided for the first time in China a religion that seemed to care for people's suffering, their personal growth, their salvation in an afterlife.Thus Buddhism took hold in North China mainly because it provided hope and magic for the masses and a political firewall against Confucianism for the new rulers.As late as the beginning of the fifth century, therefore, Buddhism was misunderstood and encouraged for the wrong reasons in both north and south.

Kumarajiva, who would change all this, was born in Kucha to an Indian father of the Brahmin caste and a mother of noble blood. When he was seven he and his mother traveled to Kashmir to enter Buddhist orders together. After several years of studying the Theravada sutras, he moved on to Kashgar, where he turned his attention to Mahayana philosophy. At age twenty we find him back in Kucha, being ordained in the king's palace and sharpening his understanding of the Mahayana scriptures. He also, we are told, sharpened his non-Buddhist amorous skills, perhaps finding consolation in the illusory world of the senses for the hollow emptiness of sunyata

In the year 382 or 383, he was taken captive and removed to a remote area in northeastern China, where he was held prisoner for almost two decades, much to the dismay of the rulers in Ch'ang-an, who wanted nothing more than to have this teacher (who was by then a famous Buddhist scholar) for their own. After seventeen years their patience ran out and they sent an army to defeat his recalcitrant captors and bring him back. He arrived in Ch'ang-an in the year 401 and immediately began a project crucial to the future of Chinese Buddhism. A modern scholar of Chinese religion tells what happened next.

". . .Chinese monks were assembled from far and near to work with him in translating the sacred texts.This was a 'highly structured project,' suggestive of the cooperative enterprises of scientists today.There were corps of specialists at all levels: those who discussed doctrinal questions with Kumarajiva, those who checked the new translations against the old and imperfect ones, hundreds of editors, sub-editors, and copyists.The quality and quantity of the translations produced by these men in the space of eight years is truly astounding.Thanks to their efforts the ideas of Mahayana Buddhism were presented in Chinese with far greater clarity and precision than ever before.Sunyata—Nagar- juna's concept of the Void—was disentangled from the Taoist terminology that had obscured and distorted it, and this and other key doctrines of Buddhism were made comprehensible enough to lay the intellectual foundations of the great age of independent Chinese Buddhism that was to follow."¹⁷

The Chinese rulers contrived to put Kumarajiva's other devotion to use as well, installing a harem of ten beautiful young Chinese girls for him, through whom he was encouraged to perpetuate a lineage of his own.This genetic experiment apparently came to nothing, but two native Chinese studying under him, Seng-chao (384-414) and Tao-sheng (ca.360-434), would carry his contribution through the final steps needed to open the way for the development of Ch'an.

SENG-CHAO

The short-lived Seng-chao was born to a humble family in the Ch'ang-an region, where he reportedly got his indispensable grounding in the Chinese classics by working as a copyist.He originally was a confirmed Taoist, but after reading the sutra of Vimalakirti (which described a pious nobleman who combined the secular life of a bon vivant businessman with an inner existence of Buddhist enlightenment, a combination instantly attractive to the practical Chinese), Seng-chao turned Buddhist.In the year 398, at age fifteen, he traveled to the northwest to study personally under the famous Kumarajiva, and he later returned to Ch'ang-an with the master.

Conversant first in the Taoist and then in the Buddhist classics, Seng-chao began the real synthesis of the two that would eventually evolve into Ch'an.The China scholar Walter Liebenthal has written that the doctrine of Nagarjuna's Middle Path, sinicized by Seng-chao, emerged in the later Ch'an thinkers cleansed of the traces of Indian origin.He declares, "Seng-chao interpreted Mahayana, [the Ch'an founders] Hui-neng and Shen-hui re-thought it."¹⁸

Three of Seng-chao's treatises exist today as the Book of Chao (or Chao Lun), and they give an idea of how Chuang Tzu might have written had he been a Buddhist.There is the distrust of words, the unmistakable preference for immediate, intuitive knowledge, and the masterful use of wordplay and paradox that leaves his meaning ambiguous.Most important of all, he believed that truth had to be experienced, not reasoned out.Truth was what lay behind words; it should never be confused with the words themselves:

“A thing called up by a name may not appear as what it is expected to appear; a name calling up a thing may not lead to the real thing.Therefore the sphere of Truth is beyond the noise of verbal teaching.How then can it be made the subject of discussion?Still I cannot remain silent.”¹⁹

The dean of Zen scholars, Heinrich Dumoulin, declares, "The relationship of Seng-chao to Zen is to be found in his orientation toward the immediate and experiential perception of absolute truth, and reveals itself in his preference for the paradox as the means of expressing the inexpressible."²⁰ Dumoulin also notes that the Book of Chao regards the way to enlightenment as one of gradual progress. However, the idea that truth can be approached gradually was disputed by the other major pupil of Kumarajiva, whose insistence that enlightenment must arrive instantaneously has caused some to declare him the ideological founder of Zen.

TAO-SHENG

The famous Tao-sheng was the first Chinese Buddhist to advance the idea of "sudden" enlightenment, and as a result he earned the enmity of his immediate colleagues—and lasting fame as having anticipated one of the fundamental innovations of Zen thought.He first studied Buddhism at Lu-shan, but in 405 he moved to Ch'ang-an, becoming for a while a part of the coterie surrounding Kumarajiva.None of his writings survive, but the work of a colleague, Hui-yuan, is usually taken as representative of his ideas.

Tao-sheng is known today for two theories.The first was that good deeds do not automatically bring reward, a repudiation of the Indian Buddhist concept of merit.The other, and perhaps more important, deviation he preached was that enlightenment was instantaneous.The reason, he said, was simple: since Buddhists say the world is one, nothing is divisible, even truth, and therefore the subjective understanding of truth must come all at once or not at all.Preparatory work and progress toward the goal of enlightenment, including study and meditation, could proceed step-by-step and are wholesome and worthwhile, but to "reach the other shore," as the phrase in the Heart Sutra describes enlightenment, requires a leap over a gulf, a realization that must hit you with all its force the first time.

What exactly is it that you understand on the other shore?First you come to realize—as you can only realize intuitively and directly—that enlightenment was within you all along.You become enlightened when you finally recognize that you already had it.The next realization is that there actually is no "other shore," since reaching it means realizing that there was nothing to reach.As his thoughts have been quoted: "As to reaching the other shore, if one reaches it, one is not reaching the other shore.Both not-reaching and not-not-reaching are really reaching. . . .If one sees Buddha, one is not seeing Buddha.When one sees there is no Buddha, one is really seeing Buddha."²¹

Little wonder Tao-sheng is sometimes credited as the spiritual father of Zen. He championed the idea of sudden enlightenment, something inimical to much of the Buddhism that had gone before, and he distrusted words (comparing them to a net which, after it has caught the fish of truth, should be discarded). He identified the Taoist idea of wu-wei or "nonaction" with the intuitive, spontaneous apprehension of truth without logic, opening the door for the Ch'an mainstay of "no-mind" as a way to ultimate truth.

THE SYNTHESIS

Buddhism has always maintained a skeptical attitude toward reality and appearances, something obviously at odds with the wholehearted celebration of nature that characterizes Taoism.Whereas Buddhism believes it would be best if we could simply ignore the world, the source of our psychic pain, the Taoists wanted nothing so much as to have complete union with this same world.Buddhism teaches union with the Void, while Taoism teaches union with the Tao.At first they seem opposite directions.But the synthesis of these doctrines appeared in Zen, which taught that the oneness of the Void, wherein all reality is subsumed, could be understood as an encompassing whole or continuum, as in the Tao.Both are merely expressions of the Absolute.The Buddhists unite with the Void; the Taoists yearn to merge with the Tao.In Zen the two ideas reconcile.

With this philosophical prelude in place, we may now turn to the masters who created the world of Zen.

