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John R. McRae (1947–2011)

Chinese name: 馬克瑞

John R. McRae is a Professor of East Asian Buddhism and the author of Seeing Through Zen: Encounter, Transformation, and Genealogy in Chinese Chan Buddhism and The Northern School and the Formation of Early Ch'an Buddhism (Studies in East Asian Buddhism, No 3). These were supplemented by numerous articles that contributed to a fuller understanding of the field.

E.g.
The Ox-Head School of Chinese Ch'an Buddhism: From Early Ch'an to the Golden Age
by John R. McRae
in Studies in Ch'an and Hua-yen, ed. R.M.Gimello & P. N. Gregory, Studies in East Asian Buddhism,
No. 1, Kuroda Institute, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 1983, pp. 169-252.

He has taught at both Indiana and Cornell Universities, and at Komazawa University in Tokyo.

For the BDK Chinese Tripiṭaka Translation Project, Professor McRae had completed the translations of the following 5 texts:

1) Questions of Mañjuśrī (文殊師利問經 Taishō No. 468)
2) The Vimalakīrti Sutra (維摩詰所說經 Taishō No. 475)
3) The Śūraṅgama Samādhi Sutra (佛說首楞嚴三昧經 Taisho No. 642)
4) Essentials of the Transmission of Mind (黄檗山斷際禪師傳心法要 Taishō No. 2012-A)
5) The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch (六祖大師法寶壇經 Taishō No. 2008)

There is one more text that Prof. McRae was working on together with his wife, Prof. Jan Nattier, that being the Commentary on the Lotus Sutra (法華義疏 Taishō No. 2187). We are hopeful that is, too, would eventually be completed bearing Prof. McRae’s name.

Works Online

PDF: Seeing Through Zen: Encounter, Transformation, and Genealogy in Chinese Chan Buddhism
by John R. McRae
University of California Press, Berkeley & Los Angeles, 2003

PDF: The Northern School and the Formation of Early Ch'an Buddhism (Studies in East Asian Buddhism, No 3)
by John R. McRae
University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 1986

This is an excellent introduction to the texts and doctrines of the early Chan School, dealing as well with historical developments. Includes translations of several early Chan treatises preserved in the Dunhuang texts (especially PELLIOT 3559).

PDF: The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch
Translated by John R. McRae

Treatise on the Two Entrances and Four Practices
attributed to Bodhidharma
Translated by John R. McRae

Chapter 7. Hagiography of Bodhidharma: Reconstructing the Point of Origin of Chinese Chan Buddhism
by John R. McRae
in: India in the Chinese Imagination: Myth, Religion, and Thought
edited by John Kieschnick and Meir Shahar
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014

DOC: Shen-hui and the Teaching of Sudden Enlightenment in Early Ch'an Buddhism
by John R. McRae
In: Sudden and Gradual: Approaches to Enlightenment in Chinese Thought by Peter N. Gregory
University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu, 1987, pp. 227-275.

PDF: Zen evangelist: Shenhui, sudden enlightenment, and the southern school of Chan Buddhism
by John R. McRae
edited by James Robson and Robert H. Sharf, with Fedde de Vries.
Series: Classics in East Asian Buddhism | “A Kuroda Institute Book.”
University of Hawai‘i Press, [2023] |

PDF: Ch'an Commentaries on the Heart Sūtra: Preliminary Inferences on the Permutation of Chinese Buddhism
by John R. McRae
Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies (JIABS) 11/2 (1988), pp. 85-115.

PDF: Essentials of the Transmission of Mind 黄檗山断際禅師伝心法要
Translated by John R. McRae
The Essentials of the Transmission of Mind is based on the teachings of Huangbo Xiyun, who is identified in the title of the Taisho 2012 text as Chan Master Duanji. Huangbo’s dates are unknown (he probably died in the mid-850s),
In: BDK Tripitaka Translation Series: Zen Texts, 2005, pp. 3-42.

PDF: 'Encounter Dialogue and the Transformation of the Spiritual Path in Chinese Ch'an,'
by John R. McRae
in: Paths to Liberation: The Mārga and its Transformation in Buddhist Thought, ed. Robert E. Buswell and ed. Robert M. Gimello (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1992), pp. 339-369.

PDF: Christoph Anderl & Christian Wittern (comp.)
Chan Buddhism in Dunhuang and Beyond: A Study of Manuscripts, Texts, and Contexts in Memory of John R. McRae (2020, Brill)

John R. McRae: A Bibliography 391ff
Compiled by Christian Wittern and Christoph Anderl

The Antecedents of Encounter Dialogue in Chinese Ch'an Buddhism
by John R. McRae
Indiana University
in: The Koan: Texts and Contexts in Zen Buddhism, ed. Steven Heine and ed. Dale S. Wright (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 46-74.
http://kr.buddhism.org/zen/koan/John_McRae.htm

I. Introduction

II. The eightfold path to the emergence of transcribed encounter dialogue and k'an-hua ch'an

A. The image of the Ch'an master responding spontaneously to his students

B. "Questions about things" in the Northern school

C. The "Ch'an" style of explanation in eighth-century sources

D. Doctrinal bases for the social orientation of early Ch'an practice

E. The use of ritualized dialogue between teachers and students

F. The widespread use of anecdote and dialogue in teaching

G. The fabrication of enlightenment narratives

H. The genealogical structure of Ch'an dialogue

III. Final ruminations

I. Introduction

Why are descriptions of Ch'an practice, both medieval and modern, so dominated by dialogues, narratives, and orality? Where other schools of Buddhism may be described in terms of relatively succinct lists of doctrines and practices-four of this, eight of that, a dash of ritual, a measure of self-cultivation-it seems that the only way to describe Ch'an is by a succession of narratives: to explain the Ch'an emphasis on understanding the mind, tell the story of Huik'o cutting off his hand to hear the teachings from Bodhidharma; to explain ch'an's attitude toward seated meditation, recount how Huai-jang prodded Ma-tsu by pretending to grind a tile into a mirror; to explain how true spiritual understanding goes beyond words, describe Huang-po and Lin-chi prancing through their unique combination of first and shout. This is not just the odd proclivity of medieval Chinese; Ikky?'s sojourn under the Nij? bridge in Ky?to is just one example from medieval Japanese Zen.1) And one can hardly read a page of twentieth-century writings on Zen without encountering the use of story as explanatory device. The most notable practitioner of this strategy is of course D. T. Suzuki, whose standard approach is effectively to write that "Zen is such-and-such, and let me tell a few stories that exemplify what I mean, "with little or no real attempt at explanation. And virtually all of these stories involve include the direct quotation of words put in the mouths of enlightened Zen masters. Why, among all the schools of Buddhism, is there such an emphasis on dialogues, narratives, and orality in the explanation of Zen Buddhism?

For many readers, it might not be immediately obvious why this is a reasonable and important question, since the equation of Ch'an with stories has all the feeling of a shared cosmology, a worldview that we all think of as naturally and obviously true. 2) That is, the orality of Ch'an practice is as much a given as the air we breathe, the water in which fish swim. To think of why Ch'an and the descriptions of Ch'an should emphasize orality is roughly akin to asking why there is gravity. But this is just the point: just as modern physics may thrill at the explanation of that most omnipresent of forces, so should we turn our collective gaze to perhaps the most common feature of Ch'an Buddhism, its peculiar use of language. The first step in this process is to recognize that the use of language, narration, and orality in and about Ch'an is indeed profoundly "peculiar," that we should self-consciously defamiliarize ourselves with the conventional Ch'an rhetoric that teaches us to be comfortable with paradox and absurdity, to too easily accept the bizarre as merely "the way Ch'an masters behave." I would argue there is nothing pre-ordained or obligatory about how Ch'an masters and their students are depicted in Ch'an literature; the first step in understanding Ch'an as a cultural and religious phenomenon is to realize how deeply contingent, how specifically conditioned in historical terms, such descriptions are. To paraphrase Suzuki R?shi, the founder of the San Francisco Zen Center and one of the most beloved icons of Zen in America, we need an attitude of "beginner's mind" toward the understanding of Ch'an itself.3)

The goal of this paper is to specify and describe the various factors that influenced the appearance of Ch'an encounter dialogue. Given both the limitations of space and the preliminary nature of my own research on the matter, I will not attempt to analyze how all these factors may have operated in coordination with each other to yield the results apparent in the historical record; the focus here is strictly on the apprehension of the most likely culprits, not the complete unraveling of the entire conspiracy.

Before this inquiry can begin, however, we must understand what "encounter dialogue" is and how its appearance may be recognized. This will draw us into two separate areas: first, issues of orality versus written transcription and, second, the historical evolution of Ch'an and the types of texts that may include the transcriptions of encounter dialogue.

