Chapter 3. The formation of Chan: rebellion against scholasticism¶

By the middle of the Tang, Chinese Buddhism's scriptures and doctrinal learning had reached their height. The canon ran to thousands of fascicles, systems of doctrinal classification competed to rank themselves highest, translation workshops were state enterprises, lecture platforms were everywhere, and commentaries on commentaries acquired commentaries of their own. Then the An Lushan Rebellion of 755 destroyed the economic basis of northern doctrinal scholarship. The lecture platforms of the two capitals declined amid the upheaval, while another kind of Buddhism arose in the southern mountains and forests under regional military rule. Its banner carried four short phrases: a separate transmission outside the teachings; no reliance on written words; direct pointing to the human mind; seeing one's nature and becoming a Buddha. Volume 1 has already examined the lineage legends, Huineng and the Southern School, and the encounter cases and Five Houses in full.¹ This chapter reads them solely as a history of transformation. This was the second time in Buddhist history that the established procedures were denied. The first took place in India, when Nāgārjuna refused the judgment of epistemology and logic (Essay 5, Chapter 1). This time, in China, Chan refused the judgment of texts. Sudden awakening passed over every stage that doctrinal classification had laid out. Both ended the same way. Those who denied the procedures became the makers of new ones.

The starting point of the chain deserves a separate check, for it is a typical instance of the rule that the later the record, the richer its detail. The records of Bodhidharma have three layers. The earliest is the Record of the Monasteries of Luoyang (547). Beneath the pagoda of Yongning Monastery stands Bodhidharma, a "foreigner from Persia" who claims to be 150 years old. Seeing the golden disks dazzling in the sun, he "chanted 'namo' aloud and kept his palms joined for days." There is no Chan teaching, no facing a wall, no emperor. The second layer is Tanlin's preface to the Treatise on the Two Entrances and Four Practices. Bodhidharma has become "of Brahmin stock from southern India," and his teaching comprises two entrances and four practices. The original wording for entrance through principle is "rely on the teachings to awaken to the essential principle." The earliest Bodhidharma literature teaches reliance on scriptural teachings, the exact opposite of the later slogan. The third layer is Daoxuan's Continued Biographies of Eminent Monks (645). Bodhidharma crosses the sea to China and gives Huike the four-fascicle Laṅkāvatāra. "Wall contemplation" names a meditation method, not a stone cave. Of Huike's severed arm, Daoxuan writes that "bandits cut off his arm." Standing in the snow to seek the Dharma, the exchange with Emperor Wu of Liang, crossing the river on a reed, returning west with a single shoe, and the precious pedigree of twenty-eight patriarchs all come from the eighth- and ninth-century Record of the Dharma-Jewel through the Generations and Baolin zhuan, precisely the period when contests over legitimate transmission were fiercest. Biography thickened in step with the needs of the lineage. What remains at the level of historical fact is only a meditation teacher from southern India, or Persia in another account, active in northern China in the early sixth century, teaching the two entrances and four practices and emphasizing the Laṅkāvatāra.²

From the second patriarch to the fifth, four curves move together. First, scriptural support. Huike inherits the Laṅkāvatāra and its tathāgatagarbha teaching of noble wisdom realized for oneself. Daoxin's Essential Expedient Methods for Entering the Way and Pacifying the Mind joins the Laṅkāvatāra to the single-practice samādhi of the Mañjuśrī Prajñāpāramitā. Laṅkāvatāra and Prajñāpāramitā thus converge. Under Hongren, the Diamond Sūtra gradually replaces the Laṅkāvatāra. The true-and-eternal theory of mind and nature acquires Prajñāpāramitā's negative exposition, and Chan's doctrinal structure takes shape. Second, the form of life. Huike's circle practices itinerant asceticism, lodging wherever conditions permit, with one robe and one bowl. Daoxin settles on Mount Shuangfeng for thirty years, with five hundred followers. For the first time, Chan practitioners form a permanent community. Hongren's East Mountain community numbers seven hundred. "All four postures are places of practice; all three forms of action are Buddha-work." Hongren himself joins in labor and service by day and sits in collected meditation until dawn at night. Days are for work, nights for meditation. Third, method. Contemplating the body as no different from the Buddha gives way to the single-practice samādhi of recollecting the Buddha and purifying the mind, then to guarding the original true mind. Each step simplifies the method, until one enters deeply through a single gate and a single phrase can transmit it. Fourth, certification. The loose affiliations of Laṅkāvatāra teachers give way to an emerging consciousness of entrustment within the East Mountain community. Awareness of a transmission chain grows with the community's size. An honest gap remains in the middle. There are almost no records of the third patriarch, Sengcan; the Inscription on Faith in Mind was attributed to him later. The least documented link sits at the chain's very center. A lineage narrative can least tolerate a gap, and later generations supplied the most material for this one.³

The left panel shows the chapter’s three early documentary layers plus a fourth visual layer for the eighth- and ninth-century legends. In the 645 layer, the arm cut off by bandits is Huike’s, not Bodhidharma’s. The English image reverses the taper of the stacked layers; neither their width nor their thickness measures the quantity or reliability of the evidence. “The later the archive, the more detailed” states the chapter’s criticism of expanding lineage narratives, not increasing historical reliability.

The right panel draws two of the four developments discussed in the text: community size and lineage consciousness. Scriptural reliance and methods of practice remain in the prose. The figures of five hundred at Daoxin’s Twin Peaks and seven hundred under Hongren at East Mountain are the numbers given in the chapter, not points in a continuously measured population series. The patriarchs on the horizontal axis are not equally spaced dates. The English image changes Sengcan’s circular blank into a vertical gap; both mean that almost no documentary record survives, not that the chapter establishes the total absence of every record.

