Meta: Primary Sources - Zen Masters v/s Apologists

Religious apologists, particularly those affiliated with Japanese Buddhism, have dedicated their careers to undermining Chinese history in order to equate Zen with Japanese Buddhism and all it's failures. This was particularly important in the 1900's, where Japanese Buddhism suffered a number of truly cataclysmic failures, including Dogenism's support of Japan's role in WW2, the publication of Hakuin's secret "answer manual", and the fracturing of Dogen's church by people like Shunryu Suzuki, D.T. Suzuki, and the Critical Buddhists.

One of the fronts of this fight involved legitimizing Chinese Zen Masters, so that they seemed no different that Japanese Buddhist priests. This has been attempted by relegating Chinese Zen records to the "mythological stories" pile, and substituting writings by other factions, many not friendly with Zen, as the official "history".

Examples:

• Bodhidharma texts: People claim texts are teachings of Bodhidharma... there is no historical or Zen textual basis for this claim.
• Song era writers: People claim that writers from the song era are "just as reliable as Zen Masters about Zen"; including government officials, biographers, Zen fanboys.

Japanese Buddhist Apologetics assumes that "Zen Master" is just a religious title. To this end, lots of non-Zen sources are used to define Zen, including determining who is a credible source of "Zen doctrine".

• The designation "Zen Master" is used to justify claims of relevance for various texts.

Chinese Zen is focused on Zen Master being a designation for enlightened people.

• Dialogues are used to demonstrate who is a Zen Master and who isn't, rather than using the designation to justify the teachings.

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Welcome link; ewk comment: ^who? There is no reason to think that history will be kind to this strategy. In general, the writings and perspective of the subgroup are generally given more weight than those of outsiders. Early Christians define themselves, Native Americans define themselves, and so on.

In the short term though, Japanese Buddhists have flooded the market with apologetics they call scholarship, rife with racist and religious undertones... "Buddhism" more legitimate than Zen, Japanese (Dogen) and Tibetan (Dunhuang) sources are more reliable than Zen sources.

Submitted April 18, 2021 at 03:57PM by ewk https://ift.tt/3mYb2Wv