The term "encounter dialogue" renders a Chinese term used by YANAGIDA Seizan 柳田聖山 to refer to the questions and responses that take place between Ch'an masters and their students, chi-yüan wen-ta 機緣問答 (J. kien mond?).4) As used here, encounter dialogue is a particular type of oral practice, one in which masters and students interact in certain definable, if unpredictable, ways. Ideally, the goal of the interactions is the enlightenment of the students, and since the teachers cannot simply command their students to achieve this they use various verbal and physical methods to catalyze the event. Often the exchanges of encounter dialogue can be understood in terms of both the assumption of a spiritual path (maarga, tao 道) and its negation: students ask questions positing a path to liberation, and teachers undercut the implicit assumptions involved so as to indicate the immediate perfection of the here-and-now. 5) There are of course also negative examples, in which a student is dismissed for not being a true seeker, or when a student or other questioner turns out to be beyond the need for spiritual assistance. And sometimes a student or fellow teacher will catch a master napping, so to speak, using an inadvertant dualism. Even in these cases, there is a palpable sense of lively immediacy in encounter dialogue exchanges. What is not included in the definition of encounter dialogue are questions that seek to elicit explanations about Buddhist doctrine or the spiritual path in general, as well as answers that seek to provide information. Such topics miss the mark because they are only "about" seeking and do not speak to the needs of an actual seeker in the immediate present.

The preceding definition should suffice for the moment, in spite of its incompleteness and lack of detail. More important, it is almost certainly an idealized abstraction that fails to capture the vitality, variegation, and nuance of encounter dialogue itself, and which perhaps incorporates too much of our own projections onto medieval Chinese Ch'an. We can ignore these issues for the present. A pair of significant problems occurs, however, because of the spontaneous fluidity of oral exchange and the fixity of written language. First, what we have to go on are written texts, which contain not encounter dialogue itself but the transcriptions thereof. This is a crucially important distinction. There is good evidence to suggest that something like encounter dialogue was in vogue within Ch'an practitioner communities long before it came to be written down, and that the very act of transcribing it was both difficult and significant. Second, how do we recognize when a particular exchange is one of encounter dialogue, rather than some less inspired form of communication? Are there specific characteristics of written language by which we can differentiate between knowledge-and enlightenment-oriented discussions? Although it would be a difficult, if no doubt useful, exercise to enumerate such characteristics, the task is probably easier done than said: we may not be able to explain it well, but we can recognize encounter dialogue when we see it. In addition, I will argue below that the transcriptions of encounter dialogue exchanges use a set of literary techniques to generate the impression of oral spontaneity and lively immediacy, and it will be useful to observe the extent to which this literary effect has shielded us from seeing the dramatized nature of the transcriptions. That is, encounter dialogue exchanges do not necessarily record what "really happened," although they are rendered with such lively immediacy that they appear this way to the reader. It is important to recognize literary efficacy for what it is.

When did encounter dialogue emerge in the Ch'an tradition, and when did it first come to be transcribed in written form? The following is a quick summary of the historical evolution of Ch'an, organized into a convenient set of periods or phases. 6)

Proto-Ch'an: Although the historical identity of Bodhidharma is now unrecoverable, a group of meditation specialists celebrated him as their spiritual model from at least the middle of the sixth century on. This group of practitioners seems to have wandered to various locations in northern China, carrying with them the Treatise on the Two Entrances and Four Practices(Erh-ju ssu-hsing lun 二入四行論), a text composed in Bodhidharma's name to which they appended a substantial body of material. Much of this latter material is anonymous or attributed to figures unknown. And the provenance of this material is also in question, with some of it probably deriving from the eighth century. None of the exchanges included seem to fit the definition of encounter dialogue given above, but there are several that might be considered questionable. 7)

East Mountain Community: During the half-century from 624 to 674, Tao-hsin 道信(580-651) and Hung-jen 弘忍(601-74) stewarded a monastic community at Shuang-feng 雙峰("Twin Peaks") or Huang-mei 黃梅 in what is now Hupeh Province. Tao-hsin actually resided on the western peak; the name of this phase of Ch'an is taken from the location of the community during Hung-jen's time, since he was the central figure of this phase of Ch'an. We know that this was a meditation community attended by Buddhists of various inclinations from all over China. We know a certain amount about the teachings of Hung-jen, or at least those attributed to him retrospectively, through a text known as the Treatise on the Essentials of Cultivating the Mind(Hsiu-hsin yao lun 修心要論), which was compiled for him by his students some years or even decades after his death. There also exists a text attributed to Tao-hsin, but this was probably composed even later than the Treatise on the Essentials of Cultivating the Mind. 8) In any case, there is nothing resembling encounter dialogue in either of these texts, and the closest we get to any sense of dialogic immediacy is the following statements attributed to Hung-jun:

My disciples have compiled this treatise [from my oral teachings], so that [the reader] may just use his True Mind to grasp the meaning of its words... If [the teachings contained herein] contradict the Holy Truth, I repent and hope for the eradication [of that transgression]. If they correspond to the Holy Truth, I transfer [any merit that would result from this effort to all] sentient beings. I want everyone to discern their fundamental minds and achieve buddhahood at once. Those who are listening [now] should make effort, so that you can achieve buddhahood in the near future. I now vow to help my followers to cross over [to the other shore of nirvaa.na]....

QUESTION: This treatise [teaches] from beginning to end that manifesting one's own mind represents enlightenmnet. [However, Ⅰ] do not know whether this is a teaching of the fruit [of nirvaa.na] or one of practice.

ANSWER: The basic principle of this treatise is the manifestation of the One Vehicle...

If I am deceiving you, I will fall into the eighteen hells in the future. I point to heaven and earth in making this vow: If [the teachings contained here] are not true, I will be eaten by tigers and wolves for life-time after lifetime.

This material from the very end of the Treatise on the Essentials of Cultivating the Mind clearly evokes the voice of the compilers, who identify themselves as Hung-jen's students. However, both here and in the repeated injunctions to "make effort" throughout the text, we may be hearing Hung-jen's own voice as well.

Northern school: In 701 Shen-hsiu 神秀(606?-706) arrived in Lo-yang at the invitation of Empress Wu, an event which constitutes the debut of Ch'an among China's cultured elite. For the next two or three decades Shen-hsiu and his students maintained an extremely high profile in imperial court society, where they presented themselevs as transmitters of the "East Mountain Teaching" of Tao-hsin and especially Hung-jen. (Actually, the East Mountain Teaching period of Ch'an might be extended past Hung-jen's death to include Shen-hsiu's residence at Yü-ch'üan ssu during 675-700, and the Northern school phase may be said to have begun with Hung-jen's student Fa-ju's 法如 [638-89] activities on Mount Sung in the 680s.) The Northern school represented a great flourishing of Ch'an activity and writing, and the first examples of the "transmission of the lamp history" (ch'üan-teng shih 傳燈史 ; J. ent?shi) genre of Ch'an texts appear during this phase. It is in one of these texts that we find the first incontrovertible evidence that something like encounter dialogue was being practiced within the Ch'an community-but was not yet being transcribed in full. 9)

Southern school: Beginning in 730, a monk named Shen-hui 神會 (684-758) sharply criticized the Northern school in public, promoting instead his own teacher Hui-neng 慧能 (638-712) as the Sixth Patriarch in succession from Bodhidharma and the exponent of the true teaching of sudden enlightenment. Shen-hui's career included activity both in the provinces and centered on Lo-yang, and he was an active missionary for the new Ch'an movement as well as a factionalist partisan and fundraiser. Indeed, my research into his life and teachings suggests that his vocation on the ordination platform helped to determine the content and style of his teachings. We have a remarkable collection of texts recording the teachings of Shen-hui, which include a considerable amount of oral exchange, and although I believe he had a significant influence on the transformation of Ch'an discourse, none of this oral exchange constitutes encounter dialogue according to the definition given above.10)

Oxhead school: Although this faction describes itself as a subsidiary lineage deriving from Tao-hisn, its real heyday was the second half of the eighth century. Below I will discuss two texts associated with this school, the Treatise on the Transcendence of Cognition (Chüeh-kuan lun 絶觀論), an anonymous text from sometime after 750 or so, and the Platform Suutra of the Sixth Patriarch (Lin-tsu t'an-ching 六祖壇經), the first version of which dates from about 780. In addition to the significant data in these two texts, I will introduce a few brief passages from biographical sources for members of the Oxhead school, which in spite of its shadowy historical reality had a very creative impact on the evolution of Ch'an rhetoric and doctrine.

Provincial Ch'an: Sometime in the second half of the eighth century, or perhaps the very beginnig of the ninth, a new style of Ch'an developed in what is now Kiangsi and Hupeh. I will focus on Ma-tsu Tao-i 馬祖道一(709-88) and his Hung-chou school 洪州派. 11) Ma-tsu and his disciples are depicted in Ch'an records as engaging in spontaneous repartee in what is almost a barnyard atmosphere of agricultural labor and other daily tasks, and this style of interaction seems to fit perfectly with the descriptions of Ma-tsu's teachings about the ordinary mind and the activity of the Buddha-nature. (These issues are discussed below in section GET.) If so, this would be the earliest incontrovertible appearance of encounter dialogue, and indeed the accounts of Ma-tsu and his first-and second-generation disciples form the core repertoire of encounter dialogue anecdotes in Ch'an literature. There is just one problem: the presentation of Ma-tsu and his disciples in this fashion does not occur in writing until 952, and earlier writings relating to Ma-tsu and his faction present a somewhat different image of his community.

