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Wendi Adamek (1959-)
Wendi Leigh Adamek

Born in Hawai'i, Dr. Wendi Adamek received her undergraduate, M.A., and Ph.D. degrees from Stanford University. Her research and teaching interests center on Chinese religions and East Asian Buddhism, and she has taught previously at the University of Iowa, Barnard College, Columbia University, and the University of Sydney. She was a Fulbright Research Fellow at Kyoto University (1990) and Peking University (2004), a Stanford Humanities Center Fellow (2009), and also received research grants from the Bukkyō Dendō Kyōkai (Numata), Jacob K. Javits Foundation, Chiang Ching-kuo Foundation, and the United States National Endowment for the Humanities. Her first book The Mystique of Transmission (2007), which won an Award for Excellence from the American Academy of Religion, explores a controversial eighth century Chan/Zen community in Sichuan. Included in the Translations from Asian Classics series of Columbia University Press, her most recent publication is The Teachings of Master Wuzhu: Zen and Religion of No-Religion (2011), which takes up provocative themes from her first book and presents her translation of a little-known Chan/Zen text in an accessible manner. Her current book project, Practicescape: The Buddhists of Baoshan , centers on a seventh-century eschatologically oriented community in Henan. Other interests include Daoism, Buddhist art, forest restoration, network theory, and environmental literature. A future book project on environmental and social issues is underway.
The Department of Religious Studies, University of Calgary, is pleased to announce that Dr. Wendi Adamek has been appointed to the Numata Chair in Buddhist Studies, starting January 1, 2014.
http://www.ucalgary.ca/numatachair/
http://buddhism.lib.ntu.edu.tw/BDLM/toModule.do?prefix=/search&page=/search_detail.jsp?seq=340064
http://ucalgary.academia.edu/WendiAdamek

Light and Shadows in the Dharma-Grove (Falin guang’an 法林光暗)
by Wendi Adamek
https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/pages/3571745/adamek-wendi

It started somehow with the spiders. I was about eight years old, out on a routine patrol of my domain, the hillside pastures and guava groves surrounding our house in Waimea on the Big Island of Hawai’i. Like many children I was afraid of spiders. We lived with a diversity of them that I tried to avoid at all costs but now remember with nostalgia.

I was trundling along through the thick kikuyu grass looking for grasshoppers or other interesting events. I was also trying to evade the opportunistic stickers and seeds that I would later have to pick off my clothing, a daily ritual. Suddenly, almost in my face, there was the enemy: a fat little gold-and-brown spider in its web. This species has become rare in Hawai’i, and now if I come across one I tell it to please flourish and prosper. That day I drew up short and turned to go around it -- and there was another one to my right. I spun -- another behind me! And the final turning made my skin crawl. Yet another web sealed me in, how could that be? I was completely surrounded by occupied spiderwebs, how had I gotten right into the middle of their trap? It must be dark magic, I had been wrangled. I was rooted to the spot with terror, and then I burst through the web behind me and ran, frantically brushing and pummeling my clothes to get rid of imagined malevolence. I blundered into a small tree and ignored the bruises. No doubt I wreaked havoc among spiders and other beings that peaceful sunny day as I galloped homeward in panic.

I grew up in a magical world, tossing around in ocean waves that were compounds of water and light, swallowing quite a lot of both. I contemplated tidepools and reefs for hours, got lost in remote valleys, went sliding along lucid streams. As in a fantasy story, my parents were around but were caught up in their own lives and didn’t “hover.” My brother and I ran wild and also suffered silently in the usual tribal wars among children at school, in the neighborhood. Like many children, I identified with innocent victims. I was motivated to labor over challenging literature when it was about children and their successful metamorphoses: Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, Jane Eyre, Huckleberry Finn.

If I thought of the day of the spiders, it was in terms of how “they” had menaced “me.” It wasn’t until I was well into Buddhist practice and studies that I started to think about how automatic and suffocating it is to construct and constrict oneself into a world of affines and enemies. Grasshoppers, butterflies, and tidepool fish were beautiful friends; the spiders and eels who ate my friends were dark, evil.

I subsequently spent a lot of my adult life working with “para-sites” (Michel Serres’s insightful triple-entendre): neither one nor two, and what goes between. Windows, channels, thresholds; holy ghosts, uninvited guests, and their communion; things that taking, give and giving, take; the paradoxicals that provide ways in and out of the dichotomy of good and evil without wreaking havoc; this was an incomplete sentence. In the account of my life in Buddhist Studies that follows I have tried to capture the ways that gratitude and bruises are inseparable. While light and shadow are co-constructions and therefore empty of intrinsic reality, my attempts to work with them and through them have had real effects. I have tried to convey my appreciations, and also acknowledge what I have learned from the “implied spiders” (Wendy Doniger’s felicitous phrase from another context). I wish I could mention everyone who has helped me along the way, but it is impossible to fit in forty years of encounters. There is an even more personal tangled understory I have not included, as well as a never-ending story that I would not attempt to capture. On all levels I have met with behavior to emulate and to eschew. Many kinds of actions have shaped my studies, my practice, and my mental-physical continuum, trundling along in my imaginary domain.

Early Lights

I began as a Buddhist practitioner in high school (Seabury Hall, Makawao, Maui). In 1975 Robert Aitken Rōshi came to give a series of talks on Zen for our ongoing Religious Studies seminar. Much later, I was delighted to discover an accidental synchronicity -- he and his wife Anne had founded the Honolulu Diamond Sangha in Manoa in 1959, the place and year I was born. At fifteen I joined the Maui Zendō in a very informal capacity -- I attended some sittings and learned about arranging cushions, bowing, and being served tea. I also learned that spiders and mosquitoes, as fellow-beings, were not to be squashed even when they attempted to join in one’s zazen. I still sit with the Maui Sangha, and some of those “grown-ups” in their twenties with whom I first sat are close friends. Now we seem the same age.

I went on to Stanford University with a scholarship in 1976 and for twenty years that was my home-base, interspersed with wanderings. My freshman roommate was Roxanne (“Roxie”) Guilhamet, a fellow-wanderer with whom I have shared many a yarn and glass of grog; now she lives in an ashram and we sometimes write emails in “pirate-speak.” In the course of getting my BA, MA, and PhD, I studied abroad in India and at Harvard (Boston seemed in many ways more strange).

I had little inkling at the time how privileged I was during those years; highlights included studying Greek literature with Sabine MacCormack, Nietzsche and Wagner with René Girard, Marxism with Mark Mancall, Chinese philosophy with David Nivison, anthropology with Michelle Rosaldo, Asian art with Melinda Takeuchi, Chinese research methods with Albert Dien, and literary Chinese with a true literatus, Kao Kung-yi. I also studied Daoist texts with Michel Strickmann, commuting to Berkeley to attend his classes. In Buddhist studies, I was lucky to work with Judith Berling, Diana Paul, Luis Gómez, Anne Klein, and Robert Buswell, and get an education in Bay Area jazz-clubs from Mark Blum.

Throughout the PhD process, my double-benevolence mentors were Carl Bielefeldt and Bernard Faure. Carl patiently slogged through Chinese and Japanese texts with us and returned my papers dauntingly overwritten with much-needed editing advice. Bernard was the pied-piper of post-modernism and Buddhism’s understories, leading us into the wilderness and leaving us there to find our own way out -- or not.

Now, looking back, I am astounded at how cheerfully and cheekily their wives Fumiko and Dominique put up with having scruffy graduate students constantly milling around. We must have seemed always underfoot, demanding attention. Dominique is still a close friend, she now battles to liberate hapless incarcerated would-be immigrants who have been “disappeared” into a drafty former storage facility in New Jersey, work that seems much more meaningful than mine.

Lacking a proper segue (as Carl might have pointed out) -- my practice-landscape during undergraduate and graduate studies was rich and variegated. During my “pre-Kyoto” Zen period I sat for a brief time with Kōbun Chino’s group in Los Altos and participated in numerous sesshin (retreats) with the Diamond Sangha at Ring of Bone Zendō in Nevada City and Koko-An in Honolulu.

I had encounters with other Buddhist traditions as well. During the Antioch Buddhist Studies program in Bodh Gaya in 1979-80, I did several long Vipassana retreats with S. N. Goenka students Christopher Titmuss and “Krishna-ji,” a graceful, quiet woman who seems to have no internet afterlife. When the Dalai Lama visited Bodh Gaya, he and a group of monks devoted themselves to an open-air ritual near the Mahābodhi temple over the course of a week in January, and my fellow-students and I dropped by periodically to watch. It did not seem to have been advertised, as there were sometimes only a few of us in attendance.