PART I

THE EARLY MASTERS

. . . in which a sixth-century Indian teacher of meditation, Bodhidharma, arrives in China to initiate what would become a Buddhist school of meditation called Ch'an. After several generations as wanderers, these Ch'an teachers settle into a form of monastic life and gradually grow in prominence and recognition. Out of this prosperity emerges a split in the eighth-century Ch'an movement, between scholarly urban teachers who believe enlightenment is "gradual" and requires preparation in traditional Buddhism, and rural Ch'anists who scorn society and insist enlightenment is experiential and "sudden," owing little to the prosperous Buddhist establishment. Then a popular teacher of rural Ch'an, capitalizing on a civil disruption that momentarily weakens the urban elite, gains the upper hand and emasculates urban Ch'an through his preaching that the authentic line of teaching must be traced to an obscure teacher in the rural south, now remembered as the Sixth Patriarch, Hui-neng.

CHAPTER ONE

BODHIDHARMA: FIRST PATRIARCH OF ZEN

There is a Zen legend that a bearded Indian monk named Bodhidharma (ca. 470-532), son of a South Indian Brahmin king, appeared one day at the southern Chinese port city of Canton, sometime around the year 520. From there he traveled northeast to Nanking, near the mouth of the Yangtze River, to honor an invitation from China's most devout Buddhist, Emperor Wu of the Liang Dynasty. After a famous interview in which his irreverence left the emperor dismayed, Bodhidharma pressed onward to the Buddhist centers of the north, finally settling in at the Shao-lin monastery on Mt. Sung for nine years of meditation staring at a wall. He then transmitted his insights and a copy of the Lankavatara sutra to a successor and passed on—either physically, spiritually, or both. His devotion to meditation and to the aforementioned sutra were his legacies to China. He was later honored as father of the Chinese Dhyana, or "Meditation," school of Buddhism, called Ch'an.

Bodhidharma attracted little notice during his years in China, and the first historical account of his life is a brief mention in a chronicle compiled well over a hundred years after the fact, identifying him merely as a practitioner of meditation.However, later stories of his life became increasingly embellished, as he was slowly elevated to the office of First Patriarch of Chinese Ch'an.His life was made to fulfill admirably the requirements of a legend, as it was slowly enveloped in symbolic anecdotes illustrating the truth more richly than did mere fact.However, most scholars do agree that there actually was a Bodhidharma, that he was a South Indian who came to China, that he practiced an intensive form of meditation, and that a short treatise ascribed to him is probably more or less authentic.Although the legend attached to this unshaven Indian Buddhist tells us fully as much about early Ch'an as it does about the man himself, it is nonetheless the first page in the book of Zen.

[Bodhidharma], the Teacher of the Law, was the third son of a great Brahmin king in South India, of the Western Lands.He was a man of wonderful intelligence, bright and far-reaching; he thoroughly understood everything that he had ever learned.As his ambition was to master the doctrine of the Mahayana, he abandoned the white dress of a layman and put on the black robe of monkhood, wishing to cultivate the seeds of holiness.He practiced contemplation and tranquillization; he knew well what was the true significance of worldly affairs.Inside and outside he was transpicuous; his virtues were more than a model to the world.He was grieved very much over the decline of the orthodox teaching of the Buddha in the remoter parts of the earth.He finally made up his mind to cross over land and sea and come to China and preach his doctrine in the kingdom of Wei.¹

China at the time of Bodhidharma's arrival was a politically divided land, with the new faith of Buddhism often supplying a spiritual common denominator.Bodhidharma happened to appear at a moment when an emperor in the northwest, the aforementioned Wu (reigned 502-49), had become a fanatic Buddhist.Shortly after taking power, Wu actually ordered his imperial household and all associated with the court to take up Buddhism and abandon Taoism.Buddhist monks became court advisers, opening the imperial coffers to build many lavish and subsequently famous temples.

Emperor Wu led Buddhist assemblies, wrote learned commentaries on various sutras, and actually donated menial work at temples as a lay devotee.He also arranged to have all the Chinese commentaries on the sutras assembled and catalogued.Concerned about the sanctity of life, he banished meat (and wine) from the imperial table and became so lax about enforcing criminal statutes, particularly capital punishment, that critics credited his good nature with an increase in corruption and lawlessness.While the Taoists understandably hated him and the Confucianists branded him a distracted ineffectual sovereign, the Buddhists saw in him a model emperor.Quite simply, Emperor Wu was to southern Chinese Buddhism what Emperor Constantine was to Christianity.

The emperor was known for his hospitality to visiting Indian monks, and it is entirely possible he did invite Bodhidharma for an audience.² According to the legend, Emperor Wu began almost immediately to regale his visiting dignitary with a checklist of his own dedication to the faith, mentioning temples built, clergy invested, sutras promulgated. The list was long, but at last he paused, no doubt puzzled by his guest's indifference. Probing for a response, he asked, "Given all I have done, what Merit have I earned?" Bodhidharma scowled, "None whatsoever, your majesty." The emperor was stunned by this reply, but he pressed on, trying another popular question. "What is the most important principle of Buddhism?" This second point Bodhidharma reportedly answered with the abrupt "Vast emptiness."³ The emperor was equally puzzled by this answer and in desperation finally inquired who, exactly, was the bearded visitor standing before him—to which Bodhidharma cheerfully admitted he had no idea. The interview ended as abruptly as it began, with Bodhidharma excusing himself and pressing on. For his first miracle, he crossed the Yangtze just outside Nanking on a reed and headed north.

The legend of Bodhidharma picks up again in North China, near the city of Loyang.The stories differ, but the most enduring ones link his name with the famous Shao-lin monastery on Mt.Sung.There, we are told, he meditated for nine years facing a wall (thereby inventing "wall gazing") until at last, a pious version reports, his legs fell off.At one time, relates another Zen story, he caught himself dozing and in a fit of rage tore off his eyelids and cast them contemptuously to the ground, whereupon bushes of the tea plant—Zen's sacramental drink—sprang forth.Another story has him inventing a Chinese style of boxing as physical education for the weakling monks at Shao-lin, thereby founding a classic Chinese discipline.But the most famous episode surrounding his stay at the Shao-lin concerns the monk Hui-k'o, who was to be his successor.The story tells that Hui-k'o waited in the snows outside Shao-lin for days on end, hoping in vain to attract Bodhidharma's notice, until finally in desperation he cut off his own arm to attract the master's attention.

Bodhidharma advocated meditation, sutras, and the trappings of traditional Buddhism as a way to see into one's own nature.His legends represent Zen in its formative period, before the more unorthodox methods for shaking disciples into a new mode of consciousness had been devised.However, one of the stories attributed to him by later writers sounds suspiciously like a Zen mondo (the traditional consciousness-testing exchange between master and monk).According to this story, the disciple Hui-k'o

entreated Bodhidharma, saying, "Master, I have not found peace of mind.I beg you to pacify my mind for me."Bodhidharma replied, "Bring me your mind and I will pacify it for you."Hui-k'o was silent for a time, finally conceding he could not actually find his mind."There," said Bodhidharma, "I have pacified it for you."This symbolic story illustrates eloquently the concept of the mind as a perceiver, something that cannot itself be subject to analysis.Logical introspection is impossible.The mind cannot examine itself any more than the eye can see itself.Since the mind cannot become the object of its own perception, its existence can only be understood intuitively, as Hui-k'o realized when he tried to plumb its whereabouts objectively.