Rather than proceed further with this listing of Ch'an phases and factions, let me comment on the crucial incongruity just mentioned. The first text to transcribe Ch'an encounter dialogue bursts onto the scene in 952, a twenty-fascicle compilation of dialogues and stories associated with all Buddhas and patriarchs down to that time. The is the Tsu-t'ang chi 祖堂集 or Anthology of the Patriarchal Hall, which was compiled by two third-generation students of Hsüeh-feng I-ts'un 雪峰義存(822-908) living in ch'üan-chcu 泉州 (Fukien). The compilers worked during the period of disturbances and political unrest following the collapse of the T'ang dynasty, but in the peaceful haven of the Five Dynasties regimes of the Min-Yue ?越 region of the southeastern coast. I can only imagine that the two compilers were amazed to discover an unexpected characteristic about the Buddhist monks arriving in Ch'üan-chou during this period: so many of them told encounter dialogue anecdotes about their teachers, their teachers' teachers, and their fellow practitioners. Presumably, until this emergency gathering of the sa^ngha no one had quite paid attention to the very prevalence of such anecdotes, which probably circulated in the form of monastic gossip as practitioners traveled from one place to the next. Thus I imagine the two compilers exclaiming in amazement at the recognition that so many were celebrating the same types of stories, the initial realization of the magnitude of a new development that before then the participants in this informal, "back room" enterprise had considered interesting individually without recognizing its widespread importance. 12)

At the same time as the Tsu-t'ang chi compilers realized the widespread nature of this gossip and its intrinsic religious value, they must also have become aware of its precarious existence: further civil disturbance might do irreversible damage to the Buddhist establishment, and this ephemeral oral genre would be lost. Thus, simultaneously with the expression of amazement at what they had just recognized as a new and widespread phenomenon of encounter dialogue practice, they also reacted with horror at the prospect that, unless it were recorded, the entire body of material and indeed news of the genre itself were liable to disappear with the civil and military unrest of the times.

One of the innovations of encounter dialogue transcriptions as a genre is that they record not only the sage pronouncements of Buddhist teachers, but the sometimes foolish and often formulaic questions of their students as well. I am not certain the Tsu-t'ang chi compilers were aware of the significance of their decision to record not only the words of teachers, but also those of the students. Rather, I imagine they could not have seen any other course of action, given the quality of the dialogue material they had collected, although from our vantage point this appears to be a shift of major significance in the evolution of Chinese Buddhism.13) Whatever their reflexive awareness of the processes involved, they established a format in which written recreations of oral dialogue could be transcribed in a standardized format (i.e., Mandarin) of colloquial speech and thus be widely understandable, without the barriers of regional dialect transcriptions that would have rendered the text inaccessible at various points to all Chinese readers. In Ch'an studies we have tended to disregard the significance of the act of transcribing or representing oral dialogue in writing, but of course this is not a trivial process at all. Even though many o the dialogues recorded in the Tsu-t'ang chi were between southerners or residents of other regions who must have been spoken in some form other than northern Mandarin, that is the form in which they are represented in the anthology. In other words, either or both of two conditions apply to virtually the entire contents of the Tsu-t'ang chi: first, dialogues had to be converted from some non-Mandarin dialect into Mandarin, and, second, literary techniques were used to make the written product appear as if it transcribed actual speech. 14) The first condition suggests that in the very act of transcription some "translation" of encounter dialogue exchanges inevitably took place; the second is merely our recognition of the fact that we are dealing with a genre primarily of "text" rather than "event." In other words, rather than thinking of the Tsu-t'ang chi anecdotes as sources of information about what happened in Ch'an history in the eighth century, we should approach them as evidence for how Ch'an figures thought and wrote in the tenth.

These speculations and inferences have played an important role in determining the course of the present research, but they will have to await another venue to be examined as they deserve. Here I must emphasize the extraordinary nature of the Tsu-t'ang chi and the great temporal disconformity between the supposed emergence of encounter dialogue as a religious practice and its transcription into written form.15) True, this text is one in a series of "transmission of the lamp history" texts, which begins in the second decade of the eighth century, so that its basic structure is not unprecedented. However, with the exception of some partial and/or equivocal examples introduced below, no earlier transcriptions of encounter dialogue now exist, and it is stunning for the first known representatives of this new genre to appear for the very first time in such extensive form. It is not only that there is such a substantial volume of this material appears all in one text, although this is of course striking, but also that the material included shows all the signs of a mature oral genre. That is, these are not raw, disconnected stories, Often we find different versions, comments, and changes that imply both a lively discourse community and conscious editorial intervention. Obviously, the Ch'an community as a whole is engaged in a shared or common dialogue about the spiritual implications of a whole is engaged in a shared or common dialogue about the spiritual implications of a number of profound statements and telling anecdote. And, of course, they were organized into the comprehensive genealogical framework of the "transmission of the lamp history" genre.

Eventually, processes such as these lead to the emergence during the Sung dynasty of the Kung-an chi 公案集 (J. K?an sh?) or precedent anthologies, in which particular snippets of encounter dialogue material were collated into series and their most crucial passages used to form curricula of meditation subjects. This style of practice is referred to as "viewing the critical phrases," K'an-hua 看話; J. kanna. I am referring of course to texts such as the Blue Cliff Records (Pi-yen lu 碧巖錄 ; J. Hekigan roku) and Gateless Barrier (Wu-men kuan 無門關 ; J. Mumonkan). Although it would be convenient to think of these precedent anthologies as entirely a later development, we will see that the tendency of teachers to put questions to their students becomes apparent well before the appearance of the Tsu-t'ang chi. Was it possible, in fact, that the very editorial tendencies that led to the emergence of the precedent anthologies were already apparent in the Tsu-t'ang chi? We will not be able to address this intriguig question in the present context. However, there is good evidence that early Ch'an teachers posed unsolvable conundrums for their students to contemplate, a practice which is inescapably similar to the later k'an-hua style of meditation. Therefore, it makes excellent sense to couch these inquiries in terms of not only the oral practice of encounter dialogue, but also so as to include certain encounter-style interrogations by teachers of their students.) By "encounter-style" I of course mean inquiries that conform to the style of emphasis on individual spiritual endeavor described for encounter dialogue above.)

I will introduce an example from the Tsu-t'ang chi at the end of this paper. Based on the preceding considerations, though, we can specify the following questions to be asked of the available evidence on Ch'an prior to the appearance of this important text: Does any of the dialogue material of early Ch'an bear similarities to mature encounter dialogue? Are there any partial transcriptions of encounter dialogue exchanges, especially teachers' questions that might have been used to guide students' meditative endeavors? At the most basic level, what are the criteria we should use for identifying encounter dialogue material, or its prototypic variants, if any? And, at the opposite end of the scale, is there any evidence for tendencies similar to those which led to the emergence of k'an-hua or "viewing the critical phrase" type of Ch'an, which seems to be a natural progression from the devotion to encounter dialogue perse?

II. The eightfold path to the emergence of transcribed encounter dialogue and k'an-hua ch'an

Based on an admittedly sketchy review of the evidence, I have found eight separate characteristics of early Ch'an Buddhism that may have contributed to the eventual emergence of encounter dialogue and k'an-hua Ch'an. I have avoided previously discussed doctrinal issues, such as the concepts of ^suunyataa(emptiness) and praj~naa(non-discriminating wisdom), and the impact of Maadhyamika dialectic, etc. But this by no means limits us to linguistic issues; below I will suggest that Ch'an had to develop a rationale for socially oriented practice prior to the perfection of dialogue techniques. Obviously, none of these characteristics is shared throughout the entire early Ch'an movement, and there are almost certainly others not yet identified.

A. The image of the Ch'an master responding spontaneously to his students

There are numerous examples of early Ch'an teachers being described as having special abilities of teaching, which they exercised in an unstructured moment-to-moment manner. Some of the earliest known expressions of this concern Hung-jen, the central figure of the East Mountain Teaching and so-called "fifth patriarch." Hung-jen forms the original nucleus of the hagiographical persona of the unlettered sage, and he is described as spending his days in meditation and his nights tending the monastery cattle. As soon as he was appointed successor to Tao-hsin, the previously silent Hung-jen was immediately able to understand the problems of his students and teach them with a fluid, spontaneous style that combined an appreciation of the Ultimate Truth with complete expertise in the expediencies of religious practice. 16) Fa-ju, who was unique among Hung-jen's students for spending so many years with the master, is described as having unique abilities in his interactions with his students, so that he could remonstrate them strongly without incurring resentment. His anger is described as two empty boats hitting each other in the middle of a lake, which I take to mean having a hollow sound that signified an absence of attachment or resistance. Also to be considered here are Lao-an 老安, or Hui-an 惠安(584?-708) and I-fu 義福(661-736) of the Northern school, who were the subjects of various occultish anecdotes.17)

The primary examples of this religious type are of course Bodhidharma and Hui-neng. The portrayal of Bodhidharma teaching Hui-k'o and others clearly developed over time and has been documented so clearly by SEKIGUCHI Shindai 關口眞大 as to represent something of an index to the evolution of the Ch'an ideology as a whole. Based solely on date of first occurrence, though, it is significant for our purposes that the famous "pacification of the mind" exchange between Bodhidharma and Hui-k'o does not appear until the publication of the Tsut'ang chi in 952. In earlier texts, Bodhidharma is represented as teaching Hui-k'o by means of the transmission of the La^nkaavataara (in the Hsü kao-seng chuan 續高僧傳 667) or Diamond Suutra (the appendix to a text by Shen-hui, who died in 758); even the famous exchange between Bodhidharma and Emperor Wu of the Liang dynasty, a celebrated mismatch that neatly illustrates the difference between the conventional "Chinese maarga model" and the Ch'an "encounter model" of master-student exchange, is not recorded for the first time until 758 or shortly thereafter (in the same appendix to Shen-hui's text). 18)

Hui-neng is of course a different story. Here we can safely accept the date of 780 suggested by both Yampolsky and Yanagida as the date of the Tun-huang version of the text as its date of compilation, so that a few pages below we may consider an accretion to the text in at least its two tenth-century versions. 19) That is, we can purposely avoid consideration of the existence of any earlier version of the text and take the Platform Suutra as pertaining to a legendary creation of the late eighth century and beyond, rather than the historical figure who supposedly died in 713. Here we have a figure who responds to situations with remarkable élan and spiritual brilliance, in spite of the fact that he is supposedly quite untutored in the literary arts: he composes insightful poetry (the "mind verse" [hsin-chieh 心偈] offered in response to 'Shen-hsiu's verse), makes mysteriously profound pronouncements (informing two monks that their minds were in motion, not the flag and wind about which they were arguing), and poses miraculous challenges to individual seekers (showing the pursuing Hui-ming 慧命 CHECK that he could not lift the robe, let alone take it back to Huangmei 20)). In all these cases, Hui-neng is represented as enlightened, not by any doctrine he pronounces or essay he produces, but rather in his interactions with the figures around him.

