This is the first of two revised academic essays I plan to post on the sudden and gradual debate in Ch'an and Dzogchen.
Sudden
and Gradual Teachings and the Dissemination of Szechuan Chan into
Tibet
Early
Ch’an
The
origins of the Chinese Buddhist movement which came to be known as
Ch’an are shrouded from us in cloud. Our view begins to clear in
the early seventh century with a meditation tradition in Hupeh
Province known as the East Mountain School. This school was headed by
Hung-jen (circa 600-674), who later tradition considers the
5th Patriarch
in a lineage descending from the legendary transmitter of the
tradition from India to China, Bodhidharma (early 5th century
CE)(Mcrae 2003: 45-53).
Hung-jen
had several disciples who came to be important teachers in their own
right. Four of these were Shen-hsiu (606?-706), Hui-neng (?-713),
Chih-hsien (609-702) and Hui-an (582-709). In 701 Empress Wu invited
Shen-hsiu to the capital, Luo-yang, showing him great honour (47). As
a result Shen-hsiu quickly became very popular in the capital.
Shen-hsiu’s teachings have some features which would be familiar to
any student of the later Ch’an tradition. He
emphasized “contemplation of the mind” as central to
practice. He urged his students to strive for realization in the here
and now as opposed to focusing on study or merit making, and he used
as his central pedagogical tool the reinterpretation of sutras and
Buddhist rituals as metaphors for aspects of meditation practice. An
interesting text circulated by the East Mountain school associated
with Hung-jen and Shen-hsiu, The
Five Skillful Means,
reveals something more of their approach:
Question:
When viewing, what things do you view?
Answer: Viewing
viewing, no thing is viewed.
Question:
Who views?
Answer: The
enlightened mind views.
Penetratingly
viewing the realms of the ten directions, in purity there is not a
single thing. Constantly viewing and being in accord with the locus
of non-being, this is to be equivalent to a buddha. Viewing with
expansive openness, one views without fixation. Peaceful and vast
without limit, its untaintedness is the path of bodhi.
The mind is serene and enlightenment distinct, the body’s serenity
is the bodhi tree.
The four tempters have no place of entry, so one’s great
enlightenment is perfect and complete, transcending perceptual
subject and object. (Mcrae 53)
Here
we see elements of tathagatagarbha teachings
(the inherent, untainted purity of the ground of the
mind), yogacara (the
transcendence of subject and object) shunyata (there
is not a single thing) and possibly Taoist (the locus of non-being).
This possibly represents a mix of standard Indian Mahayana doctrine
and Taoist thought, a reflection of the “Buddho-Taoist” phase
of early Chinese Buddhism (Robinson/Johnson/Bhikkhu 2005:180-183).
Between
730 and 732 a monk named Shen-hui (670-762) gave public talks where
he criticised two students of Shen-hsiu, Chiang-mo-tsang(?) and
Pu-chi (675-739) criticising their authenticity and style of
practice. According to a report on his criticisms, they taught:
a)
to ‘freeze the mind to enter concentration’,
b)’ fix
the mind to view purity’,
c) ‘activate
the mind to illuminate the external’, and
d) ‘concentrate
the mind to realize the internal’ (Mcrae 54).
This
approach to practice has the familiar outlines of shamatha (stilling)
[a, b, and d] and vipashyana (insight)
[c]. These are traditionally the two aspects of Buddhist meditation
practice, maintained in the teachings of other Chinese Buddhist
schools as well like the T’ien T’ai, as reflected in
Chi-I’s Great
Calming and Contemplation (Mo-ho Chih-kuan). Shen-hui
criticised their focus on sitting meditation (tso-ch’an), saying
that properly ‘sitting’ (tso) is not activating
thoughts, and ‘meditation’ (ch’an) is seeing the
fundamental nature (Mcrae 54). Although Shen-hui’s teachings are
often described as instrumental in the creation of the sudden/gradual
controversy in Chan (Mcrae 54-56), he must be representative of a
trend, or else it is difficult to understand the sudden crop of
teachers preaching sudden enlightenment which sprung up so
energetically around this time, some of whom knew of Shen-hui but did
not know him, as we shall see.