The actual teachings of Bodhidharma are not fully known.The first notice of the "blue-eyed barbarian" (as later Chinese called him) is in the Chinese Buddhist history entitled Further Biographies of Eminent Priests, usually dated around the year 645, more than a century after he came to China.This biography also contains the brief text of an essay attributed to Bodhidharma.At the time it was compiled, Bodhidharma had not yet been anointed the First Patriarch of Zen: rather he was merely one of a number of priests teaching meditation.Accordingly there would have been no incentive to embellish his story with an apocryphal essay, and for this reason most authorities think it is authentic.⁴ A later, more detailed version of the essay by Bodhidharma is contained in the Records of the Transmission of the Lamp (A. D. 1004). This latter text is usually the one quoted, and it is agreed to be the superior literary document.⁵ We are in good company if we accept this essay as a more or less accurate record of the thoughts of the First Patriarch.

The text that Bodhidharma left was meant to show others the several ways to enlightenment.

There are many ways to enter the Path, but briefly speaking, they are two sorts only.The one is "Entrance by Reason" and the other "Entrance by Conduct."⁶

The first of these paths, the Entrance by Reason, might more properly be called entrance by pure insight.The path advocated seems a blending of Buddhism and Taoism, by which the sutras are used as a vehicle for leading the seeker first to meditation, and then to a nonliterary state of consciousness in which all dualities, all sense of oneself as apart from the world, are erased.This is an early and eloquent summary of Zen's objectives.

By "Entrance by Reason" we mean the realization of the spirit of Buddhism by the aid of scriptural teaching.We then come to

have a deep faith in the True Nature which is one and the same in all sentient beings. The reason that it does not manifest itself is due to the overwrapping of external objects and false thoughts. When one, abandoning the false and embracing the true, and in simpleness of thought, abides in pi-kuan [pure meditation or "wall-gazing"], one finds that there is neither selfhood nor otherness, that the masses and the worthies are of one essence, and firmly holds on to this belief and never moves away therefrom.He will not then be guided by any literary instructions, for he is in silent communication with the principle itself, free from conceptual discrimination, for he is serene and not-acting.⁷

Bodhidharma is given credit for inventing the term pi-kuan, whose literal translation is "wall-gazing," but whose actual meaning is anyone's guess. Pi-kuan is sometimes called a metaphor for the mind's confrontation with the barrier of intellect—which must eventually be hurdled if one is to reach enlightenment. In any case, this text is an unmistakable endorsement of meditation as a means for tranquilizing the mind while simultaneously dissolving our impulse to discriminate between ourselves and the world around us. It points out that literary instructions can go only so far, and at last they must be abandoned in favor of reliance on the intuitive mind.⁸

The other Path (or Tao) he described was called the "Entrance by Conduct" and invokes his Indian Buddhist origins.The description of "conduct" was divided into four sections which, taken together, were intended to subsume or include all the possible types of Buddhist practice.

By "Entrance by Conduct" is meant the Four Acts in which all other acts are included. What are the four? 1. How to requite hatred; 2. To be obedient to karma; 3. Not to seek after anything; and 4. To be in accord with the Dharma⁹

The first Act of Conduct counseled the believer to endure all hardships, since they are payment for evil deeds committed in past existences.

What is meant by "How to requite hatred"?Those who discipline themselves in the Path should think thus when they have to struggle with adverse conditions: During the innumerable past ages I have wandered through multiplicity of existences, all the while giving myself to unimportant details of life at the expense of essentials, and thus creating infinite occasions for hate, ill-will, and wrong-doing.While no violations have been committed in this life, the fruits of evil deeds in the past are to be gathered now.Neither gods nor men can foretell what is coming upon me.I will submit myself willingly and patiently to all the ills that befall me, and I will never bemoan or complain.In the Sutra it is said not to worry over ills that may happen to you.Why?Because through intelligence one can survey [the whole chain of causation].When this thought arises, one is in concord with the principle because he makes the best use of hatred and turns it into the service of his advance towards the Path.This is called the "way to requite hatred."¹⁰

The second Rule of Conduct is to be reconciled to whatever comes, good or evil.It seems to reflect the Taoist attitude that everything is what it is and consequently value judgments are irrelevant.If good comes, it is the result of meritorious deeds in a past existence and will vanish when the store of causative karma is exhausted.The important thing to realize is that none of it matters anyway.

We should know that all sentient beings are produced by the interplay of karmic conditions, and as such there can be no real self in them.The mingled yarns of pleasure and pain are all woven of the threads of conditioning causes. . . .Therefore, let gains and losses run their natural courses according to the ever changing conditions and circumstances of life, for the Mind itself does not increase with the gains nor decrease with the losses.In this way, no gales of self-complacency will arise, and your mind will remain in hidden harmony with the Tao.It is in this sense that we must understand the rule of adaptation to the variable conditions and circumstances of life.¹¹

The third Rule of Conduct was the teaching of the Buddha that a cessation of seeking and a turning toward nonattachment brings peace.

Men of the world remain unawakened for life; everywhere we find them bound by their craving and clinging.This is called "attachment."The wise, however, understand the truth, and their reason tells them to turn from the worldly ways.They enjoy peace of mind and perfect detachment.They adjust their bodily movements to the vicissitudes of fortune, always aware of the emptiness of the phenomenal world, in which they find nothing to covet, nothing to delight in. . . .Everyone who has a body is an heir to suffering and a stranger to peace.Having comprehended this point, the wise are detached from all things of the phenomenal world, with their minds free of desires and craving.As the scripture has it, "All sufferings spring from attachment; true joy arises from detachment."To know clearly the bliss of detachment is truly to walk on the path of the Tao.¹²

The fourth Rule of Conduct was to dissolve our perception of object-subject dualities and view life as a unified whole.This merging of self and exterior world Bodhidharma calls pure mind or pure reason.

The Dharma is nothing else than Reason which is pure in its essence.This pure Reason is the formless Form of all Forms; it is free of all defilements and attachments, and it knows of neither "self" nor "other."¹³

Having set forth this rather elegant statement of Zen and Buddhist ideals, as ascribed to Bodhidharma, it unfortunately is necessary to add that it appears to have been taken directly from the Vajrasamadhi Sutra (attributing quotations from the sutras to Patriarchs was common), with the sole exception of the term pi-kuan¹⁴ At the very least, the legend at this time does not portray Bodhidharma as a despiser of the sutras. He was, in fact, using a sutra as a vehicle to promote his practice of intensive meditation. It is not known what role meditation played in Buddhism at this time. However, the scholar Hu Shih questions how well it was understood. "[An early Buddhist historian's] Biographies, which covered the whole period of early Buddhism in China from the first century to the year 519, contained only 21 names of 'practitioners of dhyana (meditation)' out of a total of about 450.And practically all of the 21dhyana monks were recorded because of their remarkable asceticism and miraculous powers. This shows that in spite of the numerous yoga manuals in translation, and in spite of the high respect paid by intellectual Buddhists to the doctrine and practice of dhyana, there were, as late as 500, practically no Chinese Buddhists who really understood or seriously practiced dhyana or Zen."¹⁵

Perhaps Bodhidharma, arriving in 520, felt his praise of meditation, using the words of an existing sutra, could rouse Chinese interest in this form of Buddhism. As it turned out, he was successful beyond anything he could have imagined, although his success took several centuries. As D. T. Suzuki sums it up, "While there was nothing specifically Zen in his doctrine of 'Two Entrances and Four Acts,' the teaching of pi-kuan, wall-contemplation, was what made Bodhidharma the first patriarch of Zen Buddhism in China."¹⁶ Suzuki interprets pi-kuan as referring to the mind in a thoughtless state, in which meditation has permitted the rational mind to be suppressed entirely. The use of meditation for this goal instead of for developing magical powers, as had been the goal of earlier dhyana masters, seems to have been the profound new idea introduced to China by Bodhidharma.¹⁷

The passage of Bodhidharma is also swathed in legend. What eventually happened to this traveling Indian guru? Did he die of poison, as one legend says; or did he wander off to Central Asia, as another reports; or did he go to Japan, as still another story would have it? The story that has been the most enduring (recorded in a Sung work, Ching-te ch'uan-teng-lu) tells that after nine years at the Shao-lin monastery decided to return to India and called together his disciples to test their attainment.The first disciple reportedly said, "As I view it, to realize the truth we should neither rely entirely on words and letters nor dispense with them entirely, but rather we should use them as an instrument of the Way."To this, Bodhidharma replied, "You have got my skin."

