Records of the Transmission of the Lamp: Volume 3: The Nanyue Huairang Lineage (Books 10-13) – The Early Masters

Way.

In the Hun lands the winds incite, in the land of Han they engender realisation

20.558

Introduction

‘As for the peerless bodhi, through the body it becomes the Vinaya, talked in the mouth it becomes Dharma, practised in the heart, Chan. Applying these three they come to one.’⁵ All Buddhist schools since the time of the Buddha are based on the practice of śīla, dhyāna, prajñā, that is, the cultivation of an ethical life (Vinaya), of meditation and of wisdom.

Meditation stands central: practised devotedly it ‘cleans’ direct awareness, which is a direct knowing from and of the origin.⁶ As for the word Chan (originally Channa), it is the Chinese transliteration of the Indian word dhyāna, meaning meditation. It is often forgotten that the Chan School, just as in the School of the Elders (Hinayāna), practises meditation in all the four positions: standing, walking, sitting and lying.⁷

The Extended Record of Chan Master Baizhang Huaihai (his biographical entry in the CDL is 6.105) goes into a little more detail about what he calls the ‘direct mirror awareness’,

‘Only if the direct mirror-like awareness just does not abide in anything existent or non-existent whatsoever, mundane or supra-mundane, and neither makes an interpretation of non-abiding nor even a non-interpretation of non-abiding, then one’s own heart is Buddha and its shining function belongs to the Bodhisattvas. Then the heart and its workings have become like a ruler and his ministers, in which the function of shining responds to fluctuating conditions, as if the ocean were talking in waves, illumining the ten thousand things without effort.’⁸

Or, as Chan Master Fenzhou Wuye says in 8.124,

‘The nature of your seeing, hearing and awareness is the same as the ancient Great Void. It was not born and does not die. All realms and states are originally empty and quiescent and there is not a single Dharma to be obtained. Those who are lost do not understand this and are therefore bewildered in these realms. Completely bewildered by the states of existence is drifting around in them without end. You should know that the nature of the heart is originally self-existent, not dependent on anything created, just like an indestructible diamond. All dharmas whatsoever are like shadows, like sounds, without substantial reality.’

It would seem then that there is a lot of work for us to do, for direct knowing mirror- awareness is certainly not a knowing based on proof and logic, on scientific analysis, on thinking, but is direct, immediate and, more to the point, unobstructed.

Although the doctrinal roots of Chan go back to the Buddha, the topsoil in which the Meditation School (Chan) is planted is textually oriented towards Mahāyāna Buddhism. This topsoil was perhaps never more thoroughly ploughed in Chinese Buddhist literature than in the Records from the Chan Mirror (Zongjing Lu 904-975 CE). Yanshou was a central figure in an already mature Buddhist tradition which embraced the broader spectrum of the Mahāyāna prevalent in Yanshou’s day in the state of Wuyue than came to be the case, when an articulated Chan entered the political arena later at the beginning of the Song dynasty. Indeed, in those days (late 10th century) in Wuyue (south China) the arcadian life of an all inclusive Buddhism had long been maturing and [Chan] meditation practice was a central feature.⁹

In the Preface to the ZJL Yanshou spells out, in classic terminology, the problem facing human beings from a traditional Buddhist perspective: he says, ‘The reverent submission is that the true source, deep and quiescent and the sea of awakening, pure and clear, cut off the two extremes of name and form without trace. In the very beginning there is no awakening. Then an agitated heart suddenly arises, activating basic karmic proclivities inauspicious for the clarity of awakening.

‘Due to a lighting up there arises reflection and the seeing of differences suddenly flourishes. Then the reflection gathers dust, forms proliferate, take shape and spread, like a mirror giving reality to images. The root of personality arises abruptly and thinking follows such that the world of differentiation comes into being. Later, due to knowledge, love and hate take on different intensities.

‘From all of this the genuine is lost and the [true] nature suffers neglect by grasping to forms and chasing names. The affective pollutants accumulate and block up whilst defiled awareness solidifies into a continuum. Genuine awakening is locked up in a night of dreams in which the three worlds are submerged in enchantment. Crawling along within the nine happy abodes¹⁰ on a dark path, the wisdom-eye is blinded by the yoke of karmic sufferings. Mourning for the gate of liberation, a self is endured in the middle of no-self, a hasty somewhere set up in the middle of going nowhere.’¹¹

The ZJL by Yongming Yanshou, the St. Thomas Aquinas of Chinese Mahāyāna Buddhism,¹² is a recapitulation of the whole history of the Mahāyāna transmission to China up to his day. In chapters 97 and 98 Yangshou discusses Chan, almost at the end of his 100-chapter work.

