HISTORY, TRANSHISTORY, AND NARRATIVE
HISTORY: A POSTMODERN VIEW OF
NISHITANI'S PHILOSOPHY OF ZEN
By Steven Heine
Philosophy East and West
Volume 44, Number 2(April 1994)
PP 251-278
P251
Truths are illusions whose illusionary nature has
been forgotten...
Nietzsche, Gay Science
I.Nishitani and Postmodernism
One of the major contributions in Nishitani Keiji's
modern philosophical exposition of Zen is his discus-
sion of the question of history in a comparative
light with Western religious, philosophical, and
social scientific approaches. Nishitani's main theme
probably is the ideological encounter between
religion and science as well as religion and
nihilism, as critically seen from the standpoint of
Buddhist emptiness ('suunyataa) , or what Kyoto
School thinkers refer to as absolute nothingness
(zettai mu). Yet, Jan Van Bragt comments in the
introduction to his translation of Nishitani's
Religion and Nothingness, "From within the Kyoto
School, the treatment of history in the final two
essays [on "`Suunyataa and Time" and `Suunyataa and
History"] has been received as the strongest and
most original part of the book. For the Western
reader, on the other hand, these chapters may well
be the hardest to digest... [for] our view of
history seems to be systematically dismantled before
our very eyes, stone by stone." Further, in
Nishitani "the whole construction [of history as an
objectifiable process] is reduced to so much
rubble."(1) For Van Bragt, Nishitani's approach to
history is significant in the way that he stimulates
other Kyoto School thinkers and at the same time
"offends" (in the positive Kierkegaardian sense)
Westerners whose presuppostions are radically
undercut by his penetrating analysis.
In his deconstruction of Western notions of history,
Nishitani criticizes the linear, teleological view
implicit in Christian theocentrism and secular
anthropocentrism from the standpoint of the Zen
philosophy of circular time. According to Nishitani,
both Western approaches are based on an "optical
illusion" in that they seek to locate the
transhistorical dimension by looking infinitely into
the past for a beginning or indefinitely into the
future for an end, while failing to realize that
"the beginning and end of time in itself lie
directly beneath the present, at its home-ground,
and it is there that they are to be sought
originally."(2) In contrast, Zen emphasizes the
spontaneity and creativity of a transhistorical,
holistic present moment which encompasses the
historical continuity of past and future in terms of
an ever-renewable cyclicality and reversibility of
time. Nishitani's critique is greatly influenced by
Nietzsche's refutation of the Platonic-Christian
world view in favor of the "innocence of becoming"
(Unschuld des Werdens), and he considers the notion
of eternal recur-
P252
rence to represent the closest Western approximation
of--though it still falls somewhat short of
attaining--the self-surpassing Zen perspective.
Nishitani's use of Zen as a philosophical tool to
dismantle the West represents an interesting and
compelling breakthrough in large part because while
Zen, and Buddhism in general, deals extensively with
the related issues of time, death, and impermanence
in explaining the psychological and ontological
nature of reality, traditional Zen doctrine does not
appear to be particularly well developed with regard
to the topic of history. The Zen view of itself as
constituting the "direct transmission from
selfsame-mind to selfsame-mind" (ishin-denshin)
indicates that the enlightenment experience is
uniform and identical across generations; such an
approach seems to stress the timeless, ahistorical
quality of religious fulfillment construed to
transcend historical conditioning and to be
impervious to historical investigation. For example
in his well-known public debate with Zen historian
Hu Shih, D. T. Suzuki argued that too much attention
to the question of historicality misses the essence
of the Zen experience.(3) Indeed, although Nishitani
engages in a Zen critique of Western historical
consciousness, it is rather more common to find that
it is Zen that has been challenged and criticized by
recent commentators, from both positivist and
deconstructionist perspectives, for its apparent
deficiencies and inconsistencies in this area. In
the thirty years since the Japanese publication of
Religion and Nothingness, there have been two major
developments in the historical studies of Zen and
the philosophy of history in general that may
challenge Nishitani's conclusions.
First, positivist historians have demonstrated that
Zen lacks a sense of its own historiography in that
its historical writings are not reliable as factual
accounts but are actually involved in producing a
kind of mythical-legendary "pseudohistory."(4) The
main genres of Zen literature, especially the
"recorded sayings" of the masters and the
"transmission of the lamp" histories, became
prominent during the Sung dynasty but deal primarily
with T'ang dynasty leaders. These writings purport to
chronicle the origins and development of the sect but
are primarily concerned with using legendary
anecdotes expressed in terms of standard mythic
themes of pilgrimage and prophecy, predestined
encounters and supernatural intervention, and
temptation and heroic attainment to hagiologize the
lives of leading Zen teachers, including the seminal
figures Bodhidharma and Hui-neng, as well as
post-Ma-tsu figures such as Lin-chi and Te-shan.
Recent historical studies by Yanagida Seizan and
Western scholars influenced by his work, including
Bernard Faure, Heinrich Dumoulin, and John McRae,
among others, seriously question the historicity in
the traditional accounts of the major patriarchs. It
seems clear now that Bodhidharma and Hui-neng, though
not necessarily totally fabricated, can no longer be
understood as the substantive historical personages
portrayed in the chronicles. From a deconstructionist
perspective, the illustrious names
of
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the first and sixth patriarchs may represent no more
than convenient designations to which texts and
doctrines crucial for the advancement of the sect
have been attributed by subsequent generations.(5)
It is not necessarily unusual or surprising for a
tradition to "invent"(6) itself by writing its
history backwards, or for a religion to mythologize
and hagiologize its leaders. Yet this mythicization
may be disconcerting because it seems to go against
the grain of the message of Zen masters' teaching.
Typically the goal of their instruction is just the
opposite of myth-making. To attain enlightenment, Zen
requires the demythologization through face-to-face
dialogical encounter with an attained master, of any
conceptual fixation or delusion in the mind of
disciples, and points directly to a spiritual
fulfillment expressed through such concrete
particulars as "mountains are mountains, rivers are
rivers, " "carrying water and chopping wood is the
wonderful Tao," "when tired I eat, when hungry I
sleep," and "everyday mind itself is buddha." Thus,
there appears to be a gap between the truth of the
enlightenment experience Zen proposes in
master-disciple dialogues and the method of depicting
its leading representatives in the chronicles. In
other words, there is a fundamental irony pervading
Zen literature concerning the source dialogues: Zen
mythologizes, at times perhaps excessively so,
precisely about the ability of its masters to
demythologize pedagogically through face-to-face
dialogue at any opportunity. Yet modern exponents of
Zen, including Nishitani, probably have been somewhat
oblivious to, or have accepted uncritically, the
mythical content and narrative structure of its
writings. Consequently, it can be argued that Zen
must come to recognize and justify its own sense of
narrative history before it can be utilized by
Nishitani as a means of refuting the view of history
typical of the West.
In addition, three decades ago, Nishitani's work
was greatly influenced by and yet sought to surpass
the major trend in continental philosophy at the
time, Heideggerian phenomenology, which in turn was
based largely on an overcoming of Nietzsche's notion
of will to power. Since then, however, key
developments in postmodern thought, also seeking to
go beyond Nietzsche and Heidegger, have continued to
question the conventional linear teleology that
became dominant in the nineteenth century.
Intellectual historians and philosophers of history
such as Barthes, Foucault, Lyotard, Ricoeur, and
White, responding especially to the Nietzschean view
of the multiple perspectives of truth, no longer see
history merely as an objective (or external) and
linear (or sequential) process, as Nishitani charges,
but as a tropological form of discourse or an
unfolding self-critical literary structure that
"contain(s) an irreducible and inexpungeable element
of interpretation."(7)
That is, history is not the cataloguing of a
chronological sequence of facts but the dynamic
reordering of time in the telling of a narrative,
which is "the syntagmatic dispersion of events across
a temporal series
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presented as a prose discourse."(8) Narrative
theorist Robert Scholes maintains, for example, that
"there is no recording, only constructing reality"
--that is, no objective reality but an open-ended
"text" which simultaneously engages author and
reader, narrator and interpreter. Dramatist Eugene
lonesco suggests, "Realism does not exist.
Everything is invention. Even realism is invented.
Reality is not realistic."(9) Also, literary critic
Roland Barthes, influenced by Buddhist
contemplation, maintains, "the writerly text is
ourselves writing, before the infinite play of the
world (the world as function) is traversed,
intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular
system...which reduces the plurality of entrances,
the opening of networks, the infinity of
languages.(10) Therefore, it seems that
postmodernism has already developed a response to
Nishitani's critique. Further, one might contend
that it is more plausible to evoke postmodern
narrative theory as a way of accounting for Zen's
self-presentation through mythicized chronicles than
it is to use Zen in order to dismantle Western
thought. Narrative theory and discourse analysis
have been applied in recent years to other
scriptural traditions, especially Biblical
criticism, and this functions as a middle way
between factually oriented historiographical and
conceptually minded philosophical approaches.(11)
The aim of this essay is to initiate a reevaluation
of Nishitani's Zen critique of Western notions of
history in light of the challenges and objections to
traditional Zen historicality raised by recent
developments in historical studies of Zen and in
philosophy of history in the West. The conclusions
will highlight the way that narrative discourse can
be seen as a point of convergence between Zen and
postmodernism by analyzing the legend of Bodhidharma
and the "skin, flesh, bones, and marrow" dialogue
attributed to the first patriarch as a
narratological and tropological literary form.