Next a nun came forward and said, "As I view it, the Truth is like an auspicious sighting of the Buddhist Paradise; it is seen once and never again."To this Bodhidharma replied, "You have attained my flesh."

The third disciple said, "The four great elements are empty and the five skandhas [constituents of the personality: body, feelings, perception, will, and consciousness] are nonexistent. There is, in fact, nothing that can be grasped." To this Bodhidharma replied, "You have attained my bones."

Finally, it was Hui-k'o's turn.But he only bowed to the master and stood silent at his place.To him Bodhidharma said, "You have attained my marrow."¹⁸

According to a competing story, Bodhidharma died of poisoning at the age of 150 and was buried in the mountains of Honan.¹⁹ Not too long thereafter a lay Buddhist named Sung Yun, who was returning to China after a trip to India to gather sutras, met Bodhidharma in the mountains of Turkestan. The First Patriarch, who was walking barefoot carrying a single shoe, announced he was returning to India and that a native Chinese would arise to continue his teaching. Sung Yun reported this to Bodhidharma's disciples on his return and they opened the master's grave, only to find it empty save for the other shoe.

How much of the story of Bodhidharma is legend?The answer does not really matter all that much.As with Moses, if Bodhidharma had not existed it would have been necessary to

invent him.Although his first full biography (ca.645) makes no particular fuss over him, less than a century after this, he was declared the founder of Zen, provided with a lineage stretching directly back through Nagarjuna to the Buddha, and furnished an exciting anecdotal history.Yet as founders go, he was a worthy enough individual.He does seem to have devised a strain of Buddhist thought that could successfully be grafted onto the hardy native Chinese Taoist organism.He also left an active disciple, later to be known as the Second Patriarch, Hui-k'o, so he must have had either a charismatic personality or a philosophical position that distinguished him from the general run of meditation masters.

It is important to keep in mind that Bodhidharma, man and myth, was the product of an early form of Zen.The later masters needed a lineage, and he was tapped for the role of First Patriarch.The major problem with Bodhidharma was that many of his ideas were in direct contradiction to the position adopted by later Zen teachings.For instance, recall that he promoted the reliance on a sutra (the Lankavatara); and he heavily stressed meditation (something later Zen masters would partially circumvent).The Jesuit scholar Heinrich Dumoulin has declared that Bodhidharma's attributed teaching in no way deviates from the great Mahayana sutras.²⁰ It is, in fact, a far cry from later Zen ideas, says John Wu, the Chinese authority.²¹ Finally, he left no claim to patriarchy, nor did his first biographer offer to do this for him.

Perhaps the evolution of Zen is best demonstrated by the slow change in the paintings of Bodhidharma, culminating in the latter-day portrayals of him as a scowling grump.His image became successively more misanthropic through the centuries, perhaps as a way of underscoring the later Zen practice of establishing a rather dehumanized relationship between the Zen master and pupil, as the master shouts, beats a monk, and destroys his ego through merciless question-and-answer sessions.For all we know, the "wall-gazing Brahmin" of ancient China may have had a wry smile to go along with his droll sense of humor.Perhaps it is fitting to close with the most lasting apocrypha associated with his name, to wit the stanza that later masters attributed to him as an alleged summary of his teaching, but which he, promulgator of the Lankavatara Sutra, would undoubtedly have disowned:

A special transmission outside the sutras;

No reliance upon words and letters;

Direct pointing to the very mind;

Seeing into one's own nature.

Chapter Two

HUI-K'O: SECOND PATRIARCH OF ZEN

Hui-k'o (487-593) first enters the history of Zen as an eager Chinese scholar devoted to meditation.Wishing to become a disciple of the famous Indian monk who had recently installed himself at the Shao-lin monastery, Hui-k'o set up a vigil outside the gate.Time passed and the snows began to fall, but still Bodhidharma ignored him, declaring, "The incomparable doctrine of Buddhism can only be comprehended after a long hard discipline, by enduring what is most difficult to endure and by practicing what is most difficult to practice.Men of inferior virtue are not allowed to understand anything about it."¹Finally Hui-k'o despaired and resorted to an extreme measure to demonstrate his sincerity: he cut off his own arm and offered it to the master.(This act reportedly has been repeated since by an occasional overenthusiastic Zen novice.)Even a singleminded master of meditation like Bodhidharma could not ignore such a gesture, and he agreed to accept Hui-k'o as his first Chinese disciple.

Unlike Bodhidharma, Hui-k'o is not a mysterious, legendary figure, but rather is remembered by a detailed history that interacts periodically with known events in Chinese history.²He came from the Chi family and was originally named Seng-k'o, only later becoming known as Hui-k'o.The most reliable report has him coming from Wu-lao, with a reputation as a scholarly intellectual preceding him.Indeed he seems to have been a Chinese scholar in the finest sense, with a deep appreciation of all three major philosophies: Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism.It was toward the last, however, that he

slowly gravitated, finally abandoning his scholarly secular life and becoming a Buddhist monk.He was around age forty, in the prime of what was to be a very long life, when he first encountered Bodhidharma at the Shao-lin monastery.Whether he lost his arm by self-mutilation, as the later Zen chronicles say, or whether it was severed in a fight with bandits, as the earliest history reports, may never be determined.³ The later story is certainly more pious, but the earlier would seem more plausible.

For six years he studied meditation with Bodhidharma, gradually retreating from the life of the scholar as he turned away from intellectualism and toward pure experience.When Bodhidharma finally decided to depart, he called in all his disciples for the famous testing of their attainment recounted in Chapter l.⁴ Hui-k'o, by simply bowing in silence when asked what he had attained, proved that his understanding of the master's wordless teaching was superior, and it was he who received the Lankavatara Sutra. The event reportedly was sealed by a short refrain, now universally declared to be spurious, in which Bodhidharma predicted the later division of Ch'an into five schools:

Originally I came to this land

To transmit the Dharma and to save all from error

A flower with five petals opens;

Of itself the fruit will ripen.⁵

As the story goes, Hui-k'o remained at the Shao-lin for a while longer and then went underground, supporting himself through menial work and learning about Chinese peasant life firsthand.Reportedly, he wanted to tranquilize his mind, to acquire the humility necessary in a great teacher, and not incidentally to absorb the Lankavatara Sutra.When asked why he, an enlightened teacher, chose to live among menial laborers, he would reply tartly that this life was best for his mind and in any case what he did was his own affair.It was a hard existence, but one he believed proper.Perhaps it was in this formative period that the inner strength of Ch'an's first Chinese master was forged.