891-971 CE, who appears in book 25 of the CDL), which would render almost inconceivable the notion that these two monks did not know each other well. Daoyuan, a generation younger than Yanshou, is credited with another seminal work, A Colleetion of the Common Praetiee of the Buddhas and Patriarehs ), a work that is said to have brought together the various inchoate Chan lineages under one overarching family tree. But the attribution of this work to Daoyuan is problematic, since nothing is known of him or of his original work. Daoyuan’s work on the Chan patriarchal lineage was taken up later by another man, who reworked it and changed the title to Reeords of the Transmission of the Lamp CDL).¹³

The man who reworked Daoyuan’s work was of quite a different stamp than a Yanshou or a Daoyuan: how different only became clear later. He was actually born as a crane chick. The horror and fright felt in the confinement room at this event by all those present would be a prelude to the impact he – or it – would make on a whole range of events in the future. Anyway, they threw this thing into a river when it was born to try to get rid of it but an old uncle of the mother, who was obviously in the habit of believing anything, said that the births of extraordinary men only appear between long intervals of time. So they all rushed outside to look for the thing-chick they had thrown away and luckily found it. What did they find? They found a little baby embryo-boy within the revolting exuviae of a crane. Its body was still covered in feathers, but happily they fell off a month or so later. So the story goes.¹⁴ This was in the year 974 CE, a year before the death of Yanshou at the age of seventy-one. The name of the chick-man was Yang Yi and he became an all-powerful civil servant rather than a monk like Yanshou or Daoyuan.

Things started happening very quickly after the birth of the feathered one: when Yang Yi was only seven years old even the Emperor of China heard of his doings and when he was eleven he was summoned to court, being already learned and able to converse on profound subjects with any of the adult literati. But the rise of Yang Yi was also the endtime of the arcadian life of Chan as it was adumbrated in Yanshou’s encyclopaedic work, written a generation before Yang Yi appeared at court.

What is known is that the man who would rise to power at the centre of court life far away in the imperial capital, Yang Yi, also hailed from the same area as the two monks Yanshou and Daoyuan. Yang Yi, of spotless moral integrity despite the heady and artificial atmosphere in which he worked, somehow acquired Daoyuan’s work, presumably with the agreement of all concerned. Yang Yi’s life work was quite unusual amongst civil servants, a fact not even appreciated today. It was no less than to play a key role in helping to reshape the traditional society of his day into a new Song dynasty dispensation. Drafting imperial edicts, reforming the civil service examination system into a new meritocracy, as well as revamping traditional Chan Buddhist lore – all was geared to opening up more opportunities to more people for entry into government service and to make Chan Buddhist practice more inclusive. The extraordinary thing is that Yang Yi succeeded in all these fields. What he made of Daoyuan’s original work, in the service of the dynasty’s crusade for more transparency, would have a lasting influence into our own day: he is responsible for the first canonical Chan Buddhist work.

Says Albert Welter, ‘Because teng-lu (i.e. the CDL and its sequels) were forged and shaped to assert revisionist claims regarding Ch’an orthodoxy, they are best treated as historical fiction...’¹⁵ Quite so! Yet is it not the same kind of historical fiction as is found in Aeschylus, Shakespeare and Goethe? Furthermore since the debunking of Japanese biased Zen history after Dunhuang, it is said that Linji/Rinzai Zen is not the classic, authentic Zen after all (therefore revisionist). Yet the Linji/Rinzai monastic system has at least the advantage of a thousand year-long history of actual practice and the fruits thereof behind it; that makes it authentic. An Ur Chan is surely a chimera.¹⁶

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As Kristopher Schipper has pointed out, almost all the Chinese historical writings are pre-eminently Confucian – a fact often overlooked by researchers.¹⁷ A clear picture of the early history of Buddhism in China then – or of Daoism for that matter – without government influence, is difficult to acquire. Yet despite the vicissitudes of dynastic changes over long periods of time, Buddhist and Daoist temples and their local social support systems seem to have had a continuous existence throughout the many dynastic changes.¹⁸ There was always an active accommodation between government and religionists in China.¹⁹ It is equally impossible to write a coherent history of Chan before 845 CE simply because there isn’t one: the Chan texts were composed after that time, under government auspices. Chinese Buddhism is rooted in the economic, social, cultural and religious history of China from the grass roots to the very top.

c.360-434 CE), famous for his saying, ‘Buddhahood is attained through instantaneous awakening’ – an insight which would come to full fruition during the ninth and tenth century of our era. The efforts of this famous 4th century Buddhist cleric helped to germinate the future Chan fruit. In the year 429 CE Daosheng made his opinion known that icchantikas (the most spiritually deluded beings) were capable of experiencing Buddhist awakening. This courageous statement went directly against the prevailing conviction in Chinese Buddhism of that time, based on an early shortened version of the Mahāparanirvā a Sūtra translated from the Sanskrit by Faxian and Buddhabhadra in 416/7 CE at the southern capital (modern Nanjing). In this sutra it said that icchantikas were forever excluded from the benefits of Buddhist wisdom because they had destroyed all their roots of goodness. That this was said in a canonical sutra made it incontrovertible doctrine. It could not be argued with nor could any monk whatsoever have a conflicting opinion about it. After a lifetime of Buddhist practice Daosheng had come to a radical insight whose pronouncement resulted in immediately being stripped of his Buddhist robes and expelled from the community of monks, just a few years before his death.

