Buddhist Studies from India to America

Essays in Honor of Charles S. Prebish

Damien Keown, Damien Keown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134196319
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Orientalische Philosophie

Charles Prebish is Professor of Buddhism, Pennsylvania State University, US – a leading international scholar and co-founder of what is now the 'Buddhism section' of the American Academy of Religion, and served an additional term on the steering committee.

Prebish is well known in N. America, and this book should attract readers in the region

The author of the book, (Damien Keown), and Charles Prebish are editors of the Critical Studies in Buddhism series published by Routledge.

Contributors are well-known international scholars whose participation guarantees that the academic quality of the work is high and the standard even throughout

Part I VINAYA STUDIES AND ETHICS

1 DŌGEN AND THE PRECEPTS, REVISITED

Steven Heine

When doing zazen, what precepts are not upheld, and what merits are not produced?

(Dōgen, Shōbōgenzō zuimonki)

Dōgen’s view in relation to Chinese Ch’an

In the course of an illustrious career, Charles Prebish has been known for innovation and advancement in numerous areas of scholarly inquiry as well as in ways of disseminating scholarship. These range from his seminal work on the Vinaya to Buddhist ethics in a broader sense and from helping establish the fields of American Buddhism and comparative studies of religion and sport to exploring the uses of internet technology in developing and distributing the results of research. Perhaps the best-known and most enduring element of Prebish’s remarkable legacy is the translation and examination of the role of the precepts in relation to monastic regulations or Vinaya, as demonstrated by his first book on Buddhist Monastic Discipline and more recent publications.¹

In the spirit of Prebish’s legacy, this chapter evaluates the role of the precepts in the approach to the theory and practice of Dōgen (1200–1253), founder of the Sōtō (Chin. Ts’ao-tung) Zen sect during the early Kamakura era, when Chinese Ch’an of the Sung dynasty was first being transmitted to Japan. Dōgen’s view of the precepts is particularly interesting for what it indicates about his relation to the Ch’an Five Mountains (Chin. Wu-shan, Jap. Gozan) monastic institution, as well as early Zen predecessors and rivals, in addition to the Japanese Tendai school, from which the Zen movement emerged as an independent sect.

One of the most important factors is that there seems to be a fundamental inconsistency in how Dōgen appropriated and applied the precepts in creating his own monastic system at his two main temples. These are Kōshōji temple in Kyoto, where he was the founding abbot from 1233 to 1243 when he moved from the capital to the remote mountains of Echizen province, and Eiheiji temple established in 1244 (originally called Daibutsuji until the name was changed in 1246), of which Dōgen remained abbot until his death. At some point—it is not clear when this was initiated although it was apparently in operation during the later years of the Eiheiji period—Dōgen began advocating a new system of administering 16-article precepts (jūrokujōkai).

Dōgen’s system includes three main items: (1) the three jewels or refuges (taking refuge in Buddha, Dharma, Sangha); (2) the three pure precepts (not sustaining evil, sustaining good, liberating sentient beings); and (3) the ten major or heavy precepts (not to kill, not to steal, not to lie, not to commit sexual acts, not to partake of intoxicants, not to defame male and female monastics or lay followers, not to covet, not to resist praising others, not to be stirred to anger, not to revile the three treasures).² This system seems to differ significantly from what other schools in China and Japan, both Ch’an/Zen and non- Zen (Tendai, Pure Land, Nichiren), were performing. Various Buddhist schools administered either additional or a different set of precepts, or dispensed with the behavioral codes altogether.

Sōtō tradition has long indicated that Dōgen’s system was based on the precepts he received directly from Chinese Ch’an mentor Ju-ching as part of the transmission process held several months after his enlightenment experience of casting off body-mind (shinjin datsuraku) attained during the summer retreat of 1225. According to the main sectarian biography, the Kenzeiki of 1472, and other traditional sources, in the fifth month Dōgen began face-to-face transmission (menju) with Ju-ching and recording conversations with his mentor that are included in the Hōkyōki.³ His enlightenment was confirmed by Juching at the time of a visit to the abbot’s quarters one night in the seventh month, and Dōgen was invited to be appointed temple attendant, but as a foreigner, he declined this offer, according to a passage in the Shōbōgenzō zuimonki, deferring instead to native Chinese monks.⁴

On the eighteenth day of the ninth month, Dōgen received the special version of the bodhisattva precepts, according to the colophon of the Busso shōden bosatsu kaisahō.⁵ This would have been Dōgen’s third precept ceremony. It followed his initiation into the Japanese Tendai school on the tenth day of the tenth month of 1213 under Kōen at Kaidanin hall of Enryakuji temple as well as the ceremony conducted at the time of receiving the seal of transmission (inka) from Myōzen in the Huang-lung (Jap. Ōryū) stream of the Lin-chi (Jap. Rinzai) Ch’an school at Kenninji temple in Kyoto in 1221. This was two years before the travels of Dōgen and Myōzen to China.

