Ch'an-tsung

Ch'an-tsung (Chin.). The ‘Ch'an school’, the Chinese name for the school that preserved and transmitted the methods of Ch'an from master to disciple. The history of the school in China is long and complex. By its own account, a lineage of meditation masters existed in India from the time of the Buddha himself. One day, in the middle of an assembly, the Buddha held a flower before the monks without saying a word. All in the assembly were puzzled by this gesture, except for Mahākāśyapa, who understood the Buddha's meaning and smiled. The Buddha then confirmed Mahākāśyapa's understanding and publicly ‘transmitted his Dharma’ to him. According to later legend, this direct, ‘mind-to-mind transmission’ passed through 28 generations of patriarchs in India. The last of these, Bodhidharma, travelled to China in 526 and became the first of the Chinese patriarchs, passing the Dharma on to his disciple, Hui-k'o (487–593).

In time, the Dharma was transmitted from Hui-k'o, the second Chinese patriarch, to the sixth, Hui-neng (638–713). Historically, this appears to have been a period of transition: while the earlier masters were known as students and teachers of the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra, the school came to define itself in later years as one that eschewed scriptural study and attempted to point directly to the human mind as the fount of enlightenment (bodhi). In addition to this shift, a controversy broke out over the nature of practice and enlightenment. In Ch'an lore, this was epitomized as the struggle between proponents of ‘gradual enlightenment’, represented by Hui-neng's fellow disciple Shen-hsiu (606–706), and ‘sudden enlightenment’, propounded by Hui-neng himself.

At stake was the question: does one have to work towards enlightenment, gaining it step-by-step over a period of time, or does it manifest fully developed in an instant? The former position justified, even required, a long period of study and practice, undergirded by careful observance of moral precepts. The latter rested on the Mahāyāna idea that all dualities are ultimately unreal, including such dyads as ignorance–enlightenment, practice–attainment, and saṃsāra–nirvāṇa. Under this critique, the position of sudden enlightenment asserted that, since there was nowhere to go and nothing to change, enlightenment could occur instantaneously. This position, enshrined in the foundational work The Platform Sūtra of the Sixth Patriarch, eventually won out. The result was that subsequent Ch'an rhetoric stressed the immediacy of enlightenment, while in actual practice seekers continued to meditate and observe the precepts.

The rejection of written and oral teachings and the acceptance of sudden enlightenment as the orthodox position led to a period of intense experimentation and creativity as teachers sought for ways to directly impart the content of their experience to students. Thus, during the late T'ang and the Sung dynasties, the school entered into a period sometimes described as ‘the golden age of Ch'an’, where masters employed ‘shock Ch'an’ techniques to evoke the students' direct, experiential understanding. These techniques, pioneered by such figures as Ma-tsu Tao-i (709–88), Huang-po Hsi-yün (d. 850), and Lin-chi I-hsüan (founder of the Lin-chi school, d. 866), included beating with sticks, shouting directly into students' ears, bizarre behaviour, and seemingly nonsensical answers to students' questions. Many stories of such masters were recorded either in a new genre of literature called ‘Recorded Sayings’, which transmitted the words and deeds of individual masters, or in anthologies such as the Blue Cliff Records and the Gateless Gate.

Such creativity and spontaneity was difficult to maintain over the long term, and eventually a way was found to appropriate and institutionalize the methods of ‘shock Ch'an’. By the late Sung, masters began assigning students to study and contemplate the stories of masters contained in the ‘Recorded sayings’ literature or in the anthologies, with a view to placing themselves into the stories and attempting to see directly the mind of the master or the student depicted therein. As students had success with this technique, the stories that were found most effective were used again and again, and came to be regarded as kung-an (Jap., kōan), or ‘public cases’, and became standardized. This became the favoured practice within the Lin-chi school. Other schools, such as the Ts'ao-tung school, rejected this method, claiming that its emphasis on a formal, goal-oriented practice violated the basic principle of sudden enlightenment, which, as noted above, held that all beings were already perfectly enlightened and liberated just as they were. This school stressed the practice of ‘silent illumination’ (Chin., mo-chao Ch'an) where students simply sat with no goal in mind save to realize their already-perfect Buddhahood. The Lin-chi school, in turn, criticized this practice for its inertness and quietism.

By the Yüan and Ming dynasties, kung-an practice had become overly formalized, and critics of the Ch'an school argued that it mistook witty rejoinders for genuine enlightenment. Practitioners of ‘silent illumination’ came in for criticism on the account that their practice led to mere laziness and torpor. While a few reformers emerged in the mid-Ming, such as Tz'u-p'o Chen-k'o (1543–1603) and Han-shan Te'-ch'ing (1546–1623), the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci and his successors found that Buddhist monks, and particularly Ch'an monks, were viewed by the population at large as effete and decadent. These Jesuit reports, however, may not be entirely reliable, and it is likely that many ordinary people remained devout followers of Buddhist teachings.

In the modern period, reformers and accomplished masters such as Hsü-yün (1840–1959) and Lai-kuo (1881–1953) helped to instil respect for Ch'an once again, and social trends such as modernization, urbanization, and the general rise in educational levels has given the laity increased time and inclination to take up the practice. In the West, the scene has been dominated by Japanese zen, but some Chinese Ch'an masters, such as Sheng-yen (1930– ) and Hsing-yun (1927– ) have developed followings in Europe and America.