Part 8 (1/2)
Has gone to the kinsmen of Lady Yang.7
_Although none of these blood relatives ever rose to the rich opportunities the situation afforded, another of her favorites compensated abundantly for their political inept.i.tude.
His name was An Lu-shan, a ”barbarian” of Turkish extraction, born in 703, who first entered China as a slave to an officer in a northern garrison of the empire. After distinguis.h.i.+ng himself as a soldier, he came to the attention of Yang Kuei-fei, who was so charmed by the man that she adopted him as her son. Before long he was a familiar figure at the court, reportedly very fat and possessing a flair for entertaining the bored aristocracy by his flippancy. Eventually he was made governor of a frontier province, where under pretense of a foreign threat he proceeded to recruit an army of alarming proportions and questionable allegiance.
Meanwhile, back in the capital, Lady Yang and her relatives had taken over the government, whereupon they unwisely decided that An Lu-shan should be brought under firmer control. With their hostility providing him just the pretext needed, he marched his new army toward Ch'ang-an, pausing only long enough to conquer Loyang and proclaim himself emperor. This was in January 756. By July he had also taken Ch'ang-an, from which the royal family had already fled. Conditions deteriorated sufficiently that the troops supporting the throne demanded, and got, the head of Lady Yang Kuei-fei as the price for continued support. (On imperial orders she was strangled by a eunuch.) In the meantime, the imperial T'ang forces found reinforcements, including some Arab mercenaries. After a battle outside Ch'ang-an which left An Lu-shan's forces in disarray, the rebel was murdered, some say by his own son.
Soon thereafter the victorious mercenaries sacked and looted Loyang, ending forever its prominence in Chinese history. The government of the T'ang survived, but it was penniless after the many war years in which it could not enforce taxation.8
The time was now 757, some four years after Shen-hui's banishment. The dest.i.tute government, desperate for money, decided to set up ordination platforms in the major cities across China and raise cash by selling certificates of invest.i.ture for
Buddhist monks. (Since entry into the priesthood removed an individual from the tax rolls, it was accepted practice for the Chinese government to require an advance compensation.) Shen-hui's oratorical gifts were suddenly remembered by some of his former followers, and the old heretic was recalled to a.s.sist in the fundraising. He was such an effective fundraiser in the ruined city of Loyang that the government commissioned special quarters to be built for him on the grounds of his old temple, the Ho-tse. (He was later to be remembered as the Master of Ho-tse.)
The price for his cooperation seems to have been the official acceptance of his version of Ch'an's history. In his battle with the Northern school of Ch'an he had outlived his opponents and through a bizarre turn of events had finally won the day. Solely through his persistence, the obscure Southern Ch'an monk Hui-neng was installed as Sixth Patriarch in Ch'an histories (replacing Shen-hsiu), and one history went so far as to declare Shen-hui himself the Seventh Patriarch.
The philosophical significance of what Shen-hui's ”Southern” doctrine brought to Ch'an has been described as nothing less than a revolution.
A modern Zen scholar has claimed that Shen-hui's revolution produced a complete replacement of Indian Buddhism with Chinese philosophy, keeping only the name. Shen-hui, he claims, swept aside all forms of meditation or _dhyana _and replaced it with a concept called no-mind: the doctrines of ”absence of thought” and ”seeing into one's original nature.”9
Perhaps this philosophical _coup d'etat _may best be understood by comparing the Northern and Southern teachings. The discredited Northern school of Shen-hsiu had preached that the road to enlightenment must be traversed ”step by step,” that there were in fact two stages of the mind--the first being a ”false mind” which perceives the world erroneously in dualities, and the second a ”true mind” which is pure and transcends all discriminations and dualities, perceiving the world simply as a unity. One proceeds from the ”false mind” to the ”true mind” step by step, through the suppression of erroneous thought processes by the practice of _dhyana_ or meditation, in which the mind and the senses slowly reach a state of absolute quietude.
The Southern school took issue with this theory of the mind on a number of points. To begin, they said that if there really is no duality in the world, then how can the mind be divided into ”false” and ”true”?
They argued that the answer quite simply is that there is only one mind, whose many functions are all merely expressions of single true reality. The unity of all things is the true reality; our minds are also part of this reality; and upon realizing this, you have achieved the same enlightenment experience once realized by the Buddha. There is no ”false mind” and ”true mind,” nor is there any need for a long program of _dhyana _to slowly suppress false thoughts. All that is needed is to practice ”absence of thought” and thereby intuitively to realize a simple truth: One unity pervades everything. This realization they called Buddha-mind, and it could only happen ”all at once” (not ”step by step”), at any time and without warning. This moment of primal realization they called ”seeing into one's original nature.”
Although Shen-hui is somewhat vague about exactly what practice should replace meditation, the scholar Walter Liebenthal has inferred the following about Shen-hui's att.i.tude toward ”sudden enlightenment” as a replacement for meditation: ”He seems to have rejected meditation in the technical sense of the word. Instead of methodical endeavors designed to promote religious progress he recommends a change of point of view leading to non-attachment. . . . Non-attachment in this case means that external objects are not allowed to catch our fancy.. . .
_ [A] thing recollected is isolated, it is singled out of the whole, and is thus an illusion; for all short of the undifferentiated continuum is illusive. The senses work as usual . . . but 'no desire is aroused.' . . . This change happens suddenly, that is, it is not dependent upon preceding exertions; it can be brought about without first pa.s.sing through the stages of a career. That is why it is called 'sudden awakening.' _”10 _
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Liebenthal interprets Shen-hui as saying that whereas the purpose of meditation should be merely to erase our attachment to physical things, it also removes our cognizance of them, which is not necessarily a requirement for nonattachment. It should be possible for us to be aware of the world without being attached to it and enslaved by it. According to Shen-hui's sermon:
_ When thus my friends are told to discard as useless all they have learned before, then those who have spent fifty or more, or only twenty years practicing meditation, hearing this, might be very much puzzled. . . . Friends, listen attentively, I speak to you of self- deception. What does self-deception mean? You, who have a.s.sembled in this place today, are craving for riches and pleasures of intercourse with males and females; you are thinking of gardens and houses. . . .
The Nirvana Sutra says, ”To get rid of your pa.s.sions is not Nirvana; to look upon them as no matter of yours, that is Nirvana._”11_
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So far so good; but how do we reach this state of recognition without attachment? Apparently the way is to somehow find our original state, in which we were naturally unattached to the surrounding world. The way is to mentally disa.s.sociate ourselves from the turmoil of society that surrounds us and look inward, touching our original nature. In this way, both _prajna _and _samadhi_, awareness and noninvolvement, which have been described as the active and pa.s.sive sides of meditation, are achieved simultaneously.
_Now, let us penetrate to that state in which we are not attached. What do we get to know? Not being attached we are tranquil and guileless.
This state underlying all motions and pa.s.sions is called samadhi.
Penetrating to this fundamental state we encounter a natural wisdom that is conscious of this original tranquility and guilelessness. This wisdom is called _prajna_. The intimate relation between _samadhi _and _prajna _is thus defined.
. . . If now you penetrate to that state in which your mind is not attached, and yet remains open to impressions, and thus are conscious of the fact that your mind is not attached, then you have reached the state of original blankness and tranquility. From that state of blankness and tranquility there arises an inner knowledge through which blue, yellow, red, and white things in this world are well distinguished. That is _prajna_. Yet no desires arise from these distinctions. That is _samadhi_.