In
745 he took up campaign in Luoyang. In one report of a public talk of
his (Mcrae 54) Shen-hui presented Shen-hsui as being of the ‘Northern
School’ of Ch’an, a label he apparently invented, and his
own master, Hui-neng, as being of the Southern School. Shen –hui
appropriated the concept of a lineage of transmission of the Ch'an
teachings from the East Mountain “Northern School” but
stressed the unilineal nature of that transmission in a new way.
Hui-neng was the only true successor of Hung-jen, and Shen-hui of
Hui-neng. Shen-hui attacked the “Northern School” teachings
as dualistic and gradualist, and presented his own as the true
teachings, constituting a sudden penetration to the nature of mind
and reality through dropping all conceptual thought. Shen-hui
insisted that mental impurities were ultimately non-existent, and
emphasizing antidotes to them was a distracting hindrance, not a help
(Robinson/Johnson/Bhikkhu 202).
Shen-hui’s
attack successfully helped to stigmatize
explicitly “gradualist” approaches and created a
Northern/Southern Shen-hsiu/Hui-neng dichotomy familiar to many from
the later narrative of the Platform
Sutra (circa
780). By
the time of the famous poet Liu Zongyuan (773-819), some viewed the
battle for authentic “Ch’an” as onerous and bemoaned
the Northern/Southern dichotomy, as revealed by the epitaph Liu wrote
for the Oxhead school master Ru-hai:
The
greatest aberration in the diminution of the Buddhist teaching is the
term “Chan”: Grasping, it defiles things; misleading, it
becomes separate from the truth…[Master Ruhai] has said…[After
the transmission had reached] Shenhsiu and Huineng, north and south
reviled eachother like fighting tigers, shoulder-to- shoulder, and
the Way became hidden. (Mcrae
58)
In
753 Shen-hui was banished from Luoyang after members of the Imperial
Court turned against him. In 756, however, when the government was in
exile due to the An lu-shan Rebellion (755), Shen-hui was enlisted to
help raise money for the beleaguered government by selling ordination
tickets (which allowed one to become a monastic).
Tibet
and Szechuan Ch’an
In
the meantime Tibet was conquering and moving into western China. In
780 this resulted in Tibet gaining control of Tun-huang in Szechuan
Province, which they would occupy until 848 (Broughton 1). This
initiated a period of intensified cultural interaction between Tibet
and China.
It
was in this period that two students of Hui-an, another disciple of
Hung-jen, became prominent in Szechuan Province. These were a Korean
monk, Wu-hsiang, also known as Reverend Kim (?-761), and P’ao T’ang
Wu-chu (714-774). Also active in this area was a monk of the Northern
School, a disciple of Chiang-mo-tsang (above) and I-fu (658-736),
both students of Shen-hsiu. His name was Mo-ho-yen, or Hwa-shang
Mahayana. Reverend Kim, Mo-ho-yen, and Wu-chu would all play a
significant role in the introduction of Ch’an into Tibet. It is
interesting to note that whether these Ch'an monks were students of
Hung-Jen through Hui-an or through Shen-hsiu, they taught radically
non-dual and immediate approaches to awakening.
One
of the most valuable documents in the Tun-huang corpus for
understanding early Ch’an is the Li
tai fa pao chi, the Record
of the Dharma Treasure Down Through the Generations. The
text belongs to the P’ao T’ang school of Wu-chu. Previous to the
Tun-huang discoveries, The P’ao T’ang school was chiefly known to
us from the writings of Tsung-mi, the 3rd Hua-yen
Patriarch and scholar of the Chan tradition, but recent scholarship
on the Pao
Chi has
provided much more information about this interesting Chan lineage
hitherto buried in the cave of Tun-huang.
According
to Yanagida Seizan, the Pao
chi has
two particularly interesting characteristics. The first is a radical
development of the wu-nien (no
thought) teaching shared with Shen-hui which strongly emphasized
personal spontaneity and no reliance on practices and scriptures
(1983: 20). The second is its configuration of lineage, in which we
see a familiar pattern of reconstructing lineage to assert
authenticity by forging defining connections to the past. According
to the Pao
chi it
is Wu-chu who possesses the true transmission from the 6th Patriarch.
It claims Hui-neng gave the robe, the symbol of the transmission, to
Empress Wu to caretake, who passed it on Chih-shen (609-702), from
whence it went to Ch’u Chi (665-732) and thus to Wu-chu (1983: 23).
