Conclusions

This concluding chapter argues that the most reasonable way to account for the composition of Chan texts is to assume that Chan authors were quite aware of the art of writing “religious literature,” and were equally aware of how their efforts fit into a long tradition of reshaping tradition. Thus, though Chan authors no doubt wrote their texts for a variety of reasons, it remains altogether likely that their view of the Buddhist tradition and its ever-expanding body of literature was a particularly clear-eyed one, and that, based on that clarity, they felt entitled to continue the work of rewriting tradition in new and provocative terms. In presenting this evidence, this book casts doubt on the regrettably durable assumption that ancient and medieval religious authors were simple people who straightforwardly wrote down what they thought about life and salvation, with little or no consideration for politics, personal gain, institutional longevity, state support, their place in history, and so on.

Koans and Being There

This chapter focuses on koans. The English word “koan” comes from the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese gong'an, which means “public case” in the sense of a legal precedent. The term gong'an begins to appear in Chan texts in the first half of the twelfth century as a technical term for a particular literary gesture that had already been in vogue in the eleventh century, one in which an author first selected a particular vignette or dialogue from some older strata of Chan literature and then offered commentary on it, or a poem about it, or often both. Thus, it took at least two Chan masters to make a koan—the one who supposedly first said or did something that was recorded in a Chan text, and a later one who took interest in just that account and developed it with his own commentary and/or poems.

The Platform Sūtra and Other Conspiracy Theories

This chapter focuses on the Platform Sūtra. Composed sometime in the late eighth century, Platform Sūtra picks up and works over a number of claims regarding the Bodhidharma clan that had been put forth in earlier Chan works. The text opens with an unusually creative “autobiography” of Huineng, one that circles around an involved conspiracy supposedly orchestrated by master Hongren. As the details of the conspiracy come into focus, the reader learns that Hongren's chosen heir was not Shenxiu, but rather Huineng. With that startling “history” newly revealed roughly one hundred years after the events supposedly took place, the narrative turns to show Huineng giving a formal dharma teaching that, in places, appears to negate many of the building blocks of the Buddhist tradition, while also emphasizing the innate presence of perfect tradition within each person in the form of the buddha-nature.

Making History: Chan as an Art Form

This chapter highlights several important elements at work in the process of writing history. The first thing to see is that writing history represents a doubling of reality: in addition to the everyday world that one lives in, where one's senses are engaged in a fluid and continuous manner, the writer of history works to evoke scenes and events that, though invisible, can be made to appear to the reader as integral parts of reality, albeit in the past. Put this way, one can appreciate how the skills needed to write history reflect the growing human ability to artify the world. Why this matters for understanding Chan literature is that one wouldn't be far wrong in describing Chan as a gradually solidifying set of literary gestures designed to enhance—and organize—the present, by carefully designing and curating images of an imaginary past.

Rules for Purity

This chapter explores what we can infer about daily life in Chan monasteries based on details drawn from a genre of texts called “rules for purity.” The oldest Chan example of this genre, Rules for Purity for a Chan Monastery, was written in 1103 by a Chan abbot named Zongze. One of the remarkable things about Zongze's text is the way it combines historical—and largely mythical—claims regarding the Bodhidharma family with precise institutional rules for selecting the abbots who were to govern Chan monasteries. Thus, at the larger Chan monasteries that would have followed Zongze's “rules for purity,” ambitious monks with promising qualities were formally set within the Bodhidharma family, trained for years, and then, having been vetted by monastic and state officials, put to work running the enormous monastic estates that dotted the Chinese landscape.

Chan “Dialogues” from the Tang Dynasty

This chapter explores “Chan dialogue,” considering two dialogue texts from the Tang dynasty. The Discourse on the Essentials of Cultivating Mind was, at some point, attributed to Hongren, though its final section says that it was put together by his students. Meanwhile, the Discourse on No-Mind promises to present an account of the final truth of Buddhism or, rather, the “great Dao,” as the author calls it. Looking closely at these two Tang dialogue texts, it would seem that the two kinds of Buddhism that were identified in the Two Entrances and Four Practices have now been brought together to form a unified discourse in which the karmic form of Buddhism—the Second Entrance—is presented as something to be dreaded, while the sudden, “trapdoor” teachings promise that karmic Buddhism can be overcome as one somehow gains enlightenment and instant access to an innate form of buddhahood.

Truth, Conspiracy, and Careful Writing

This chapter looks at three texts that reworked the figure of Huineng for new purposes: the Biography of the Great Master of Caoqi, the Platform Sūtra of the Sixth Patriarch, and the Record of the Dharma-Jewel through the Generations. What is particularly impressive about these three texts is that they take the trope of conspiracy and shift it from a direct charge leveled against the competition—Shenhui's strategy—and turn the accusation into an objective-looking history in which an invisible and omniscient narrator gradually gets the reader to “see” that a conspiracy has been perpetrated. Thus, each of these three “histories” reveals not only a new version of the Bodhidharma family but also how and why someone else's history came to be accepted into the public record. Hence, these narratives count as a kind of metawriting in which one of the key elements of the story is to show how someone else tried to write the Bodhidharma story.

More Local Buddhas Appear

This chapter discusses how the history of the Bodhidharma family developed in several directions in the wake of Du Fei's Record of the Transmission of the Dharma-Jewel. On one front, at least two masters—Puji and Yifu—came to be officially recognized as Shenxiu's descendants. When exactly this happened remains unclear. It is usually assumed that they both actually were Shenxiu's disciples and in that capacity received his sanction before he died. Besides this uncertainty regarding the timing of Puji's and Yifu's official inclusion in the Bodhidharma family, a number of sources name other masters as Shenxiu's descendants. Looked at this way, the birth of Chan is found in two other historical realities: an increasingly widespread desire—among elite Buddhist—to be included in the Bodhidharma family; and, the multiplication of techniques—literary, artistic, ritualistic and architectural—that made such claims to this legacy appear plausible.

Portable Ancestors

This chapter examines the two newer versions of the Bodhidharma family in the context of the three preceding Bodhidharma narratives. In these two early genealogical texts—Faru's biography from Shaoli Monastery and Du Fei's Record—there is solid evidence for thinking that the increasing clout of the fictive Bodhidharma family was, in fact, the result of a series of authors reworking prior literary statements in sly and careful ways. In particular, the narrator of Faru's biography, while clearly combining and editing earlier accounts of the various masters, figured out how to stage his new claims so that they would appear to have been already known and endorsed throughout the empire. Likewise, Du Fei masterfully undermined the earlier Bodhidharma narratives regarding: the centrality of transmitting the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra; the teaching of “wall-contemplation” and the Two Entrances; and the claim that Huike lost his arm to bandits.

Plans for the Past

This chapter compares the oldest surviving accounts of Bodhidharma to slightly earlier narratives that sought to explain how the essence of Buddhism moved from India into the possession of certain Chinese men. The first part of the chapter looks at how two late-sixth-century masters—Zhiyi (532–597) and Xinxing (540–594)—were presented as perfect receptacles of truth; the second part then covers the earliest accounts of Bodhidharma and his teachings. The final section of the chapter looks closely at Huike, the supposed disciple of Bodhidharma, to try to make sense of the way his biography in Daoxuan's Continued Biographies of Eminent Monks was rewritten so that he appears to stand at the head of a lineage that passes on the essence of Buddhist truth in a man-to-man manner.