As a Tendai novice, Dōgen would likely have received the 58-article bodhisattva precepts spelled out in the Fan-wang ching (Jap. Bonmōkyō, in Taishō, vol. 24, no. 1484) that included the ten-article major precepts listed above in addition to the 48-article minor precepts. The Fan-wang ching attributed to Kumārajīva was not a translation of an Indian original but was composed in China based on eight-principle scriptural sources, which were sūtras all translated into Chinese between the third and fifth centuries.⁶ Since the time of Saichō, the Japanese Tendai school had abandoned the 250-article Prātimokşa (or so-called Hīnayāna) precepts that were generally required in China and still administered in Nara temples. However, since Dōgen was only 14 and the Tendai tradition established by Saichō called for the precepts to be administered not before the age of 20, it is possible that he only received the ten Mañjuśrī precepts of the śrāmanera as delineated in the Wen-shu-shih-li wen-ching (Taishō, vol. 14, no. 468).⁷ It is very likely that the bodhisattva ceremony for Dōgen at Mt. Hiei was either more or less duplicated or adapted to Dōgen’s level of seniority at Kenninji, which was founded by Eisai who established the Rinzai sect in Japan in 1202 as a branch temple of Tendai Taimitsu with an emphasis on meditation.

Did Dōgen learn the system of 16-article precepts from Ju-ching? According to the Hōkyōki (sections 5 and 49), Ju-ching allowed the Japanese novice to occupy the bodhisattva-śīla seat, indicating that his years of living under Japanese Tendai were accepted as legitimate qualifications even though he lacked the necessary Ch’an credentials and would not have been considered a monk by typical standards. As will be explained below, this would have been an extraordinary phenomenon in the Chinese Ch’an circle of the period, and was far different to the treatment that Dōgen received under then abbot Wu-chi when he first visited Mt. T’ien-t’ung in 1223. Since Dōgen’s case already differed from the accepted procedure for the transmission of the precepts within the Chinese Ch’an community, was it possible that Ju-ching transmitted a distinct set of precepts to Dōgen, different from the styles used in both countries? The Hōkyōki passages are quite vague and ambiguous about the use of the term “bodhisattva precepts” and whether this refers to a general sense of Mahāyāna practice or specific behavioral codes.

In considering these issues, however, it seems to be a highly dubious claim that Dōgen was instructed in the 16-article precepts by his Chinese mentor. Recently, a document with 16-article precepts was found in Shorenin, a Tendai temple in Kyoto, so that there is some possibility that Dōgen’s approach to having 16 articles is based on one of the Tendai precepts styles. It is also possible to speculate that in non-Zen Buddhist schools as well as Tendai in Japan there were different combinations, including the ten-article major precepts along with such expressions of devotion as the three refuges, the three pure precepts, and ritual repentances, an arrangement which is very close to Dōgen’s approach.⁸ If the 48-article minor precepts were eliminated, it may be that these were very general, open-ended exhortations for compassionate attitudes rather than rules governing behavior in the strict sense; they would therefore have been easily dispensable once the six articles of the refuges and pure precepts were accepted. However, it is doubtful that these combinations would have been considered, before Dōgen, to be monkmaking in the sense of conferring legitimacy to a new member of the monastic community.

The primary point is that as a Ch’an monk in the Ts’ao-tung school who was then abbot of Mt. T’ien-t’ung, one of the highly ranked temples in the Five Mountains monastic institution, Ju-ching no doubt adhered to a tradition that was spelled out in Tsung-che’s Ch’an-yüan ch’ing-kuei (Jap. Zen’en shingi) of 1103. The Ch’an-yüan ch’ing-kuei, which was the authoritative text of rules and regulations in the Ch’an school supposedly based on a source text attributed to Pai-chang (but no doubt apocryphal) from the early ninth century, required the combined precepts for all monks.⁹ This is unambiguously enunciated in the first two sections of the first fascicle covering “Receiving the Precepts” and “Upholding the Precepts.”