It configures the lineage of teachers and disciples as Hung-jen-
Chih-Hsien- Ch’u Chi - Wu-hsiang - Wu-chu. According to Seizan,
Wu-chu was in fact not a direct disciple of Wu-hsiang, but of Ch’en
Ch’u-chang , himself a lay follower of Lao-an (582-709) (ibid).
Interestingly, the Pao
chi also
presents Wu-chu as being a student of Tzu-tsai (?), who it presents
as a student of Hui-neng. According to Tsung-mi, however, Tzu-tsai
was a disciple of Lao-an (Ibid). All of this seems to suggest an
attempt on the part of the author(s) of the Pao
chi to
identify Wu-chu with the Southern School and Hui-neng when to all
appearances his lineage descended from the Northern School through
Lao-an or Chih-Shen or both. This may have been because his teachings
had more affinity to Shen-hui than Shen-hsui.
One
quote from the Tun-huang Great Perfection (Dzogchen)
literature ascribes the following teaching to Wu-chu: “No-mind
(wu-i) is morality; no-thought (wu-nien)
is concentration; and non-production of the illusion mind is
insight.” Another states:
To
follow after arising is the defilement of sentient beings. To depend
upon quiescence is movement in nirvana. Do not follow after arising
nor depend upon quiescence, do not enter concentration; have no
arising; do not enter Ch’an; have no practice. (Broughton 15)
The
Pao chi contains an interesting biography of Wu-chu, a relevant
condensed excerpt of which I will include here:
The
Ho-shang [Wu-chu] was a man of Mei-Hsien, Feng-hsiang….he
unexpectedly met the white robed layman Ch’en Ch’u-chang, whose
origins are unknown. People of the time called him a magical
apparition body of Vimalakirti. He spoke the all-at-once-teaching. On
the very day the Ho-shang met him, they intimately co-incided and
knew eachother, and Ch’en silently transmitted the
mind-dharma…During the T’ien-pao years [742-756] he unexpectedly
heard of Reverend Ming of Tao-tz’u Shan in Fan-yang, Reverend
Shen-hui of the eastern capital [Lo-yang], and Reverend Tzu-tsai of
the superior prefecture of T’ai-yuan, all disciples of the
6th Patriarch
[Hui-neng] who spoke the all-at-once teaching… He subsequently
went to T’ai-yuan and paid obeisance to Tzu-tsai…He heard
lectures on the deportment of Reverend Ming of T’ao-tz’u Shan and
the idea behind Reverend Shen-hui’s sayings. Since he already
understood their meanings, he did not visit them and pay obeisance.
(Broughton 20)
Notable
here is the reference to Shen-hui. Shen-hui also appears later in
the Pao-chi,
where he gives a series of discourses, some of which include
improbable comments on various Szechuan Chan figures (Adamek 2004:
88). Thus we see the text both establishes a spiritual affinity with
Shen-hui, whose teachings Wu-chu “already understood”, and
furthermore enlists him to criticize other Szechuan teachers aside
from Wu-chu!
The
text goes on to recount Wu-chu’s continuing spiritual development
and his receiving of the seal of approval from Reverend Kim. Wu-chu’s
style of practice is described as: “In the mountains Ch’an
master Wu-chu does not allow obeisance, confession, mindfulness, and
chanting, but merely sits in voidness and quietude” (Broughton
23). When this is reported to Rev. Kim by shocked students, who
ask, “Can this be Buddhadharma?“ (ibid), Rev. Kim is
presented as approving. This presentation of Wu-chu’s style is in
harmony with Tsung-mi’s presentation as well (Broughton 38).
In
751 Mesag-tsom the Tibetan Emperor (r. 704-751) sent Sang-si, young
Chinese son of a commissioner living in Tibet, to accompany a team of
four young Tibetans into China in search of the Dharma.
The Statements
of the Ba Family says
that they received teachings and three texts from a master in I-chou
(Ch’eng-tu) named Reverend Kim (Chin ho-shang) also known as
Wu-hsiang. When the pilgrims returned in 759 they found Mesag-tsom
dead and his son, Trisong Detsen (c.742-797) not yet old enough to
ascend the throne. In the meantime forces at the court sympathetic to
Bon, the indigenous religion of Tibet, were suppressing Buddhism and
the pilgrims decided to hide away their treasures for the time being.
