Thought it'd be nice to look at the foundation of Zen, was on the page for Heze Shenhui and felt this would be valuable in posting.
The story will begin with the year A.D. 700, when the Empress Wu 武后 (who reigned as "Emperor" from 690 to 705 ) invited an old Ch'an monk of the Lankaa School 楞伽宗 [5] to pay her a visit at the capital city of Changan. The monk was Shen-hsiu 神秀, who was then already over ninety years old and had long been famous for his dhyaana (meditation) practice and ascetic life at his hilly retreat in the Wutang Mountains 武當山 in modern Hupei. The imperial invitation was so earnest and insistent that the aged monk finally accepted.
When he arrived in 701, he had to be carried in a chair to the imperial audience. The Empress was said to have done him the unusual honor of curtsying and making him a guest in one of her palaces. Her two emperor-sons (whom she had deposed successively in 684 and 690 ) and the whole Court worshipped him and sat at his feet. For four years he was honored as "the Lord of the Law at the Two National Capitals of Changan and Loyang, and the Teacher of Three Emperors." When he died in 705, he was mourned by the Court and hundreds of thousands of the populace. By imperial order, three monasteries were built in his memory, one at the Capital, one at his birthplace in Honan, and one at the place of his ch'an life. A brother of the two emperors and Chang Yueh 張說, the great prose writer of the day, wrote his biographical monuments.
In Chang Yueh's text, this genealogical line of Shen-hsiu's Buddhist descent was made public:
Bodhidharma 菩提達摩, Hui-k'o 慧可, Seng Ts'an 僧粲, Tao-hsin 道信 (died 651), Hung-jen 弘忍 (died 674), Shen-hsiu 神秀
In a very voluminous commentary on a tiny "suutra" — the Yuan-Chiao-Ching 圓覺經 (the Suutra of Perfect Enlightenment), which was most probably fabricated by Tsung-mi himself — there occurs a lengthy passage in which Tsung-mi lists the Seven Great Schools of Ch'an and gives a concise summary of the teachings of each. It is very remarkable that, of the seven only three may be called the old Ch'an, while the other four are distinctly revolutionary. Without following his arrangement of the order of the schools, I shall present the older schools first:
The three older schools were: (1) The Northern School of Shen-hsiu and his disciples, which Shen-hui had attacked as the Ch'an of gradual enlightenment. (2) A school in western China which practiced a peculiar way p.15 of pronouncing the one word "Fu" (Buddha) as the method of simplified contemplation. (3) The school of Chih-hsin, a fellow student with Shen-hsiu and Hui-neng, and the later school founded by Chih-hsin's disciples at the Ching-chung Monastery 淨眾寺 in Chengtu. It was the tradition of these schools to simplify Ch'an to three sentences: "Don't recall the past; don't contemplate the future; don't forget the path of wisdom." It was from the last-named Ching-chung School that the famous Ma-tsu came.
Even in this group of older schools, there was a clear tendency to break away from Indian dhyaana practice and work out their own simplified form of contemplation.
(4) The fourth school was that of the Pao-t'ang Monastery 保唐寺 at Chengtu, founded by the monk Wu-chu 無住 (died 774), who came out of the Ching-chung School and started a quite radical school of his own, in which "all forms of Buddhist religious practice — such as worship, prayer, repentance, recitation of the sutras, painting the image of the Buddha, and copying Buddhist scriptures — were forbidden and condemned as foolish." This school inherited the "three sentences" from the mother school, but changed the third to read: "Don't be foolish." And to them "all thought, good or evil, is foolish and idle." "No thought, no consciousness — that is the ideal."
(5) The fifth school, to which Tsung-mi himself claimed allegiance, was that of Shen-hui, which, as already noted, renounced all Ch'an practices and believed in the possibility of sudden enlightenment. Tsung-mi was very fond of quoting Shen-hui's dictum: "The one word 'Knowledge' is the gateway to all mysteries." That sentence best characterizes Shen-hui's intellectualistic approach. In his Discourses, he frankly said: "Here in my place, there is no such thing as ting 定 (samaadhi, quietude), and nobody talks of concentration of the mind." "Even the desire to seek bodhi (enlightenment) and achieve nirvaa.na is foolish."
(6) The sixth school was the Ox-head Hill School, an old school based on the philosophy of the Praj~naapaaramitaa Suutras and the Maadhyamika School of Naagaarjuna. Under its new leaders in the eighth century, notably Hsuan-su 玄素 ( died 752 ) and Tao-ch'in 道欽 (died 792), the school seemed to have become openly nihilistic and even iconoclastic. Tsung-mi says this school taught that "there is neither Truth [Law] to bind us, nor Buddhahood to attain." "Even if there be a life better than nirvaa.na, I say that that too is as unreal as a dream." Hsuan-su's biographer told this story: A butcher notorious for his great cruelty heard him speak and was moved to repentance. Hsuan-su accepted him and even went to his house and took meals with his family. Tsung-mi says this school holds that "there is neither cultivation, nor no-cultivation; there is neither Buddha, nor no-Buddha."
(7) The seventh school was the great School of Tao-i 道一 (called Ma-tsu because of his family name Ma, died 788). Ma-tsu taught that "the Tao is everywhere and in everything. Every idea, every movement of the body — a cough, a sigh, a snapping of the fingers, or raising of the eyebrows — is the functioning of the Buddha-nature in man. Even love, anger, covetousness and hate are all functionings of the Buddha-nature." Therefore, there is no need of a particular method of cultivation. "Let the mind be free. Never seek to do good, nor seek to do evil, nor seek to cultivate the Tao. Follow the course of Nature, and move freely. Forbid nothing, and do nothing. That is the way of the 'free man,' who is also called the 'super-man.'" According to Tsung-mi, this school also holds that "there is neither Law [Truth] to bind us, nor Buddhahood to attain."
These are the schools of Chinese Ch'an as Tsung-mi knew them in the early years of the ninth century. The Pao-t'ang School was openly iconoclastic and even anti-Buddhistic. The three others were equally radical and probably even more iconoclastic in their philosophical implications.
Submitted July 20, 2017 at 08:43AM by Dillon123 http://ift.tt/2vEzOPL
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