I also studied meditation and The Jewel Ornament of Liberation with the 3rd Jamgon Kongtrul Rinpoche, Karma Lodrö Chökyi Senge (1954-1992). A memory lingers of an “affinity” there, and a crossroads. I was invited to study with the Rinpoche in Sikkim and was granted an entry-visa. However, I was newly married and my husband did not get a visa, so I decided to continue onward to Thailand and Japan with him. Much later, I was saddened to hear of the Rinpoche’s untimely death.

I also spent an important year living near Tokyo in 1986-87 and practicing with the Sanbō Kyōdan Sangha in Kamakura, under the leadership of Yamada Kōun Rōshi. In the middle of that time my father died in an accident. After returning from his funeral I went immediately into a memorable sleepless sesshin, and Yamada Rōshi and his impressive dōjō lieutenants were very kind. Six months later my husband (the same one for whom I had relinquished the chance to practice in Sikkim nearly a decade earlier) asked for a divorce. I finished my final two years of PhD coursework and exams while coping with those losses, and it seemed like a fresh start to set out for Kyoto to begin dissertation research.

Kyoto

I find myself at another crossroads when contemplating writing about my time in Kyoto. Those three years (1990-93) were perhaps the most pellucid, magical and yet “grounded” period of my life. I bow to the Fulbright Foundation and Bukkyō Dendō Kyōkai with deep gratitude. There were many bodhisattvas: Professor Katsumi Mimaki sponsored and welcomed me to Kyoto University. My fellow graduate students Akemi Iwamoto, Jonathan Silk, Franco Gatti, Elizabeth Kinney and Helen Baroni were lively, funny, and informative companions. Antonino Forte gave me a desk and shelf-space in his gem-like library in the “Italia Kaikan” where I carried out my daily painstaking translation of the Lidai fabao ji, all in hand-written notes. Professor Forte also generously introduced me to the tangled networks, treasures, and histories of temples in and around Kyoto.

I became affiliated with the Zen Bunka Kenkyūjo and IRIZ (International Research Institute for Zen Buddhism) at Hanazono University, where I attended seminars and was welcomed to afternoon tea-symposia with the incomparable Yanagida Seizan Sensei. He granted me free range in his library and gave me a job during my final six months in Kyoto. I also learned much about the Lidai fabao ji in seminars with Koga Hidehiko Sensei. Urs App tried with limited success to help me enter the digital age, and provided my first electronic text of the Lidai fabao ji. (Dear Reader, if you can imagine it, this was the pre-CBETA era.)

My rooms in an old wooden machiya (townhouse) were sheltered in vegetable gardens tended by the kindly Miwas, landlord-and-lady who acted in loco-grandparentis to students fortunate enough to find their haven in the lee of Tetsugaku-no-michi and Hōnen-ji. I practiced at Daishū-in in Ryōan-ji with the majestic Sōkō Morinaga Rōshi. Through his students Ursula Jarand and Daijō Minick I was introduced into the complex, austerely beautiful, and deeply shadowed world of Rinzai Zen in Kyoto. I also got to travel in Korea for a month with professors and students from Hanazono. Our host Jongmuk Sunim of Haein-sa, then a fellow-student at Hanazono, will always be a treasured friend and Dharma-companion.

When I think of Kyoto, it is like remembering a lucid dream; the people, places and scenes seem saturated with color, mystery, and feeling, liable to metamorphoses and resonances with past and future. I have not returned to Japan since. I think I am wary of disturbing an ongoing dream. I wrote a lot of poetry during that time, here is one from somewhere around the middle:

Year of the Monkey (January 1992)

On New Year’s Eve I sat toasting at the kotatsu with my friend who has two boys.

Their father is in New York burning his dead mother, sending her body out of the Burning House, express.

We drank wine and ate the golden yellow cake she baked. The older boy watched blue Doraimon cartoons, the young one ate cake and drank sweet weak tea until he shed all his clothes and clutched his little balls and danced about the room in an ecstasy of past-bedtime sugar, or perhaps he was the Monkey King revealing himself as we talked long of funerals and the dead.

Pedaling home at two a.m. I passed bonfires in the shrines and red lanterns, the glow of cigarettes where boys on the curb swallowed Kansai dialect and smoke and beer.

On New Year’s Day I went underwater, to the icy temple at Pacific Dragon Pond.

I never resurfaced.

I am a clumsy Zen student serving in the Dragon-Rōshi’s parlor, where he breaths smoke and drinks tea with little fish who come to pay respects.

We eat good-luck soba with monks and drunken guests; there’s Russian brandy and blue-blooded cheese, and morsels of students whose cheeks turn fiery with wine and Rōshi-banter. His eyes are bright and bloodshot, his voice kindly and assured, warmed by the glow at the back of his expandable gorge. I wonder if it is the glow of the Mani-gem, at last. Maybe I should reach down his scaly throat and find out.

On the second day of the New Year, my friend who is a vestal in the shrine of transcendental dining culminated an elaborate three-day ritual called osechi ryōri. The final rite was held in my rooms -- a company of the elect assembled to celebrate the incomprehensible revelation of myriad forms of fish, vegetables, rice-wine and soy-sauce displayed in mandalas of unimaginable splendor.

At three a.m. I washed my way through a landscape of empty dishes, slow with the love of wondrous people I have known. And fish, vegetables, soy-sauce and rice-wine.

A friend whom I had not seen for years and who will never know how I see you brought me a bear made of polished grey stone with inset turquoise eyes, the bright blue eyes of the Bear in the winter sky.

Each year I have more friends who live afar, more photos of people who have died, of babies who have become children. Each year my friends give me wealth untold, houses of moments I can carry nowhere. And each year’s good cheer shared with mutable members of my tribe adds fat to my winter hips and strips thin coats from the soft stuff in my skull, where dreams adorn the walls like pin-ups in a cell, but whether nun’s or prisoner’s I can never tell.

There’s My Savior and here the Prince of Darkness, from this pastiche of religious kitsch and pop icons sometimes your eyes gleam like stars in a winter sky.

On the third day of the New Year, I got a stick of incense from the box I bought when you and I went to Tōji and held hands in the autumn twilight. I lit it with a match from the place where we had lots of red wine and you told me you wanted to divorce your husband. I put it in the bowl you bought me when I wasn't looking because you had your boyfriend distract me (easy) while you bought it, and I watched the smoke curl in front of the pebble with a white circle you found on the beach when I was with you, and later I found it in your desk drawer with my last letter to you after you died. The pebble rests in front of the Tibetan bell you bought in Nepal when we were still married, though now you live in Wisconsin with your new wife and baby girl. And beside the bell sits the carved wooden boar you gave me because it’s my birth year and I’m your sister’s daughter, and next to the boar in perfect harmony sits the bear with blue eyes.

All of you, so many and so many more, time without end.

Saying prayers for you at midnight, half a globe away where you bury your father under a winter sky.

Back at Stanford, in Hiding

I spent the next three years invisibly at Stanford, writing dissertation chapters on a slender but life-saving fellowship from the Jacob Javits Foundation while living in retreats provided by my dear departed friend and benefactor, Margery Strass. She generously offered rooms in her lovely house in Menlo Park for a pittance, her cabin on the McKenzie River in Oregon, and her unfailing faith that I would make it.

Daijō and Ursula also left Kyoto during that time, sent out on a temple-building mission for Morinaga Rōshi, who sadly did not live to see its completion. They established Daishū-in West in Benbow, California. I went there to work-practice and laugh with them, clearing brush, building and planting, chopping wood, and picking up endless oak leaves off the pea-gravel. Zazen was the smell of the California hills while sitting out on the engawa, fine Kyoto incense in the new-built dōjō.

First Job: University of Iowa

I got a job in the School of Religion at the University of Iowa in 1996. I finally finished my dissertation in a fugue of sleeplessness while developing my first courses. I began to realize that having students meant a lifelong learning-curve. Janine Tasca Sawada took me under her wing and I was privileged to get to know her family. I married my colleague, the incomparable Sanskritist Frederick M. Smith, who is still a close friend even though we later divorced. With him I got to know a wilder yet more domestic India. Iowa City was full of incredible writers and musicians but no restaurants to speak of, so people (especially Philip Lutgendorf) developed the art of cooking magnificently at home. I went back to Daishū-in West to practice in the summers.

China

In 1994 I first set foot in China and was hooked. After being formally introduced to Beijing, I spent three days in a hard-sleeper train-carriage to Dunhuang with Sarah Fraser, by day playing cards and inhaling secondhand smoke, by night nervously eyeing rats promenading the overstuffed luggage-racks near my head. The “Buddhist Network of Wealth” tour followed in 1999. With support from the Mellon Foundation and other donors, Sarah and Dunhuang researcher Yang Wei organized a two-week seminar in Dunhuang and then two weeks tracking Tang images and sites in Sichuan. On that trip I was privileged to get to know Rong Xinjiang, Ding Mingyi, Ma Shichang, Yang Wei, Buzzy Teiser, and Brook Ziporyn. Memorable moments included navigating a pig-sty in a remote village to get to a Tang buddha-image, and Brook gathering a crowd with his guitar-playing on a flat-bottomed little ferryboat across a river. By popular demand, Brook kept playing, back and forth, and the ferryman had to ask people to get off, for fear of sinking.