In 761 it was safe to reveal them and Sang-si removed them from
hiding and “distributed the teachings of Reverend
Kim” (Broughton 6). In time Sang-si became abbot of Samye
monastery, the first monastery in Tibet.
In
the 760’s another member of the Ba family, Gsal-nan, a minister of
Trisong Detsen, went to China to receive teachings. Although Tibetan
records claim he studied with Reverend Kim, Kim died in 762. It is
now believed that he studied with Wu-chu, who was teaching in I-chou.
The Pao
Chi was
influential in Tibet, particularly in materials preserved by the
Nying-ma-pas, the Tibetan school most sympathetic to doctrines of
sudden enlightenment. For example the sayings of Wu-chu appear in
Nying-ma-pa texts; Tibetan texts name Bodhidharma Bodhidharmatrata,
which echoes the name for Bodhidharma found in the Pao
chi; and
Tibetan literature uses it’s formula of 29 Patriarchs (Amadek
2004:). Thus we see that the Wu-chu school, although fading in China,
had a significant influence in Tibet.
Szechuan
Chan Two: Mo-ho-yen
The
third lineage to arrive in Tibet was that of another Northern School
master, Mo-ho-yen. The Chinese text Settling
the Correct Principle of Suddenly Awakening to the
Great Vehicle (Tun-mun
ta-ch’eng cheng-li chueh)
says that the Northern School Master Mo-ho-yen came to Tibet in 781
or 787 at the invitation of the Tibetan Emperor and returned to
Tunhuang in the next decade, where he continued to teach. His
distinctive teachings were “gazing-at-mind” (k’an-hsin)
and “no-examing-no-thought” (pu-ssu
pu-kuan)
(Broughton 9). Mo-ho-yen, like Wu-chu, took “one of the most
radical positions on the side of sudden enlightenment in the sudden
vs. gradual enlightenment controversy” Gomez (SHC 69). Note
again his belonging to the Northern
School lineage.
According
to Chinese and Tibetan records of the debate, the reason the Emperor
requested Mo-ho-yen to come to Tibet was to debate Kamalashila, an
Indian scholar monk of the Nalanda tradition who taught a gradualist
path. Tibetan historians regard the debate as being a turning point
in Tibetan history. It was the moment when it was to be decided which
stream of Buddhism would be promoted by the Tibetan monarchy: the
Chinese all-at-once way or the Indian gradualist path.
The
debate at Samye
According
to the Tibetan scholar Buston’s 14th century
account of the debate, Mo-ho-yen taught:
As
long as one carries out good or evil acts, one is not free from
transmigration as (these acts) lead to heaven or hell (respectively).
It is like clouds which cover the empty sky irrespective of their
being white or black…Whoever does not think of anything, whoever
does not reflect, will be totally free from transmigration. Not
thinking, not pondering, non-examination, non-apprehension of an
object- this is the immediate access (to liberation)” (Gomez
70-71).
Gomez
has shown that Mo-ho-yen is not, in fact, entirely consistent in his
stance on sudden and gradual practices, generally asserting their
uselessness but sometimes acknowledging their value for lesser
practitioners (96-101).
Mainstream
Tibetan versions of the debate say Kamalashila won, although a
Chinese source and a Nyingma-pa source give the victory to Mo-ho-yen.
Whatever the details of the debate, from a historical point of view
Kamalashila’s perspective was indeed accepted as the dominant view
in Tibet. Tibetan Buddhism to this day identifies itself strongly
with Indian traditions, not Chinese. When one factors in the greater
value, from a government perspective, of Kamalashila’s position,
which stressed the importance of morality and Buddhist cultural
forms; the greater proximity and economic connection to Nepal and
India; the prestige of India as the original source of Budhdism; and
the state of conflict between Tibet and China, there is no need to
search far for reasons for Kamalashila’s victory, whether the
legend represents an actual debate or simply a victory that came to
be established by history.
