CHAPTER FOUR

The Chronicles of Zen

_A special transmission outside the _sutras_; No reliance upon words and letters; Direct pointing to the very soul; Seeing into one's own essence. _(Traditional Homage to Bodhidharma)

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_Bodhidharma

_THERE IS A ZEN tradition that one day while the Buddha was seated at Vulture Peak he was offered a flower and requested to preach on the law. He took the flower, and holding it at arm's length, slowly turned it in his fingers, all the while saying nothing. It was then that his most knowing follower smiled in understanding, and the silent teaching of Zen was born. That wordless smile is believed to have been transmitted through twenty-eight successive Indian patriarchs, ending with the famous Bodhidharma (ca. A.D. 470-534), who traveled to China in 520 and founded the school of Ch'an Buddhism, becoming the first Chinese patriarch.

What Bodhidharma brought to China was the Indian concept of meditation, called _dhyana _in Sanskrit, Ch'an in Chinese and Zen in Japanese. Since the transmission of the wordless insights of meditation through a thousand years of Indian history must, by definition, have taken place without the assistance of written scriptures or preaching, the identity and role of the twenty-eight previous Indian patriarchs must be approached with caution. It has been suggested that the later Chinese Ch'an Buddhists, striving for legitimacy of their school in the eyes of colleagues from more established sects, resurrected a line of "patriarchs" from among the names of obscure Indian monks and eventually went on to enshroud these faceless names with fanciful biographies. These Indian patriarchs reportedly transmitted one to the other the wordless secrets of _dhyana_, thereby avoiding any need to compose _sutras_, as did the lesser-gifted teachers of the other schools.

Although Bodhidharma clearly was an historical figure, he made no personal claims to patriarchy and indeed was distinguished more by individuality than by attempts to promulgate an orthodoxy. Arriving from India to teach meditation, he was greeted by an emperor's boasts of traditional Buddhism's stature in China. Bodhidharma scoffed and marched away, reportedly crossing the Yangtze on a reed to reach the Shao-lin monastery, where he sat in solitary meditation facing a cliff for the next nine years. This famous interview and Bodhidharma's response were the real foundation of Zen.

Bodhidharma seems to have gone essentially unnoticed by his contemporaries, and in the first record of his life--Biographies of the High Priests, compiled in 645--he is included simply as one of a number of devout Buddhists. He is next mentioned in _The Transmission of the Lamp_, a sourcebook of Zen writings and records assembled in the year 1004. In point of fact, Bodhidharma, like the Buddha, seems not to have left a written account of his teachings, although two essays are extant which are variously attributed to him and which probably maintain the spirit if not necessarily the letter of his views on meditation. The most quoted passage from these works, and one which encapsulates the particular originality of Bodhidharma, is his praise of meditation, or _pi-kuan_, literally "wall gazing." This term supposedly refers to the legendary nine years of gazing at a cliff which has become part of the Bodhidharma story, but it also may be taken as a metaphor for staring at the impediment that reason places in the path of enlightenment until at last the mind hurdles the rational faculties. His words are reported as follows:

_When one, abandoning the false and embracing the true, and in simpleness of thought abides in _pi-kuan_, one finds that there is neither selfhood nor otherness. . . . 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.1

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This emphasis on meditation and the denial of reason formed the philosophical basis for the new Chinese school of Ch'an. By returning to first principles, it was a denial of all the metaphysical baggage with which Mahayana Buddhism had burdened itself over the centuries, and naturally enough there was immediate opposition from the more established sects. One of Bodhidharma's first and most ardent followers was Hui-k'o (487-593), who, according to The Transmission of the Lamp, waited in vain in the snows outside Shao-lin monastery, hoping to receive an auThence with Bodhidharma, until at last, in desperation, he cut off his arm to attract the Master's notice. Some years later, when Bodhidharma was preparing to leave China, he left this pupil his copy of the Lankavatara Sutra and bade him continue the teachings of meditation. Today the one-armed Hui-k'o is remembered as the Second Patriarch of Ch'an.

It seems odd that one who scorned literary instruction should have placed such emphasis on a _sutra_, but on careful reading the Lankdvatara, a Sanskrit text from the first century, proves to be a cogent summary of early Ch'an teachings on the function of the counter mind. According to this _sutra_,

_Transcendental intelligence rises when the intellectual mind reaches its limit and, if things are to be realized in their true and essence nature, its processes of mentation . . . must be transcended by an appeal to some higher faculty of cognition. There is such a faculty in the intuitive mind, which as we have seen is the link between the intellectual mind and the Universal Mind.2

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Regarding the achievement of self-realization by meditation, the _sutra_ states,

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

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

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

_Do not be an embodier of fame; do not be a storehouse of schemes; do not be an undertaker of projects; do not be a proprietor of wisdom. . . . Be empty, that is all. The Perfect Man uses his mind like a mirror-- going after nothing, welcoming nothing, responding but not storing.4

_Bodhidharma, practitioner of "wall-gazing" meditation, probably knew nothing of Taoism, but he seems to have sensed correctly that China would provide a home for his Buddhism of nonattachment. The Chinese of the Tang era (618-907) did indeed find in his teachings a system remarkably congenial to their own thousand-year-old philosophy of _tao_, or The Way. Even the practice of _dhyana_, or meditation, resembled in a sense the Chinese tradition of the ascetic, solitary hermit, musing on the essence of nature in a remote mountain retreat. Whether Ch'an was really Buddhism masquerading as Taoism or Taoism disguised as Buddhism has never been fully established: it contains elements of both. But it was the first genuine merging of Chinese and Indian thought, combining the Indian ideas of meditation and nonattachment with the Chinese practice of nature reverence and nature mysticism (something fundamentally foreign to the great body of Indian philosophy, either Hindu or Buddhist).

