Zen Under the Gun: Translators ARE NOT scholars

I picked up a copy of Zen Under the Gun, by J.C. Cleary.

This is a big deal book because it purports to be a look at Zen in China from 1200-1400, from the time around Wumen past Mingben.

There are some HUGE caveats though, and Cleary sort of hides them in the introduction.

The Chinese texts translated in this book are to be found in the Zoku Zokyo, The Continuation of the Canon, a collection of Chinese Buddhist texts that was put together at the beginning of the twentieth century by scholars in Japan. This collection contains many of the records of the Zen teachers from the Song. Yuan, and Ming periods. This collection can be accessed online at suttaworld.org.

He also says:

In the era this book focuses on, Zen teachers often urged followers to combine the Zen understanding of mind with the practices of Pure Land Buddhism-reciting the name of Amitabha Buddha. visualizing Amitabha Buddha, taking vows to be reborn in the Pure Land.

In the usual Pure Land understanding. Amitabha is a buddha of the distant past who vowed to save all those who sincerely invoke his name by enabling them to be reborn in his Pure Land, where free of the afflictions of sickness, suffering, old age, and death they could progress to final enlightenment.

In the Zen understanding of Pure Land, Amitabha is identical with our innate enlightened mind, and the Pure Land is the purity of our inherent buddha-nature. The Zen adepts found that the Pure Land practice of reciting the buddha-name can be a powerful tool for focusing scattered minds and letting people reorient them selves toward a larger reality usually screened off by the preoccupations of their false selves.

and

In the course of their teaching activities. Zen masters often emphasized the basic lessons of Mahayana Buddhism. They pointed out the artificial, self-contradictory, impermanent nature of the false self and the inventory of perceptual experiences it sustains. They spoke of the classic Mahayana program for moving beyond the false self. via the "six perfections"-generosity, discipline, pa tience, energetic effort, meditation, and wisdom. They set forth the ideal of the bodhisattva path, of returning from the "great death" (of the false self) back to life in the world of ordinary people and their illusions, to work for universal liberation by whatever means necessary.

Much of the supposedly mysterious quality of Zen utterances dis appears when they are contextualized in terms of the classic Mahayana theories of being and consciousness. This is what I have tried to do in the translations in this book, while letting the characteristic style of the Zen school show through vividly. The four Zen teachers translated here artfully challenge their listeners to live the life of wisdom described in the Buddhist scriptures. They remind people that they are already in the presence of the absolute, and that only the self-created barriers of false perception keep them from realizing this.

Finally, here are the four "masters" the book covers:

1. Hengchuan (1222-1289) was almost sixty when the Mongol con querors took power in southeast China where he lived and taught.

2. His disciple Gulin (1262-1329) lived to see the Mongol overlords adopting a veneer of Chinese culture for their regime, even making Confucian philosophy the official orthodoxy.

3. Gulin's student Zhuxian (1292-1348), after working as a Zen teacher in China, spent the last twenty years of his life in Japan where he lectured on Buddhism at the court of the new Ashikaga shoguns, and taught at various major temples.

4. Daian (1347-1403) was a spiritual great-grandson of Heng chuan-his teacher's teacher was Hengchuan's disciple. Daian grew up during the millenarian uprisings that broke the Mongol hold on central China, and reached manhood as the new Ming dynasty was establishing its rule over the country.

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Welcome! ewk comment: JC Cleary talks about how war is ravaging China at a cataclysmic level for the hundreds of years around this period. It is historically unprecedented in China, and the stone age China of the Cultural Revolution is a direct result of this period. The China that flourished in 1000 CE, which would be nearly comfortable to many modern people, is nearly erased in the centuries that followed.

We can see that JC Cleary is struggling with academic thinking as well. No self respecting cultural anthropologist would call the Zen's reform of Pure Land that Cleary admits is so divergent from actual Pure Land Buddhism any kind of Pure Land Buddhism. Nobody would call Zen's reform of Mahayana actual Mahayana Buddhism; as Hakamaya points out, even stuff as basic as Buddha nature, #3 From the Four Statements of Zen, can be seen as entirely antithetical to any form of Buddhism.

So Cleary is really just translating, and that has to be entirely divorced from academic study of Zen. His Phd in Languages isn't in any way an equivalent to Hakamaya's degree in Buddhism and neither offer us anything like Blyth's level of Zen scholarship. Just contrasting Hakamaya and Cleary we see Cleary has a very weak grasp on philosophy generally, let alone Philosophy of Comparative Religion.

So as I break this book down going forward, it is essential that we see, to the greatest extent possible, that Cleary's goals are opposed to Hakaymaya's, which are both opposed to Blyth's.

The fact that this text is a anthology created by Japanese Buddhists in the 1900's absolutely diminishes the academic value of the text to nearly zero.

Submitted March 15, 2022 at 07:55AM by ewk https://ift.tt/rgXGMP4