II. Nishitani's Zen Critique of Western Approaches
to History
Nishitani's main aim in Religion and Nothingness
(original Japanese title: Shukyo to wa nanika, or
What is Religion?) is to analyze the ways that
traditional religion, especially Christianity,
encounters and responds to several forces in modern
society which conflict with, challenge, and negate
it. These forces include science, which seeks to
replace religion by explaining the origin and
structure of the universe based on reason rather than
revelation; nihilism, which negates all truth claims,
particularly otherworldly or supernatural ones; and
secularism, which represents a gradual undermining of
traditional spiritual values and customs by giving
priority to finite, material pursuits. Nishitani
considers that genuine spirituality has been kept
alive in the West not so much through mainstream
religiosity but through what could be called the
suprareligious mystical longing for divine unity in
Eckhart and St. Francis as well as the extrareligious
philosophical quest for existential authenticity in
Sartre and Nietzsche. Yet he
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also maintains that Zen is an ideal tool with which
to survey critically and to overcome
self-reflectively Western thought because it
represents an "excelsior" or self-surpassing (kojo)
attitude not bound to any particular point of view,
even its own historical or ideological background in
Buddhist doctrine.(12) Therefore, Zen is not merely
an alternative to Christianity but the paradigmatic,
nonfixated ideology that exposes the orgin of the
forces that contradict and stifle the vitality of
religion.
In asking which of the these forces--science,
nihilism, or secularism--has the most devastating
impact on religion, Nishitani's response is that
ironically Christianity itself lies at the root and
must bear responsibility for creating the very
trends that threaten to negate it. Nihilism may seem
to be the most significant challenge to religion
because it denies any possibility of finding meaning
even in scientific investigation. Yet Nihitani sees
nihilism as a by-product of the scientific assertion
of lifeless matter; he agrees with Heidegger that
nihilism arose as a historical stage in connection
with the onset of--and it is therefore a unique
response to--modernization. On the other hand,
secularism, which seems to be another consequence of
the scientific, technologized era, severely
undermines religion because, unlike science, it does
not even attempt to engage in the kind of dialogue
that may in the end strengthen the ideology of
religion; secularism has the deteriorating effect of
"rust, " caused by indifference, that eats away
slowly but surely at the very structure of
traditional religious life. Science appears to oppose
religious faith in the supernatural with its logical
approach to natural law, but for Nishitani, scientism
is the converse of religion that is still
fundamentally of the same origin as Christianity.
The key to understanding the connection between
religion and science is to see that both are a
product of the Christian view of time and history.
Christianity developed its linear teleology as a way
of going beyond the primal, mythical sense of
circular time. Mythical circularity is based on
externally arranged cycles such as the seasonal
rotation determining the fertility, growth, and
harvest of crops, and it must be distinguished from
the circular time of Buddhist thought, which is
subjectively realized through the meditative
awareness of an "eternal now."(13) For Christianity,
time begins with creation caused by a transhistorical
being (God), and the unfolding of history is a
sequence of dramatic events from the sins of Adam
through the death and resurrection of Christ and
building toward a final eschatological culmination
guided by a new, desperately needed transhistorical
intervention (Second Coming). Scientific and secular
approaches to history may deny the role of a
transhistorical power, but in seeking to discover and
explain the origin or cause of things in the past and
the attainment of progress in the future, they
represent a projection of the teleological position
seeming to go outside but still operating within the
linear framework of Christianity. Nishitani writes:
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Although the views of history found in
Christianity and in the Enlightenment represent
diametrically opposed points of view, they both
concur in recognizating a meaning in history.
From its standpoint of theocentric faith,
Christianity sees a divine providence...
operative in history; the Enlightenment, from
its anthropocentric standpoint of reason,
locates the telos of history in the consummate
rationalization of human life.(14)
Nishitani agrees that Nietzsche's "creative nihilism"
attempts to encompass the totality of new creations
in history. But he also seems to concur with
Heidegger's critique of eternal recurrence as the
ceaseless perpetuation of the will to will based on
an infinite regression into the past. Thus, eternal
recurrence does not fully capture the bottomless
present moment in which, according to Buddhism, the
circularity of past and future are contained. In
order to revitalize Christianity in terms of the
genuine ground of circular time, Nishitani recommends
a radical existentialization and demythologization of
the main events of Christian cosmology and teleology.
In this way, "the most solemn moments of
Christianity... [including] the meatanoia to faith
that represents the solemn moment when the solemnity
of those other moments is truly realized" are
transformed by way of demythologizing linear,
teleological history into a sense of "gathering all
those times within the home-ground of the present."
Furthermore, this home-ground is a matter not of
external time but of authentic existential
realization in that "Dasein [human existence]
realizes the solemnity of the present as a monad of
eternity, and thereby realizes all times in their
solemnity."(15) As Masao Abe explains in his analysis
of Nishitani, this monad moves neither backward nor
forward but "can be properly realized only by
overcoming both the regressive and the progressive
movements together with the very dimension on which
these two opposing movements are taking place."(16)
A prime example of true awareness of circular time
in Zen is Dogen's doctrine of the unity of practice
and realization, or the inseparability of a
continuing, sustained exertion and a fundamental
awakening: "As one practices, " Dogen writes, "one
must not anticipate realization apart from practice
in that practice points directly to original
realization."'(17) Dogen also maintains the
"unceasing circulation of continuous practice"
(gyojidokan), such that "the Way [of buddhas and
patriarchs] is circulating ceaselessly without even
the slightest gap between resolution, practice,
enlightenment and nirvana."(18) Perhaps the most
striking parallel in Western thought to this
understanding of the transhistorical eternal now is
the William Blake verse:
To see a world in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.(19)
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III. Historicality and Narrative History: Two
Challenges to Nishitani's Zen
The aim of this section is to take a closer look at
two recent challenges to Nishitani's view of the
philosophical superiority of the Zen approach to
history. One of these involves issues within the sect
and refers to questions raised from the standpoint of
modern historiography concerning deficiencies in the
traditional Zen method of presenting its own history
This challenge is twofold, because it involves both
Zen scholasticism in Sung China and contemporary
studies of Zen that have presupposed a teleological
model of history. The other challenge pertains to
developments in postmodern thought that have shown
that there are Western alternatives to the
nineteenth-century style of history Nishitani
criticizes, especially in terms of narrative theory.
The combined impact of the two challenges is to
highlight and explore the narrative structure of Zen
chronicles now seen not as a deficient means of
writing history but as a way of legitimizing the sect
through the deliberate selection of a form of
discourse that is fully compatible with the
demythological aim of Zen philosophy.
