Part 4 (1/2)
_[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 p.r.o.nouncements, 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, pract.i.tioner 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 j.a.pan.
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 embarra.s.s 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 a.s.sembly 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 a.s.sumed 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.