I then spent 2001-2001 and 2004-2005 as a research fellow at the Zhongguo Gudaishi Yanjiu Zhongxin (Center for Research on Ancient Chinese History) at Peking University (Beida), thanks to the kindness of Rong Xinjiang and the generosity of the Fulbright Foundation and NEH. I attended Professor Rong’s seminars both years, and got to know the layout and lore of Chang’an city during the Tang rather well. I also got to know stellar graduate students who became friends, including Lei Wen (now at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences), Wang Jing (now at Renmin University), and Wang Jing’s husband Shen Ruiwen, an archaeology professor at Beida. I met weekly with my tutor and good friend Shen Penghua (now teaching at Belmont Hill in Massachusetts) for translation questions and discussion.

I made my first trip to Baoshan in Henan in 1999, after the grand Sichuan tour. I sought out the site because I had stumbled on an intriguing article by Ōuchi Fumio while browsing in the stacks at the University of Iowa. I visited Baoshan again in 2001 and 2005. On the 2005 trip, Wang Jing, Shen Ruiwen, Fred Smith and I spent two weeks meticulously photographing and making transcriptions of the inscriptions. I subsequently translated all the Sui-Tang era inscriptions, and for many years I have had the world of Baoshan as my central research focus; even when I was not able to work on it due to teaching it was in my thoughts.

A handful of articles and finally in 2015 the completed book manuscript, Practicescape: The Buddhists of Baoshan were the results. However, work on Practicescape and my connections with China were severely impacted by the unfolding events of the next stage of my career. I know I lost touch with good friends in China in the process; I feel sad about it, and this is a belated apology. When I was at Beida, I always felt the “tenure” pressure and the need to turn my Lidai fabao ji dissertation into a book. I did not cultivate friendships with the same intensity that I had in Kyoto. Also, while my spoken Japanese was never great, it had been better than my spoken Mandarin ever became, even after two years in Beijing. While translating literary Chinese (slowly) remains a deep joy, I never developed a good ear for tones or modern compounds, and trying to speak was always excruciating.

My “practicescape” in Beijing was my own small room. I know that meditation groups and gatherings were developing alongside the lavish and often garish restorations of Buddhist temples. However, focussed on work, I became a monastic in a different way and kept to a routine. In the mornings I did yoga-pilates and meditation for three hours and then cooked a non-oily organic lunch. (At least, the Carrefour market where I did my shopping boasted an organic section, but who knows what went on behind the labels?) I then went to the Center and worked at my desk until 10pm (with a boxed dinner of leftovers), or attended seminars. This meant that I avoided getting the ubiquitous Beijing cough or other ills, and managed to stay more or less on track in the midst of chaos, pollution, and nonstop construction noise. However, it also meant that I didn’t go to lunch very often with my colleagues, and didn’t benefit from language practice and the exchange of views. This I regret.

Barnard and Columbia

In 2001 I took a tenure-track job at Barnard College and moved to New York, for complex reasons that belong to the “tangled understory.” One aspect of that tangle was having to blow the whistle on the Chair of the School of Religion when six female graduate students came to Fred and myself to complain about his behavior. He was quietly given early retirement, but I had reason to believe that before he left he went around to his cronies and did his best to scuttle my tenure chances.

Two weeks after I moved to New York, the Twin Towers were hit. 9/11 was the context in which I got to know a new world as it crumbled and changed. It would prove to be a baptism-by-fire into East Coast competitive agonizing. Over the next few years I also got a close-up view of the increasing marginalization of Ivy League intellectuals in global discourse (which turned into Twitter and clamor). I hope I am the wiser for it, but I am very glad I’m not still living in its epicenter.

That national trauma and the ways it continues to be exploited across the spectrum have affected the lives of everyone I know, perhaps tipping the always-already precarious balance between human evolution and devolution. This is The Way We Live Now, but here I hope I will be forgiven for returning to my personal Barchester Chronicles. For me it was a time of dramatic contrasts, close friendships, and traumatic betrayal.

The “Ivy League” period from 2001 to 2009 was inestimably important for my intellectual development. At Columbia, Princeton, Harvard, and Yale, I was able to attend talks, workshops and conferences that changed my world. I began to focus on economics, ecology, and complexity/network theory. I developed my “Gift-theory” series of courses, which morphed into my current work on environmental issues. It was incredibly heady to attend seminars organized by Joseph Stigliz and the Committee for Global Thought, where I heard talks by Prabhat Patnaik, Elinor Ostrom, Jeffrey Sachs, and George Soros, among others.

In the midst of this excitement, one dramatic personal trajectory concerned the fate of my first book, The Mystique of Transmission: On an Early Chan Text and Its Contexts. An anonymous first reviewer for University of Hawai’i press wrote: “This work is of no use to anyone inside or outside the field. The author should just throw it in the trash.” This was the conclusion of a scant paragraph with no concrete critique besides animus toward my style. I know who it was, because I later confronted him. I suspect some of the reasons but will never know for certain. I have heard that he claims the book was substantially altered in its published form, but this is not true, the chapters are more or less the same. It is true that the translation was not included in the manuscript he received, but I promised it was on its way. (At the time I was completing the process of digitizing the handwritten translation that was the basis of my dissertation.) Fortunately, the reviewers for Columbia University Press, including the late lamented John McRae, were helpful and encouraging. The book went on to win an AAR award for Excellence in Textual Studies in 2008.

By the time this much-appreciated vindication was bestowed, I was in the middle of another battle. The Ivy League world was more overtly hierarchical than any I had previously encountered, and the tier to which I belonged, tenure-track, was suffused with a miasma of anxiety and gossip. It was difficult to know whom to trust, and as it turned out, my trust in one of my closest colleagues at Barnard was entirely misplaced.

When it came time for my tenure review she was Chair of the four-person Religious Studies department, which meant that she only needed one more vote to create a “split” department and deny my tenure case. There was no full review of my work, no canvassing of letters from my field. The pretext was that my teaching evaluation numbers were lower than average, but when I finally obtained those numbers, mine were on a par with and in some cases higher than tenured colleagues.

There are other possible reasons, again ultimately unknowable. My colleague was perhaps jealous of my welcome in the Columbia side of the department, where her own tenure case had encountered an obstacle that required intervention by the Barnard Provost to overcome. In my case the same Provost was no doubt motivated by economics: Barnard was in debt due to its commitment to a huge building project contracted before the 2008 meltdown, and was then in dire straits. My position in Chinese Buddhism had also just been replicated at Columbia, so it must have been tempting to turn the line I occupied into a much-needed line in Islam, which is what subsequently happened.

         It was devastating; I still remember where I was sitting when I was told. There were the usual stages -- denial, anger, turning inward. I wrote about all of this in connection with a family trip taken a month after I got the news, a story that was published as “Green Blood Tahiti” in a literary journal that is tiny but clearly has high standards (here we need a “wink/smile emoticon), Literature in North Queensland.

         What stands out after all these years is the reaction of true friends and supporters. Leading the charge were the “The Dolphins” who rallied around to save me from the sharks, both real (the adjudicators of my imminent job-loss) and imaginary (my fears of disgrace and having to leave academia). Among the Dolphins were Chün-fang Yu, Dorothy Ko, Bernard Faure (who had joined the Columbia faculty in 2006), Mark Taylor, Wendy Swartz, Tao Jiang, Marcus Bingenheimer, Michael Puett, Rachel McDermott, and Max Moerman.

         Chün-fang, Dorothy, Mark, and Bernard did battle with the Barnard administration: letters were written, meetings were held, appeals were made. They won the concession that if I agreed to Barnard’s claims about my teaching, I would have a chance for another review in a year. To me this seemed a Catch-22: if I agreed to their negative assessment, which was not backed up by their own numbers, then they would have more concrete grounds for dismissing me the following year (by claiming that nothing had improved). It was also painful to contemplate hanging around in that crippled capacity. I was urged to take legal action, and I think the administration was rather afraid that I would, given their recent history with controversial tenure cases. I decided to forgo that ordeal. In the spring of 2009, I wasn’t sure what was next. At the last minute there was a reprieve; I won a year’s fellowship at the Stanford Humanities Center.