A. Zen and Historicality. Nishitani's strategy in
using Zen to critique the West is to elevate the
issue of history to a higher, more metaphysical
level in terms of the dynamic unity of time and
eternity, allowing for the uniqueness of particular
events. But recent investigations have raised
serious questions about the historicity of the
leading figures depicted in Zen literature on a
lower, more practical level of factuality and
verifiability. In order to appreciate this issue, it
is necessary to review briefly the relation between
the three main genres of Zen texts: lamp histories,
expecially the Keitoku dentoroku (1004); recorded
sayings, including the Shike goroku (early Sung),
covering four masters, Ma-tsu, Pai-chang, Huang-po,
and Lin-chi; and koan collections such as the
Hekiganroku (1128) and the Mumonkan (1229).(20) The
first two genres are chronicles and thus primarily
historical and biographical: the lamp histories
trace the genealogy of the sect, beginning with the
seven primordial buddhas and culminating in
`Saakyamuni, in a refined classical style, and the
recorded sayings focus on the life and teachings of
remarkable individual masters using a more rustic,
colloquial style.(21) The koan collections are
primarily theoretical, and highlight the pedagogical
significance of paradigmatic anecdotes with prose
and poetic commentaries.(22) As Yanagida Seizan has
shown, the literary unit that forms the basis for
all these genres is the "transmission or satori
dialogue" (kien-mondo), a spontaneous encounter,
first associated with the teaching of Ma-tsu, in
which an enlightened master displays an uncanny
knack for exposing and overcoming the conceptual
fixation of a disciple, often by using wordplay,
paradox, non sequitur, Or some nonverbal gesture
such as the iconoclastic "sticks and shouts" of
Te-shan and Lin-chi.(23)
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Most of the dialogues are attributed to T'ang
dynasty masters subsequent to Ma-tsu and were
initially contained in T'ang works such as the
Horinden (801), but these did not become prominent
until the T'ang writings were absorbed into and
given a systematic application in the
transmission-of-the-lamp histories that became
popular and developed rapidly during the early
Sung.(24) The Sung was marked by a proliferation of
multiple forms of expression when, according to
Yun-hua Jan, "we find a large and unprecedented
number of [historical] works."(25) While the pace of
composition reached the accelerated rate of one
major chronicle written every eight years, the
concern for accuracy was severely diminished, so that
this apparently was the time Zen was busy creatively
writing its history backwards.(26) The chronicles
consist largely of fabrications and legends
attributed retrospectively to famous patriarchs and
falsely projected as factual, yet in these works
factuality is obliterated by sacred myth and
hagiography. Zen chronicles not only exaggerate and
defy common sense but are often based on claims of
prophecies and oracles, heavenly signs and portents,
premonitions and predestinations, infant awareness,
and fateful encounters. The Horinden itself (some of
which is irretrievably lost) has been described as
"partially a creation and partially a 'historical'
arrangement of many old and new legends about the
Indian and Chinese patriarchs and Ch'an masters,
starting with the Seven Buddhas of the Past up to
Ma-tsu inclusively." Concerning its usefulness for
examining the life of Ma-tsu, for example, "the
report about Ma-tsu's own role... has been lost; we
are therefore dependent on later works which are
presumably based on the [Horinden]."(27) Furthermore,
a textual archaeology that tries to discover an
authentic source of historicality for the chronicles
will undoubtedly prove fruitless due to the
exaggerations and general unreliability of the lamp
histories, of which Kenneth Ch'en writes, "the
standard Ch'an history, Record of the Transmission of
the Lamp [Jpn Keitoku dentoroku], was written almost
four centuries after the events, and during that
interval numerous Ch'an legends must have been
fabricated and inserted into the account."(24) Philip
B. Yampolsky sums up the approach to history found in
Zen chronicles by arguing, "in the manufacture of
this history, accuracy was not a consideration....
The few facts that are known can, perhaps, also be
molded into a nice story, but it is one surrounded by
doubts, lacunae, and inconsistencies... [and] almost
certainly untrue."(29)
One of the difficulties in the way Zen history has
been presented in contemporary scholarship derives
from the nineteenth-century teleological model of
history that is followed by most historians of Zen.
The teleological model is problematic in that it
betrays a modern tendency, as exposed by Nietzsche
and Foucault, (30) to expect history to follow
recognizable patterns leading to clearly designated
goals. The teleological approach reconstructs the
life of a Zen master by piecing together
p259
references to his exploits scattered throughout the
various chronicles. Thus it tends to rely on
internal sources within the Zen tradition that have
something at stake ideologically in presenting an
orderly view of their own history. The result is
that some modern historians of Zen, who do an
otherwise first-rate job of working with original
texts, take their hermeneutic cue somewhat
uncritically from sectarian sources---an unfortunate
and often counterproductive coincidence between the
expectations of contemporary scholars and the
polemics of traditional texts.(31) Teleological
historians at times accept the conflation of myth
and history offered by Zen, and thereby echo and
perpetuate what McRae labels the "string of pearls"
approach to the lineage of masters. This, McRae
writes, "create(s) a sequence of vivid snapshots of
the patriarchs, each with his own biography and set
of teaching, much like a beautiful necklace of
identical pearls. Alas, from the standpoint of
history we find that the pearls are illusory and the
necklace only a convenient fiction. There is
virtually nothing that is known about [Zen] during
the seventh century that does not come down to us
filtered through the perspective of the eighth
century or later periods."(32)
On the other hand, in viewing the development of
Zen writings from a teleological or sequential
standpoint, the mythical, narrative quality of the
chronicles is frequently overlooked in that it is
seen as a necessary stage, a stepping-stone that is
also a partial obstacle leading up to and negating
itself in reaching the status of demythologized koan.
According to the lamp histories, the dialogues that
were said to have originated during the T'ang were,
in the later Sung (twelfth and thirteenth centuries),
extracted from out of the mythical chronicles and
given prominence as the "paradigmatic cases" (kosoku)
of the koan collections. Although both kinds of
dialogue are genuinely undogmatic, unlike the
sustained, intricate, and dialectically progressive
Socratic dialogues, Zen dialogues are brief,
allusive, and epiphanous.(33) The ideological and
stylistic connection between the dialogues and koans
is that both reflect the subitist soteriology and
iconoclastic epistemology of Zen. From this
perspective, the historical evolution of Zen
literature is considered to involve necessarily a
process of distillation and abbreviation so that the
wordiness of the chronicles is condensed in the koan
collections as a way of rediscovering the misplaced
pithy dialogues. As Robert Buswell maintains,
"[Koanintrospection Zen] may thus be seen as the
culmination of a long process of evolution in Zen
whereby its subitist rhetoric came to be extended to
pedagogy and finally to practice."(34) The tendency
to abbreviate reached its final stage in the
"shortcut" practice perfected by Ta-hui, which was
crucial to the rise of Rinzai Zen in Korea and Japan,
of citing only the "main or essential phrase" (wato)
that sometimes contains just a single word or
syllable such as "Mu."(35)
However, a history of Zen literature that
presupposes this linear,
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sequential development is questionable because it is
not accurate from a historiographical standpoint,
and at the same time it is not faithful to the
narratological aims of the chronicles. For one
thing, the compositiion of Zen writings did not
occur in the order so indicated, for, in fact, the
three genres all pretty much appeared at the same
time in the early Sung. While it is true that the
famous koan collections such as the Hekiganroku were
composed nearly a hundred and fifty years after the
earliest lamp history, Yuan-wu's work was based on a
century-old collection (1026) by Hsueh-tou, and the
earliest koan compilation was actually put togethes
just at the same time as the first and most famous
of the lamp histories.(36) In addition, all the
genres were continually being worked on throughout
the Sung dynasty and beyond. Furthermore, the koans
are certainly not devoid of many of the same
mythical, folktale elements found in the chronicles,
and these are used in intimate connection with
demythologization, as in the case of Pai-chang's
encounter with a monk involved in spirit possession
and reincarnation as a fox.(37)
Thus, the teleological explanation tends to over-
look the profound intertextuality of the chronicles
and koan collections, which almost always shared the
same seemingly limitless pool of anecdotes,
dialogues, and legends. The genres did not develop in
a sequential order with an internal logic of first
losing and then finding the dialogues. Rather, the
leading examples of each genre were composed around
the same time, and the dialogues themselves may have
been created retrospectively, at least in part, to
form a narrative that serves to legitimize and
idealize the leaders of the main surviving sect after
the short-lived but consequential imperial
suppression of Buddhism in China in 845.(38) AS
Foucault and others indicate, modes of discourse are
never far removed from struggles for power and
approval.(39) The genres represent complementary and
interdependent approaches to organizing common
material: the chronicles use prototypical mythical
themes of pilgrimage, prophecy, and predestined
meetings to create romanticized narratives of the
lives of eminent masters and thereby establish the
continuity of generation-to-generation lineage; and
the koan collections stress the tropological
structure inherent in the kind of radical
demythologizing the masters undertake so as to
overcome all discursive, symbol-generating thinking.
But while failing to account for the significance of
the narrative style of the chronicles, the "string of
pearls" method takes for granted the illusory view of
history offered in the lamp histories concerning the
spontaneity of the masters who supposedly created the
transmission dialogues. Western researchers
influenced by Yanagida have analyzed the source of
and challenged the hagiographical halo surrounding
many of the Zen patriarchs, and this skepticism has
been carried to the extent of questioning the
historicity of figures such as Bodhidharma and
Hui-neng.(40)
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However, too much skepticism also neglects the key
issue of discourse analysis, or of examining Zen
discourse from the standpoint of textuality rather
than strict historicality: what is the literary
structure and function of the legends themselves which
contain the dialogues with which the Zen writings are
preoccupied? Because of the gap between the time of
the oral sources and the written compositions, some
scholars view the Sung works---both the chronicles
and koan collections which give priority to precedent
over creativity--as a sign of decline and a nostalgic
hope for recapturing the lost spontaneity of a bygone
classical period. Others interpret the Sung as the
period of genuine creativity for synthesizing the
otherwise disparate materials of an earlier time, and
accord it the label of "golden age."(41) A third
standpoint, borrowing from either positivism or
deconstructionism, finds the Sung writings to be a
time of inventing, or at least fancifully
remembering, an essentially forgotten tradition which
may or may not have ever existed in the pure form
depicted in the chronicles.