B. "Questions about things" in the Northern school

How did early Ch'an teachers interact with their students? The hagiographical images of Hung-jen and Hui-neng are not our only clues: we do not know how the students responded, but at least we have some evidence for the types of questions early Ch'an masters placed before them.

The Leng-ch'ieh shih-tzu chi 楞伽師資記 [Records of the Masters and Disciples of the La^nkaa[vataara], a "transmission of the lamp history" written in the second decade of the eighth century, contains an intriguing set of rhetorical questions and short doctrinal admonitions, which it refers to as "questions about things" (literally, "pointing at things and asking the meanings," chih-shih wen-i 指事問義).21) Such questions and admonitions are attributed to several of the early masters, as shown in the following examples:

(Gu.nabhadra)

When [Gu.nabhadra] was imparting wisdom to others, before he had even begun to preach the Dharma, he would assess [his listeners' understanding of physical] things by pointing at a leaf and [asking]: "What is that?"

He would also say: "Can you enter into a [water] pitcher or enter into a pillar? Can you enter into a fiery oven? Can a stick [from up on the] mountain preach the Dharma?"

He would also say: "Does your body enter [into the pitcher, etc.,] or does your mind enter?"

He would also say: "There is a pitcher inside the building, but is there another pitcher outside the building? Is there water inside the pitcher, or is there a pitcher inside the water? Or is there even a pitcher within every single drop of water under heaven?"

He would also say: "A leaf can preach the Dharma; a pitcher can preach the Dharma; a pillar can preach the Dharma; a building can preach the Dharma; and earth, water, fire, and wind can all preach the Dharma. How is it that mud, wood, tiles, and rocks can also preach the Dharma?"

(Bodhidharma)

The Great Master [Bodhidharma] also pointed at things and inquired of their meaning, simply pointing at a thing and calling out: "What is that?" He asked about a number of things, switching their names about and asking about them [again] differently.

He would also say: "Clouds and mists in the sky are never able to defile space. However, they can shade space [so that the sun] cannot become bright and pure..."

(Hung-jen)

The Great Master (Heng-jen} said: "There is a single little house filled with crap and weeds and dirt-what is it?"

He also said: "If you sweep out all the crap and weeds and dirt and clean it all up so there is not a single thing left inside, then what is it?..."

Also, when he saw someone light a lamp or perform any ordinary activity, he would always say: "Is this person dreaming or under a spell?" Or he would say: "Not making and not doing, these things are all the great parinirvaa.na."

He also said: "When you are actually sitting in meditation inside the monastery, is there another of you sitting in meditation in the forest? Can all the mud, wood, tiles, and rocks also sit in meditation? Can mud, wood, tiles, and rocks also see forms and hear sounds, or put on robes and carry a begging bowl?"

(Shen-hsiu)

(Shen-hsiu} also said: "Is this a mind that exists? What kind of mind is the mind?"

He also said: "When you see form, does form exist? What kind of form is form?"

He also said: "You hear the sound of a bell that is struck. Does (the sound} exist when (the bell} is struck? Before it is struck? What kind of sound is sound?" He also said: "Does the sound of a bell that is struck only exist within the monastery, or does the bell's sound also exist (throughout} the universe (in all the} the directions?"

Also, seeing a bird fly by, he asked: "What is that?"

He also said: "Can you sit in meditation on the tip of a tree's hanging branch?"

He also said: "The Nirvaa.na Suutra says: 'The Bodhisattva with the Limitless Body came from the East.' If the bodhisattva's body was limitless in size, how could he have come from the East? Why did he not come from the West, South, or North? Or is this impossible?"22)

There are a number of observations that must be stated about these interrogatives, even if we cannot develop them all fully here. First, to me the image of Bodhidharma asking about the things around him has the ring of believability, but only because I know what it is like to move into a new language community and struggle to communicate with those around me. By the rule of difference used in biblical interpretation,23) I wonder if this may be a detail actually deriving from the shared life experiences of foreign missionaries that was so trivial as to escape polemical alteration. I can easily imagine Bodhidharma struggling with language, and yet at the same time transforming some of his questions from simple linguistic issues into more profound religious and philosophical queries. Second, although I have not made an extensive search, my readings over the past decade and occasional discussions with specialists in Indian Buddhism have not shown any specific antecedents to this type of inquiry in any earlier Buddhist context. One of course might draw comparisons with the questions found in ch'ing-t'an 淸談 or "pure conversation" literature of the third and fourth centuries, but I have not found this line of investigation to be fruitful. 24) Third, this style of interrogation probably had some general currency at the beginning of the eighth century among Northern school figures. In the strictest sense, of course, all we can say is that it was known to the compiler of the text, a successor to Shen-hsiu named Ching-chüeh (683-ca. 750). The attribution of "questions about things" is clearly unreliable with regard to Gu.nabhadra, who is included in the Ch'an lineage solely in this text and without any known basis in fact. In spite of my speculative comment just above, it is not fair to assert on the basis of this text that such questions were actually known to Bodhidharma, either. Fourth, the terminology used here is clearly based on a Chinese dictionary usage, in which chih-shih or to "indicate [a] thing" refers to characters whose shape immediately invoke the abstract meaning involved, such as the numbers one and two and the directions up and down(一, 二, 上, 下, respectively).25) Fifth, the logical similarity and content of several of the questions implies a consistent intellectual perspective, which seems not thoroughly undercut by their paradoxical nature. The doctrinal implications of these questions would certainly merit further investigation.

Sekiguchi has already suggested that these "questions about things" resemble the Kung-ans of later Ch'an. Although his analysis was superficial and unconvincing to the extent that it inspired unusually harsh criticism from Yanagida, I believe that his observation deserves reconsideration. 26) Obviously, we cannot jump immediately from these questions to the k?an anthologies of the eleventh century and beyond, but instead need to take into account the intervening efflorescence of encounter dialogue. However, it certainly is reasonable to infer that these represent something like the same sort of questions posed by masters to students in that later genre. In contrast to kung-an anthologies, there is no context or literary structure to explain how such questions were intended.

C. The "Ch'an" style of explanation in eighth-century sources

In addition to these "questions about things," there are various hints in texts from this period and slightly later of what seems like the idiosyncratically "Ch'an" style of discourse glorified in the later tradition. It is not always clear, to be sure, that one unified style of explanation is indicated, but the references are enough to suggest that something interesting is being reported, but not yet recorded in full.

The central figure in this respect is Shen-hsiu, already introduced above, who had a special role as "Ch'an commentator" on the meaning of the suutras as translated by ^Sik.saananda during the first few years of the eighth century. One longs to know what the "Ch'an meaning" of any scriptural term might be, but no doubt Shen-hsiu's style of interpretation was largely identical to the "contemplative analysis" found in his Treatise on the Contemplation of the Mind(Kuan-hsin lun 觀心論) and related works. Here Shen-hsiu represents all of Buddhism as metagogy for the "contemplation of the mind" (k'an-hisn 看心), declaring that the Buddha was simply not interested in the nominal subject matter of some of the suutras but instead had an esoteric meaning. Thus rather than actually describing how monks should bathe themselves, the Buddha was actually building an extended metaphor for meditation, with the heat of the fire standing for the power of wisdom, the cleansing effect of the water the efficacy of mental concentration, etc. Rather than describing actual votive lamps to be used for devotion, the Buddha described the "truly enlightened mind," in which the body was metaphorically the lamp's stand, the mind the lamp's dish, and faith its wick, etc. Shen-hsiu writes, "If one constantly burns such a lamp of truly suchlike true enlightenment, its illumination will destroy all the darkness of ignorance and stupidity." 27)

Another clue for the prevalence of unconventional "Ch'an-style" dialogue occurs in the epitaph for the Northern school figure I-fu(661-736) by Yen T'ing-chih 嚴挺之, in which the another recounts that he and Tu Yü 杜昱, another of I-fu's epigraphers, collected the departed master's sayings as they were remembered by his students. The two men were apparently unable to write down all of those sayings, presumably because of their great number. Even though they recognized the value of these sayings, neither of their epitaphs for I-fu contains anything that might correspond to the subject of such a search. 28) Although the format of disciples collecting a master's sayings is known from the earliest days of Ch'an (witness the material associated with Bodhidharma's Treatise on the Two Entrances and Four Practices (Erh-ju ssu-hsing lun 二入四行論) and the Treatise on the Essentials of Cultivating the Mind (Hsiu-hsin yao lun 修心要論), the latter of which declares explicitly that it was compiled by Hung-jen's students), but the manner of the statements by Yen T'ing-chih and Tu Yü imply that a special kind of pronouncement was involved.

