CHAPTER 7

Influences on the Development of Zen
Before the Early T'ang Dynasty

From the time Great Master Bodhidharma came East over the sea during the era of Emperor Wu of the Southern Liang dynasty, he remained in China for about twenty years. Aside from his transmission of the Zen mind teaching to the young monk Shen-kuang, who became the second patriarch of Zen, he also had a number of other disciples who studied with him at the same time. These were Tao-fu, Tao-yu, the nun Tsung-chih, and Yang Hsuan, governor of Ch'i-ch'eng.

Although these disciples did not directly continue the lineage of Zen, they nevertheless took up the very same message of breaking through appearances and detaching from objects, directly pointing to the human mind to see its essence and attain Buddhahood. They naturally developed and spread the work of Zen teaching at the same time, so during the interval between the Southern dynasties of Liang and Ch'en and the Sui dynasty they in turn influenced the Zen meditation of Zen Master Hui-ssu of Nan-yueh, who earnestly cultivated practice of the Lotus sutra and pratyutpanna-samadhi, concentration on the immediate presence of the Buddhas.

Through this influence, Hui-ssu preached the Zen of direct pointing to mind, saying he was "pointing to things to communicate the mind, but nobody understands." Later his disciple Zen Master Chih-che (Chih-i), who received his robe and bowl, founded the practical teachings of the T'ien-t'ai school, consisting of three kinds of cessation and three kinds of contemplation, thus setting up the first distinct school of Chinese Buddhism after the Dharma Master Hui-yuan had established the Pure Land school during the Chin dynasty.

Chih-i took the methods of meditation concentration practiced in Hinayana Buddhism, combined them with thorough reflection and insightful contemplation of the principles of Mahayana Buddhism, and picked up on the essential points of Zen, which directly points to the human mind to see its essence and attain Buddhahood. Chih-i formed a comprehensive system, making a complete arrangement of the theories of Buddhism, and founded a mode of teaching of real gradual practice in a systematic course of cultivation and realization.

Thus it was that from the end of the Ch'en dynasty and beginning of the Sui dynasty, on through the T'ang, Sung, Yuan, Ming, and Ch'ing dynasties, over a period of more than a thousand years, the grandees of the intelligentsia, the literati, people who liked metaphysics and yet were unwilling to give up the world and their fondness for scholarship, all followed the practical methods of Zen concentration according to the cessation and contemplation exercises of the T'ien-t'ai school. There were also those who combined this with the Zen school: people such as the famous T'ang dynasty gentleman Li Hsiao, who was an outstanding T'ien-t'ai scholar; and others such as Po Chu-i, Lu Fang-weng, Su Tung-p'o, Wang An-shih, and the great neo-Confucians of the early Sung dynasty, all of whom went through a course of T'ien-t'ai cessation and contemplation practice, which is a form of meditation concentration. The meditation concentration first learned by the famous Ming dynasty Confucian Wang Yang-ming was also the T'ien-t'ai cessation and contemplation practice. The famous Ch'ing dynasty scholar Kung Ting-an not only wrote an essay extolling T'ien-t'ai cessation and contemplation meditation concentration; he even made every effort to repudiate the errors of the Zen school.

It is important that this issue be brought to the attention of those who are studying the history of Chinese culture and philosophy, in order that everyone be able to distinguish rigorously the differences between cessation and contemplation meditation concentration and the mind teaching of the Zen school, and to understand the key to the controversy between gradual practice and sudden enlightenment. It is important to understand these issues in the context of the influence of Zen on Chinese philosophy during and after the Sui and T'ang dynasties, as well as the connection between the T'ien-t'ai school and secular scholars over the ages.

In the past, the usual run of professors and Confucianists studying Chinese Buddhism or philosophy felt threatened by the multiplicity and vast scope of the ideas found in Chinese Buddhist studies and the schools of Chinese Buddhism. At a loss to know where to turn, they set about their research in a confused manner and made a central issue of the T'ang dynasty controversy between Southern subitist (sudden) Zen and Northern gradualist Zen. Clearly, they have suffered from bias and confusion.

In reality, from the Sui and T'ang dynasties, through the first century or so of the early T'ang, after Shen-kuang and aside from the five generations of patriarchs who solely transmitted the lineage of the Zen school, there were three other people who studied under Great Master Bodhidharma along with Shen-kuang. While Shen-kuang's formal transmission of the patriarchy went to third Zen patriarch Seng-ts'an, altogether there were seventeen other known great masters over six generations who also belonged to the Shen-kuang succession but were descended from his other disciples who were contemporaries of the third patriarch. The fourth patriarch, Zen Master Tao-hsin, produced one hundred and eighty-three worthies in addition to the fifth patriarch Hung-jen. The famous sixth patriarch Hui-neng was not Hung-jen's only student either, for he had a hundred and seven notable contemporaries who belonged to the succession of Zen Master Hung-jen.

By the time of the fifth Zen patriarch in the early T'ang dynasty, those among these descendants of the Zen patriarchs who were comparatively well known and who can be traced through existing historical source materials, had scattered in the four directions, each setting up paths of guidance, influencing both urban and rural society as well as T'ang dynasty Chinese Buddhism. The establishment of the Hua-yen school also had some connection to the dissemination of the Zen school.

From the time of the reign of empress Wu Tse-t'ien (684-705), there were quite a few disciples in the succession of Zen Master Shen-hsiu of the so-called Northern school. Although the Zen of the Southern school following the sixth patriarch Hui-neng is referred to as the true lineage of the Zen school, this is merely a question of the heritage of succession of the Zen lineage and cannot be taken as an absolute basis for assessing the influence of Zen on the intellectual trends of Chinese culture and philosophy during the T'ang dynasty. Because of this, it seems to me that if one wants to talk about Zen studies, it is first necessary to study Zen truly and correctly, in terms of doing real work in Zen meditation and insight. Only afterwards can one talk about Zen. If one wants to talk about the intellectual history of Zen, or the history of Chinese philosophy and Chinese Buddhism, it is imperative to understand the whole picture; it will not do to generalize about the whole based on a part, or to speak based on a fixation on only one element.