One way out of the impasse between fact and fabri-
cation, myth and history, and apologetics and
skepticism is to analyze Zen not in terms of factual
history but literary history. This approach,
according to John Maraldo, "would focus on the
evolution of literary forms but avoid claims about
their internal representation or misrepresentation of
historical reality... [such that] literary patterns
serve as the measure for determining the identity of
linguistic forms."(42) (To a large extent the studies
of Suzuki and Nishitani function in this way, though
their work is not identified as such.) (43) The
question for the historian then becomes one of
looking beyond the issue of verifying or disproving
the historicality of Zen legends in order to discover
the "spiritual ideal" or "religious paradigm"
underlying Zen's elaborate mythicization.(44) As
Yanagida strongly suggests in his major work on the
formation of the transmission literature, studies of
this material that are aimed merely at discrediting
its historical claims are unsatisfactory unless
researchers are sympathetic and able to penetrate to
the level of "sacred narrative" (shukyo-setsuwateki)
by which the chronicles function.(45) In evaluating
the relation between dialogues and chronicles from a
literary standpoint, the issue is not one of defining
classical and postclassical epochs, or of arguing for
or against the verifiability of the historical claims
of the texts. Rather, the aim of literary criticism
or discourse analysis is to show that the apparent
contradiction between truth and method in the
dialogues and chronicles is resolvable by analyzing
the diverse ways the genres have captured and/or
deliberately misplaced the underlying dialogical unit
within the context of the religious symbolism of a
larger literary structure. In order to accomplish
this task, it is helpful to survey several recent
theories in narrative history and tropological
discourse.
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B. Postmodern Narrative Theory. The second challenge
to Nishitani's Zen critique of the West involves the
increasing sensitivity concerning the problematics
of linear, teleological time posited by postmodern
thinkers. Postmodernists no longer view history as an
objective movement from beginning to end of
externalized time, but as an internally interpretive
process that provides a basis for the overlapping and
inseparability of past, present, and future. Like
Nishitani, many postmodernists trace their critical
stance back to Nietzschean multiperspectivism.
However, postmodernists are less interested in the
attempted conjoining of time and eternity in the
notion of eternal recurrence than in Nietzsche's
analysis of the various ways historical thinking has
been exercised in the essay contained in the Untimely
Meditations, "On the Uses and Abuses of History."
Here Nietzsche analyzes three approaches to
appropriating the meaning of past events: the
monumentalistic, which concentrates on peak heroic
moments; the antiquarian, which is the pious and
reverent acceptance of the past as an object of
respect; and the critical, which judges what has
transpired without illusion or mercy.(46) While the
first two approaches follow a teleological model, the
third reveals the flaws they inevitably contain,
though at times this is done from an admittedly
overly harsh perspective. In an essay evaluating and
extending Nietzsche's contribution to the question of
history, Foucault sets up a contrast between the
conventional teleological approach and what is termed
"effective" history, which focuses on differences and
distances, discontinuity and plurality, rather than
projecting an abstract ideal of uniformity.(47)
Thus, for many postmodernists, history is not an
objective sequence of occurrences but a verbal image
of reality that reflects the way language is used
rhetorically (that is, tropologically) to construct a
form of discourse for which there is no essence but
only texts, and "no Logos... only hieroglyphs."(48)
Discourse analysis tries to view language not from
the standpoint of linguistics, semiotics, or
hermeneutics but as the fabric of verbal and
nonverbal, oral and written decentric signs and
symbols woven into a tapestry of tangled,
intertextualized texts. The primary structure of
historical discourse is narration, which describes
events selectively so as to inform the audience of a
message or to instruct it in a set of beliefs. The
persuasiveness of narrativity derives from
emplotment--that is, the capacity for organizing the
flow of historical time as a whole, with all the
pertinent material included and the rest filtered out
(including of course, what historiographers consider
pertinent data). While a narrative traces time back
to an inaugural event that establishes a repetitive
pattern and projects ahead for the sake of posterity
to a conclusive end, it is focused on a pivotal,
epiphanous moment that provides the context and
texture for all preceeding and succeeding occasions.
The epiphany, which "forms the prism through which
everything that transpires must be filtered,"(49)
establishes a polarity of good versus evil or
delusion versus
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enlightenment associated with the time before and
after the event. However, the event itself is not
some literal or substantive entity, but is
"characterized by the mode of figurative discourse
in which [it is] cast."(50) That is, narratives rely
upon figures of speech to provide the informational
and evocative power that connects them to the
desired audience response.
Because a narrative still operates more or less
within a linear framework of beginning and end,
Nishitani would likely argue that narrative theory
falls short of attaining a transhistorical, eternal
now. Yet, Nishitani's Zen critique of Western views
of history becomes somewhat suspect and muted by the
recent historiographical criticism of Zen. There is a
credibility gap, to use Nietzschean terminology,
between Zen's critical ideal and its actual
monumentalistic practice. Paul Ricoeur suggests that
there are various dimensions of historical time that
function as a bridge connecting ordinary clock-time
and "universal time"; one of these involves tracing
the line of succession of generations who are
commemorated by archival collections of texts and
memorabilia. The concern with succession, Ricoeur
points out, is generally related to setting up
traditionality,(51) and this seems to be where the
Zen chronicles are located--at a limited, imperfect
sense of time rather than, as Nishitani suggests, the
"excelsior" or self-surpassing one. On the other
hand, one of the aims of postmodern thought is to
demonstrate that narrativity that is executed for the
sake of traditionality is not necessarily a flawed or
deficient approach to history. Perhaps the Zen
narrative represents a vehicle chosen not out of
naivete but in order to carry out the selfsurpassing,
transhistorical message Nishitani has highlighted.
IV. Narratological and Tropological Structure of the
Bodhidharma Legend and Dialogue
What is needed, then, for an understanding of the
role of historicality In Zen is a middle ground
between Nishitani's overemphatic affirmation of the
superiority of Zen and the overstated criticism of
the Zen chronicles by some historians. The key to
accomplishing this is to show the relation between
the elaborate, systematic, mythical narrative of the
chronicles and the concrete, anecdotal,
demythologizing message of the dialogues and koans.
In this section, I will argue against the
conventional, teleological view of Zen literature
that sees the chronicles serving the dialogues by
acting as a kind of "loose-leaf" storehouse from
which the essential material can be picked at will.
Instead, I suggest that the dialogues serve the
chronicles by functioning as the basic literary unit
that is carefully crafted and selected to promote and
advance the narrative texture. This involves
analyzing how the dialogue operates on two
insepacable levels: one is to see the way it
contributes to the macro or extensional level of the
larger narratological structure, and the other is to
break
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down the figures of speech in the actual exchange of
words in terms of the micro or intensional level of
the tropological structure. AS Dale Wright argues,
narrative is selected as a form of expression in Zen
chronicles not out of ignorance of a better approach
to recording history, but due to a deliberate
decision to find the most appropriate manner of
communicating its sense of lineage and
inheritance.(52) In addition to the points mentioned
above, narrative is useful because, as Jean-francais
Lyotard notes, it is a form of discourse which in
the right setting communicates more persuasively and
pervasively with its audience than a scientific
explication of knowledge. Narrative is instructional
by transmitting wisdom to insiders of a lineage
through figures of speech and wordplay, and
transactional in engaging the reader as participant
in the events depicted by setting up an alternative
rhythm of time."(53) Roland Barthes further stresses
the transactional element by describing the
evocative mutuality and intimacy of the author
(which he refers to as the "writerly" dimension of a
text) and the reader (or "readerly" dimension), who
partakes of the "pleasure of the text" through
joyous reading.(54)
A survey of recent theories of narration indicates
that there are several main factors generating the
narrative structure: there is a basic literary unit
or kernel of composition that is synthesized alter
considerable thematic conflict into at least two
higher, more complex levels--one consisting of
character development and the other of overall plot
or theme--by virtue of a restructuring of time to
attain an inseparability and translinearity of past,
present, and future revolving around pivotal,
epiphanous moments.(55) In Zen chronicles, the satori
dialogue--dialogue is the "preeminent enactment" for
it involves showing rather than mere telling(56)--is
the basic unit or nucleus that acts as a catalyzer
for the complexity of narration. The synthetic levels
are, first, the remarkable transformational
experiences of individual Zen masters, as portrayed
in the recorded sayings, and, second, the uniform
process of transmission from master-to-master dating
from time immemorial to the present day, as depicted
in the lamp histories. The chronicles thus use the
dialogues to mythologize and hagiologize the line of
succession of masters whose lives fit into a common
pattern, which recalls the analysis of liminality in
the rite of passage of heroic missions as suggested
by van Gennep, Turner, and Campbell.(57) The first
stage is the agonizing doubt and sense of
hopelessness by someone of impassioned hope
concerning the proper interpretation of traditional
doctrine, often involving the meaning of a perplexing
line from the sutras, and the consequent prolonged
impasse in enlightenment leading to an endless search
for the right teacher.(58) Part of the torment and
perplexity is due to the contention that there are so
very few authentic teachers left. Then, after years
of special training comes the sudden, dramatic
breakthrough experience of satori, usually occuring
after the disciple has been shamed or humiliated to a
point
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beyond hope and hopelessness, will and no-will, by
an almost brashly self-confident yet incorruptible
master who understands just how to extricate him
from his conceptual fixation, often by using an
absurd gesture such as shouting, stamping, or
hitting with a stick, or by some form of outrageous
humor.(59) The final stage is the continuing quest
of the newly anointed successor to determine the
appropriate heir to the lineage, whose approval
requires initiatory testing through verbal and/or
nonverbal exchange and who is capable of eventually
surpassing the master.