As time went on, the epitaphs of members of the Northern school and other figures important in the development of Ch'an began to include precisely this sort of material. For example, note the following exchange and commentary form the epitaph for P'u-chi's 普寂 student Fa-yün 法雲 (d.766):

"Has the Buddha's teaching been transmitted to you?"

"I have a sandalwood image [of the Buddha] to which I pay reverence."

[This reply was] profound yet brief, and those listening felt chills of loneliness. The day after [the questioner, a prominent official,] left, Fa-yün died without illness while sitting cross-legged on his chair.29)

After all the hyperbole about Shen-hsiu's being equivalent to a buddha and P'u-chi's being the religious teacher of the universe (themes stated in documents from the first half of the eighth century as part of the Northern school's campaign for public recognition), it is perfectly natural to find a slightly later master deflating the idea of the transmission altogether.

The epitaph for Hui-chen 慧實(673-751), who was more closely affiliated with the T'ien-t'ai and Vinaya schools than with Ch'an, includes a more explicit reference to and several examples of what seems like encounter dialogue:

"When people do not understand, I use the Ch'an [style of] teaching(ch'an-shuo 禪說)."

QUESTION: "Are not the teachings of the Southern and Northern [schools] different?"

ANSWER: "Outside the gates of both houses is a road to everlasting peace."

QUESTION: "Do the results of religious practice vary according to the extent [of realization]?"

ANSWER: "When a drop of water falls from the cliff, it knows the morning sea."

QUESTION: "How can one who is without faith achieve self-motivation [in spiritual endeavor]?"

ANSWER: "When the baby's throat is closed (i. e., when choking), the mother yells to frighten it [loose]. Great compassion is unconditioned, but it can also cause [a student to] whimper."30)

A confirmed skeptic might suggest that Hui-chen is merely answering in easily understood metaphors, rather than in some really new "Ch'an [style of] teaching." If this is the case, then we must infer that a new type of metaphorical or metagogic usage became the vogue in Ch'an Buddhism during the second half of the eighth century, for such usage is also apparent in the biographies of Fa-ch'in 法欽 (714-92) and Hsüan-lang 玄朗 (673-754), well-known representatives of the Oxhead and T'ien-t'ai schools, respectively. 31) The Sung kao-seng chuan 宋高僧傳 [Biographies of Eminent Monks (Compiled During the) Sung] and Ching-te ch'üan-teng lu 景德傳燈錄 [Records of the Transmission of the Lamp (Compiled During the) Ching-te (Era, or 1044)] contain several examples of encounter dialogue involving Northern school figures, although of course these examples may be later fabrications. 32) The practice of this prototypic encounter dialogue may have had a much wider currency than the extant body of literature suggests, and the members of the Northern school may have only been the first to legitimize its use within the Ch'an tradition,

D. Doctrinal bases for the social orientation of early Ch'an practice

What were early Ch'an practitioners doing when using paradoxical interrogation, dialogue, and interactive training methods? Since they do not tell us explicitly,33) our only recourse is to turn to the voluminous writings they did bequeath to us and explore them for clues. There are obvious methodological problems in this approach involving interpretive leaps and projections, but I see no other recourse.

One of the most clearly apparent features of the Treatise on the Two Entrances and Four Practices attributed from quite early on is its bimodal structure, which consists of one abstract and one active "entrance" or "access" to accomplishment of the Dharma. Although there are several different ways in which one can read this text, one of the most appropriate and useful readings is to take them as introvertive and extrovertive, respectively. That is, the "entrance of principle" refers to interior cultivation, mental practice undertaken deep within the individual's psyche, and the "entrance of practice" refers to practice undertaken actively and in interaction with the world.

Other than dialogue per se, the other important question to be considered here is the extent to which the doctrinal formulations of the Northern school's Five Expedient Means (Wu fang-pien 五方便) may have provided justification for the emergence of encounter dialogue. Here I am not thinking of encounter dialogue so much as an oral practice, but in the more general category of its identity as a social practice. That is, is there anything in the Five Expedient Means that provides justification for the outward, social dimension of Ch'an religious practice?

The answer to this question is of course affirmative, the key passage being the following (from section J):

Bodhisattvas know the fundamental motionlessness of the six senses, their internal illumination being distinct and external functions autonomous. This is the true and constant motionlessness of the Mahaayaana.

[QUESTION]: What do "internal illumination being distinct" and "external functions autonomous" means?

ANSWER: Fundamental wisdom (ken-pen chih 根本智) is "internal illumination being distinct." Successive wisdom (hou-te-chih 候得智) is "external functions autonomous."

[QUESTION]: What are fundamental wisdom and successive wisdom?

ANSWER: Because one first realizes the characteristic of the transcendence of the body and mind, this is fundamental wisdom. The autonomous [quality of] knowing and perception and the nondefilement [associated with the enlightened state] are successive wisdom. The first realization of the fundamental.... if realization [of the transcendence of body and mind] were not first, then knowing and perception would be completely defiled. Know clearly that the autonomous [spontaneity of] knowing and perception is attained after that realization and is called successive wisdom.

When the mind does not activate on the basis of the eye's perception of form, this is fundamental wisdom. The autonomous [spontaneity of] perception is successive wisdom. When the mind does not activate on the basis of the ear's hearing of sounds, this is fundamental wisdom. The autonomous [spontaneity of] hearing is successive wisdom. The nose, tongue, body, and consciousness are also the same. With the fundamental and successive [wisdoms], the locations [ch'u 處) are distinct, the locations are emancipated. The senses do not activate, and the realizations are pure. When successive moments of mental [existence] are nonactivating, the senses are sagely (sheng 聖).

Now, the terms "fundamental wisdom" (mula-j~naana) and "successive wisdom" (p.r.s.tha-labdha-j~naana) are well known from the Abhidharmako^sa and many subsequent texts, but they do not occur CHECK with any emphasis in the Lotus Suutra, which is supposed to be the basis of this section of the Five Expedient Means. 34) Since this and other examples of Northern school literature revel in playing with and immediately discarding doctrinal formulations, there is little reason to speculate on why this particular pair of terms should occur here. The important issue is the congruence between this and other dyads used.

Scattered throughout the same section of the Five Expedient Means we find various statements involving this dyad:

If the mind does not activate, the mind is suchlike. If form does not activate, form is suchlike. Since the mind is suchlike the mind is emancipated. Since form is suchlike form is emancipated. Since mind and form both transcend [thoughts], there is not a single thing. 35)

The transcendence of mind is enlightenment of self, with no dependence (yüan 緣) on the five senses. The transcendence of form is enlightenment of others, with no dependence on the five types of sensory data. The transcendence of both mind and form is to have one's practice of enlightenment perfect and complete (chüeh-hsing yüan-man 覺性圓滿) and is equivalent to the universally "same" dharmakaaya of a Tathaagata. 36)

The transcendence of though is the essence, and the perceptive faculties (jianwen juezhi) are the function. Serenity (chi 寂) is the essence, and illumination (chao 照) is the function. "Serene but always functioning; functioning but always serene." Serene but always functioning-this is the absolute (li 理) corresponding to phenomena (shih 事). Functioning but always serene-this is phenomena corresponding to the absolute. Serene yet always functioning-this is form corresponding to emptiness. Functioning yet always serene-this is emptiness corresponding to form....

Serenity is unfolding; illumination is constriction (lit., "rolling up"). Unfolded, it expands throughout the dharmadhaatu. Constricted, it is incorporated in the tip of a hair. Its expression [outward] and incorporation [inward] distinct, the divine function is autonomous.37)

The meaning of enlightenment is that the essence of the mind transcends thoughts. Transcending the characteristic of craving, it is equivalent to the realm of space, which pervades everywhere. This is called enlightenment of self. Transcending the characteristic of anger, it is equivalent to the realm of space, which pervades everywhere. This is called enlightenment of others. Transcending the characteristic of stupidity, it is equivalent to the realm of space, which pervades everywhere. The single characteristic of the dharmadhaatu is the universally "same" dharmakaaya of the Tathaagata. This is called complete enlightenment.38)

These examples, which could easily be supplemented from later sections of the Five Expedient Means and other works, should suffice to reveal the basic Northern school concern for describing not only how one understands the abstract truth of the Buddhadharma, but also how one puts it into practice on behalf of sentient beings. This bimodal structure is certainly indebted to the Treatise on the Two Entrances and Four Practices attributed to Bodhidharma and may be taken as a basic characteristic of early Ch'an Buddhism.

It would be more convenient for our purposes, I suppose, if this bimodal structure explicitly involved masters and students, and if it stated clearly that one was first to become enlightened oneself and then inspire the enlightenment of others. Instead, as with all Ch'an literature at this time (not to mention the texts of other schools), the aspiring student is still invisible, and the recipients of the enlightened master's grace from the moment of successive wisdom onward are anonymous sentient beings. However, the emphasis on the importance of activity in the social or inter-personal realm (which is implicitly seen as temporarily subsequent but equal in value terms) is firmly established with these formulations.