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

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

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

_Our body is the Bodhi-tree,

And our mind a mirror bright.

Carefully we wipe them hour by hour,

And let no dust alight.5

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

_There is no Bodhi-tree,

Nor stand of a mirror bright.

Since all is void,

Where can the dust alight_?6

The story says that all were amazed, and the Fifth Patriarch immediately rubbed away the stanza lest the other monks become jealous. He then summoned Hui-neng late at night, expounded the Diamond Sutra to him, and presented him with the robe and begging bowl of Bodhidharma-- together with advice to flee south in the interest of safety.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

world of false reality perceived by one's discriminating senses and thus achive enlightenment. It is a slow, cumulative process. By contrast, the sudden school de-emphasizes _zazen _in favor of study of _koan_. The student struggles with _koan_, building up a kind of hopeless tension which may last for years, until at last his logical processes suddenly short-circuit and he attains enlightenment. Practitioners of the sudden school also use shouts and beatings to jolt novices out of their linear, sequential thought patterns. Students of the gradual school are also invited to study _koan_, and those in the sudden school are encouraged to practice _zazen_, but each school believes its own approach is best.

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

Although his introduction of a new sect inspired the customary opposition from the Tendai monks on Mt. Thei, the new faith challenging the usefulness of scholarship found a receptive audience among the newly emergent warrior class. Basically illiterate, the warriors often felt themselves intellectually inferior to the literary aristocracy, and they were delighted to be informed that a scholarly mind was an impediment rather than an asset in life. They also found Zen's emphasis on the quick, intuitive response agreeably in accord with their approach to armed combat. Eisai soon found himself invited to head a temple in Kyoto and later in the new warrior capital of Kamakura. Perhaps his most practical move was the composition of a treatise designed to win for Zen a place in the hearts of the nationalistic military establishment and at the same time to conciliate the Tendai monks on Mt. Thei. In his Propagation of Zen for the Protection of the Country he described Zen as follows:

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

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

_For a thoughtful warrior, whose life always bordered on death, there was an attraction, even a persuasion, in the belief that truth comes like the flash of a sword as it cuts through the problem of existence. Any line of religious thought that helped a man understand the nature of being without arduous literary stuThes was likely to attract the kind of warrior who felt that the greatest moments in life were the moments when death was nearest.9

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

The aristocratic priest Dogen (1200-1253), who also left the Tendai monastery for China and returned to establish the meditative, gradual school of Soto Zen, is generally considered the second founder of Japanese Zen. Although he grudgingly

acknowledged the usefulness of _koan _as an aid to instruction, Dogen considered _zazen _meditation the time-proven method of the Buddha for acTheving enlightenment. For scriptural support, he preferred to go back to the earlier Hinayana sutras for their more authentic accounts of the words of the Buddha, rather than to rely on Mahayana sources, which had been corrupted over the centuries by an elaborate metaphysics and polytheism. Dogen had not originally planned to start a school of Zen but merely to popularize _zazen_, to which end he wrote a small treatise, General Teachings for the Promotion of Zazen, which has become a classic. This was followed a few years later by a larger, more generalized work which was to become the bible of Japanese Soto Zen, _Shobogenzo_, or _Treasury of Knowledge Regarding the True Dharma_. In this work he tried to stress the importance of _zazen _while at the same time acknowledging the usefulness of instruction and _koan_ where required.

There are two ways in which to set body and mind right: one is to hear the teaching from a master, and the other is to do pure _zazen_ yourself. If you _hear_ the teachings the conscious mind is put to work, whilst _zazen_ embraces both training and enlightenment; in order to understand the Truth, you need both.10

Unlike the conciliatory Eisai, Dogen was uncompromising in his rejection of the traditional schools of Buddhism, which he felt had strayed too far from the original teachings of Gautama. He was right, of course; the chanting, savior-oriented popular Buddhists in Japan were, as Edwin Reischauer has noted, practicing a religion far closer to European Christianity of the same period than to the faith started by the Buddha--an atheistic self-reliance aimed at finding release from all worldly attachments. Dogen's truths did not rest well with the Buddhist establishment of his time, however, and for years he moved from temple to temple. Finally, in 1236, he managed to start a temple of his own, and gradually he became one of the most revered religious teachers in Japanese history. As his reputation grew, the military leaders invited him to visit them and teach, but he would have no part of their life. Possibly as a result of Dogen's attitude, Soto Zen never became associated with the warrior class, but remained the Zen of the common people. Today Soto (with approximately six and a half million followers) is the more popular version of Zen, whereas Rinzai (with something over two million followers) is the Zen of those interested in theological daring and intellectual challenge.

Historically a religion at odds with the establishment--from Bodhidharma to the eccentric T'ang masters--Zen in Japan found itself suddenly the religion of the ruling class. The result was a Zen impact in Japan far greater than any influence Ch'an ever realized in China.