A chain secured Chan's authority. The authority structure Chan made for itself was a genealogy, rather than a higher system of doctrinal classification. Twenty-eight patriarchs in India, six generations in China, robe and bowl passed on, mind sealing mind. The first half of this chain was constructed retrospectively; the records in the two paragraphs above show how it was made. That act of retrospective construction is itself this volume's material. Shenhui went north to Huatai to contest legitimate transmission on behalf of the Southern School. He made the narrative of the robe as proof of transmission into a public case. The contest turned on exclusive rights to a lineage, not on doctrine.⁴ Set these operations beside the transmission chains described in Essay 2, and they are immediately recognizable. A chain is the one thing that cannot be copied. Anyone can read a sūtra or construct a classification of the teachings. Only the claim that "our branch alone received a single transmission from the Buddha and patriarchs" cannot be replicated. In the terms of Essay 4, Chapter 1, China's gates of scripture and doctrinal classification were all soft gates. Chan installed a hard lock again. It also corresponds closely to esoteric Buddhism in Essay 7. Esoteric Buddhism ties the Dharma to initiation; Chan ties it to a master's approval. Both return the criterion to the master's hands. The two forms of certification by an individual master say the same thing.

Economic self-reliance has already appeared in outline. The Huangmei community was already in the fields by day. Baizhang made it a rule; later monastic tradition attributes to him the saying, “A day without work is a day without food.” The conjunction of farming and Chan practice formally transformed the monastic community from an economy of support by donors into one of self-support. The original rules are lost, and the surviving text is the work of Yuan authors, but the institutional reality of farming Chan is beyond doubt.⁵ The significance of self-support in the mountains and forests emerges in comparison with doctrinal scholarship. The scholarly schools lived in the capitals. Their property lay in official monasteries, their income in state grants, their lifeline wholly in the state's hands. Chan communities lived in the mountains and forests, growing their own food. What the state's hand could not reach, it could not take away. At this point, the difference was still only one of style. When the Huichang persecution arrived in the next essay, it became a matter of life and death.

As required, I mark the following explicitly as this volume's conjecture. No reliance on written words was a strategy for managing risk in troubled times. Scriptures could be burned, translation workshops dispersed, and lecture platforms banned. Only the mind transmitted from master to disciple could neither be carried off nor burned. Chan was the form of Buddhism best able to withstand disaster. First establish the straightforward half of the account. Chan's doctrinal core has a real genealogy. The convergence of a philosophy of the true and eternal mind and nature with Prajñāpāramitā's negative exposition has been detailed in Volume 1. This was not doctrine fabricated by the urge to survive. The conjecture concerns selection, not invention. Troubled times do not invent doctrines; they select them. The ninety years between the An Lushan Rebellion and Huichang were precisely the ninety years in which Chan went from a sidestream to the mainstream. The fires of Huichang then demonstrated this form's advantages, the central subject of Essay 11. The form came first; disaster then tested it.

A piece of demographic evidence can accompany this conjecture. Following the new practice in the previous chapter, it will not be designated a separate conjecture. Chan's membership needs to be viewed by stratum. Its leaders were literate, sometimes highly learned. Shenxiu was widely read; Shenhui was capable of sustaining the contest over genealogy. Early Chan teachers wrote prolifically. Scholars have long pointed out that the school of no reliance on written words was exceptionally good at writing.⁶ But as settlement and farming Chan developed, more and more of its ordinary members came from the countryside. Five or seven hundred people gathered in the Huangmei countryside. Monasteries with universal communal labor recruited from surrounding villages. Their literacy rate could not have exceeded the ordinary rural level of the time. The simplification of method thus corresponds to the declining literacy of members. An increasingly nonliterate community receives a method that increasingly dispenses with literacy. Whatever the historical truth of the narrative of Huineng's illiteracy, its function was to turn unfamiliarity with texts into an honor. Pure Land replaced literacy with name-recitation; Chan replaced commentaries with guarding the mind. The two great Chinese inventions did the same thing with respect to literacy. The ingenuity of no reliance on written words was that it appealed at both ends. At the bottom, it required no literacy; at the top, no study of commentaries. Literati weary of commentarial learning loved it too. Doctrinal scholarship lost out at both ends. Resilience to disaster was its advantage in survival, freedom from literacy its advantage in drawing members. Both advantages came from the same form.

There were three costs. The first concerned criteria. Sharp Chan exchanges became the social form of realization. Volume 2 has already identified this as the Chinese form in its analysis of shifting criteria. A master's approval has no third party; a master's authority is not subject to examination. The sentence in Essay 7, Chapter 3 applies equally in the Chan hall: there is nothing to investigate. The second was a paradox. The school of no reliance on written words produced the largest body of writing in the history of Chinese Buddhism. Transmission-of-the-lamp records, recorded sayings, and commentarial assessments ran to thousands of fascicles. Song-dynasty Chan's contemplation of a critical phrase answered the proliferation of encounter cases with a single huatou, using a new method to correct its own excess of writing. The third cost was the internal drain of lineage disputes. The more exclusive rights to legitimate transmission mattered, the more it cost to fight for them. The dispute between the Northern and Southern Schools was only the first round.

Chan drew the elites and held the mountains and forests. But most members of a religious community of two million were neither in the forests nor among the elites. They went elsewhere. The next chapter turns to Pure Land.

References¶