Tibetan Zen

The phrase “Tibetan Zen”—the title of scholar Sam van Schaik’s new book—may initially startle the casual reader. The idea of Zen in Tibet is clearly announcing some news about Tibetan Buddhism that most readers have not heard before.

The book, a collection of short translations with introductory essays, is based on van Schaik’s extensive study of rare ninth- and tenth-century Tibetan manuscripts from the famous Central Asian Buddhist cave shrines at Dunhuang, an ancient oasis town along what is often referred to as the Silk Road. These early Tibetan Dunhuang manuscripts, forgotten for over a thousand years and only rediscovered in the early twentieth century, offer a window into the existence of a Tibetan “Zen” tradition that has been virtually unknown to scholars, whether Tibetan, European, or Chinese.

Van Schaik explains at the outset that he has made a strategic choice to use the Japanese term “Zen” for what he calls a “family of traditions in Chinese, Tibetan, Japanese, Korean, and other languages.” Chan in Chinese, Son in Korean, and Zen in Japanese—all these terms are pronunciations of the Sanskrit term dhyana, or meditation. Tibetans for their part use the term samten, which is a translation of the Sanskrit word for meditation rather than a transliteration. Chan, Zen, Son, Samten are linked not only by terminology but also by some (though not all) aspects of practice, as well as by their overlapping accounts of lineage genealogy and transregional transmission. Nevertheless, these traditions each evolved in distinctive, though often mutually recognizable, ways. Continued

Submitted June 28, 2017 at 07:38PM by Dhammakayaram http://ift.tt/2tXTVYY