Chan Buddhism in Ritual Context

Bernard Faure

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134431168
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Eastern Philosophy

The essays in this volume attempt to place the Chan and Zen tradition in their ritual and cultural contexts, looking at various aspects heretofore largely (and unduly) ignored. In particular, they show the extent to which these traditions, despite their claim to uniqueness, were indebted to larger trends in East Asian Buddhism, such as the cults of icons, relics and the monastic robe.The book emphasises the importance of ritual for a proper understanding of this allegedly anti-ritualistic form of Buddhism. In doing so, it deconstructs the Chan/Zen 'rhetoric of immediacy' and its ideological underpinnings.

1

CHAN AND ZEN STUDIES

The state of the field(s)

Bernard Faure

The following comments focus on a certain number of works which, despite the vague nature of their object, can be grouped under the name Chan/Zen. I have retained, in the abundant and unequal literature relative to this domain, only the most significant contributions of the last four decades, and it goes without saying that these notes do not claim to be objective or exhaustive. As any exercise of this kind, these comments reflect the normative conceptions of their author.

Brought to the attention of the sinological world by the work of the Chinese historian Hu Shi in the 1930s, Chan/Zen studies truly blossomed only after the Second World War, that is, almost half a century after the discovery of the Dunhuang manuscripts. Apart from a few exceptions, Chan/Zen has remained the territory of Japanese and American scholars. Before presenting the works of the latter, a few words about their European precursors are in order.

As early as 1923, Paul Pelliot, in a seminal essay modestly entitled ‘Notes on some artists of the Six Dynasties and the Tang’, examined the background of the legend of Bodhidharma. In 1947, Paul Demiéville published The Mirror of the Mind, in which he compared the use of the mirror metaphor in the Chinese and Western philosophical tradition. This article, which inaugurated a series of sudies on ‘subitism’ and ‘gradualism’, has exerted a profound influence on the development of Chan studies in the US.

In 1949, Jacques Gernet, stimulated by Hu Shi’s works, published a translation of Shenhui’s Dialogues; then, in a rich article published in 1951, he described the eventful biography of this figure. The following year, Demiéville published his monumental Le Concile de Lhasa, in which he attempted to unveil the history of the controversy over ‘subitism’, which animated the enigmatic Council of Tibet (which some scholars today localize, not in Lhasa, but in the bSam yas Monastery, while others deny that such Council ever took place). This work, divided into two parts (doctrinal and historical), is a precious source of information on early Chan, and in particular on the Northern School, to which the Chinese protagonist in the controversy, Moheyan, was heir. It is regrettable that Demiéville did not follow up on his initial project, which was to dedicate a second volume to a study of the Chan doctrine. However, in subsequent years, he continued to give lectures at the Collège de France and to publish articles on this topic. It is curious, however, that while his influence in France remained small, despite the publication in 1973 of two volumes of his collected essays on Chinese Buddhism and sinology, he was beginning to be read in Japan and in the United States. Among the repercussions of his work in France, we must nevertheless mention the publication in 1970 of a special issue of Hermès on Chan, a second edition of which, greatly expanded (1985), includes not only the translation of basic Chan/Zen texts, but a few important articles on Chinese Chan (by Paul Demiéville, Nicole VandierNicolas and Catherine Despeux) and its influence in Tibet (Guilaine Mala).

In the United States, the work of Walter Liebenthal on Shenhui (1953) and the Vajrasamādhi-sūtra, despite (or because of) its originality, is on the whole unreliable. It is only with the translation of the Platform Sūtra by Philip Yampolsky in 1967, accompanied by a scholarly introduction on the legend and the genesis of the Chan patriarchal tradition, that the study of Chan earned its academic credentials. Yampolsky was the first to introduce to American scholars the recent research of Yanagida Seizan — who published, the same year, his monumental study on the historical works of early Chan (Shoki zenshū shisho no kenkyū). It was also the collaboration of Yanagida and Iriya Yoshitaka that allowed Ruth Fuller Sasaki and Miura Isshū to edit Zen Dust, a work rich in information on Chan/Zen, but difficult to use because of its hybrid character. Another scholar influenced by Japanese scholarship was Heinrich Dumoulin, whose History of Zen Buddhism (1963) provided a useful introduction to the history of Chan/Zen. This history, augmented and revised, has recently been reedited and published in two volumes (Dumoulin 1988–90).

However, it is during the last two decades that studies have multiplied, still strongly influenced by Yanagida’s work. These studies were also written in reaction against the appropriation of Zen by the counter-culture of the 1960s. The first task was to free Zen from its association, spread by Suzuki Daisetsu and his epigons, the kind of ‘Oriental mysticism’ denounced in France by René Etiemble under the name of ‘Zaine’.

To understand the direction taken by these studies, we must first place ourselves in the postwar context. The study of the Chan manuscripts from Dunhuang experienced a revival when the Chinese historian Hu Shi, after a long political interlude, took up again his research on Shenhui and Chan. Very soon, however, his historicist approach led him to run up against Suzuki, who had not forgotten the severe review of his ‘Essays on Zen’ almost twenty-five years earlier – an anonymous critique published in The Times Literary Supplement which he had wrongly attributed to Hu Shi (see Barrett 1989). At any rate, Suzuki reproached Hu Shi for his historicism in a debate which opposed him (in 1953) to the Chinese historian in the columns of the journal Philosophy East and West. The positions of the two protagonists were deeply entrenched: according to Hu Shi, Chan is merely one religious movement among others, and its development was an integral part of the political history of the Tang. According to Suzuki, however, Zen transcends history, and historians are by definition reductionists (Suzuki 1953; Hu Shi 1953).