The function of the dialogue on the lower synthetic
level is to create a concrete and vitally human
situational context through which satori
spontaneously occurs. The dialogue captures the
moment of liberation, so that temporality is
experienced in terms of peaks and valleys relative to
the time before and after attainment. Since the two
participants in the conversation represent the
timeless paradigms of enlightenment and delusion, the
already-attained and the yet-to-be, the reader is
transactionally engaged to place him- or herself into
the scene; that is, playfully to imagine how to
respond to a strict, uncompromising master's query or
to size up a stubbornly deluded disciple. On the
higher synthetic level, the aim of the chronicles is
to fashion a narrative discourse that tells "history"
in the sense of depicting the origins,
continuity-in-change, and intermittent periods of
closure of the distinctive way the Zen sect has been
transmitting the dharma. The dialogue becomes a
window to the "fusion of [temporal] horizons,"(60)
and serves here as an internal, ideological symbol of
authentic transmission from teacher to disciple that
is more powerful than the visible, tangible symbol of
the Bodhidharma's begging bowl that was used in
earlier times.(61) The chronicles disavow
historiography because their philosophy dictates that
the main characters of the narrative--the attained
masters--are not substantive entities but represent
interchangeable and transpositional possibilities for
self-discovery. Thus, intertextuality leads us into
what can be called the "interpersonality" concerns of
the text for which the hero, as Faure writes, "should
be interpreted as a textual and religious paradigm
and not be reconstructed as a historical figure or a
psychological essence."(62)
The combined impact of the two synthetic levels is
to create a mode of discourse delivering a message
especially pertinent to the post-845 era of Chinese
religion and culture. After the suppression of
Buddhism, which left its sophistocated scholastic
tradition discredited and largely abandoned, the Zen
masters as described in the dialogical chronicles
laid claim to representing the living embodiment of
the dharma without the need for recourse to a higher
authority or source of truth, such as scripture,
ritual, or scriptural exegesis.(63) Yet Zen's ideal
of lineal precedent, transmission, and succession
gained credence in evoking the gurudisciple
relationship typical of some Indian traditions.(64)
This enabled the
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Zen sect to compete with three rival forms of
Chinese religiosity. For instance, the Zen emphasis
on personal cultivation and attainment underlying
doctrinal learning appealed to the humanistic
attitude of the dominant class of neo-Confucian
scholar-officials (shih-tai-fu) .(65) Also, the
oracular and shamanistic qualities in the legends of
deified masters like Bodhidharma made them the rival
of the immortal saints of the leading hagiocentric
folk religion, popular Taoism, and the
formulaic-repetitive quality of the dialogues that
were easy to memorize and recite offered a spiritual
technique comparable to the nien-fo (Jpn nembutsu)
chant of Pure Land Buddhism.
The uniqueness of Zen in this cultural
setting--also influenced by philosophical Taoism,
particularly Chuang Tzu's extraordinary facility
with "goblet words" as well as neo-Taoist colloquies
(ch'ing-t'an) --pertains to the way the dialogues
and koans seek to demythologize transhistorically
the myths concerning the sect's heroes, or to the
profound interaction between the building up and
deconstructing of mythical discourse. The
quintessential example of this twofold tendency is
the account of Bodhidharma, referred to in the
Horinden (801) and later chronicles as the
twenty-eighth Zen patriarch and the first on Chinese
soil. Bodhidharma is depicted in the chronicles as
the third son of a king who crossed the Yangtze on a
single reed, meditated for nine years facing the
wall of a cave till his legs withered away before
gaining enlightenment, and commanded his foremost
disciple to cut off his arm during a snowstorm as
proof of his dedication. In some versions of the
legend, Bodhidharma is deified in that he performs
supernatural feats, including conquering illness,
poison, and death. In contemporary Japanese culture,
limbless Daruma dolls (symbolizing that arms and legs
have been cast off after years of sitting meditation)
are used as a sign of good fortune and divine
protection. Most of the later Zen masters are depicted
not as miracle workers but in more down-to-earth
fashion, yet supernatural events like prophetic
dreams, preordained encounters, and natural
signatures for human affairs almost invariably
accompany each stage of their path.
But the process of demythologization that the masters'
personal example and doctrinal instruction represents
is also reflected in aspects of the myth. Some of the
more radically iconoclastic examples of this are
Te-shan's burning of the sutras out of disgust for
textual studies and Lin-chi's proclaiming "if you see
the Buddha, kill the Buddha" in disdain for
iconographic and hagiographic worship. For
Bodhidharma demythologization is epitomized by his
legendary interview with Emperor Wu, which was
perhaps introduced into the traditional account by
Shen-hui in 732 and by the time of the Keitoku
dentoroku in 1004 had become the "most popular and
enduring of [Zen] legends."(66) According to this
tale, Bodhidharma instructed the emperor that copying
sutras and building temples would gain him "no merit"
far, indeed, there is only "vas
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emptiness, nothing sacred, " such that "I
[Bodhidharma, which means "faw of wisdom"] do not
even know [my own name]."(67) Furthermore, the
legend of Bodhidharma's arrival in China is itself
demythologized by several koans concerning the
question, "What is the meaning of the first
patriarch's coming from the west?" In case 37 of the
Mumonkan, Chao-chou responds with the non sequitur,
"The oak tree in the front garden," and in case 20
of the Hekiganroku, both Ts'ui Wei and Lin-chi
retort with the negation, "there is no meaning."
Also, Ma-tsu's response to the query is to kick the
disciple/inquirer, who is subitaneously awakened as
a result,(68) and in yet another encounter dialogue,
a master when asked this question sands on one leg
and then hits his uncomprehending student.
What precisely is the relation between the mythical
and demythical tendencies in Zen discourse? Are they
in conflict or compatible, and if the latter, is this
generated by design or accident? One way of resolving
this issue to point out an extraordinary parallel
between one of the most famous dialogues attributed
to Bodhidharma, in which the first patriarch
questions his four leading disciples, who are vying
to become the anointed dharma-heir, and the modern
analysis of the "four master tropes" of narrative
rhetoric by Vico, Kenneth Burke, and, most recently,
Hayden White. According to White, the first three of
the master tropes--metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche--
establish identity through comparison and
association, while the fourth trope--irony--calls
into question and undercuts any fixation with the
analogies contrived therein. White describes the
dynamic movement of discourse in terms of what he
calls the erratic diatactical shifting--rather than
the logical dialectical progression--between tropes
as follows:
The archetypal plot of discursive formations
appears to require that the narrative "I" of
the discourse move from an original
metaphorical characterization of a domain of
experience, through metonymic deconstructions
of its elements, to synecdochic representations
of the relations between its superfic al
attributes and its presumed essence, to,
finally. a representation of whatever contrast
or oppositions can legitimately be discerned in
the totalities identified in the third phase of
discursive representations.(69)
The movement between tropes is played out very close
to the way White describes it as Bodhidharma asks
his disciples to display their knowledge by
succinctly summing up the essence of the dharma.(70)
The first disciple says, "Neither cling to words and
letters nor dispense with them altogether, but only
use them as an instrument of Tao." This answer
suggests an understandinh of the metaphoric or
instrumental quality of language, as when Buddhism
compares the illumination of the Buddha-nature to
the light of the sun or moon, its universality to an
ocean and its waves, and its cyclicality to the roots
and branches of a tree. Bodhidharma responds to the
disciple, "You have gained my skin," which implies
that
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a metaphorical analogy, though valuable as a
pedagogical tool, reflects a relatively superficial
level of insight. Or, as Ma-tsu answers when asked
why he asserts "mind itself is buddha," "it is in
order to stop the baby's crying."(71)
However, the second disciple's response, which
gains Bodhidharma's "flesh," is more profound: "It
is like Ananda's viewing the Buddha-land of
[paradise], seeing it once and never again." This
represents a metonymic or indirect, contiguous
association of the Buddha-land and the unmentioned
dharma that at once reinforces and begins to
undercut metaphor by the final phrase, suggesting the
fleetingness of the analogy.(72) Zen dialogues
frequently rely upon metonymy through wordplay,
punning and homophones to cut off an attachment to
metaphorical comparison based on resemblance. For
instance, in the Mumonkan, case no.41, Bodhidharma
makes a liberating wordplay when he tells Hui-k'o,
who is thus made to realize that he cannot literally
bring forth his mind to be pacified, "Behold, I have
pacified your mind." Then, the third disciple
indicates another level of identity beyond metaphor
by saying, "The four elements are all empty, the five
skandhas are all unreal, there is not a thing that
can be grasped." This synecdochic equalization of the
elements and skandhas as microcosm with ultimate
reality, or of the part with the whole, which gains
the first patriarch's "bones, " is especially
emphasized in Hua-yen and T'ien-t'ai holistic
metaphysical doctrines such as "three thousand
[dharma-realms] in a single thought" (ichinen
sanzen). But when the fourth disciple simply bows
reverently without even opening his mouth--an ironic
undermining of the limitations and contradictions in
the first three answers--Bodhidharma's approval is
expressed by, "You have gained my marrow."