In one way I was sorry to leave: my practice in New York had a life and intensity of its own that seemed tied to the place itself. It included meditation to the sounds of sirens and car-alarms at all hours. It included walking meditation as a flâneur in the streets of the Upper West Side. It included Pilates and Ashtanga yoga classes with driven “Type-A” personalities. It included a weekly visit to The Cloisters and my acupuncturist and friend Jeanne Atkin. It included the brilliance and creativity of some of my students. There is something uncanny about that rock in the middle of the Hudson and East rivers, after all.

         Aside from all the dramas, I ask myself -- what is my work, on which I have staked so much, really about? Communities. Practices. Places. People. Treasured complexities that remind me, achingly, of lost-found home. But it’s the process that enthralls me. Like a dream, the details fade when I return. Here’s a guarded secret: my writing self and my speaking self are on nodding terms at best, like roomers on different floors in a boarding house. Practice is the music they both hear as they go about their lives, the writer in pajamas, the speaker dressed for work.

On the Road

The next few years were gypsy years. They began, appropriately, with a “Mountains and Rivers” sesshin in the Carson-Iceberg Wilderness with members of the Diamond Sangha. The group was led by my longtime good friend Nelson Foster, Dharma-heir of Robert Aitken and resident teacher at Ring of Bone Zendō. “Mountains and Rivers” sesshin combine a week of backpacking with walking and sitting meditation. Inspired by Dōgen, these arduous odysseys were originally conceived and practiced by the “Beat” poet Gary Snyder, co-founder of Ring of Bone Zendō. I had been on “Mountains and Rivers” trips before, but this one was marked by the sense of freedom that comes with a new threshold of uncertainty.

There and back, I remember driving through Sierra backroads listening to CDs of Indie music compiled as a gift by one of my students, the accomplished cellist Andrew Salazar. California summer forest fires had not yet become the new normal. The air was crystalline, the freedom heady. Let me not neglect to acknowledge that the transcendent experience of a solo road-trip in the mountains in an old car with a good sound system is one of the many contributing factors to climate change.

         After that turning-point sesshin with significant friends and special solitudes, I spent almost a year at the Stanford Humanities Center. It was perfect -- new friends, familiar places, lots of time to write late into the night. I also went on some job interviews, but did not get a job.

         In August my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer, and I returned to Maui. I moved in with my parents and helped take care of things during my mother’s recovery. I can’t really claim that I took care of my mother, as she barely acknowledged the need to slow down. I am happy to relate that at this writing, ten years later, she is still going strong. In their eighties, my parents maintain an enviable round of painting engagements and openings (my stepfather is an artist), community events, native-plant-enthusiast outings, concerts, travels, and socializing. I could never hope to keep up. When I’m home I join in a fraction of their events. Most evenings I wave goodbye as they sweep out the door looking sharp in “local style,” and I call after them to have fun, not to stay out too late, and drive carefully.

         Over the years I have often spent summer months living in the many-windowed room beneath my stepfather’s studio surrounded by my mother’s garden. Living halfway up Haleakala, whether from my own little veranda or hiking in the pastures of Haleakala Ranch, I am moved to stillness. I am lost and found contemplating the West Maui mountains wheeling through their arc between ocean and sky, the maunalei of mist drifting through the cloud-forest of koa and ohi’a, the stars that have always and will always remind us.

That year I worked part-time for the Leeward Haleakala Watershed Restoration Partnership and got a crash-course in conservation ecology and Hawaiian ecosystems from its founder, the legendary Dr. Arthur Medeiros. I also had more time to go on long walks with my high-school friend Ruth Ballinger and learn more about her work with children “on the spectrum” and her insightful modifications of applied behavior analysis. She taught me how to think about ABA in ways that go far beyond “behaviorism” and opened up avenues for comparison with Buddhist practice. This is an ongoing area of inquiry.

         In January of 2011 I got a job offer from the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Sydney, to begin in July. I also began spending my non-teaching time in London, as a research fellow at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.

Australia

The sheer beauty of Sydney was a revelation. The University of Sydney (“Sydney Uni”) has a sandstone Gothic core-campus worthy of Hogwarts. Indeed, I once watched flying foxes wheeling across the face of a full moon rising behind faux-medieval turrets and wondered who the producer was. Ringed with famous beaches and harbors, alive with performances both staged and spontaneous, it is a place where one lives in close quarters with loud and glorious birds. I rented a one-bedroom flat in a crumbling mansion on Glebe Point Road near the Chinese temple. It was surrounded by a garden that had largely escaped our landlady’s control. Possums, lizards, and incredibly large spiders often tried to move in with me.

         My new Buddhist studies “mates” were welcoming and wonderfully Australian each in their own unique ways. I have fond memories of hanging out with Mark Allon, Ian and Mayumi McCrabb, Judith and Adrian Snodgrass, and Andrew, Prue, and Usha McGarrity. I miss the Australian ability to turn on a dime from highly technical and abstruse discussion to wry tongue-in-cheek ego-deflation of anyone within range, including the wry humorist himself.

         My classes were full of a challenging mix: brilliant Chinese foreign students, their not-so-brilliant compatriots who paid high tuitions but took up an inordinate amount of my time with attempted plagiarisms, as well as Australian surfer dudes, preppies, and counterculturalists.

It was a political turning point for me. I experienced first-hand what I now think of as a “Neo-liberal U” corporate takeover. There is a pattern and a playbook. The University of Melbourne, the first Australian university to get hit, now offers degrees in “Tertiary Education Management.” A more recent victim, Australian National University suffered massive cuts to its world-renowned College of Asia and the Pacific.

         In February of 2012 I received an email informing us that three hundred faculty and staff would receive letters of termination. I didn’t receive “the letter,” but I had close friends who did. Tenured faculty, long-term staff, and entire departments got the ax. One of the pretexts was retroactive publishing quotas. I attended rallies in which faculty and students made moving, articulate speeches. One student simply said, “I came here to study music. Now there’s no music department.” I went on a protest march for which the organizing student group had obtained all the proper permits. Nevertheless, when the students reached the unoccupied university Senate building, city riot police in full-body armor swarmed out of a nearby alley. It was a melee. I watched a girl’s body go flying through the air and hit the ground. The next day the news media reported that a policewoman had injured her wrist but made no mention of student injuries, even though one of my students told me he had friends who were taken to hospital.

There were several campus strikes, classes and exams were chaotic, and the administration sent out an email saying our salaries would be docked unless we sent them an email saying we would not participate in the strikes. I did not cancel my classes, but I also did not send the email. The annual salaries of the top seven administrators were published: in aggregate they got in excess of $4M. The library budget that year was slightly over $300K.

         Morale was terrible, overbearing administrative processes burgeoned, choices diminished. Personal friends ended up leaving academia for good. We were informed that we could not leave the country for more than six weeks at a stretch, even during non-teaching periods. One of my colleagues in anthropology was denied permission to stay longer in Egypt to carry out fieldwork on the unfolding events leading up to the critical presidential elections.

         I chose the “six weeks” ruling as my personal battle and argued about the consequences for international research with my Head of School and the Dean, to no avail. And yes, though the negative effects on research were serious for all of us, I was also open about the impact it would have on my personal life. I told them I would resign if the ruling was not changed.

I handed in my letter of resignation in November of 2012, to become effective in June of 2013. I did not have any other job prospects. That winter I applied frantically everywhere and had one December interview for a job that at the time I thought I really wanted. When I didn’t get it I had a dark period in which I contemplated writing to my Head at Sydney Uni, apologizing and asking if I could rescind my resignation. However, to my lasting gratitude for the sense of faith or pigheadedness that intervened, I didn’t cave in. Then the University of Calgary put me on their short-list and by April I was saved.

         During my magical-realist Australian years I sat with Sydney Zen Centre, a lovely Diamond Sangha-affiliated group. I joined them for a sesshin at their “Bush Zendō,” Kodoji in Gorricks Run. I served as tenzō (head cook) for the first time and we all survived. There were leeches, lots of them. We went on a hike in Yengo National Park. It is true that the land there speaks in a way that slips into your bones and sings you stories from its long, long memory. My personal trials and jubilations in Oz vanished into its red-and-ochre rocks like a few drops spilled from a hiker’s water-bottle.

University of Calgary

Thanks to Leslie and Toyo Kawamura, I feel I have been granted a haven in a storm. Here is the brief history I compiled for the Numata Chair website:

The Numata Chair in Buddhist Studies was established in 1987 by Dr. Leslie S. Kawamura, with the kind assistance of first visiting Numata Scholar, Dr. Akira Yuyama. The fund was inaugurated with a sizable donation from the Bukkyō Dendō Kyōkai (Society for the Promotion of Buddhism), which was founded in 1965 by Rev. Dr. Yehan Numata (1897-1994). The Lethbridge Honpa Buddhist Church of Alberta/Buddhist Temple of Southern Alberta made an additional generous gift, and the two gifts were matched by 2-1 donations from the Government of Alberta, creating an endowment to support teaching and research in Buddhism at the University of Calgary. Dr. Kawamura was a minister in the Jōdo Shinshū tradition and a scholar of Yogācāra Buddhism. He was a faculty member in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Calgary from 1976 until his death, and was chairholder of the Numata Chair in Buddhist Studies from 2008 onward.

