[T]he entire lineage prior to the Song is best understood as a mythical construct, a sacred history which served to legitimize the Song Chan school and its claim to a special transmission. Even in the Song, the lineage was subject to constant manipulation and reinterpretation in order to legitimize the lineage of certain masters and their descendants or to bolster polemical and political claims. The Chan transmission lineage, in the Song as well as in the Tang, cannot be assumed to be an accurate representation of historical fact, but must be seen as a religious and political construct that served a well-defined purpose (from Morten Schlutter’s dissertation 1998).
Submitted June 12, 2017 at 07:26PM by Dhammakayaram http://ift.tt/2s2z7zc
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