Zen dialogues specialize in evoking irony by
exploiting the opacity, elusiveness, and enigmatic
quality of language through omission, ambiguity,
oxymoron, paradox, and reticence, as in the
oft-repeated paradoxical refrain, "explain the
dharma without speaking and without remaining
silent, or by using neither words nor no-words."(73)
In Biblical religion, nomen is the basis of numen,
but for Zen numen is often the absence, negation, or
withholding of nomen. Further, Zen also displays the
flexibility to return from the depths of irony to a
seemingly simple "surface" affirmation of the
concrete particulars of everyday reality, as in
"mountains are mountains, rivers are rivers."(74)
For example, Nishitani stresses the importance of
letting the thing (koto) speak for itself, as in his
emphasis on Basho's verse, "From the pine tree learn
(the koto) of the pine tree/And from the bamboo (the
koto) of the bamboo."(75) To put this in
postmodernist terms, Zen surface affirmation
represents "a boundless openness devoid of all fixed
metaphysical centers... [with] a radically
disruptive freeplay of textual signifiers...."(76)
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The Zen dialogue self-reflectively shows an
awareness of the need for different modes of
discourse based on the appropriate level of
under standing, and it thus encompasses and fosters
the interaction between mythicization, supported by
the first three tropes, and demythicization
reflecting irony. Thus, the dialogue attains the
self-surpassing, transcendental quality Nishitani
stresses: it is transformational in capturing the
spontaneous moment of attainment of satori,
transmissional as the main symbol of lineal
succession, transpositional in viewing the masters as
interchangeable pieces of the puzzle of discourse,
translinear in expressing an approach to temporality
beyond ordinary sequence, and transactional in
engaging the audience's active participation.
Further, the effectiveness of the Zen master in
meeting these ends is due largely to the
transgressive quality of his repartee, which
"engenders incurable disease by violating propriety
and infecting purity"(77)--that is, the supposed
purity of logic, grammar, and common sense.
One way of interpreting the relation between
mythology and demythology, narrative history and
transhistory, and polemics and philosphy in the
discourse of Zen chronicles and dialogues is to
refer to Roland Barthes' radical rereading of the
Tower of Babel account from a postmodern standpoint
that suggests a Zen attitude. "Thus the Biblical
myth is reversed," Barthes writes; "the confusion of
tongues is no longer a punishment, the subject gains
access to bliss by the cohabitation of languages
working side by side: the text of pleasure is a
sanctioned Babel."(78) In this view, Babel
represents not a condemnation to a labyrinth of
deception and folly but the freedom of exploring
multiple perspectives --it is the opportunity to
leave things unnamed or to question self-reflectively
the naming process by exploiting the creative
potential of the fourth and self-surpassing trope of
irony. That is, myths contain the possibility of
their own reversal. For Aristotle, mythos is the
style of discourse that establishes the meaning of
logos, but for Zen discourse mythos and logos are
used constantly to undercut one another. For Zen,
the everpresent reversibility of myth is perhaps the
greatest of all myths and yet no myth at all. This
recalls White's emphasis on authentic discourse as
seeking a middle ground between the conceptually
overdetermined and the conceptually underdetermined.
"On the contrary," according to White, "discourse,
if it is genuine discourse--that is to say as
self-critical as it is critical of others--will
radically challenge [these extremes]. It throws all
'tactical' rules into doubt, including those
originally governing its own formation.... Discourse
always tends toward metadiscursive reflexiveness.
This is why every discourse is always as much about
discourse itself as it is about the objects that
make up its subject matter."(79) To conclude, it
seems that while Zen does not necessarily have
exclusive privilege in regard to the attainment of
transhistory, it also need not be
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defensive concerning the role of narratology in the
way it presents its own history. Rather, the
intersection between Nishitani's philosophy of Zen
and postmodernism lies in their shared emphasis on
constructing a discourse for which "meaning is
always in the process of forming, deforming and
reforming,"(80) so that it reaches a continuing
state of "metadiscursive reflexiveness."(81)
NOTES
This is a revised version of a paper presented at
the Columbia University Faculty Seminar on Asian
Religion and Thought, New York, November 1991.
1- Jan Van Bragt, "Translator's Introduction," in
Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982),
pp xxxviii--xxxix. In referring to the Kyoto
School's view, Van Bragt cites Abe Masao,
"Nishitani Hakasecho 'shukyo to wa nanika'
o yomite, " Tetsugaku kenkyu 2, no. 1 (1962):
83-104. In a parallel way, Paul Ricoeur comments
on the importance of the final two chapters of
Being and Time dealing with historical time, in
Time and Narrative (Chicago and London:
University of Chicago Press, 1984), vol. 3,
pp.244-245.
2 - Nishitani, Religion and Nochingness, p.224. For
a postmodern critique of linear time, to be
discussed more fully below, see Mark C. Taylor,
Erring: A Postmodern A/theology (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 1984),
3 - D. T. Suzuki, Studies in Zen (New York: Delta,
1955), p.135. Suzuki argues that Hu Shih "may
know a great deal about history but nothing about
the actor behind it." Actually, Suzuki and Hu
Shih are less at odds than they appear in that
the former often demonstrates his sensitivity to
historical issues and the latter still seeks an
understanding of the essence of Zen. Their real
debate is whether Zen is "conscious and rational"
(Hu Shih) or "irrational and not explainable by
intellectual analysis" (Suzuki). On the other
hand, nearly forty years later, it appears that
Hu Shih "won" the debate because of the
tremendous development of historical studies of
Zen and a general sense (perhaps not as valid as
it seems) that Suzuki overlooked these matters.
4 - John 8. McRae, The Northern School and the
formation of Early Ch'an Buddhism (Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press, 1985) , pp 7-8.
According to McRae, "except for Shen-hsiu,
Shen-hui, and a few
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other individuals, the extant body of primary
sources does not indicate one-to-one
correspondences between individual masters and
specific doctrines. Rather, the bulk of our
doctrinal information can be identified only as
having been valid in a certain general context at
a certain time."
5- Bernard Faure, "Bodhidharma as Textual and
Religious Paradigm," History of Religions 25, no.
3 (1986): 187-198.
6- Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The
Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1983).
7-Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in
Cultural Criticism (Baltimore and London: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1978), p.51.
8-Ibid., p.96.
9-Both Scholes and lonesco are cited in John W.
Murphy, Postmodern Social Analysis and Criticism
(Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1989),
pp. 2, 28.
10-Roland Barthes, S/Z(New York: Hill and Wang,
1974), p.5. See the opening passage of the book
for a somewhat ambivalent reference to Buddhist
contemplation.
11- Meir Sternberg, The Poeitcs of Biblical
Narrative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1986), p.15. In his work on Biblical criticism,
Sternberg makes a fundamental distinction that
can be applied to other scriptural traditions,
including Zen, between "source-oriented
analysis," which deals primarily with historical
(in the conventional historiographical sense) and
social scientific concerns, and
"discourseoriented analysis, " focusing on
literary and textual interpretative issues
relative to what Foucault, interpreting
Nietzsche, calls "effective history." For a
discussion of the role of literary criticism
specifically in relation to Zen, see John C.
Maraldo, "Is There Historical Consciousness
within Ch'an?" Japanese Journal of Religious
Studies 12, nos.2-3 (1985): 141-172. For a genre
criticism of the recorded-sayings genre, see
Judith Berling, "Bringing the Buddha Down to
Earth: Notes on the Emergence of the Yu-Iu as a
Buddhist Genre," History of Religions 27, no. 1
(1987): 56-88. For a discussion of discourse
analysis in relation to understanding Dogen's
approach to koan practice, see my Dogen and the
Koan Tradition: A Tale of Two Shobogenzo Texts
(Albany: SUNY Press, 1994).
12-See Nishitani's essay,''Bukkyo ni okeru 'Kojo no
Tachiba, '" in Zettai Mu to Kami(Tokyo:
Shunjusha, 1981), pp. 150-194.