A
number of later Tibetan texts discuss Mo-ho-yen and his teachings,
and they include a record of the sayings of his teacher Hsiang-mo
Tsang, a student of Shen-hsiu. Interestingly in the Lamp
of the Ch’an Eye and Five
Classes of Orders,
two Tibetan Tun-huang texts, Mo-ho-yen’s teachings are presented
alongside P’ao T’ang teachings in a way which blurs the
boundaries between his perspective and Wu-chu’s. This is probably a
result of Mo-ho-yen teaching in Tibet in a context where the P’ao
T’ang teachings were already established. Considering an abbot of
Samye was a student of Reverend Kim’s, the presence of Szechuan
Ch’an was indeed strong in Tibet, and the different streams seem to
have converged in Tibetan memory.
According
to the Statements
of the Ba Family, subsequent
to the debate Mo-ho-yen was dramatically banished from Tibet and
Chinese suddenism vanished with him. In fact it is clear, as Kapstein
has argued, that a tamed syncretic Chan incorporating mainstream
teachings lived on in northeastern Tibet for sometime (2000: 75). It
was once assumed that Chan had lived on in Tibetan Great Perfection
traditions, which stress a sudden intuition of the innate freedom of
the awareness at the base of the mind (Van Schaik 2004: 51-70). This
has been discounted as a complete explanation in recent years (ibid).
While Ch’an likely had influence on early Dzogchen and the similar
Mahamudra practice lineage of the Kagyupas, Dzogchen and Mahamudra
are complex and multi-sourced phenomena in which the degree of Chan’s
influence is mysterious. Some scholars have argued compellingly that
they arose from an Indo-Tibetan tantric matrix and may have
incorporated Chan materials later (Reynolds 1996: 215-227). Both the
Nyingmapa Dzogchen and the Kagyupa Mahamudra tradition did in fact
borrow material from the Chan corpus, however, a fact not lost on
their Tibetan critics. It was for this reason that Sakya Pandita
(1182-1251), the great Tibetan scholar and founder of the Sakyapa
school, disparagingly called Mahamudra “a Chinese doctrine”
(ibid).
The
Great Perfection tradition in Tibet continued to stuggle with how to
formulate its Sudden path in consistent language in a similar way to
the struggles of the Chan tradition in China, although Great
Perfection literature seems to have contained less of a taboo on
gradualist teachings than in Chinese Chan. “Although there is
criticism of conceptually constructed practices, there is also a
great deal of discussion of how to engage in those practices. Thus it
is clear that the criticisms are not to be taken as an injunction
against engaging in the practices at all; rather the practices are
contextualized within the higher perspective of nonconceptuality and
nonduality” (Van Schaik 2004:5) This approach reaches its
consummation in the works of Jigme Lingpa (c.1729-1798) the teacher
of the Longchen Nyingtig (Heart Essence) cycle of Great Perfection
literature which remains the most popular approach to this day. With
poetic karma, Jigme Lingpa is said to be a reincarnation of Trisong
Detsen, the King who staged the debate at Samye in the 8th Century.
Chinese
echoes
In
China the teachings of Wu-chu were all but forgotten, although the
memory of Wu-hsiang/Reverend Kim, who influenced both the Chan and
Pure Land schools, lingered longer (Amadek 2004: 96-97). As Amadek
points out, there are also intriguing traces of influence on the
Hongchou lineage of Ma-tsu (709-788). Ma-tsu was a native of
Szechuan, and the mid-10th century Zutang
ji shows
evidence that Korean monks believed Ma-tsu’s true lineage stemmed
from Wu-hsiang, not Huai-rang (677-744) (ibid). Amadek writes that
the literary innovations of the Pao
chi influenced
the literary genres of Song Chan, and its version of the Indian line
of the Patriarchs was the one accepted as official (98).
Nevertheless,
the Pao
Chi was
“repudiated and forgotten” (ibid) in China. The P’ao T’ang
lineage itself shows no traces of being successfully passed on very
far beyond Wu-chu’s students, perhaps because of its rejection
of praxis, in
the end indeed a radically anti-practical stance. Wu’chu’s
uncompromising rejection of any conditional approach to the
unconditioned could not be integrated into Orthodox Chan (Amadek
2004: 91-97), despite it’s suddenist rhetoric.
Bibliography
Adamek,
Wendy. “The lidai fabao ji (Record of the Dharma Jewel Through
the Ages).” Heine, Steven; Wright, Dale S, ed. The
Zen Canon: Understanding The Classic Texts.
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in Ch’an and Hua-yen.
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