The combined system included the 250-article Prātimokṣa precepts as spelled out in the Ssu-fen lü (Jap. Shibunritsu, in Taishō, vol. 22, no. 1428) that were to be received as a prerequisite for the 58-article Mahāyāna (bodhisattva) precepts. It is confirmed in the writings of Eisai, who traveled to China over 30 years before Dōgen, that the combined system was strictly followed in the Five Mountains monasteries. As T.Griffith Foulk explains,

To become a fully ordained monk (ta-seng), a novice had to receive the full 250 precepts from a Vinaya master at a government-approved ordination platform. Full ordination was a requirement for training in the sangha halls of Ch’an monasteries and all other public monasteries in the Sung.¹⁰

Perhaps Ju-ching made an exception for the foreign disciple in not requiring the Prātimokṣa precepts before he entered training, but it is nearly impossible to imagine that he would have created a new system of transmission just for Dōgen’s benefit. Kagamishima Genryū, one of the leading Dōgen scholars of the postwar period, suggests that Dōgen himself came up with a way of streamlining and simplifying the precept system in order to break free from the hegemony of the Japanese Tendai school. Kagamishima points out that there is no record of the transmission of the 16 articles in the history of Chinese Ch’an Buddhism, nor were they ever mentioned in either Ju-ching yü-lu or any other Ch’an text.¹¹ Kagamishima observes that it would have been exceptional for Ju-ching to recognize Dōgen’s status but highly unlikely that this would have also meant a change of the Ch’an precept system:

What Ju-ching did reflects that he understood the position of the Japanese bodhisattva precepts through Dōgen and expressed his own agreement [with it]. Nevertheless, Ju-ching’s recognition of the position of Japanese bodhisattva precepts is not tantamount to the negation of the combined precepts as accepted by the Chinese Ch’an tradition. It would have been impossible for Ju-ching to retransmit the śrāmanera precepts to Dōgen, who already had received the bodhisattva precepts.¹²

Key to Kagamishima’s argument is that Dōgen himself formulated a new approach because he did not have the personal experience needed to be able to require the combined precepts for his disciples. Dōgen never received the 250-article Prātimokşa precepts either in Japan before he went to China or while he was visiting the mainland from 1223 to 1227. Although Myōzen was encouraged by Eisai to receive the Prātimokşa precepts by traveling to Nara, he would not have had permission to administer the combined precepts at Kenninji. Despite Eisai’s strong advocacy for the practice that he experienced in China, as a new temple Kenninji would not have been able to administer the Prātimokşa precepts. Nara temples were the only sites actively handling the Hīnayāna precepts in Japan. Kenninji was still considered a branch temple of the main Tendai center at Enryakuji temple on Mt. Hiei, which was resistant to change and reluctant to accept new procedures and practices, even as fledgling movements were beginning to flourish at the start of the Kamakura era. Myōzen had gone to Tōdaiji in Nara to receive the complete precepts (gusokukai) of Hīnayāna as early as 1199, at the age of 16, before taking the bodhisattva precepts (bosatsukai) at Enryakuji some years later. His pilgrimage to Nara, perhaps made at Eisai’s prodding, was not directly related to an anticipation of the trip taken with Dōgen.

One question frequently asked is: Why did Dōgen not prepare for the trip to China by making a stop at Nara to receive the Prātimokşa precepts?¹³ From listening to Myōzen who gained transmission (though not the Hīnayāna precepts) from Eisai, Dōgen must have become aware of the requirement in China. Even if we are somewhat skeptical of the account of Myōzen, which presumes that the precepts were available in Nara for the asking from a temple that was still in an intense rivalry with Enryakuji,¹⁴ once Dōgen reached the mainland, the lack of combined precepts caused numerous delays and tribulations. Unlike Myōzen, he was not given permission to enter China for a couple of months after his arrival at the port in the fourth month of 1223, and so he was not able to join the Mt. T’ien-t’ung retreat that first summer. Arriving in China without the combined precepts meant that as a novice Dōgen barely ranked above scores of irregular, itinerant practitioners who roamed the various temples. Once he disembarked in the fifth month of 1223, after the summer retreat had already gotten underway, it is not clear how or why Dōgen was accepted into Mt. T’ien-t’ung. Perhaps it was due to Myōzen’s intercession or to a petition filed by Dōgen, as some sources suggest.

Shortly after he joined the monastery, another procedural issue led to Dōgen filing an official challenge to the monastic system (see Figure 1.1) in an appeal that, according to the Kenzeiki, went all the way up to the imperial le...