E. The use of ritualized dialogue between teachers and students

The mechanical formulations given above are not the only interesting feature of the Five Expedient Means. The text must have been something like a set of teacher's notes for holding initiation and training meetings according to an approved Northern school program, in which context it includes the following examples of ritualized dialogue. The first example is from the very beginning of the text, just after the initiates are led responsively through a declaration of certain basic vows:

The preceptor asks: What do you see (lit., what thing do you see)?

The disciple(s) answer: I do not see a single thing.

Preceptor: Viewing purity, view minutely. Use the eye of the Pure Mind to view afar without limit, without restriction. View without obstruction.

The preceptor asks: What do you see?

ANSWER: I do not see a single thing.

D. View afar to the front, not residing in the myriad sensory realms, holding the body upright and just illuminating, making the true essence of reality distinct and clear.

View afar to the rear...to both sides...facing upwards...facing downwards...in the ten directions all at once...energetically during unrest..minutely during calm...identically whether walking or standing still...identically whether sitting or lying down, not residing in the myriad sensory realms, holding the body upright and just illuminating, making the true essence of reality distinct and clear.

E. QUESTION: When viewing, what things do you view?

[ANSWER}: Viewing, viewing, no thing is viewed.

[QUESTION}: Who views?

[ANSWER]: The enlightened mind (chüeh-hsin 覺心) views.

Penetratingly viewing the realms of the ten directions, in purity there is not a single thing. Constantly viewing and in accord with the locus of nonbeing (wu-so 無所), 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 (p'u-t'i lu 菩提路). The mind serene and enlightenment distinct, the body's serenity is the bodhi tree (p'u-t'i shu 菩提樹). The four tempters have no place of entry, so one's great enlightenment is perfect and complete, transcending perceptual subject and object.39)

The second example is in the second section, which is nominally based on the Lotus Suutra:

A. The preceptor strikes the wooden [signal-board] and asks: Do you hear the sound?

[ANSWER] : We hear.

[QUESTION]: What is this "hearing" like?

[ANSWER]: Hearing is motionless.

[QUESTION]: What is the transcendence of thoughts?

[ANSWER]: The transcendence of thoughts is motionless.

This motionlessness is to develop the expedient means of sagacity (hui fang-pien 慧方便) our of meditation (ting 定). This is to open the gate of sagacity. Hearing is sagacity. This expedient means can not only develop sagacity, but also make one's meditation correct. [To achieve this motionlessness] is to open the gate of wisdom, to attain wisdom (chih 智). This is called the opening of the gates of wisdom and sagacity. 40)

Here we find transcribed segments of ritual dialogue from a doctrinally specific Northern school context. When looking for antecedents for transcribed dialogues in early Ch'an texts, we should not overlook this type of material. That is, to what extent did encounter dialogue grow out of a monastic training and ritual context in which students responded to monkish ritual celebrants in thoroughly formalized manners? Elsewhere in the Five Expedient Means are other portions of this catechistic ritual, which demonstrate the same form of scripted recitation-and-response pattern. This material skilfully weaves Northern school doctrine into an intriguing mix of ritualized initiation, teaching catechism, and guided meditation practice. I have already discussed the relevance of some of the phraseology here for our understanding of Northern school doctrine and the construction of the Platform Suutra;41) other aspects of this material that deserve discussion include its bearing on the indebtedness of early Ch'an to T'ien-t'ai formulations. 42) Here I would like to focus on the following possible reading of the implications of this material: that Ch'an encounter dialogue derived not (or, perhaps, not solely) out of spontaneous oral exchanges but rather (perhaps only in part) out of ritualized exchanges. Given arguments already made by Griffith Foulk and Robert Sharf that spontaneity is merely "inscribed" within the heavily ritualized context of Sung dynasty Ch'an, this interpretation allows us to wipe out the distinction between the "classical" age of T'ang dynasty Ch'an when encounter dialogue was spontaneous and the subsequent ritualization of dialogue within Sung dynasty Ch'an.43) At the very least, the examples of transcribed dialogue introduced above should break us loose from the preconception of "event" and suggest we look elsewhere for the origins of encounter dialogue as "text." I will come back to these points later.

F. The widespread use of anecdote and dialogue in teaching

One factor that should not be overlooked is the widespread tendency within the developing Ch'an movement to use anecdotal material and dialogue transcriptions for teaching purposes. One can almost chart the ever-increasing anecdotal content of Ch'an literature. One of my favorite examples is a story about a stupid couple brewing rice wine, who've never seen a mirror and mistake their partners' reflections on the surface of the fermenting liquid as secret lovers; the moral drawn is that foolish ordinary people do not recognize that the entire world is a reflection of their own minds.44) The growth of the Bodhidharma legend over time is once again relevant here, but need not be discussed again. Then again, the most important individual contributor to this dimension of Ch'an was of course Shen-hui.

We do not have to accept the entirety of Hu Shin's characterization of Shen-hui's historical importance-which clearly projects Hu's own twentieth century concerns onto his medieval subject-to recognize that Shen-hui transformed Chinese Ch'an. Whatever the doctrinal significance of Shen-hui's teaching of sudden enlightenment. whatever the factionalist impact of his outspoken criticism of the Northern school, one of the ways in which he changed Ch'an was in the extreme caution he made his colleagues feel about describing their doctrinal formulations. I have labelled this impact Shen-hui's standard of "rhetorical purity," which mitigated against any expression using dualistic or gradualistic formats. That is, Shen-hui's vigorous attack on the dualism and gradualism of Northern school teachings had a chilling effect on other teachers.

Simultaneously, Shen-hui was a master story teller, even as he was a master public speaker. Many of the most famous stories of Ch'an appear first in the transcriptions of his sermons and lectures: Bodhidharma and Emperor Wu, Bodhidharma and Hui-k'o, and CHECK, but not, curiously enough, many stories about his own teacher Hui-neng. There is also a substantial amount of transcribed dialogue within the Shen-hui corpus, either between Shen-hui and his designated Northern school stand-in or between him and various famous laymen of his day. There is a palpable sense of fictional creativity here, such that some of the dialogues with famous laymen may very well have been made up out of whole cloth. On the other hand, the dialogues do not quite conform to out expectations of encounter dialogue, in that they are two clearly structured, too much of a logical pattern, to represent spontaneous exchanges.

G. The fabrication of enlightenment narratives

There is another tendency of early Ch'an writings to be discussed here: the tendency to compose fictionalized accounts of enlightenment experiences. Let me discuss the other examples of this tendency before turning, in the next section, to the case of Hui-neng.

One of the best-known texts of early Ch'an is the Treatise on the Transcendence of Cognition (Chüeh-kuan lun 絶觀論) of the Oxhead school faction, whose members were known for literary creativity. This text describes an imaginary dialogue between two hypothetical characters, Professor Enlightenment (ju-li hsien-sheng 入理) and the student Conditionality (yüan-ch'i 緣起), of which the following is only the barest skeleton:

Professor Enlightenment was silent and said nothing. Conditionality then arose suddenly and asked Professor Enlightenment: "What is the mind? What is it to pacify the mind (anxin)?" [The master] answered: "You should not posit a mind, nor should you attempt to pacify it-this is called 'pacified.'"

Question: "If there is no mind, how can one cultivate enlightenment (tao 道)?" Answer: "Enlightenment is not a thought of the mind, so how could it occur in the mind?" Question: "If it is not thought of by the mind, how should it be thought of?" Answer: "If there are thoughts then there is mind, and for there to be mind is contrary to enlightenment. If there is no thought (wunian) then there is no mind(wuxin), and for there to be no mind is true enlightenment." ... Question: "What 'things' are there in no-mind?" Answer: "No-mind is without 'things.' The absence of things is the Naturally True. The Naturally True is the Great Enlightenment (ta-tao 大道)."...

Question: "What should I do?" Answer: "You should do nothing." Question: "I understand this teaching now even less than before." Answer: "There truly is no understanding of the Dharma. Do not seek to understand it." ... Question: "Who teaches these words?" Answer: "It is as I have been asked." Question: "What does it mean to say that it is as you have been asked?" Answer: "If you contemplate [your own] questions, the answers will be understood [thereby] as well."

At this Conditionality was silent and he thought everything through once again. Professor Enlightenment asked: "Why do you not say anything?" Conditionality answered: "I do not perceive even the most minute bit of anything that can be explained." At this point Professor Enlightenment said to Conditionality: "You would appear to have now perceived the True Principle."

Conditionality asked: "Why [do you say] 'would appear to have perceived' and not that I 'correctly perceived' [the True Principle]?" Enlightenment answered: "What you have now perceived is the nonexistence of all dharmas. This is like the non-Buddhists who study how to make themselves invisible, but cannot destroy their shadow and footprints." Conditionality asked: "How can one destroy both form and shadow?" Enlightenment answered: "Being fundamentally without mind and its sensory realms, you must not willfully generate the ascriptive view (or, "perception") of impermanence."

[The following is from the end of the text.]

Question: "If one becomes [a Tathaagata] without transformation and in one's own body, how could it be called difficult?" Answer: Willfully activating (ch'i 起) the mind is easy; extinguishing the mind is difficult. It is easy to affirm the body, but difficult to negate it. It is easy to act, but difficult to be without action. Therefore, understand that the mysterious achievement is difficult to attain, it is difficult to gain union with the Wondrous Principle. Motionless is the True, which the three [lesser vehicles] only rarely attain."[?]