13-Nishitani's critique of Christianity at once
resembles and yet is nearly opposite to Mircea
Eliade's study of the relation between Christian
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doctrine and mythology. Like Nishitani, Eliade
criticizes Christianity for not recognizing its
rootedness in circular time, but he identifies
the true source of "cosmic Christianity" with the
myth and rites of renewal that establish the
inseparability of cosmology and eschatology; this
source is retained though camouflaged in
millennialist and hagiocentric seasonal festival
worship. See Eliade, Myth and Reality (New York:
Harper, 1963). Nishitani, however, argues from
the other direction, that Christian
cosmology-eschatology in the sense that the end
of history is foreshadowed by the beginnings (for
example, a holocaust by water to root out evil
near the start sets up the need for a final
conflagration by fire) never overcomes naive
mythology, see Religion and Nothingness, p.213.
For the relation between fertility mythology and
Buddhist contemplation as seen in Japanese
religion, see my "From Rice Cultivation to Mind
Contemplation: The Meaning of Impermanence in
Japanese Religion," History of Religions 30, no.4
(1991):374-403.
14-Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness, p.211.
15-lbid., p.272.
16 - Masao Abe, "Will, 'suunyataa, and History," in
The Religious Philosophy of Nishitani Keiji, ed.
Taitetsu Unno (Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press,
1989), p. 289.
17-Dogen, Shobogenzo, ed. Terada Toru and Mizuno
Yaoko (Tokyo Iwanami, 1972), "Bendowa'", I.20.
18-Ibid., "Gyoji," I.165.
19-The similarity between Blake and Dogen has been
pointed out by Joan Stambaugh, Impermanence Is
Buddha-nature: Dogen's Understanding of
Temporality (Honolulu: University of Hawaii
Press, 1990,pp.32-33.
20-The following is a more comprehensive listing of
the main texts associated with each genre, along
with dates of publication indicating how most of
these texts were from the Sung era although based
on sayings and anecdotes attributed to T'ang
masters. The sources for the list are Yanagida
Seizan, Zengaku goroku II (Tokyo: Chikumi Shobo,
1974), Ishii Shudo, Chugoku Zenshushi o mana
Shobogenal ni manabu (Tokyo: Zen Bunka Kenkyujo,
1988), and Kawamura Kodo Shobogenzo no seiritsu-
shiteki no kenkyu (Tokyo: Shunjusha, 1988
Transmission of the Lamp Histories: Rekidai
hoboki(779) , Horinde (801) , Sodoshu (952) ,
Keitoku dentoroku (1004), Tensho kotorole (1036),
Kenchuu seikoku zokutoroku(1101) , Shumon
toyoshu(1133) Shumon rentoeyo(1183) , Katai
futoroku (1201), Goto egen (1253) Zoku dentoroku
(1372) ; Recorded Sayings: Shike goroku(early
Sungh)
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Rinzairoku (1046? 1120), Yang-ch'i roku (1088),
Kosonshuku roku (1100s) , Yuan-wu (Engo)
roku(1136) , Chao-chou (Joshu) goroku(1144) ,
Ta-hui (Daie) goroku (1172), Hung-chih (Wanshi)
roku(l201) , Layman P'ang(Sung, 1637) ,
Tozanroku(1640?); Koan Collections: Fun'yoroku
(by 1024) , Setcho hyakusoku juko (1026) ,
Hekiganroku (1128T), Taui-hui(Daie) Shobogenzo
(1147), Hung-chih (Wanshi) juko hyakusoku and
Nenko hyakusoku (1166) , Shoyoroku (1224) ,
Mumonkan(1228).
21-William F. Powell, tr., The Record of Tung-shan
(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1986), p.
5. Dale S. Wright says of the style of the
recorded sayings, "they twisted the slang of the
time out of its particular representational hold.
They spoke the common language of the moment in
uncommon ways in order to undermine the norms and
grounds embodied in it"; see "The Discourse of
Awakening: Rhetorical Practice in Classical Ch'an
Buddhism," journal of the American Academy of
Religion 61, no. 1 (1993) : 27. Also, the
"biographies of eminent monks" such as the So
kosoden (988), which deals with Zen and other
Buddhist luminaries in a somewhat more
historiographical way than the other chronicles,
could be considered a fourth genre.
22-Dogen's Shobogenzo is sometimes regarded as
anti-koan and prozazen, but it may represent a
subdivision of the koan collection genre in that
it provides a philosophical discussion of koans
and other dialogues centered on doctrinal themes
rather than formally identified cases--especially
when seen in light of Dogen's own koan collection
compiled in Chinese in 1235, the Shobogenzo
Sanbyaku.
23-Yanagida, "The 'Recorded Sayings' Texts of
Chinese Ch'an Buddhism," in Early Ch'an in China
and Tibet (Berkeley: Buddhist Studies Series,
1983), pp. 185-205. Perhaps the Zen dialogues
were influenced by neo-Taoist conversations or
colloquies known as ch'ing-t'an (lit. "elevated
talk"), which were eventually "transformed from a
speculative instrument into the drawing-room
pastime of a disillusioned aristocracy" (Arthur
F. Wright, Buddhism in Chinese History [Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1959], 46). he Zen
records were also influenced by Confucian and
Neo-Confucian recorded sayings of conversations
and commentaries; see Daniel Gardner, "Modes of
Thinking and Modes of Discourse in the Sung: Some
Thoughts on the Yu-Iu ("Recorded Conversations")
Texts, Journal of Asian Studies 50, no.3 (1991):
574-603. Another important, concise literary unit
in the chronicles is the poem or gatha marking
satori, succession, or death.
24-McRae, The Northern School, pp. 73-80.
P274
25-Yun-Hua Jan, "Buddhist Historiography in Sung
China, " Zeitschrift der Deutschen
Morgenlandischen Gesellschaft 114 (1964), p.362
Yanagida carefully traces the history of this
process in Shoki zenshu shisho no
kenkyu(Kyoto:Hozokan, 1967).
26 - On the idea of Zen inventing itself, see Julian
F. Pas, trans., The Recorded Sayings of Ma-tsu
(Lewiston/Queenstown: Edwin Mellen, 1987), p.42:
"These examples [of Indian encounter dialogues]
derive from Ch'an histories, written after
Ma-tsu's time, and are typically Chinese.
According to Yanagida, one may conclude that all
Ch'an masters about whom similar anecdotes have
been transmitted, belong to Ma-tsu's school, and
that their recording started from his time." Jan
notes the protest by other Buddhist schools who
wrote that Zen should "Stop the Lies."
27 - Pas, Recorded Sayings, p. 29 (emphasis added).
28 -Kenneth Ch'en, Buddhism in China: A Historical
Survey (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1964), p. 356.
29 -Philip B. Yampolsky, trans., The Platform Sutra
of the Sixth Patriarch (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1967), pp. 4-5.
30 -See Foucault's essay on Nietzsche and "effective
history, " "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, " in A
Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow(New York:
Pantheon, 1984), pp. 76-100.
31 - The traditional sources strive to present an
"arborescent" paradigm of lineage--that is, one
based on the family-tree model--that betrays a
sequential teleology; see Faure, "The
Daruma-shu, Dogen, and Soto Zen, " Monumenta
Nipponica 42, no. 1 (1987): 54.
32 - McRae, "The Story of Early Ch'an," in Zen:
Tradition and Transition ed. Kenneth Kraft (New
York: Grove, 1988), pp. 138-139. An example of a
study that seems to follow the "string of pearls"
approach (which seems to correspond to what
Nietzsche refers to as "monumer talistic"
history, as discussed below) is John Wu, The
Golden Age of Zen (Taipei: United, 1975).
33 - On the playfulness of the face-to-face
encounter in Socratic-Platonic dialogues, see
John Sallis, Being and Logos: The Way of
Platornic Dialogue (Pittsburgh: Duquesne
University Press), pp. 12-22. Zen dialogues are
much more diverse than the question-and-answer
seesions, in that the questioning process is
often deliberately and abruptly or ambiguously
concluded.
34 - Robert E. Buswell, Jr., "The 'Short-cut'
Approach of K'an-hua Meditation: The Evolution of
a Practical Subitism in Chinese Ch'an Buddhism,"
in Sudden and Gradual: Approaches to
Enlightenment its
P276
Chinese Thought, ed. Peter N. Gregory (Honolulu:
University of Hawaii press, 1987) , p. 322.
(Although I disagree somewhat with his
conclusions concerning the development of the
koan tradition, Buswell's impeccable scholarship
has greatly influenced my understanding of this
period in the history of Zen.) On the development
of the koan tradition, see Furuta Shokin, "Koan
no rekishiteki hatten keitai ni okeru shinrisei
no mondai," in Bukkyo no kompon shinri, ed.
Miyamoto Shoson (Tokyo: Sanseido, 1956), pp.807-
840.