It was in order to go beyond this rather sterile antinomy that Yanagida began to publish his works. Although he seems to have at first taken side with Hu Shi, he was nevertheless not content with the latter’s historicism. Hu Shi was actually well aware of these divergences when, in a letter addressed to Yanagida, he compared the latter’s Buddhist ideal to his own atheism. The originality of Yanagida’s position soon asserted itself, when he criticized the excesses of the historicist critique of Chan made by Sekiguchi Shindai, a Tendai historian who insisted on showing that all the ‘histories’ of Chan are fraudulent. For Yanagida, although traditional Chan historiography cannot claim the status of a truthful narrative, neither can it be dismissed as an empty fabrication. Yanagida criticized both the mythifying narrative of the ‘Histories of the Lamp’ and the demythifying history of hyper-historicism, and attempted to emphasize the religious creativity of those ‘inventions’. True, his Shoki zenshū shisho no kenkyū seems, through its rigorous application of textual criticism, to belong in the historicist tradition, but Yanagida takes care to nuance his position in the preface to this work.

Early Chan

Western scholars who have taken their cues from Yanagida have, however, essentially retained his historical critique of the origins of Chan. What mattered, above all, was a consolidation of the results of this revisionist history which allowed, in the light of the documents from Dunhuang, for a retrieval, to bring out of the dungeons of oblivion actors famous in their own time, like Shenhui, Shenxiu, and other masters of the Northern School; but this also led to a denouncement of the myth of Chan origins. As characteristic products of this phase, we can mention the works of John McRae, Jeffrey Broughton and Bernard Faure on Northern Chan, of Robert Buswell on the apocryphal Vajrasamādhi-sūtra, and the various collections of essays published by the Kuroda Institute under the direction of Peter Gregory. Griffith Foulk also questioned the still prevailing image of an early Chan largely independent of Tang Buddhist institutions (Foulk 1987).

Furthered by the reproduction on microfilm of the Dunhuang manuscripts, the study of early Chan rapidly became a fecund domain. We must note, however, that despite the existence of microfilm collections in several American universities, such as Berkeley and Cornell, and the publication a few years ago in Taiwan of a photographic edition of the Dunhuang baozang, American scholars, contrary to their Chinese, Japanese and French scholars, have not yet made a concerted effort in the critical study of these manuscripts. For different reasons, Chan studies and ‘Dunhuangology’ have remained separate fields on both sides of the Atlantic.

Among the important contributions to the American discovery of Chan, let us mention Early Chan in Tibet and China (Lai and Lancaster 1983), and Sudden and Gradual: Approaches to Enlightenment in Chinese Thought (Gregory 1987a). The first work contains, among others, the translation of two important articles by Yanagida, one concerning the Lidai fabao ji and the Chan school in Sichuan (Yanagida 1983a), and another on the emergence of the ‘Recorded Sayings’ (yulu) of classical Chan (Yanagida 1983b), as well as a survey of the studies on Tibetan manuscripts from Dunhuang by Ueyama Daishun. The second work opens with a translation of essays by Demiéville and R. A. Stein on Chinese and Tibetan ‘subitism’.

The question of the relationship between Chan and Tibetan Buddhism was also the object of a number of studies, for instance Jeffrey Broughton’s ‘Early Ch’an Schools in Tibet’ (Broughton 1983). The collection in which this essay appeared, Studies in Ch’an and Hua-yen, edited by Gregory and Gimello, also contained essays by Luis Gómez on the teaching of Moheyan (the Chan master studied by Demiéville in Le concile de Lhasa) and by John McRae on the Niutou (Oxhead) School (Gimello and Gregory 1983).

In 1986, Gregory edited another volume dealing with the reciprocal influences of various Chinese Buddhist schools regarding meditation. The lion’s share was nevertheless given to Chan, with essays on Chan and Pure Land (Chappell), on the ‘One-Practice samādhi’ (Faure), on the ‘secret’ of Chan meditation (Bielefeldt), and on the kōan technique in Korean Soŏn (Buswell).

While bearing testimony to the increasing erudition of Chan studies, these works still represent by and large an essentially doctrinal approach of the Buddhist tradition, and in the end make little effort to place Chan in its broader socioreligious context. The same is true for the work of McRae on the Northern School and the formation of Chan, published the same year (McRae 1986). In this well-documented study, McRae attempted to rehabilitate Northern Chan, which was accused by Shenhui of representing a form of gradualism and merely a collateral lineage of Chan, thus inferior to the direct lineage of the Southern School, represented by Shenhui and his master Huineng. McRae showed that the Northern School had nothing to envy in its rival regarding subitism or legitimacy (on this question, see also Faure 1988).

McRae’s recent work on Shenhui provides a synthesis of former studies in the light of archeological and iconographic discoveries concerning Shenhui. Following Yanagida, McRae uses in particular the recently discovered portrait of Shenhui to analyse the development of Chan in the Buddhist kingdom of Nanzhao (modern Yunnan). Furthermore, he undertakes an annotated translation of Shenhui’s complete works, which will supersede the partial tran...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• ROUTLEDGECURZON STUDIES IN ASIAN RELIGION
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• 1 Chan and Zen studies: the state of the field(s)
• 2 Imagining the portrait of a Chan master
• 3 On the ritual use of Chan portraiture in medieval China
• 4 A Tang dynasty Chan mummy [roushen] and a modern case of furta sacra?: investigating the contested bones of Shitou Xiqian
• 5 Filling the Zen shū: notes on the Jisshū Yōdō Ki
• 6 Quand l'habit fait le moine: the symbolism of the kāsāya in Sōtō Zen
• 7 The enlightenment of kami and ghosts: spirit ordinations in Japanese Sōtō Zen
• 8 How Dōshō's medicine saved Dōgen: medicine, Dōshōan and Edo-period Dōgen biographies
• Glossary
• Index