Hui-k'o's major concern during this period must inevitably have been the study of the Lankavatara Sutra entrusted him by Bodhidharma.The Lankavatara was not written by a Zen master, nor did it come out of the Zen tradition, but it was the primary scripture of the first two hundred years of Ch'an.As

D.T.Suzuki has noted, there were at least three Chinese translations of this Sanskrit sutra by the time Bodhidharma came to China.⁶ However, he is usually given credit, at least in Zen records, for originating the movement later known as the Lankavatara school. As the sutra was described by a non-Ch'an Chinese scholar in the year 645, "The entire emphasis of its teaching is placed on Prajna (highest intuitive knowledge), which transcends literary expression. Bodhidharma, the Zen master, propagated this doctrine in the south as well as in the north, the gist of which teaching consists in attaining the unattainable, which is to have right insight into the truth itself by forgetting word and thought. Later it grew and flourished in the middle part of the country. Hui-k'o was the first who attained to the essential understanding of it. Those addicted to the literary teaching of Buddhism in Wei were averse to becoming associated with these spiritual seers."⁷

The Lankavatara purportedly relays the thoughts of the Buddha while ensconced on a mountain peak in Sri Lanka.Although the work is notoriously disorganized, vague, and obscure, it was to be the stone on which Hui-k'o sharpened his penetrating enlightenment.The major concept it advances is that of Mind, characterized by D.T.Suzuki as "absolute mind, to be distinguished from an empirical mind which is the subject of psychological study.When it begins with a capital letter, it is the ultimate reality on which the entire world of individual objects depends for its value."⁸ On the question of Mind, the Lankavatara has the following to say:

. . .the ignorant and the simple minded, not knowing that the world is what is seen of Mind itself, cling to the multitudinousness of external objects, cling to the notions of being and non-being, oneness and otherness, bothness and not-bothness, existence and non-existence, eternity and non-eternity. . . .⁹

According to the Lankavatara, the world and our perception of it are both part of a larger conceptual entity.The teachings of the Lankavatara cast the gravest doubt on the actual existence of the things we think we see.Discrimination between oneself and the rest of the world can only be false, since both are merely manifestations of the same encompassing essence, Mind.Our perception is too easily deceived, and this is the reason we must not implicitly trust the images that reach our consciousness.

. . .[I]t is like those water bubbles in a rainfall which have the appearance of crystal gems, and the ignorant taking them for real crystal gems run after them. . . .[T]hey are no more than water bubbles, they are not gems, nor are they not-gems, because of their being so comprehended [by one party] and not being so comprehended [by another].¹⁰

Reality lies beyond these petty discriminations.The intellect, too, is powerless to distinguish the real from the illusory, since all things are both and neither at the same time.This conviction of the Lankavatara remained at the core of Zen, even after the sutra itself was supplanted by simpler, more easily approached literary works.

As Hui-k'o studied the Lankavatara and preached, he gradually acquired a reputation for insight that transcended his deliberately unpretentious appearance. Throughout it all, he led an itinerant life, traveling about North China. It is reported that he found his way to the capital of the eastern half of the Wei kingdom after its division in the year 534. Here, in the city of Yeh-tu, he taught his version of dhyana and opened the way to enlightenment for many people. Though unassuming in manner and dress, he nonetheless aroused antagonism from established Buddhist circles because of his success, encountering particular opposition from a conventional dhyana teacher named Tao-huan. According to Further Biographies of the Eminent Priests (645), Tao-huan was a jealous teacher who had his own following of as many as a thousand, and who resented deeply the nonscriptural approach Hui-k'o advocated. This spiteful priest sent various of his followers to monitor Hui-k'o's teaching, perhaps with an eye to accusing him of heresy, but all those sent were so impressed that none ever returned. Then one day the antagonistic dhyana master met one of those former pupils who had been won over by Hui-k'o's teachings. D. T. Suzuki translates the encounter as follows:

When Tao-huan happened to meet his first messenger, he asked: "How was it that I had to send for you so many times?Did I not open your eye after taking pains so much on my part?"The former disciple, however, mystically answered: "My eye has been right from the first, and it was through you that it came to squint."¹¹

The message would seem to be that Hui-k'o taught a return to

one's original nature, to the primal man without artificial learning or doctrinal pretense. Out of resentment the jealous dhyana master reportedly caused Hui-k'o to undergo official persecution.

In later years, beginning around 574, there was a temporary but thorough persecution of Buddhism in the capital city of Ch'ang-an.Sometime earlier, an ambitious sorcerer and apostate Buddhist named Wei had decided to gain a bit of notoriety for himself by attacking Buddhism, then a powerful force in Ch'ang-an.In the year 567 he presented a document to the emperor claiming that Buddhism had allowed unsavory social types to enter the monasteries.He also attacked worship of the Buddha image on the ground that it was un-Chinese idolatry.Instead, he proposed a secularized church that would include all citizens, with the gullible emperor suggested for the role of "pope."The emperor was taken with the idea and after several years of complex political maneuvering, he proscribed Buddhism in North China.

As a result, Hui-k'o was forced to flee to the south, where he took up temporary residence in the mountainous regions of the Yangtze River.The persecution was short-lived, since the emperor responsible died soon after his decree, whereupon Hui-k'o returned to Ch'ang-an.However, these persecutions may have actually contributed to the spread of his teaching, by forcing him to travel into the countryside.

The only authentic fragment of Hui-k'o's thought that has survived records his answer to an inquiry sent by a lay devotee named Hsiang, who reportedly was seeking spiritual attainment alone in the jungle.The inquiry, which seems more a statement than a question, went as follows:

. . .he who aspires to Buddhahood thinking it to be independent of the nature of sentient beings is to be likened to one who tries to listen to an echo by deadening its original sound.Therefore the ignorant and the enlightened are walking in one passageway; the vulgar and the wise are not to be differentiated from each other.Where there are no names, we create names, and because of these names, judgments are formed.Where there is no theorizing, we theorize, and because of this theorizing, disputes arise.They are all phantom creations and not realities, and who knows who is right and who is wrong?They are all empty, no substantialities have they, and who knows what is and

what is not?So we realize that our gain is not real gain and our loss not real loss.This is my view and may I be enlightened if I am at fault?¹²

This "question," if such it is, sounds suspiciously like a sermon and stands, in fact, as an eloquent statement of Zen concerns.Hui-k'o reportedly answered as follows, in a fragment of a letter that is his only known extant work.

You have truly comprehended the Dharma as it is; the deepest truth lies in the principle of identity.It is due to one's ignorance that the mani-jewel is taken for a piece of brick, but lo!when one is suddenly awakened to self-enlightenment it is realized that one is in possession of the real jewel.The ignorant and the enlightened are of one essence, they are not really to be separated.We should know that all things are such as they are.Those who entertain a dualistic view of the world are to be pitied, and I write this letter for them.When we know that between this body and the Buddha, there is nothing to separate one from the other, what is the use of seeking after Nirvana [as something external to ourselves]?¹³

Hui-k'o insists that all things spring from the one Mind, and consequently the ideas of duality, of attachment to this or that phenomenon, or even the possibility of choice, are equally absurd. Although he knew all too well that enlightenment could not be obtained from teaching, he still did not advocate a radical break with the traditional methods of the Buddhist dhyana masters. His style was unorthodox, but his teaching methods were still confined to lectures and meditation. This low-key approach was still closer to the tradition of the Buddha than to the jarring techniques of "sudden enlightenment" destined to erupt out of Chinese Ch'an.

Toward the end of his life, Hui-k'o was back in Ch'ang-an, living and teaching in the same unassuming manner.His free-lance style seems to have continued to outrage the more conventional teachers, and a later story records a martyr's death for him.¹⁴ One day, while a learned master was preaching inside the K'uang-chou Temple, Hui-k'o chanced by and started to chat with the passersby outside. Gradually a crowd started to collect, until eventually the lecture hall of the revered priest was emptied. This famous priest, remembered as Pien-ho, accused the ragged Hui-k'o to the magistrate Che Ch'ung-j'an as a teacher of false doctrine. As a result he was arrested and subsequently executed, an impious 106-year-old revolutionary.

Chapter Three

SENG-TS'AN, TAO-HSIN, FA-JUNG, AND HUNG-JEN:

FOUR EARLY MASTERS

The Fifth Patriarch,Hung-jen (left)

The master succeeding Hui-k'o was Seng-ts'an (d.606), who then taught Fa-jung (594-657) and Tao-hsin (580-651), the latter in turn passing the robe of the patriarchy to Hung-jen (601-74).The masters Seng-ts'an, Tao-hsin, and Hung-jen are honored today as the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Patriarchs, respectively, and revered as the torchbearers of Ch'an's formative years.Yet when we look for information about their lives, we find the sources thin and diffuse.One reason probably is that before 700 nobody realized that these men would one day be elevated to founding fathers, and consequently no one bothered recording details of their lives.