Since joining the University of Calgary in January of 2014 I have felt warmly welcomed by colleagues, first in Religious Studies and then Classics, which merged a year after I arrived. The merged department has had its trials, for complex reasons. Top-down heavy-handedness was certainly a contributing factor, and the University of Calgary in many ways fits the pattern of the over-administrated, STEM-dominated, humanities-shrinking modern public university. However, after my experiences with the “Neoliberal U” playbook in Australia, Canada so far has seemed more committed to maintaining support for the arts and humanities. Compared with other departments I have known, ours is more truly collegial. I feel I have made close friends, but will refrain from singling out anyone in particular. What I value is the overall sense of integrity and dignity with which difficult passages have been negotiated.

         I finally received tenure (without a hitch) in 2015, nearly twenty years after beginning my teaching career. Roots in Canada are deepening. I have developed what feels like a lifelong interest in Yogācāra, perhaps resonating with traces of Leslie, whom I unfortunately never met. I browse the books in his library, where I teach seminars. I appreciate the friendship of his widow Toyo, a truly talented artist (her work makes me think of Rothko softened by the subtle clarity of raku-ware). I also enjoy the friendship of retired Tibetologist Eva Neumaier, entranced by her stories of life in Ladakh, academics in Germany, and adventures on an acreage when Calgary and its environs were much more sparsely populated. I have developed a blended academic and practice relationship with the Dharma Drum Vancouver Center (DDVC), through my friendship with its impressive abbess, the Venerable Changwu.

In 2015-16, I spent a year as a member of the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. I am very grateful to Nicola Di Cosmo, head of the School, for that chance to experience the pinnacle of intellectual feasting. (Literally -- the IAS chef and sommelier are legendary.) I have never had such a year and never will again. In addition to ongoing IAS seminars, afternoon teas, and evening soirées, I participated in graduate seminars and department talks in Princeton’s East Asian Studies department and made trips to Rutgers and Columbia. It was the 100th anniversary of Einstein’s presentation of the theory of general relativity, and the commemorative events and talks were resplendent, informative, and more or less comprehensible. It was also the year of landmark LIGO detection of a gravitational wave. I learned about epigenetics while sitting under the oak trees and had chats with physicists in the laundry room.

That full and rich year inspired me to branch out and return to my roots. After I returned to Canada, I acted on my lifelong dream to live alone in a hermitage. I bought a small acreage in the “Aspen Parklands” ecozone near a lake in Water Valley, an hour from Calgary. My interest in environmental issues is gaining focus as I get to know and love this bioregion, so far from Hawai’i yet somehow familiar. I love everything about it -- planning and slowly building the fortifications necessary for any gardening-venture in these deer-infested woods, driving on backroads with the Rockies serrating the Western horizon, living in a glittering snow-globe for six months of the year, and the palpable enthusiasm of all life-forms in spring and summer.

There is a carbon-footprint calculus and underlying reality that I face everyday. I drive into Calgary, a distance of seventy-five kilometers, two or three times a week for twenty-six weeks of the year. For twenty-six weeks I drive seldom, perhaps once every two weeks. The air-miles of an internationally-active academic with family on Maui cannot be rationalized away, but I am trying to minimize energy-use as best I can. My job and my province are dependent on oil and gas, and Alberta is vociferously sales- and carbon-tax adverse. The climate is a-changing, and all global resources and economic systems are subject to varying degrees of siege, open warfare, and non-transparent control by private interests.

         I see this calculus in the lives of my students, who have more “stuff” but fewer options than I did, growing up. Would they see it this way? I know they work twenty or thirty hours a week while carrying a full course-load, and most still live at home. I fear that I have lived in a golden gap. I escaped the fifties’ Cold War nuclear shadow and witch-hunts as well as the social norms that patterned my parents’ early lives, upon whom the constraints of gender-conformity weighed heavily. I lived in an era when scholarships and grants were given more freely, even to women.

         Yet the largesse we experienced was a weapon, too. Western social services and protections were part of the arsenal of the Cold War, globally advertised images of prosperity. Beginning with Thatcher and Reagan, bits of public infrastructure could be sold off for a song, as party-favors in an ongoing orgy of political fundraising. Budgets for public services could be cut or shifted elsewhere. Universities, humanities education, and independent research occupied a “commons” that is now subject to gradual enclosure for other uses by a new ruling mandate.

         What gives me hope is that my students seem more and more aware of the stakes and the complexities. Yes, they have been “instrumentalized” from an early age. They are likely to belong to the fast-growing “precariat.” Social media partially inures them to their peril. But they are also more savvy than I am about many things. They know there is a war on, and they are polarizing. I hear both liberality and “talk radio” neoliberalism in my classroom. I have no idea where we are all headed, but I know it will get worse before it gets better.

Whatever comes next, I know I have enjoyed a bountiful life that has enabled curiosity, adventure, and unfolding pathways. I know I owe this to many beings known and unknown who have been willing to devote time, energy, and resources toward my education. I am inestimably grateful, and I am daily distressed that those opportunities and options seem to be diminishing everywhere, even in societies that should be able to help them grow.

Shadows that Cling

And what about my field, Buddhist Studies, which has through the good graces of Charles Prebish extended this invitation to meander and maunder? It is the mosaic of light and shadow in which I have lived most of my life. “Academia” shelters a network of close friends. Yet I suppose I have become more reclusive and wary. I didn’t start out this way. No doubt much of my caution is false inference and I should make efforts to overcome it. Perhaps this confession will help.

I feel I have had a number of experiences of becoming friendly with someone in the field, and then experiencing abrupt or gradual distancing. Partly this is due to the global nature of our community; sometimes years go by before one sees a friend again, and we are all so busy that it is difficult to stay in touch with everyone with whom one has had meaningful conversations. What has affected or infected me are the cases where I had a sense of being on the same intellectual wavelength with someone, or even felt they were trusted personal friends, and then experienced being “dropped” or hearing through the grapevine that unkind things were said, confidences broken. There were also those who asked me for feedback on their work and claimed to have been influenced or impressed with my work, and then in public or in print referred to me (if at all) by pointing to some small perceived error or misconception.

In the past this sense of being distanced involved scholars who were more-or-less peers, and then it came to include younger scholars. It has included both men and women. I do not refer to the class of older scholars, usually men, who indulge in biting criticism of others’ work in public forums; that is simply the usual obnoxious academic posturing and ritual. It also does not apply to any students who have taken my courses; while the atmosphere in my classes is generally friendly and relaxed, we all know I have to maintain a distance in which to evaluate their work fairly. Though we share interests by reading things together, I do not share the development of my ideas and projects with students unless we become friends after they have graduated.

         I have experienced ongoing difficulties in getting my work published. This too is shadow-and-light, as I also deeply appreciate editors and friends who have remained supportive. But whatever its reception, I cannot do other than continue my practice, this practice of writing. I know my work is multi-layered and full of detail, but it is not chaotic. I believe in including long primary-source passages and engaging in close personal readings of selected secondary-source and theoretical works, echoing in some ways the practices of traditional Chinese scholars. I stand by the meticulous care that has gone into my complex organizational structures, my shadow-boxes. My work is interdisciplinary; for all that this has become a buzzword, “thick description” (cf. Geertz) and process-oriented “associology” (cf. Latour) seem to be too challenging for the current market, at least in Buddhist Studies. But I resonate with something said by the Alberta poet Charles Noble: “My aesthetic is digression upon digression and recapitulation trying to figure out -- risking getting lost, in fact enjoying being lost, and then recapitulation in order to find out how I got there . . . When I’m writing a poem I have lots of time to think.” (albertaviews June 2018.)  

I know we all experience shadows, I am not alone. Perhaps this is why those who are very critical of others’ work are so influential in academic fields -- they are our fears personified and justified. No doubt a scholar and practitioner of Buddhism should not be vulnerable to such phantasms. Self-challenging the tendency to seek false supports for one’s sense of purpose is built into Buddhist practice -- and yet one must also maintain guiding principles that keep one on the path. Many texts deal with this tension; the Two Entrances and Four Practices is a succinct, elementary example that I learned to appreciate.