35-There were at least three other main efforts at
abbreviation in Japanese Rinzai Zen, including
the "turning word" (tengo) and "capping phrase"
(jakugo) techniques, which highlighted key,
succinct phrases of koans, and the practice of
citing "satori poems" (tokinoge) . See the
introduction in Soiku Shigematsu, trans., Zen
Forest: Sayings of the Masters (New York and
Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1981), pp.3-31; and Kenneth
Kraft, Eloquent Zen: Daito and Early Japanese Zen
(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1992).
36-This is the Fun'yoroku, see Heinrich Dumoulin,
Zen Buddhism: A History (New York: Macmillan,
1988) vol. 1, p. 246.
37-Mumonkan, case no. 2.
38-On the causes and consequences of the suppression
under Emperor Wu-Tsung, see Stanley Weinstein,
Buddhism under the T'ang(Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1987), pp. 114-136; Dumoulin
vol. 1, pp.211-213. Also, Kenneth Ch'en discusses
how and why Zen was the sole surviving sect, in
Buddhism in China, pp.363-364.
39-Foucault, "Truth and Power," A Foucault Reader,
p.74: "Truth' is to be understood as a system of
ordered procedures for the production,
regulation, distribution, circulation, and
operation of statements."
40-In another example, Faure cites Dogen and Yosai
as "not referring so much to individual
subjectivities as to discrete textual segments
representative of a certain type of discourse,"
in "The Daruma-shuu, Dogen, and Soto Zen," p. 53
n. 93.
41-On the "golden age" debate, see Buswell, p.359 n.8.
42-Maraldo, "Is There Historical Consciousness," pp.160-161.
43-See, for example, Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism,
Second Series (London: Rider, 1953), pp. 227-253.
For an essay on Dogen stressing literary or
stylistic themes, see Hee-Jin Kim, "The Reason of
Words and Letters'--Dogen and Koan Language," in
Dogen Studies, ed. William R. LaFleur (Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press, 1985), pp. 54-82.
P276
44 - See Faure, "Bodhidharma"; see also Takayuki
Nagashima, who argues that he has proven the
"non-existence" of Hui-neng but nevertheless
considers the sixth patriarch significant as a
"symbol," in Truth and Fabrications in Religion
(London: Arthur Probsthain, 1978), p.327.
45 -Yanagida, Shoki zenshu shisho no kenkyuu,
pp.17-18. Also cited in Maraldo, "Is There
Historical Consciousness," p.154.
46 -Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psycho-
logist, Antichrise. (New York: Vintage, 1968) ,
pp. 144-145.
47 -Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History."
48 -This phrase from Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs,
is cited in Murphy, Postmodern Social Analysis,p.14.
49 - Taylor, Erring,p.64.
50 - White, Tropics of Discourse, p. 94.
51 - See Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 3, section 2.
52 - Dale S. Wright, "Historical Understanding in
the Ch'an Transmisssion Narratives" (Presented at
the 1990 annual meeting of the American Academy
of Religion in New Orleans). Wright carefully
explains how the Zen sense of family spirit and
choosing heirs is influenced by traditional
Chinese patterns of ancestral worship.
53 -Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition:
A Report on Knowledge (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1984), pp . 19-22.
54 -Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (New
York: Noonday, 1975). In a similar way, Foucault
comments on the "author-function" in "What is an
Author?" in A Foucault Reader, pp. 108-109.
55 - Wallace Martin, Recent Theories of Narrative
(Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press,
1986), esp. p.112-113, dealing with Tomaschevsky,
Barthes, Chatman.
56 - This point, influenced by Plato, is made in
Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative
Structure in Fiction and Film (Ithaca and London:
Cornell University Press, 1978).
57 -The theories concerning rite of passage and
heroism usually describe three stages: departure
either by choice or calling, liminality or
crossing the threshold to fulfillment, and
reincorporation or return to a social context to
apply the lessons learned during attainment. See
for example, Victor Turner, The Ritual Process:
Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine,
1969) , pp. 94-95. On the relation between
narrative and heroism, White writes (p.88), "a
historical narrative is not only a reproduction
of the events reported in it, but also a complex
of symbols which gives us directions for finding
an icon of the structure of those events in our
literary tradition."
p277
58-For a discussion of some of the similarities in
the accounts of Te-shan and Lin-chi, see
Yanagida, "The Life of Lin-chi I-hsuan." Eastern
Buddhist 5, no. 2 (1972): 73.
59-An interesting contemporary account of the Zen
quest is in Morinaga Soko, "My Struggle to Become
a Zen Monk," in Zen pp. 13-29.
60-For this phrase, see Ricoeur, Time and Narrative,
vol. 3. p. 220.
61-Maraldo,''ls There Historical Consciousness," p.
165. Also Yampolsky discusses how Shen-hui
established Bodhidharma's robe as a symbol of the
transmission of the dharma, in The Platform
Sutra, p. 27.
62-Faure, "Bodhidharma," p.190, which appears to be
influenced by Foucault's essay, "What is an
Author?"; Foucault writes, "The author's name
manifests the appearance of a certain discursive
set and indicates the status of this discourse
within a society and a culture" (p.107). See also
David Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity:
Hermeneutics, Religion, Hope(San Francisco:
Harper, 1987), p. 45; and White, Tropics of
Discourse, pp. 88-89.
63-According to the Zen dictum which initially
appeared during the Sung dynasty (1108) but is
attributed to Bodhidharma, "A special
transmission outside the sutras/Without reliance
on words or letters" (kyoge betsuden/furyu
monji). The "correct" lineage was associated with
the Southern School, and southern China was where
Buddhism had long established positive social
connections; see Weinstein, Buddhism under the
T'ang, p. 4. Buddhism in the south remained
untouched during the persecutions prior to 845.
64-For an explanation of a Hindu view of the
guru-sisya relationship, see William Cenkner, A
Tradition of Teachers: Sankara and the Jagadgurus
Today(Delhi: Motilal, Banarsidass, 1983), pp.
15-19 esp.
65-See Miriam Levering's dissertation, "Ch'an
Enlightenment for the Laymen: Ta-hui and the New
Religious Culture of the Sung" (Harvard, 1978),
on the role of Ta-hui in propagating Rinzai Zen
among the literate elite.
66-Yampolsky, The Platform Sutra, p.27.
67-Hekiganroku, case no.1.
68-The last instance is cited in Buswell, "Ch'an
Hermeneutics: A Korean View, " in Buddhist
Hermeneutics, ed. Donald S. Lopez (Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press, 1988), p. 238.
69-White, Tropics of Discourse, p. 5. See also David
E. Klemm, "Toward a Rhetoric of Postmodern
Theology: Through Barth and Heidegger," Journal
of the American Academy of Religion 55, no. 3
(1987): 443-469.
P278
70 - The original text is in Taisho 51, no. 2076;
translation in Wu, Golden Age, p.53. For an
account of the development of different versions
of the passage, which originally had only three
disciples in a much sparser dialogue, in a number
of Zen texts leading up to the Keitodes
dentoroku, see Ishii, Sodai Zenshushi no kenkyu
(Daito Shuppansha, 1987) , pp.105-107. Also,
Dogen's interpretation of the passage in
Shobogenzo, "Katto" (based largely on an anecdote
from Chao-chou's recorded sayings), reverses the
conventional view by suggesting the equality of
all four responses without preference for silence
over speech. According to Dogen, skin is not more
shallow and marrow is not the deepest level. This
interpretation also implies an equalization of
the potential relevance of all the tropes, which
gain efficacy depending on the appropriate
context, and it suggests a refutation of the
linear, teleological approach to history.
71 - From the Ma-tsu goroku as cited in Wu, Golden
Age, pp. 95-96.
72 - On the debate among tropical theorists about
the priority of metaphorical or metonymic
thinking, see Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of
Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), pp.
200-201.
73 - For example, Mumonkan, cases 24 and 32.
74 - Tracy, Plurality and Ambiguity, p. 92.
Nietzsche also can be interpreted as attempting
"to transcend an ironic apprehension of the world
in order to arrive at a restored metaphoric
contact with reality..." that has something of
the carnivalesque about it, in Dominick LaCapra
(commenting on White's reading of Nietzsche),
Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts, Contexts,
Language(lthaca and London Cornell University
Press, 1983), p. 77.
75 - See Taitetsu Unno, "Emptiness and Reality in
Mahayana Buddhism," in The Religious Philosophy
of Nishitani Keiji, pp. 312-313.
76-Steve Odin, "Derrida and the Decentered Universe
of Chan/Zen Buddhism, "Journal of Chinese Philosophy
17 (1990): 84.
77 - Taylor, Erring, p. 117.
78 - Barthes, S/Z, pp. 3-4.
79 - White, Tropics of Discourse, p. 4.
80 - Taylor, Erring, p. 179.
81 - But to avoid this high-minded language by
paraphrasing the brooding, rebellious Marlon
Brando character in the film The Wild One, if
asked what his metadiscursive reflexiveness is
reflecting upon, the Zen master might respond
coolly, "Whaddaya got?"