When Daosheng came to the full Mahāparanirvā a Sūtra, ema in 422, he must have had quite a shock. In the new complete translation icchantikas were eligible for, were included in the Buddhist practice and its goal of awakening and indeed possessed the seeds of Buddhahood just as others did.

When we read of such controversies today we might wonder what all the fuss was about, yet in those early days when Buddhism in China was only just emerging into a clearer light after having been seen through their own Daoist constructs for three hundred years, this was nothing short of a revelation. The implications of the realisation that icchantikas could partake of Buddhist awakening were loaded with future goodies. It meant that now everybody – Buddha-nature is inherent! All beings have it, no matter who they are – it is already inbuilt, not acquired! From this time on, Daosheng’s famous statement that ‘Buddhahood is achieved through instantaneous awakening’, was now grounded in the doctrine of the Buddha-nature being inherent in all beings.

The Chan School has also been coloured by non-Buddhist sources rooted in the early Chinese world. The literary influence of the Zhuangzi, Laozi and Liezi are clearly discernable. In chapter 7 of the Zhuangzi (3rd century BCE), for example, it is said that ‘the perfected man employs his heart like a mirror’, a theme later to be echoed by many a Chan master. Indeed Chan masters often refer to seekers as ‘followers of the Dao’, a term not used exclusively to denote Daoism but used in its wider cultural context as the perennial Way that is uniquely Chinese, as Zhuxi himself was to use the term much later.

The miracle stories so popular in China from an early age (the first specifically Buddhist miracle stories appeared in 399 CE) also contain many insights into the grass-roots practices of early Buddhists at this time.²⁰ The ancient Chinese love of literary games, especially poetry competitions, where two or more people would get together to spontaneously compose little verses to which the opponent would have to add a capping phrase, in the same metre and rhyme scheme and playing on the same complex allusions as the other player, might have helped to give rise to the extraordinary explorations of language, the gong’an (Jap. kōan) genre.

We could find endless comparisons between Daoism, Buddhism and Confucianism to illustrate the roots of Chan. In the secular literature too there was a classic, still much enjoyed in China today, called A New Account of the Tales of the World (Shishuo Xinyu 403-444 CE) during the Liu Song dynasty of the Southern and Northern Dynasties (420-589 CE).²¹ This work contains some 1,130 historical anecdotes and character sketches of about 600 literati, musicians, painters, Buddhist monks, Daoist recluses and scholars who lived in the Han and Wei-Jin periods, that is, the 2nd to the 4th centuries CE. The mixture of literary and vernacular styles helped set the scene for the later tradition of informal Chinese literature, both secular and Buddhist. The work features many stories of Buddhist monks and Daoist recluses and scholars enjoying nature, enjoying ‘pure conversation’ (qing tan) and literary games.²²

About the same time the earliest known collection of Chinese Buddhist Miracle Tales was published in southern China in 399 CE.²³ There was already a long tradition of miracle tales in old China (called zhiguai Soushenji, Records of Searching for the Supernatural compiled around 350 CE,²⁴ is still popular today. This literature is not in the dry official style of the Dynastic Histories but in the piquant vernacular language, later to be put to such good use in Chan encounter dialogues.

The contrary pole to the contemporary popularity of a rootless Zen is its ancestry in the early Chinese traditions, attested by its influence on Far Eastern culture in the fields of poetry, painting, secular literature and theatre. The two poles, the ancient and the modern, first meet in the early Song dynasty with the publication of the canonical CDL, which fixes the lineage of the Chan school backwards to the Buddha and its identity forwards into our own era. There were to be five following CDLs, creating in the process a new genre in Chinese Buddhist literature which migrated to Korea and then to Japan. That the lamp is an ancient Buddhist metaphor for the transmission of the living Dharma from master to heir, like a relay over the generations seems clear enough, yet we must not regard this historieally. As in Aeschylus, reality is clothed in a good story – fiction is fact, fact is unstable fiction.