Household Pantheon of Lights

 My life has been immeasurably brightened and deepened by people in this field, this dharmadhātu. We all have different pathways and guiding lights; my personal pantheon includes Revered Patriarch Yanagida Seizan; Genius Guru-Trickster Bernard Faure; Embodiment of Wisdom Anne Klein; True Sage Daniel Stevenson; Celestial Worthy Dorothy Ko; Guanyin Manifestation Chün-fang Yu; Guiding Elders Margery Strass and Ann and Marion Rinehart; Dharma Sisters Ruth Ballinger, Masako Cordray, Roxie Guilhamet, Anne Dutton, Ursula Jarand, Lauren Valle, Maitripushpa Bois, and Venerable Changwu; Dharma Elder-Brother Nelson Foster; Dharma Companions Jungmuk Sunim and Fred Smith; and all my students, even the ones trying to bamboozle me. I also had a virtual guru: Geoff Lawton, permaculture revolutionary and disciple of Bill Mollison. I will probably never meet him face-to-face but lived with his wisdom in the course of three years of online permaculture study. I try to put this wisdom into practice in trials, errors, and intervals of bemused wonder, working with my hermitage in the Canadian woods.

Though I would like to claim that meditation is what has enabled me to navigate the obscurities, I know that I owe much of my resilience to my family. On an nearly daily basis, my parents, brother and sister and I maintain our private “family facebook,” email threads punctuated with links, jokes, and photos, in which we discuss plants, animals, poetry, religion, and politics in modes from the sublime to the really ridiculous. We also get together for family trips and outings, imbued with an atmosphere of goofiness. My sister’s husband adds his own special brand of goofiness, drawing on his background in theater and his genius at photoshopping. I would like to say that humor is an important part of Buddhist practice, but I can’t say it with a straight face.  

This is what it takes to survive a lifetime in Buddhist Studies: people you can trust.

Lately I have been working on a “new” secret project. (Research began a mere decade ago!) When I work on it I am alternately exhilarated and filled with trepidation. I imagine it is not something “the field” would approve.

There are those spiders again. Just sitting there. Off we go.

Water Valley, May, 2018

PDF: The Mystique of Transmission: On an Early Chan History and Its Contexts
by Wendi Leigh Adamek, New York, Columbia University Press, 2007, pp. 578.

The Mystique of Transmission is a close reading of a late-eighth-century Chan/Zen Buddhist hagiographical work, the Lidai fabao ji (Record of the Dharma-Jewel Through the Generations), and is its first English translation. The text is the only remaining relic of the little-known Bao Tang Chan school of Sichuan, and combines a sectarian history of Buddhism and Chan in China with an account of the eighth-century Chan master Wuzhu in Sichuan.
Chinese religions scholar Wendi Adamek compares the Lidai fabao ji with other sources from the fourth through eighth centuries, chronicling changes in the doctrines and practices involved in transmitting medieval Chinese Buddhist teachings. While Adamek is concerned with familiar Chan themes like patriarchal genealogies and the ideology of sudden enlightenment, she also highlights topics that make Lidai fabao ji distinctive: formless practice, the inclusion of female practitioners, the influence of Daoist metaphysics, and connections with early Tibetan Buddhism.
The Lidai fabao ji was unearthed in the early twentieth century in the Mogao caves at the Silk Road oasis of Dunhuang in northwestern China. Discovery of the Dunhuang manuscripts has been compared with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, as these documents have radically changed our understanding of medieval China and Buddhism. A crucial volume for students and scholars, The Mystique of Transmission offers a rare glimpse of a lost world and fills an important gap in the timeline of Chinese and Buddhist history.

How does a translated Buddhism work (and does it work)? In this elegant and erudite study, Wendi Adamek has answered this question by bringing the men and women of the late-eighth-century Bao Tang school to life. Their concerns with competition, authority, lineage, gender, and body echo ours, albeit on entirely different terms. In illuminating the Bao Tang struggles in their own eyes and the context of their times, Adamek deserves to be read by not only scholars of Buddhism, but also by cultural historians, anthropologists, and all who are interested in gender and material culture. -- Dorothy Ko, author of Cinderella's Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding Wendi Adamek's masterful discussion ranges widely through an impressive variety of subject matter, from the very beginnings of Buddhism in China through the emergence of the Chan school in the eighth century. The result is a sensitive and insightful analysis of many of the most significant issues facing this particular field of study. The Mystique of Transmission will be hailed as a major contribution that substantially increases the sophistication of intellectual discourse on the historical development and complex religious identity of Chan and Chinese Buddhism as a whole."- -- John McRae, author of The Northern School and the Formation of Early Ch'an Buddhism

Contents

Acknowledgments - xiii

Part 1
The Mystique of Transmission - 1
Chapter 1- Authority and Authenticity - 3
Fabrications - 3
On the Backgroud of the Lidai fabao ji - 6
An Overview - 12
Chapter 2 - Transmission and Translation - 17
The Challenge of Continuity - 17
Summary of the Contents of the Lidai fabao ji - 19
Emperor of the Ming Han - 21
Daoan and Transmission of Forms - 23
Buddhabhadra and Transmission of Lineage - 33
Huiyan's Transmission of Space and Place - 40
The Mystique of Legitimacy - 52
Conclusion - 54
Chapter 3 - Transmission and Lay Practice - 55
The Interdependence of Lay and Ordained Practice - 55
Criteria of Authenticity of the Dharma and the Authority of the Ordained - 58
The Role of the Bodhisattva Precepts in Lay Devotional Practice - 67
Conclusion - 88
Chapter 4 - Material Buddhism and the Dharma Kings - 91
The Dangers of Empire - 91
The Northern Wei and Spiritual Materialism - 92
Empires of Signs - 98
The Fu fazang zhuan - 101
The Legacy of Tiantai Zhiyi - 110
The Renwang jing - 114
The Sanjie (Three Levels) Movement - 120
Imaginary Cultic Robes - 128
Conclusion - 134
Chapter 5 - Robes and Patriarchs - 136
The "Chan" Question - 136
Tales of the Chan Patriarchs - 138
A Genealogy of Patriarchal Lineages - 158
Shenhui's Rhetoric - 171
Inconceivable Robes in the Vajrasamadhi-sutra and the Platform Sutra - 179
Robes Purple and Gold - 182
The Reforms of Emperor Xuanzong - 189
Chapter 6 Wuzhu and Others - 194
The Second Part of the Lidai fabao ji - 194
A Note About Style - 195
Mass Precepts Ceremonies and Formless Precepts - 197
Transmission from Wixiang to Wuzhu - 204
Locating Wuzhu - 214
Antinomianism in the Monastery - 218
Women in the Lidai fabao ji - 226
Daoists in the Dharma Hall - 237
Chapter 7 - The Legacy of the Lidai fabao ji - 253
The Portrait-Eulogy for Wuzhu - 254
Developments After the Lidai fabao ji - 276
Conclusion - 292

Part 2
Annotated Translation of the Lidai Fabao Ji
Section 1 - Sources and the Legend of Emperor Ming of the Han - 300
Section 2 - Buddhism in China - 305
Section 3 - Transmission from China to India (the Fu fazang zhuan) - 307
Section 4 - The First Patriarch, Bodhidharmatrata - 310
Section 5 - The Second Patriarch, Huiki - 313
Section 6 - The Third Patriarch - Sengcan - 315
Section 7 - The Fourth Patriarch - Daoxin
Section 8 - The Fifth Patriarch - Hongren - 319
Section 9 - The Sixth Patriarch - Huineng, Part 1 - 320
Section 10 - Dharma Master Daoan and the Scripture Quotations - 323
Section 11 - Huineng Part 2 - 328
Section 12 - Zhishen and Empress Qu - 330
Section 13 - Chan Master Zhishen - 333 Section
Section 14 - Chan Master Chuji - 334
Section 15 - Chan Master Wuxiang - 335
Section 16 - The Venerable Shenhui - 339
Section 17 - Discourses of the Venerable Wuzhu - 342
Section 18 - Wuzhu and Wuxiang - 343
Section 19 - Du Hongjian's Arrival in Shu - 352
Section 20 - Du Hongjian and the Wuzhu Meet - 356
Section 21 - Cui Gan Visits the Wuzhu - 362
Section 22 - Dialogue with Chan Master Tiwu - 368
Section 23 - Dialogue with Chan Master Huiyi - 370
Section 24 - Dialogue with Masters Yijing, Zhumo, and Tangwen - 370
Section 25 - Dialogue with Master Jingzang - 373
Section 26 - Dialogue with Master Zhiyi - 374
Section 27 - Dialogue with Master Zhongxin - 375
Section 28 - Dialogue with Dharma Master Falun - 376
Section 29 - Dialogue with the Brothers Yixing and Huiming - 378
Section 30 - Dialogue with Changjingjin and Liaojianxing (Female Disciples) - 379
Section 31 - Excerpts and Quotations Part 1 - 381
Section 32 - Excerpts and Quotations Part 2 - 385
Section 33 - Tea Gatha - 386
Section 34 - Dialogue with Daoists - 388
Section 35 - Dialogue with Dharma Masters - 392
Section 36 - Dialogue with Vinaya Masters - 392
Section 37 - Dialogue with Treatise Masters - 395
Section 38 - Trading Quotations with Masters Daoyou, Mingfa, and Guanlu - 397
Section 39 - Taking on Chan Disciples While Drinking Tea - 398
Section 40 - Dialogue with Master Xiongjun - 399
Section 41 - Dialogue with Master Fayaun Accompanied by His Mother - 399
Section 42 - Discourse to Lay Honors - 401
Section 43 - Portrait-Eulogy and Final Scene - 402