At this Conditionality gave a long sigh, his voice filling the ten directions. Suddenly, soundlessly, he experienced a great expansive enlightenment. The mysterious brilliance of his pure wisdom [revealed] no doubt in its counter illumination. For the first time he realized the extreme difficulty of spiritual training and that he had been uselessly beset with illusory worries. He then sighed aloud: "Excellent! Just as you have taught without teaching, so have I heard without hearing..."45)

I would not suggest that the preceding constitutes "encounter dialogue," because it is entirely too well structured and logical. This critique is also applicable to two texts that share a single rhetorical structure: the Treatise on the True Principle and Essential Determination.46) In each case, a single proponent of Buddhist spiritual cultivation is depicted as both enlightened Ch'an master and sincere lay seeker. That is, the same individual is depicted as both asking and answering questions concerning spiritual cultivation, in his identities as monk and layman. I have always been amused by the openings of these texts: after describing the dual identity of the speaker as both teacher and student, when the first question is posed by the student the teacher praises it as the most profound inquiry he's ever received in all his years as a monk!

(Talk about self-serving!)

The narratives found in the Treatise on the Transcendence of Cognition, Treatise on the True Principle, and Essential Determination are manifestly fictional, but it is reasonable to suspect that they were intended to model ideal teacher/student interactions and may in fact have resembled to some degree actual exchanges that took place between living meditation masters and practitioners. The point here is not to speculate on the precise nature of such events, but to note that these texts represent an innovative use of text in the Ch'an tradition. The same may be said for the Platform Suutra, of course. In my study on the Northern school I showed how the events described in this text could not have taken place, and the central point here is that the very fictionality of the Hui-neng story is of prime importance.47)

H. The genealogical structure of Ch'an dialogue

Here let me add one other point about the example of Hui-neng, based not on the fictionality of the story per se but instead the character of the protagonist. That is, I suggest that there is a profound similarity between the story of Hui-neng and that of the dragon king's daughter in the Lotus Suutra: their total lack of the conventional accoutrements of spiritually gifted persons. On the one hand, she was female, nonhuman (although of high nonhuman birth), and severely underage-yet in a single moment she was able to transform herself into a male, pass through all the trials and tribulations expected of bodhisattva practitioners, and achieve perfect enlightenment. On the other hand, he was illiterate, from the very edge of civilization in the far south, lowborn (although his grandfather had been an official, albeit a banished one), and not even a monk-yet he had the intuitive genius to be selected as the Sixth Patriarch.

It is in the story of Hui-neng that we find the last key to the emergence of encounter dialogue transcriptions. The problem was not whether or not such dialogues were actually occurring between masters and students, and if so how and to what extent. Rather, the problem was the reluctance to transcribe what may have been virtually an everyday occurrence in the back rooms of China's monastic compounds. There had to be some epistemic change that made it acceptable to transcribe, not only the words of the gifted and famous master, but those of the student as well. The example of Hui-neng may have been a significant factor in incurring this epistemic change, but the time was still not at hand.

It is generally believed that encounter dialogue first flourished in the faction of Ma-tsu Tao-i 馬祖道一 (709-88), which is known as the Hung-chou school 洪州派. Ma-tsu and his disciples are depicted in Ch'an records as engaging in spontaneous repartee in what is almost a barnyard atmosphere of agricultural labor and other daily tasks. There are enough dialogues concerning a large enough number of figures that it would seem heresy to suggest that nothing of the sort "really" happened, that the encounters were all "fictional." I will certainly not go that far here, but I cannot avoid noticing a certain problem, already introduced above: whereas the encounters involving Ma-tsu and his disciples are supposed to have taken place in the latter part of the eighth century and beginning of the ninth, they are not found in transcribed form until the year 952, with the appearance of the Tsu-t'ang chi 祖堂集 or Anthology of the Patriarchal Hall.

We do have a much earlier text from the Hongzhou school, the Pao-lin chuan 寶林傳 or Transmission of Pao-lin [Monastery]. Only parts of this text are extant, and scholars have generally assumed that the lost portions (which were devoted at least in part to Ma-tsu and his immediate disciples) must have been incorporated into, and thus were not substantially different from, the corresponding sections of the Tsu-t'ang chi. Unfortunately, I cannot accept this assumption, for the simple reason that the extant portions of the Pao-lin chuan do not contain encounter dialogue transcriptions. There is a great deal of dialogue transcribed in this text, virtually all of which is fictionalized representation of enlightened masters. However, none of this dialogue has the same lively feel as the exchanges of the Tsu-t'ang chi.

There is one feature of the Pao-lin chuan, though, that I believe to be of crucial importance: the rigid narrative structure of the text. This text describes the lives, and to a lesser extent the teachings, of the Ch'an patriarchs from ^Saakyamuni through Bodhidharma to Ma-tsu, and in each case the patriarch in question is described twice; first as a gifted student discovered by the current patriarch and second as a fully vested patriarch out searching for his own successor. It is curious that in no case (at least up to the account of Huike) is the enlightenment experience of the patriarch in question described; we have only the "before" and "after" images, not any reference to or depiction of what we would think to be the most crucial event in the entire process. For the present purposes, though, we may also note the great significance placed on the patriarchs as students. That is, this text creates a structural parity between the student as incipient patriarch and the patriarch as realized student.

I suspect that this structural parity played a role in making the transcription of encounter dialogue possible, that is, in making the transcription of both sides of encounter dialogue exchanges possible. However, it was not possible yet, and the reluctance of this text to describe enlightenment experiences may imply that it was used for popular teaching in the spread of Buddhism throughout the newly developing areas of Chiang-hsi, rather than for training within the context of the monastic meditation hall.

III. Final ruminations

Because of the preliminary nature of this research, I will not add an integrated set of conclusions. Instead, so as to indicate some of the different considerations that can be applied to examples of Ch'an encounter dialogue transcription, let me present one brief passage from the Tsu-t'ang chi. The following is the famous story of Ma-tsu's first encounter with Huai-jang:

Reverend Ma was sitting in a spot, and Reverend Jang took a tile and sat on the rock facing him, rubbing it.

Master Ma asked, "What are you doing?" Master [Huai-jang] said, "I'm rubbing the tile to make a mirror."

Master Ma said, "How can you make a mirror by rubbing a tile?" Master [Huai-jang] said, "If I can't make a mirror by rubbing a tile, how can you achieve buddhahood by sitting in meditation?"48)

Did this really "happen?" There is obviously no way to prove that it did not, but since the event is first reported some centuries it was supposed to have taken place, we are certainly entitled to substantial skepticism.

More important than journalistic accuracy, though, is how the anecdote was recorded, edited, augmented, and transmitted through both oral and written media. In the first place, we can clearly hear echoes of Vimalakiirti scolding ^Saariputra for sitting in meditation in the forest. This famous precedent has been recast in a contemporary mode, by means of implicit reference to the "mind-verses" of the Platform suutra, which of course involve polishing a mirror. The material that immediately follows on the dialogue with Ma-tsu in the Tsu-t'ang cbi contains other references to the mirror, which implies some sort of unified editorial inclination. Second, the reader should notice the primitive character of this rendition of the story: neither location nor time are specified ― all we have is the simple nucleus of the words, with no effort to establish the context. Later versions of the story will add suitable detail, but it is the nature of the Tsu-t'ang cbi to require its readers to use their imaginations to provide their own context; in Marshall MacLuhan's terms, this is "hot medium" like radio that makes the readers or listeners actively imagine what is happening, rather than a "cold medium" like television that gives viewers enough sensory data to turn off their minds.

Third, this story is usually cited as Ma-tsu's enlightenment story, or at least to indicate his identity as Huai-jang's student. Although this earliest version includes several lines of subsequent dialogue between the two men, it does not contain either statement explicitly. Based on this story Ma-tsu is traditionally thought of as Huai-jang's successor, with Huai-jang understood as a successor to the Sixth Patriarch Hui-neng. However, when we look mire closely at the available sources, we see that Ma-tsu studied with other figures as well, and that Huai-jang's connection with certain Northern school figures is ever so much more substantial than his problematic connection with Hui-neng.

The point is that, from whatever may have happened during Ma-tsu's religious training, from some unknown point in time the Ch'an community developed this image of an encounter between him and Huai-jang. Whatever did or did not happen, the news of that encounter was dramatized and circulated in oral and/or written form. What we have in the Tsu-t'ang cbi is something like the core of the story, with the reader, listener ― or perhaps the teacher ― left to supply the details. As T. H. Barrett has written, this process resembles nothing so much as the circulation of jokebooks at roughly the same time. As with the formulaic notation of the Five Expedient Means, which seems to have provided the liturgical skeleton on which Northern school teachers could superimpose their own flourishes and interpretations, the encounter dialogue literature of Ch'an was prepared as skeletal notations upon which teachers and students could improvise. In order for this genre of literature to appear, though, it required a shared conception of Buddhist spiritual practice, some of the elements of which I have attempted to isolate in the pages above.

1) See Heinrich Dumoulin, Zen Buddhism. A History Volume 1 India and china(New York: Macmillan, 1988), pp. GET. revised version info. Ikky? Get source. (Not in Dumoulin.)

2) See Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology, second edition (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), GET. In the following I use either "orality" or the "Zen use of language" as shorthand for the tripartite combination of dialogue, narrative, and orality.