During the seventh century the scattered teachers of dhyana seem to have gradually coalesced into a sort of ad hoc movement—with sizable followings growing up around the better-known figures. A certain amount of respectability also emerged, if we can believe the references to imperial notice that start appearing in the chronicles. It would seem that the dhyana or Ch'an movement became a more or less coherent sect, a recognizable if loosely defined school of Buddhism. However, what the movement apparently was striving to become was not so much a branch of Buddhism in China as a Chinese version of Buddhism. The men later remembered as the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Patriarchs have in common a struggle to bend Buddhist thought to Chinese intellectual requirements, to sinicize Buddhism. Whereas they succeeded only in setting the stage for this transformation (whose realization would await other hands), they did establish a personality pattern that would set apart all later masters: a blithe irreverence that owed as much to Chuang Tzu as to Bodhidharma.

When reading the biographies that follow, it is useful to keep in mind that the explicit details may well have been cooked up in later years to satisfy a natural Chinese yearning for anecdotes, with or without supporting information. Yet the fact that the dhyana practitioners eventually became a movement in need of a history is itself proof that these men and their stories were not complete inventions.In any case, they were remembered, honored, and quoted in later years as the legendary founders of Ch'an.

SENG-TSAN, THE THIRD PATRIARCH (d.606)

The question of the Second Patriarch Hui-k'o's successor was troublesome even for the ancient Ch'an historians.The earliest version of his biography (written in 645, before the sect of Ch'an and its need for a history existed) declares, "Before [Hui-k'o] had established a lineage he died, leaving no worthy heirs."When it later became necessary for Ch'an to have an uninterrupted patriarchy, a revised history was prepared which supplied him an heir named Seng-ts'an, to whom he is said to have transmitted the doctrine.¹ The story of their meeting recalls Hui-k'o's first exchange with Bodhidharma, save that the roles are reversed. The text implies that Seng-ts'an was suffering from leprosy when he first encountered Hui-k'o, and that he implored the Master for relief in a most un-Zenlike way, saying: "I am in great suffering from this disease; please take away my sins."

Hui-k'o responded with, "Bring me your sins, and I will take them away."

After a long silence, Seng-ts'an confessed, "I've looked, but I cannot find them."

To which Hui-k'o replied, echoing Bodhidharma's classic rejoinder, "Behold, you have just been cleansed."

Another version of the story says Hui-k'o greeted Seng-ts'an with the words, "You are suffering from leprosy; why should you want to see me?"

To this Seng-ts'an responded, "Although my body is sick, the mind of a sick man and your own mind are no different."

Whatever actually happened, it was enough to convince Hui-k'o that he had found an enlightened being, one who perceived the unity of all things, and he forthwith transmitted to Seng-ts'an the symbols of the patriarchy—the robe and begging bowl of Bodhidharma—telling him that he should take refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma (the universal truth proclaimed by Buddha), and the Sangha (the Buddhist organization or priesthood).Seng-ts'an replied that he knew of the Sangha, but what was meant by the Buddha and the Dharma?The answer was that all three were expressions of Mind.²

This exchange seems to have taken place while Hui-k'o was in the northern Wei capital of Yeh-tu.³ In later years Seng-ts'an found it necessary to feign madness (to escape persecution during the anti-Buddhist movement of 574), and finally he went to hide on Huan-kung mountain for ten years, where his mere presence reportedly was enough to tame the wild tigers who had terrorized the people there. The only surviving work that purportedly relays his teaching is a poem, said to be one of the earliest Ch'an treatises, which is called the Hsin-hsin-ming, or "On the Believing Mind."⁴It starts off in a lyrical, almost Taoist, voice worthy of Chuang Tzu, as it celebrates man's original nature and the folly of striving.

There is nothing difficult about the Great Way

But, avoid choosing!

Only when you neither love nor hate,

Does it appear in all clarity.

Do not be anti- or pro- anything.

The conflict of longing and loathing,

This is the disease of the mind.

Not knowing the profound meaning of things,

We disturb our (original) peace of mind to no purpose.⁵

Next, the poem turns to an acknowledgment of the Mahayanist concept of the all-encompassing Mind, the greatest single truth of the universe, and of Nagarjuna's Void, the cosmic emptiness of sunyata

Things are things because of the Mind.

The Mind is the Mind because of things.

If you wish to know what these two are,

They are originally one Emptiness.

In this Void both (Mind and things) are one,

All the myriad phenomena contained in both.⁶

The poem closes with an affirmation of the Ch'an credo of unity and the absence of duality as a sign of enlightenment.

In the World of Reality

There is no self, no other-than-self.

. . .

All that can be said is "No Duality!"

When there is no duality, all things are one,

There is nothing that is not included.

The believing mind is not dual;

What is dual is not the believing mind.

Beyond all language,

For it there is no past, no present, no future.⁷

Since the earliest historical sources maintain that Seng-ts'an left no writings, some have questioned the attribution of this lilting work to the Third Patriarch.Whatever its authorship, the real importance of the poem lies in its subtle merging of Taoism and Buddhism.We can watch as the voices of ancient China and ancient India are blended together into a perfect harmony until the parts are inseparable.It was a noble attempt to reconcile Buddhist metaphysics with Chinese philosophical concepts, and it was successful in a limited way.As for Seng-ts'an, the legends tell that he finally was overcome by his longing for the south and, handing down the symbols of the patriarchy to a priest named Tao-hsin, he vanished.

TAO-HSIN, THE FOURTH PATRIARCH (580-651)

China, whose political turmoil had sent the early Patriarchs scurrying from one small kingdom to another, found unity and the beginnings of stability under a dynasty known as the Sui (581-618), the first in three and a half centuries (since the end of the Han in 220) able to unify the land.⁸ This brief dynasty (which soon was replaced by the resplendent T'ang) came to be dominated by the Emperor Yang, a crafty politician who maneuvered the throne away from an elder brother—partially, it is said, by demonstrating to his parents his independence of mind by abandoning all the children he begat in the ladies' quarters. Whereas his father had undertaken the renovation of the North Chinese capital of Ch'ang-an—not incidentally creating one of the glories of the ancient world and the site of the finest moments of the later T'ang Dynasty—Emperor Yang decided to reconstruct the city of Loyang, some two hundred miles to the east. The result was a "Western Capital" at Ch'ang-an and an "Eastern Capital" at Loyang, the latter city soon to be the location of some pivotal episodes in Ch'an history.

For the construction of Loyang, a fairyland of palaces and gardens, millions of citizens were conscripted and tens of thousands died under forced labor.Emperor Yang's other monument was a grand canal, linking the Yellow River in the north with the rich agricultural deltas of the Yangtze in the south, near Nanking.The emperor loved to be barged down this vast waterway—journeys that unsympathetic historians have claimed were merely excuses to seek sexual diversions away from the capital.In any case, his extravagances bankrupted the country and brought about his overthrow by the man who would become the founder of the T'ang Dynasty, later to reign under the name of Emperor T'ai-tsung (ruled 626-49).