Notes - 407
Appendix - 511
Abbreviations - 521
Bibliography - 523
Index - 557

 

Albert Welter (University of Winnipeg) on Adamek: Mystique of Transmission
https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=23373

It has become commonplace to acknowledge the levels to which Chinese and East Asian Buddhist studies in the West have risen in recent years, and the work under current review, Wendi L. Adamek's The Mystique of Transmission , is certainly no exception. If anything, Mystique of Transmission demonstrates the degree to which Western scholarship on East Asian Buddhism has come into its own as well as the distance traveled. This is a finely crafted piece of scholarship, over which the author has labored for years; it was the subject of her doctoral dissertation completed a little over a decade ago. One of the things that this work is not is a narrowly conceived treatise on an obscure Chan text. The name of the text in question, the Lidai fabao ji 歷代法寶記 (Record of the Dharma-Jewel through the Generations), appears in the book's title only obliquely, as “an early Chan history,” and while it forms the core around which the trunk has been fashioned, it is “its contexts” around which this work revolves. The text is the product of an obscure Chan school of the late Tang, the Bao Tang 保唐 (protect the Tang dynasty), which fashioned a highly controversial claim to exclusive Chan orthodoxy on the pretext of having acquired the robe of the first Chinese Chan patriarch, the hallowed figure Bodhidharma. The movement died quickly and, except for a few notices in contemporary sources, was largely forgotten until the recovery of the Lidai fabao ji among the cache of manuscripts discovered in the library cave at Mogao 莫高, outside the Silk Road oasis of Dunhuang 敦煌, at the beginning of the twentieth century. Along with other manuscripts discovered at Dunhuang, the Lidai fabao ji has had a monumental impact on our understanding of early Chan history. As the first book on the Lidai fabao ji and Bao Tang school to appear in a Western language, Mystique of Transmission makes an important contribution to the developing scholarly literature on Chan, Buddhist, and Chinese history.

The book is divided into two parts: part 1, “The Mystique of Transmission,” and part 2, “Annotated Translation of the Lidai fabao ji .” Part 1 is divided into seven chapters: "Authority and Authenticity," "Transmission and Translation," "Transmission and Lay Practice," "Material Buddhism and the Dharma Kings," "Robes and Patriarchs," "Wuzhu and His Others," and "The Legacy of the Lidai fabao ji ." While many of the themes sounded here are familiar to the study of Chan, the subheadings tell a somewhat different story. Chapter 2 is a good example. While “Transmission and Translation,” the title of the second chapter, would seem to fall squarely within the rubric of Chan concerns, the subheadings include topics like “Emperor Ming of the Han,” “Daoan 道安and Transmission of Forms,” Buddhabhadra 佛馱跋陀羅 and Transmission of Lineage,” and “Huiyuan's 慧遠 Transmission of Space and Place.” As these subheadings suggest, the concern in The Mystique of Transmission is not so much the contents of the Lidai fabao ji as how these contents may be framed within larger discourses on Chinese Buddhism. The same may be said for chapters 3 and 4. Subheadings of the chapter on “Transmission and Lay Practice” reveal concerns like “The Interdependence of Lay and Ordained Practice,” “Criteria of Authenticity of the Dharma and the Authority of the Ordained,” and “The Role of the Bodhisattva Precepts in Lay Devotional Practice.” Likewise, the “Material Buddhism and the Dharma Kings” chapter includes sections on “The Dangers of Empire,” “The Northern Wei 北魏 and Spiritual Materialism,” “Empires of Signs,” “The Legacy of Tiantai Zhiyi” 天台智顗, “The Renwang jing ” 仁王經, “The Sanjie 三階 (Three Levels) Movement,” and “Imaginary Cultic Robes.”

Aside from the brief, introductory chapter 1--which includes a discussion on the background of the Lidai fabao ji text--the text figures parenthetically, but strategically, to the discussion until we get to chapter 5, at which time concerns central to the Chan school emerge to take center stage. The “Robes and Patriarchs” chapter includes discussions of “The 'Chan' Question,” “Tales of the Patriarchs,” “A Genealogy of Patriarchal Lineages,” “Shenhui's 神會 Rhetoric,” “Inconceivable Robes in the Vajrasamādhi-sūtra and the Platform Sūtra ,” and “Robes Purple and Gold.” Chapter 6 revolves around Wuzhu 無住 and the Bao Tang Chan faction, the aims of which the Lidai fabao ji text was compiled to represent. The author here sees fit to discuss topics germane to the text: mass precepts ceremonies and formless precepts, antinomianism in the Bao Tang monastery, the role of women in the Lidai fabao ji , and Wuzhu's discourse with Daoists and confrontation with local powers. The final chapter discusses the legacy of the Lidai fabao ji through a discussion of the text's portrait-eulogy (zhenzan 真讚) for Wuzhu, framed against examples of portrait-eulogies from Chan, other Buddhist and Chinese examples, and by considering it in the context of the Buddhist concept of the response-body (yingshen 應身) in Chan representations. Finally, we are provided references to the Bao Tang school in later records, particularly the Beishan lu 北山錄 (Record of North Mountain), references in Tibetan sources, and comparisons with the Hongzhou 洪州 school, which also originated in Sichuan province.

However formulated, the Bao Tang school and the Lidai fabao ji remain central to the discussion. The Lidai fabao ji, expertly translated and amply annotated, is contained in part 2. The translation is based on Stein ms. 516, which, following Koga Hidehiko 古賀英彦, whose seminar at Hanazono 花園 University in Kyoto the author attended from 1991 to 1993, is considered the best of the remaining Dunhuang manuscripts. Adamek also consulted Pelliot ms. 2125, the primary text used in Yanagida Seizan's 柳田聖山 1976 Japanese translation in Shoki no zenshi 初期の禅史 II. The translation is divided into forty-three sections, following Yanagida, according to natural divisions in the narrative. Most annotations are also based on annotations contained in Yanagida's work. Students and scholars alike will be pleased that Adamek has included the Chinese text of the Lidai fabao ji . Each section begins with a heading, making it fairly easy to find one's way through the text's contents, and with reference to the corresponding Taishō 太正 page and line number, even though the Taishō text (T. 51.2075), based largely on Pelliot ms. 2125, has a number of errors. After the Taishō reference, one finds the Chinese text, followed by the English translation. The format is highly reminiscent of Japanese translations of texts of this nature, like Yanagida's, and the author has clearly adopted it. Thus, part 2--the translation, annotation, and format--may be viewed as an adaptation heavily indebted to Japanese scholarship in the field. In this regard, part 2 stands in rather stark contrast to the wide-ranging discussions in part 1, whose style and narratives Adamek has taken largely from themes struck in recent Western, primarily English language, scholarship. Where East Asian language scholarship is cited in part 1, it is more to recent Chinese language than to Japanese scholarship. While this represents a trend that has been emerging in recent years, Adamek's work affirms this shift to a heightened degree; it is a trend that we will likely see more of in the future.

Returning the focus to part 1, the approach Adamek takes there is consistent with the tendency in recent scholarship to move beyond a simple quest for historical fact, mired as it is in its own context, and to acknowledge how the fault lines of fiction may reveal “echoes from the past expunged from more authoritative works” (p. 4). One of the aims of the study is to contextualize Bao Tang transmission claims, to validate a position that, to modern eyes, seems only worthy of a charlatan. In an era where the transmission of Bodhidharma's robe was believed to substantiate claims to Chan orthodoxy, the Bao Tang school alleged that the same robe which the fifth patriarch, Hongren 弘忍, had bestowed upon the sixth patriarch, Huineng 慧能 --so famously described in the Platform Sūtra-- was bequeathed by empress Wu Zetian 武則天 to Wuzhu 無住, a master claimed in the lineage of the Bao Tang school. The claim had little currency, and the Lidai fabao ji and Bao Tang school were quickly consigned to the dustbin of history (or, in this case, the library of Dunhuang), where they were rediscovered in the twentieth century. Even though the Bao Tang school has been roundly dismissed on the basis of the Lidai fabao ji 's spurious claims, Adamek finds a surprising variety of narratives pulsating through it, and uses them to animate a number of Chan and Chinese Buddhist anxieties. It would not be going too far to claim that what we have here is a history of Chinese Buddhism converging in the late eighth-century narratives of the Lidai fabao ji . Indeed, it is Adamek's claim that the authors of the Lidai fabao ji “attempted to establish the place of the Bao Tang school within a chronicle of the history of Buddhism in China” (p. 4). “The fact that the Bao Tang school was so short-lived and its remains hermetically sealed,” she argues, only accentuates its importance as “a more accurate reflection of the Buddhist world of the eighth and ninth centuries, the 'golden age' of Chan, than the authoritative accounts that were produced in the tenth through twelfth centuries” (p. 7). And even though Adamek admits she “cannot offer an entirely new vision or an expansion of frontiers, but rather a journey through familiar territory with a long-lost text in hand,” for those with an interest in Chinese Buddhism and Chinese religions in general, the journey is a worthwhile one (p. 12). Her efforts will, without doubt, not only raise awareness of the Lidai fabao ji and its contexts, but also underscore a whole array of issues, themes, and debates that animate Chinese Buddhism.