3) See Shunryu Suzuki, Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind: Informal Talks on Zen Meditation and Practice(New York: Weatherhill, 1970).

4) YANAGIDA Seizan, "The Development of the 'Recorded Sayings' Texts of the Chinese Ch'an School," trans. by John R. McRae, in Lewis Lancaster and Whalen Lai, eds., Early Ch'an in China and Tibet, Berkeley Buddhist Studies, no.5(Berkeley, CA: Lancaster-Miller Press, 1983), pp.185-205, esp.pp.192 and 204 n.25, where the first compound (for "encounter") is defined.

5) See my "Encounter dialogue and the transformation of the spiritual path in Chinese Ch'an, "in Robert E. Buswell, Jr., and Robert M.Gimello, eds., Paths to Liberation: The Maarga and its Transformations in Buddhist Thought (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1992), pp.339-69.

6) The following summary draws heavily from my Northern School, pp. GET, although with the incorporation of more recently published analyses.

7) CHECK Yanagida and Faure translations. Consider one or two examples?

8) See David Chappell, "The Teachings of the Fourth Ch'an Patriarch Tao-hisn(580-651)," in Lewis Lancaster and Whalen Lai, eds., Early Ch'an in China and Tibet, pp.89-129; and Bernard Faure, The Will to Orthodoxy: A Critical Genealogy of Northern Chan Buddhism, trans. by Phyllis Brooks (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 50ff. Although both Chappell and Faure take the section devoted to Tao-hisn in the Leng-ch'iehshih-tzu chi as an authentic representation of his teachings, I have argued that it is unlikely to be so; see Northern School, p.119.

9) In this paper I have intentionally over-simplified the definition of encounter dialogue and the issue of when it first came to be transcribed. Recently I have begun to consider hitherto unnoticed examples of Ch'an literature from Tun-huang that include dialogue transcriptions that may test the boundaries of the usage here.

10) Certain examples of Shen-hui's story-telling will be discussed below. The dialogues in his texts involving Shen-hui himself are formulaic and doctrinally oriented. I will defer documentation to my study of his teachings and translation of his extant works, which is now in progress.

11) In an unpublished manuscript on early Ch'an history, Jeffrey Broughton uses the term "metropolitan Ch'an" to encompass both the Northern and Southern school phases, which largely completed for the same clientele of cultured urbanites. While I choose to differentiate between the Northern and Southern schools here(and recent evidence shows how much of Shen-hui's efforts were in the provinces), my use of "provincial Ch'an" is indebted to Broughton's usage. CHECK to see if he uses "provincial Ch'an." Yanagida, "Recorded Sayings," p.192, suggests that the practice of recording Ch'an encounters probably began with Ma-tsu. The present article attempts to address this issue with greater nuance.

12) For the expalnation of "back room" activities, Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life(Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1959), pp. 106-40, esp.pp.109-13.

13) See the article cited in note 5 above.

14) Here I am drawing upon personal conversations with Professor Mei Tsu-lin of Cornell University.

15) One of the indications of this disconformity is that no encounter dialogue material has been discovered among the Tun-huang texts, even though a set of verses by the compilers' immediate teacher, Ching-hsiu Wen-teng淨修文 [人十登] , occurs there.

16) See MeRae, Northern School, p.36. It may not be precisely fair to suggest these were the earliest such descriptions in Ch'an literature, since the same text (the Ch'üan fa-pao chi 傳法寶紀) simultaneously provides information about other teachers. Also, the epitaph for Fa-ju, discussed immediately following, antedates the Ch'üan fa-pao chi by two decades. Nevertheless, Hung-jen was the earliest central figure around whom this sort of mystique developed.

17) The metaphor about Fa-ju is found in the Ch'üan fa-pao chi, McRae, Northern School, p.264. For various stories about Lao-an and I-fu, See Northern School, pp.56-59 and 64-65, and Faure, Will to Orthodoxy, 100-5(Huian, i.e., Lao-an) and 78-81 (Yifu, i.e., I-fu).

18) See SEKIGUCHI Shindai 關口眞大, Daruma no kenky? 達磨の硏究 (T?ky?: Iwanami shoten 岩波書店, 1967), which lists the various elements of Bodhidharma's hagiography and the texts in which they appear, arranged chronologically.

19) Cite En? no kenky?. Check Schlütter and there: are Daj?ji and K?sh?ji versions that old? Or, can they be taken as indicative of the Hhi-hsin version, which was?

20) This story is expanded considerably as the Platform Suutra evolves. See En? kenky?. GET. Yampolsky?

21) This section draws heavily on Northern School, 91-95.

22) Northern School, pp.92-93.

23) See Perrin, CHECK Brakke and Jan's Ugra presentation.

24) I have looked for similarities, to no avail, in Richard B. Mather, trans., A New Account of Tales of the World, by Liu I-ch'ing, with commentary by Liu Chün (Minneapolis, MN; University of Minnesota Press, 1976)...

25) See the definition in OGAWA Tamaki 小川館環樹, et al., Shin jigen 新辭源, 改訂版(T?ky?: Kadokawa shoten 角川書店, 1994),p.413a. Of course, this makes me wonder all the more about any actual connection with Bodhidharma's efforts to learn Chinese and teach the Dharma.

26) Cf. SEKIGUCHI Shindai 關口眞人, Daruma no kenky? (T?ky?: Iwanami shoten, 1967), pp.335-43, and YANAGIDA Seizan, Yaburu mono(T?ky?: Shunj?sha, 1970), p.236.

27) See the Kuan-hsin lun, in McRae, Northern School, p.235.

28) See Northern School, pp.95, 294 n. No1, and 302 n. 243.

29) See Northern School, pp.95-96 and 302 n.244.

30) See Northern School, pp. 96 and 302 n. 245.

31) See Northern School, pp. 96 and 302 n. 246.

32) The best example of this is Hsiang-mo Tsang 降魔藏 (d.u.); see Northern School, p.63.

33) And of course their somewhat later successors had a great reluctance to explain their activities openly. Perhaps they were profoundly incapable of doing so, for reasons we have not yet thought to explore.

34) This pair of terms is discussed in the Abhidharmako^sa, 26.4x, and Fa-tsang's 法藏 Wu-chiao chang 五敎章, A3.64x. CHECK these! These references are from Nakamura, 381c-d, where the two terms are correlated with self-use wisdom and enlightening self, and other-use wisdom and other-use wisdom and enlightening others. NOTE that these terms ae widely used in the Five Expedient Means. See Mochizuki, 1269a-b and 1378b-c, 2689c-90a, and 4846b-cv. CHECK occurrence of terms in Tendai CD.

35) Northern School, p. 174 (from Five Expedient Means, section One, A).

36) Northern School, p. 175 (same, One, D).

37) Northern School, p. 178 (same, One, J).

38) Northern School, p.179 (same, One, M). I have included only this one example of how a dualistic formulation is expanded into a tripartite one, but others occur. For example, on pp.176-77 the text develops a different tripartite variation in which the initial nonactivation of the mind is correlated with the dharmakaaya, knowledge of the motionlessness of the six senses is correlated with the sambhogakaaya, and perfect illumination through all the senses is correlated with the nirmaa.nakaaya.

39) Northern School, pp. 173-74 (Five Expedient Means, Introduction, C-E). For various minor comments on the terminology used, see Northern School, pp.228-29 nn.228-33.

40) Northern School, p. 180 (Five Expedient Means, Two, A).

41) See the conclusion to Northern School, p. 238.

42) Note Shen-hsiu's 25-year residence at Yü-ch'üan ssu 玉泉寺, previously T'ien-t'ai Chih-i's 天台智?(538-97) place of residence.

43) GET Foulk and Sharf references.

44) See the Yüan-ming lun 圓明論, Northern School, pp.169-70.

45) Cf. John R, McRae, "The Ox-head School of Chinese Buddhism: From Early Ch'an to the Golden Age," in R. M. Gimello and P. N. Gregory, eds., Studies in ch'an and Hua-yen, Kuroda Institute Studies in East Asian Buddhism, no. 1(Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1983), pp.169-253.

46) These titles are abbreviations of Ta-sheng k'ai-hsin hsan-hsing tun-wu chen-tsung lun 大乘開心顯成頓悟眞宗論 [Treatise on the True Principle of Opening the Mind and Manifesting the (Buddha)-nature in Sudden Enlightenment (According to the) Mahaayaana], and Tun-wu zhen-tsung chin-kang po-jo hsiu-hsing ta pi-an fa-men yao-chüeh 頓悟眞宗金剛修性達彼岸法門要決 [Essential Determination of the Doctrine of Attaining the Other Shore (of Nirvaa.na) by the Practice of Adamantine Wisdom (According to) the True Teaching of Sudden Enlightenment]. I have discussed these treatises in "Shen-hui and the Teaching of Sudden Enlightenment in Early Ch'an Buddhism," in Peter N. Gregory, ed., Sudden and Gradual: Approaches to Enlightenment in chinese Thought, Kuroda Institute Studies in East Asian Buddhism, no.5 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987), pp.227-278, and although now I would be very hesitant to make the historical assertions that form the heart of this article, the intriguing format of these two essays is still worthy of comment. CHECK texts to see final outcome: is student enlightened in each?

47) See Northern School, p. 6. McRae's first law of Zen studies reads, "It's not true, and therefore it's more important." That is, historical events are trivial in comparison with how legends and myths live in the popular consciousness.

48) TTC, 72a14-b3.