The T'ang is universally regarded as one of the great ages of man, and it is also considered the Golden Age of Ch'an.The founding emperor, T'ai-tsung, was a wise and beneficent "Son of Heaven," as Chinese rulers were styled.⁹ Under his influence, the capital city of Ch'ang-an became the most cosmopolitan metropolis in the ancient world, with such widespread influence that when the first visiting Japanese came upon it, they were so dazzled they returned home and built a replica for their own capital city. The city was laid out as a grid, with lavish vermilion imperial palaces and gardens clustered regally at one end. Its inhabitants numbered upward of two million, while its international markets and fleshpots were crowded with traders from the farthest reaches of Asia and Europe, echoing with a truly astounding cacophony of tongues: Indian, Japanese, Turkish, Persian, Roman Latin, and Arabic, not to mention the many dialects of Chinese. Christians moved among the Buddhists, as did Muslims and Jews. Artisans worked with silver, gold, jewels, silks, and porcelains, even as poets gathered in wine shops to nibble fruits and relax with round-eyed foreign serving girls. Such were the worldly attractions of Ch'ang-an during the early seventh century. This new sophistication and urbanization, as well as the political stability that made it all possible, was also reflected in the change in Ch'an—from a concern chiefly of nomadic dhyana teachers hiding in the mountains to the focus of settled agricultural communities centered in monasteries.

The growth in Ch'an toward an established place in Chinese life began to consolidate under the Fourth Patriarch, Tao-hsin, the man whose life spanned the Sui and the early T'ang dynasties. He is best remembered today for two things: First, he was particularly dedicated to meditation, practicing it more avidly than had any dhyana master since Bodhidharma; and second, he is credited with beginning the true monastic tradition for Ch'an. His formation of a self-supporting monastic community with its own agricultural base undoubtedly brought Ch'an a long way toward respectability in Chinese eyes, since it reduced the dependence on begging. Itinerant mendicants, even if teachers of dhyana, had never elicited the admiration in China they traditionally enjoyed in the Indian homeland of the Buddha.Begging was believed to fashion character, however, and it never disappeared from Ch'an discipline.Indeed, Ch'an is said to have encouraged begging more than did any of the other Chinese Buddhist sects, but as a closely regulated form of moral training.

Tao-hsin, whose family name was Ssu-ma, came from Honan, but he left home at seven to study Buddhism and met the Third Patriarch, Seng-ts'an, while still in his teens. When Seng-ts'an decided to drop out of sight, he asked this brilliant pupil to take up the teaching of dhyana and Bodhidharma's Lankavatara Sutra at a monastery on Mt. Lu. Tao-hsin agreed and remained for a number of years, attracting followers and reportedly performing at least one notable miracle. The story says that he saved a walled city from being starved out by bandits by organizing a program of public sutra chanting among its people. We are told that the robbers retired of their own accord while, as though by magic, previously dry wells in the city flowed again. One day not too long thereafter Tao-hsin noticed an unusual purple cloud hanging over a nearby mountain. Taking this as a sign, he proceeded to settle there (the mountain later became known as Shuang-feng or "Twin Peaks") and found the first Ch'an community, presiding over a virtual army of some five hundred followers for the next thirty years.

He is remembered today as a charismatic teacher who finally stabilized dhyana teaching. In an age of political turmoil, many intellectuals flocked to the new school of Ch'an, with its promise of tranquil meditation in uneasy times. Tao-hsin apparently encouraged his disciples to operate a form of commune, in which agriculture and its administration were merged with the practice of meditation.¹⁰ In so doing, he seems not only to have revolutionized the respectability of dhyana practice, but also to have become something of a national figure himself.This, at any rate, is what we may surmise from one of the more durable legends, which has him defying an imperial decree to appear before the emperor, T'ai-tsung.

This legend concerns an episode which allegedly took place around the year 645.As the story goes, an imperial messenger arrived one day at the mountain retreat to summon him to the palace, but Tao-hsin turned him down cold.When the messenger reported this to the emperor, the response was to send back a renewed invitation.Again the messenger was met with a refusal, along with a challenge.

"If you wish my head, cut it off and take it with you.It may go but my mind will never go."

When this reply reached the emperor, he again dispatched the messenger, this time bearing a sealed sword and a summons for the master's head.But he also included a contradictory decree requiring that Tao-hsin not be harmed.When the master refused a third time to come to the palace, the messenger read the decree that his head should be severed.Tao-hsin obligingly bent over, with the command "Cut it off."But the messenger hesitated, admitting that the imperial orders also forbade harming him.On hearing this Tao-hsin reportedly roared with laughter, saying, "You must know that you possess human qualities."¹¹

The Fourth Patriarch's teachings are not well known, other than for the fact that he supposedly devised and promoted new techniques to help novices achieve intensive meditation. The following excerpt of his teaching illustrates his fervor for dhyana

Sit earnestly in meditation!The sitting in meditation is basic to all else.By the time you have done this for three to five years, you will be able to ward off starvation with a bit of meal.Close the door and sit!Do not read the sutras, and speak to no man!If you will so exercise yourself and persist in it for a long time, the fruit will be sweet like the meat which a monkey takes from the nutshell.But such people are very rare.¹²

The de-emphasis on the sutras points the way to later Ch'an.Interestingly, however, the usefulness of sitting in meditation would also come under review in only a few short years, when the new style of Ch'an appeared.

The reports of Tao-hsin say that Hung-jen, who was to become the Fifth Patriarch, was one of his followers and grasped the inner meaning of his teaching.It was Hung-jen whom he asked to construct a mausoleum in the mountainside, the site of his final repose, and when it was finished he retired there for his last meditation.After he passed away, his body was wrapped in

lacquered cloth, presenting a vision so magnificent that no one could bear to close the mausoleum.

Aside from his historical place as the founder of the first real community for Ch'an, there is little that can be said with assurance about Tao-hsin.However, a manuscript discovered early in this century in the Buddhist caves at Tun-huang purportedly contains a sermon by the Fourth Patriarch entitled "Abandoning the Body."

The method of abandoning the body consists first in meditating on Emptiness, whereby the [conscious] mind is emptied.Let the mind together with its world be quieted down to a perfect state of tranquility; let thought be cast in the mystery of quietude, so that the mind is kept from wandering from one thing to another.When the mind is tranquilized in its deepest abode, its entanglements are cut asunder. . . .The mind in its absolute purity is like the Void itself.¹³

The text goes on to quote both Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu, as well as some of the older sutras, and there is a considerable reference to Nagarjuna's Emptiness.This text, real or spurious, is one more element in the merging of Taoism and Buddhism that was early Ch'an, even as its analysis of the mind state achieved in meditation anticipates later Ch'an teachings.

FA-JUNG, THE ST.FRANCIS OF ZEN (594-657)

In the parade of Patriarchs, we should not overlook the maverick Fa-jung, a master who was never officially crowned a Patriarch, but whose humanity made him a legend.¹⁴ Fa-jung (594-657), whose family name was Wei, was born in a province on the south bank of the Yangtze River and in his early years was a student of Confucian thought. But before long his yearning for spiritual challenge led him to Buddhism. He finally settled in a rock cave in the side of a cliff near a famous monastery on Mt. Niu-t'ou, where his sanctity reportedly caused birds to appear with offerings of flowers.

According to the Zen chronicle Transmission of the Lamp (1004), sometime between 627 and 649 the Fourth Patriarch, Tao-hsin, sensed that a famous Buddhist was living on Mt.Niu-t'ou and went there to search out the man.After many days of seeking, he finally came upon a holy figure seated atop a rock.As the two meditation masters were becoming acquainted, there suddenly came the roar of a tiger from the bramble farther up the mountain.Tao-hsin was visibly startled, causing Fa-jung—friend of the animals—to observe wryly, "I see it is still with you."His meaning, of course, was that Tao-hsin was still enslaved by the phenomenal world, was not yet wholly detached from his fears and perceptions.

After they had chatted a while longer, Fa-jung found occasion to leave his seat and attend nature at a detached location.During his absence Tao-hsin wrote the Chinese character for the Buddha's name on the very rock where he had been sitting.When Fa-jung returned to resume his place, he was momentarily brought up short by the prospect of sitting on the Buddha's name.Expecting this, Tao-hsin smiled and said, "I see it is still with you."

He had shown that Fa-jung was still intimidated by the trappings of classical Buddhism and had not yet become a completely detached master of the pure Mind.The story says that Fa-jung failed to understand his comment and implored Tao-hsin to teach him Ch'an, which the Fourth Patriarch proceeded to do.