While the topics addressed in The Mystique of Transformation are too numerous to discuss in any detail in a review like this, let me choose one example to give readers an idea of what to expect. In “The Dangers of Empire” section of chapter 4, Adamek begins with a characterization of the threat posed by spiritual materialism in the Northern Wei dynasty (386-534). Students of Chan will be familiar with the alleged dialogue between Bodhidharma and Emperor Wu 武宗 of the Liang 粱 dynasty (502-557) over the role of material donations in Buddhism. Bodhidharma's refusal to allow Emperor Wu's philanthropy as true merit (gongde 功德) constitutes one of the foundational episodes animating Chan ideology. Adamek treats the Northern Wei as “a study in the enthusiasm of a particular Buddhist 'age of innocence,' a short period when practical, propitiatory, and lavishly material Buddhism was adopted unreservedly” (p. 92). The Northern Wei is used as “an opportunity to trace a relationship between state and Sangha from hazy beginnings, through persecution and triumphant resurgence, to a precipitous end” (p. 92). As a result, the Northern Wei remained a lesson and a warning throughout Chinese Buddhist history of the dangers of material largesse, and this became a theme that would resonate through Chan discourse, as the story about Emperor Wu and Bodhidharma indicates. In Adamek's reconstruction, there are resonances between the Northern Wei experience and the reactions against the material Buddhism of Empress Wu Zetian in the Tang (considered in chapter 5), which quickened the pace of Chan's development. By the time of the Bao Tang school, denunciations of spiritual materialism were common themes in both Buddhist and non-Buddhist discourse. Yet, Adamek is not content to leave the topic here, as many might be inclined, but reminds us of contradictions inherent in the monastic enterprise, where the principles of austerity and of the generation of wealth are both part of the soteriological amalgam that enlivens Sangha activity (p. 93). As a result, Buddhist clerics' relationships with political power were not always harmonious, but “without a strong civil and military service maintaining order and borders and the kind of economy that could generate expenditure for merit, Buddhist monasteries could not thrive” (p. 99).

In the next section, “Empire of Signs,” Adamek explores five different textual and ritual responses to the fear of Sangha corruption that fueled Chinese “decline of the Dharma” (famie 法滅) or “final age” (mofa 末法) eschatology: the Fu fazing [yinyuan] zhuan 付法藏[因緣]傳 (Account of the [Avādana] of the Transmission of the Dharma Treasury), an early chronicle of Indian Dharma Transmission, probably compiled in China; Tiantai Zhiyi's systemization of doctrines and practices; the state-protection rituals of the Renwang jing (Scripture of Humane Kings); Xinxing's 信行inexhaustible treasury; and Daoxuan's 道宣 visionary ordination ritual. It is beyond the scope here to consider any of these in detail. Adamek contends that each of these is a response to the same tension: the need to clarify the spiritual stream of true Dharma transmission from the flood of ordinations generated for profane, materialistic reasons. And, as a result, the seeds of sectarianism in Chinese Buddhism are seen as germinating from a desire to clarify a workable Buddhist identity in response to the pressures of imperial patronage. For rulers, Buddhism offered an “alluring mirror” and “a reservoir of spiritual wealth that could also become a tempting hoard of real wealth in times of fiscal crises,” but also “a potentially dangerous rival for the favor of the masses” (p. 100). It is this tension, according to Adamek, that shapes the “decline of the Dharma” discourse that runs through the five responses she considers, “all of which reflect the Sangha's tug-of-war between self-accusation and persecution complex” (p. 100).

This provides but a hint of the abundant and variegated narratives contained in The Mystique of Transmission . While I might have wished for more extended discussion, I was pleased that Adamek called attention to the correspondence between Chan literature and secular fiction in the late Tang, where preparatory sketches and notes in the margins of official literature developed into a new genre known as chuanqi 傳奇 (transmitted marvels) fiction. Characteristics of this new genre also appear in what has come to be known as “classic” Chan literature (p. 195). Adamek also notes similarities between the sparser and more colloquial mode of Chan literature and the caustic style of late Tang literati, such as Han Yű 韓愈. While readers with different areas of expertise may wish for fuller treatment of subjects in their areas of interest, I found Adamek's instincts on the mark even where I had wished for more. In short, this is a highly recommended work whose merits are likely to stand for some time to come. In addition to people interested in Chan and Chinese Buddhism, Mystique of Transmission will be of interest to scholars working in ancillary areas, if for no other reason than its ability to encapsulate complex subjects in a rigorous and engaging style.

 

PDF: The Lidai fabao ji (Record of the Dharma-Jewel through the Ages)
by Wendi Leigh Adamek
in: The Zen Canon: Understanding the Classic Texts (2004), pp. 81-106.

PDF: Robes Purple and Gold: Transmission of the Robe in the "Lidai fabao ji" (Record of the Dharma-Jewel through the Ages)
by Wendi Leigh Adamek
History of Religions, Vol. 40, No. 1, Buddhist Art and Narrative. (Aug., 2000), pp. 58-81.

PDF: Revisiting Questions about Female Disciples in the Lidai fabao ji (Record of the Dharma-Treasure through the Generations)
by Wendi Leigh Adamek
Pacific World: Journal of the Institute of Buddhist Studies, Third Series, Number 18, 2016, pp. 57-65.
Special Issue: Essays in Honor of John McRae

PDF: A Niche of their Own: The Power of Convention in Two Inscriptions for Medieval Chinese Buddhist Nuns
by Wendi Leigh Adamek
The University of Chicago, 2009

PDF: The Teachings of Master Wuzhu: Zen and Religion of No-Religion
by Wendi Leigh Adamek, Columbia University Press, New York, 2011
This is a scaled-back version of The Mystique of Transmission, which is available for download.

The Record of the Dharma-Jewel Through the Generations (Lidai fabao ji) is a little-known Chan/Zen Buddhist text of the eighth century, rediscovered in 1900 at the Silk Road oasis of Dunhuang. The only remaining artifact of the Bao Tang Chan school of Sichuan, the text provides a fascinating sectarian history of Chinese Buddhism intended to showcase the iconoclastic teachings of Bao Tang founder Chan Master Wuzhu (714-774). Wendi Adamek not only brings Master Wuzhu's experimental community to life but also situates his paradigm-shifting teachings within the history of Buddhist thought. Having published the first translation of the Lidai fabao ji in a Western language, she revises and presents it here for wide readership.
Written by disciples of Master Wuzhu, the Lidai fabao ji is one of the earliest attempts to implement a "religion of no-religion," doing away with ritual and devotionalism in favor of "formless practice." Master Wuzhu also challenged the distinctions between lay and ordained worshippers and male and female practitioners. The Lidai fabao ji captures his radical teachings through his reinterpretation of the Chinese practices of merit, repentance, precepts, and Dharma transmission. These aspects of traditional Buddhism continue to be topics of debate in contemporary practice groups, making the Lidai fabao ji a vital document of the struggles, compromises, and insights of an earlier era. Adamek's volume opens with a vivid introduction animating Master Wuzhu's cultural environment and comparing his teachings to other Buddhist and historical sources.

Imagining the portrait of a Chan master
by Wendi Leigh Adamek
PDF in: Chan Buddhism in Ritual Context (2003), pp. 36-73.

PDF: The Literary Lives of Nuns: Poems Inscribed on a Memorial Niche for the Tang Nun Benxing
by Wendi Leigh Adamek
T'ang Studies, No. 27, 2009, 40–65.

Transmitting Notions of Transmission
by Wendi Leigh Adamek
PDF in: Readings of the Platform Sūtra. Edited by Morten Schlütter and Stephen F. Teiser. Columbia Readings of Buddhist Literature.
New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. pp. 109-133.

PDF: As if This Is Home
by Wendi L. Adamek

Cf. PDF: Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate Raworth