It is often forgotten that the Buddhist Vinaya training is still the normal time-honoured way for all Buddhist monks of whatever school, of whatever era, of whatever civilisation, to attain transcendence since the days of the Buddha. The Chan/Zen monk is no exception to this millennia-long tradition, despite all the literary hype. The Vinaya rules for monks, some 250 ordinances, 348 for nuns (!), governing their entire daily life, was and still is the physical bedrock of the religious life for all monks everywhere. ‘...the religious state is a spiritual schooling for the attainment of the perfection of charity. This is accomplished through the removal of the obstacles to perfect charity by religious observances...’²⁵ The Vinaya rules arose out of the original utterances of the Buddha, to help his community on points of form as they arose – the ‘thou shalt’ and ‘thou shalt nots’ of daily monastic life – and later became the recorded precedents by which monks were enabled the more easily to live harmoniously together. There were also a number of guidelines for the laity, pointing to a reciprocal relationship between the ordained and householders on many levels, from the social to the economic, political, cultural and spiritual. Whether the many Buddhist schools of early China belonged to the Hinayana or to the Mahayana stream, all adhered to core Vinaya guidelines as the foundation of their practice.

Most of the early masters of Chan started their religious life – ‘left the home life’ – practising as monks in one of the many Vinaya schools, under the guidance of a Dharma Father who functioned as temple priest by virtue of himself having engaged in some years of training. These schools were monasteries and temples which also functioned as cultural centres, centres of education and even as post-houses and treasuries, in a world that was more or less in constant turmoil.

Indeed, it must have seemed to many that leaving the home life to become a monk was a much more exciting and interesting career prospect than to stay at home in one’s native village where there was no education, or where there was a good chance of being press-ganged into one of the many private armies often roaming about the countryside. Many youngsters were given to the monasteries as children (the normal age was eleven ) in order to give them a chance, not only for a good square meal every day but also for the opportunities open to any bright young novice in many different fields of activity. For the best monks and for those from poor backgrounds, the educational opportunities offered in the temples and monasteries were at the very least a cultural boon and often a means to real liberation.

The ideal and the practice of the Vinaya rules centred around three areas of spiritual activity: the cultivation of morality, the cultivation of meditation and the nurturing of wisdom (śila, dhyāna, prajña). Monks did not normally engage in work. The larger monasteries did own land but this was cultivated by tenant farmers or by serfs and slaves, owned by the monasteries themselves. Other servants worked as intermediaries engaged in usury and commerce on the monks’ behalf. The normal way of life for monks and nuns in India was the daily alms round, the practice of meditation and the instruction of the laity.

In the extreme circumstances of almost constant warfare going on somewhere on the early Chinese mainland, monks and nuns were subjected to pressure from two sides. On the one hand pressure stemmed from the social and commercial life Buddhist monasteries had to adopt as a result of the prevailing social and economic conditions, and on the other hand from the sheer weight of the Vinaya rules by which each tried to live a pure life under such difficult circumstances. This seems to have been largely responsible for creating tensions which showed themselves in a growing separation of Vinaya monks within certain monasteries; some monks wished to tread a new path to Buddhist practice.

This new path, which began to emerge during the Tang dynasty, was not geared to compromising on the Vinaya rules or on being imprisoned by the letter of the Buddhist Law. By virtue of the prevailing unsettled circumstances, for example before and after the proscription of 842-5 CE, Chan monks took to breaking through all the dead wood of usage that had accumulated over many centuries in order to make a clean start at getting to the heart of the Buddha’s message. Indeed the events of 842-5 CE seem to have helped this process along.

The religious renewal emerging from the nascent Chan school was radical in two respects: firstly, monks were to work for their own sustenance, which meant daily physical labour, cultivating fields to grow their own food. This could not have been a more far-reaching departure from the time-honoured way of monks walking their daily alms round or from owning serfs and slaves to do their menial work. Secondly, although meditation was central, it was so in quite a radical way. Daily physical work, ‘moving meditation’ – life ‘in all four positions’ (sitting, standing, walking and lying) – was to be the meditation. The meditative practice of this way into the heart of the Buddha’s teachings would increasingly embrace the laity too, since it stressed the importance of cultivating a new attitude to all activity in ordinary daily life. The thrust of this daily life practice of work as meditation was – and still is – to give oneself wholeheartedly into whatever is being done at the moment, tantamount to the ceasing of all notions of good and bad. These departures were innovative and perfectly suited to the realities of life within and outside the monastery, then as now.

In this connection, a master of the Linji/Rinzai School worthy of special mention is Baizhang Huaihai (Jap. Hyakujō Ekai 749-814 CE, 6.105, vol. 2), who wrote the rules for all Chan/Zen monasteries still in force today, and who is famous for his dictum, ‘a day without work is a day without food.’ It is related that when he was getting old the