The following critique comes from the preface of the book 'Hoofprint of the Ox' by Sheng-Yen and is written by a fellow called Dan Stevenson.
I have no agenda in sharing this except for my wish to create a lively discussion/debate on a topic that's near and dear to me.
Chan being largely new to the West, most of us are not only unfamiliar with its idiom, but the very fact of our attraction to it, as transparent and innocent as it might seem, is bound to be loaded with expectations and agendas that are not altogether commensurate with it. This makes the Chan student and Chan discourse in the United States much different creatures from their counterparts in China, Vietnam, Korea and Japan. Particularly with its intuitivist emphasis on "wordless" practice and "mind-to-mind" transmission, Chan is susceptible to host of strange, unstated assumptions that might be smuggled in under the name of spiritual growth. As many American groups learned during the Chan-master meltdowns of the early 1980s, when left undisclosed and undiscussed, these assumptions can be destructive to all involved.
One concern of master Sheng-yen is the misunderstanding that arises from representations of Chan as a practice or direct experience that "does not depend on words and texts." Many years ago, when I was acting as interpreter for one of his talks in New York City, Sheng-yen chose to lecture on Chan practice and its relation to Buddhist concepts of prajna ("liberating insight") and sunyata ("emptiness"), a fairly frequent topic in those days. When the time for questions came, a sharp-looking fellow stood up, started him in the eye, and said cagily, "This is a wonderful menu. Now, where is the meal!" There was a tense silence in the room - all eyes fixed on the master. Without the slightest flinch he calmly said, "Come on a Chan retreat sometime."
The student didn't get the meal that he expected. More than likely he wasn't looking for a meal at all. Since then I have seen this kind of thing at countless talks and classes on Chan - people pounding the floor, grunting and shouting, speaking in poetic paradoxes, glaring in silence like Bodhidharma, often doing everything but saying what was really on their minds. When the topic of practice comes up, one will often hear, "Just get on with it!" or "We just do our practice here; we don't talk about it. What does Zen have to do with talk? What does Zen have to do with thinking, or with the study of Buddhist doctrine?" True enough, just as in the classic Buddhist formulation of the eightfold path, Chan practice does require one to put oneself completely and unreservedly into the method. At some point you have to stop second-guessing and just let the method do its work. And yet, when pressed on the issue, few are able to tell you just what this "practice" involves, let alone where it is headed, what it is going to do for you, and how it purports to get there. When practice itself begins to produce effects, the problem becomes even more serious. So why all these elusive antics with Chan? Why such dogmatic resistance to intellect and to constative speech, especially when the antics of "pure Chan practice" are clearly as contrived and ideologically ramified as the most formulaic of religious doctrines?
One will find this uncompromising attitude among East Asian Buddhists as well, as Sheng-yen's story will show. But in East Asia Chan "wordlessness" tends to be constituted within a much more nuanced environment of institution, learning, and practice than the rhetoric of books on Chan has led us to expect. For example, the jiao schools of "doctrinal learning" and the Chan school of "meditative insight" both point the way to recovery of the original Buddha-nature. Both traditions likewise emphasize the need for committed practice and personal enlightenment. It is a very common (and unfortunate) mistake to think that the so called doctrinal traditions concern themselves solely with dead-letter learning, and that Chan is the only school that involves actual meditative practice and experience. Both traditions practice; they simply differ in their respective approaches to practice and their ways of sanctioning religious authority.
To that extent, one also finds the two streams to be closely involved with one another historically. Chan monasteries had libraries that contained a wide range of Buddhist and non-Buddhist works, and the historical record shows that Chan practitioners not only read them, but that the more illustrious masters were extremely well versed in them. Doctrinal formulations of Tiantai and Huayan, the major Mahayana sutras and treatises, the vinaya codes, the general Buddhist hagiographic and historical record - all routinely find their way into the sermons of Chan masters. Even the tropes of such quintessential Chan formulas as Linji's dispositions of guest and host, the five ranks of the Caodong school, and the ten oxherding diagrams have been shown to resonate closely with mainstream Chinese formulations of the bodhisattva path.
All things considered, Chan "mastery" is anything but an innocent chopping of wood and carrying of water. As master Sheng-yen will often point out, for all its emphasis on being a "wordless" teaching Chan boasts by far the largest literary corpus of any of the Buddhist schools, the jiao schools included. Moreover, it is through this literature - a highly manicured genre, in its own right - that Chan practitioners imbibe the rich color and texture of Chan enlightened encounter. As the stuff that Chan students lecture on, pour over, meditate on, and rehearse in the course of Chan training, this material becomes the idiom through which the whole idea of Chan enlightenment takes shape and gets acted out as communicative norm. Transcendent experience or not, the entire project of Zen practice is embedded in webs of signification and expectation that are as routinized as any excercise in abhidharmic analysis, Tiantai exegesis, or Tibetan debate.
In Chinese Buddhist parlance - the Chan school, included - persons who either reject or are not conversant in this generalized idiom of Buddhist learning and practice are often referred to as "darkly enlightened" or "sightless ascetics," meaning that they may have some experience in the practice but that they are unequipped to assess the legitimacy of their own spiritual status, let alone guide others. Chan "wordlessness" is not a licence to be indiscriminate about either meditative technique or meditative experience. It does not affirm all practice as good, or all meditative experience as positive. In fact some are downright bad; and without deference to the well-trodden ways of tradition or a genuinely competent teacher to check their every turn, the prospects of the ignorant are considered by most Chinese Buddhists to be little better than demon bait.
Submitted July 10, 2020 at 04:17PM by SpringRainPeace https://ift.tt/2BWjP8r
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