Tao-hsin's message, once again, was to counsel nondistinction, nonattachment, nondiscrimination; he said to abjure emotions, values, striving.Just be natural and be what you are, for that is the part of you that is closest to the Buddhist ideal of mental freedom.

There is nothing lacking in you, and you yourself are no different from the Buddha.There is no way of achieving Buddhahood other than letting your mind be free to be itself.You should not contemplate nor should you purify your mind.Let there be no craving and hatred, and have no anxiety or fear.Be boundless and absolutely free from all conditions.Be free to go in any direction you like.Do not act to do good, nor to pursue evil.Whether you walk or stay, sit or lie down, and whatever you see happen to you, all are the wonderful activity of the Great Enlightened One.It is all joy, free from anxiety—it is called Buddha.¹⁵

After Tao-hsin's visit, the birds offering flowers no longer appeared: evidence, said the later Ch'an teachers, that Fa-jung's physical being had entirely vanished.His school on Mt.Niu-t'ou flourished for a time, teaching that the goals of Ch'an practice could be realized by contemplating the Void of Nagarjuna.As Fa-jung interpreted the teachings of the Middle Path:

All talk has nothing to do with one's Original Nature, which can only be reached through sunyataNo-thought is the Absolute Reality, in which the mind ceases to act.When one's mind is free from thoughts, one's nature has reached the Absolute.¹⁶

Although Fa-jung's teachings happened to be transmitted to Japan in later years, through the accident of a passing Japanese pilgrim, his school did not endure in either country beyond the eighth century.His was the first splinter group of Zen, and perhaps it lacked the innovation necessary to survive, because it clung too much to traditional Buddhism.

As Fa-jung's years advanced, he was encouraged to come down from his mountain and live in a monastery, which his better judgment eventually compelled him to do.It is reported that after his final farewell to his disciples he was followed down the mountain by the laments of all its birds and animals.A more ordinary teacher would have been forgotten, but this beloved St.Francis of Zen became the topic of lectures and a master remembered with reverence ever after.

HUNG-JEN, THE FIFTH PATRIARCH (601-74)

The other well-known disciple of the Fourth Patriarch, Tao-hsin, was the man history has given the title of Fifth Patriarch, Hung-jen (601-74).The chronicles say that he came from Tao-hsin's own province and impressed the master deeply when, at age fourteen, he held his own with the Fourth Patriarch in an introductory interview.As the exchange has been described, Tao-hsin asked the young would-be disciple his family name, but since the word for "family name" is pronounced the same as that for "nature," Hung-jen answered the question as though it had been, "What is your 'nature'?"—deliberately misinterpreting it in order to say, "My 'nature' is not ordinary; it is the Buddha-nature."

Tao-hsin reportedly inquired, "But don't you have a 'family name'?"

To which Hung-jen cleverly replied, "No, for the teachings say that our 'nature' is empty."¹⁷

Hung-jen went on to become the successor to the Fourth Patriarch, with an establishment where several hundred followers gathered.The chronicles have little to say about the actual life and teachings of the Fifth Patriarch, but no matter.His place in history is secured not so much for what he said—there is actually very little that can reliably be attributed to him—but rather for his accidental appearance at the great crossroads of Zen.Hung-jen and his monastery became the symbol of a great philosophical debate that occupied the first half of the eighth century, a conflict to be examined in detail in the two chapters to follow.Suffice it to say here that the chronicles at least agree that he was an eminent priest and well respected, a man to whom an early-eighth-century document attributes eleven disciples of note.¹⁸ Among those listed who are particularly important to the events that follow are a monk named Shen-hsiu and another named Hui-neng, the men whose names would one day be associated with a celebrated midnight poetry contest in Hung-jen's monastery.

This contest eventually came to symbolize the conflict between the teachings of gradual enlightenment and sudden enlightenment, between intellectual and intuitive knowledge, between sophisticated urban Buddhism and unlettered rural teachers, and between promoters of the abstruse but challenging Lankavatara Sutra sanctioned by Bodhidharma and the cryptic Diamond Sutra.Quite simply, it was a battle between what would eventually be known as the Northern and Southern schools of Ch'an, and it concerned two fundamentally opposing views of the functions of the human mind.As things turned out, the gradual, Northern, Lankavatara Sutra faction went on for years thinking it had won—or perhaps not really aware that there was a battle in progress—while the anti-intellectual, Southern, Diamond Sutra faction was gathering its strength in the hinterlands for a final surge to victory.When the Southern school did strike, it won the war handily and then proceeded to recast the history of what had gone before, even going so far as to put posthumous words of praise for itself into the mouths of the once-haughty Northern masters.Thus the mighty were eventually brought low and the humble lifted up in the annals of Ch'an.It is to the two masters whose names are associated with this battle that we must turn next.

Chapter Four

SHEN-HSIU AND SHEN-HUI:

"GRADUAL" AND "SUDDEN" MASTERS

Whereas the Ch'an Patriarchs of earlier times had been, more often than not, fractious teachers ignored by emperors and gentry alike, the T'ang Dynasty saw Ch'an masters rise to official eminence, receiving honors from the highest office in China.The first half of the eighth century witnessed what was to be the greatest battle within the school of Ch'an, but it was also the time when Ch'an was finally recognized by Chinese ruling circles.The name most often associated with this imperial recognition is the famous, or perhaps infamous, Empress Wu.¹

Wu was not born to royalty, but in the year 638, when she was thirteen, she was placed in Emperor T'ai-tsung's harem as a concubine of relatively low rank.Disapproving historians claim that one day she managed to catch the crown prince, the heir apparent to the aging emperor, in what we today might euphemistically call the bathroom, and seduced him at a moment when he was without benefit of trousers.Thus she was already on familiar terms with the next emperor when her official husband, Emperor T'ai-tsung, went to his ancestors in the summer of 649.Although she was only twenty-four years old, custom required that she join all the deceased emperor's concubines in retirement at a monastery—which ordinarily would have been the last anyone heard of her.As it happened, however, the new emperor's first wife was childless, with the effect that he began devoting increasing attention to a favorite concubine.Knowing of the emperor's earlier acquaintance and infatuation with Wu, the barren empress recalled her from the convent, intending to divert the emperor from his current favorite.The cure, however, turned out to be far more deadly than the ailment.

Through an intrigue that apparently included murdering her own child by the emperor and then blaming the empress, Wu soon had both the empress and the competing concubine in prison.Not content with mere imprisonment for her rivals, she went on to have them both boiled alive—after first amputating their hands and feet, eliciting a dying curse from the concubine that she would return as a cat to haunt Wu.To escape this curse, Wu permanently banned cats from the imperial compound, and eventually persuaded the emperor to move the government from Ch'ang-an to Loyang, where for the next half century she tried to exorcise the memory of her deed.In late 683 Wu's husband, the emperor, died, and for a time she allowed his son, the true heir, to occupy the throne—until she could find a pretext to take over the government completely.

A couple of years after the emperor's death, when Wu was aged sixty, she became infatuated with a lusty peddler of cosmetics and aphrodisiacs, a man whose virility had made him a favorite with various serving ladies around the palace.To give him a respectable post, she appointed him abbot of the major Buddhist monastery of Loyang—enabling him to satisfy, as it were, a double office in the service of the state.His antics and those of his followers did the cause of Buddhism little good over the next few years.When in 695 his arrogance finally became too much even for Wu, she had him strangled by the court ladies and his body sent back to the monastery in a cart.Although Wu is remembered today as an ardent Buddhist, some have suggested that her devotions turned as much to the claims of fortune telling by Buddhist nuns (some of whose organizations in Loyang reportedly ran brothels on the side) as to a pious concern with Indian philosophy.