Foreword to the Reprint Edition
WIDELY READ AND RETOLD in East Asia since the eighth century, the Platform Sūtra of the Sixth Patriarch is a foundational text of Chan Buddhism (known in Japan as “Zen”). The origins of the text can be traced back to the beginnings of Chan itself in seventh-century China, but for centuries the only known editions of the Platform Sūtra dated to 1290 or later. However, in the first decades of the twentieth century an early manuscript of the Platform Sūtra was found in a hidden temple library at Dunhuang in western China. This text, dating to ca. 780 and in many ways quite different from the later versions, is an invaluable source for understanding the early development of Chan Buddhism. The present reissue of Philip Yampolsky’s study and translation of the Dunhuang manuscript, originally published in 1967, will be of great value to anyone interested in the origins and early evolution of Chan Buddhism in China and the foundations of later Chinese Chan and Japanese Zen, as well as Korean Sŏn.
The Dunhuang Platform Sūtra is an exciting and inspiring text that still has the power to capture an audience well over a thousand years after its composition. Created at a time when Chan only recently had become a self-aware movement, and when issues of who held the true patriarchal succession and what constituted the true Chan teachings had come to the fore, the text affords us a window into both doctrinal innovations and factional struggles within the nascent Chan school. At the core of the Platform Sūtra is the dramatic story of how a poor and despised commoner by the name of Huineng becomes the sole heir to an exalted lineage of enlightened Chan patriarchs going all the way back to the Buddha himself. Cast as a recorded sermon addressed to both monastics and laypeople, the text has Huineng first tell his own story, then deliver a number of often startling teachings that seem to reject seated meditation, dismiss the value of seeking merit, and repudiate worship of the buddhas. In addition, Huineng personally confers a set of “formless precepts” on the members of his audience, a ceremony in which the readers of the Platform Sūtra are also invited to participate through embedded notes in the text. The innovative format of the Platform Sūtra and its dramatic story, provocative teachings, and affirmation of the validity of lay practice have ensured its survival over many centuries and made it a popular text among monastics and laypeople alike.
The central message of Huineng’s teachings in the Platform Sūtra is that inherent buddha nature is the original true condition of all sentient beings, right here for clear-eyed monastics and laypeople to experience for themselves. This is a teaching that requires an uncompromising nondualism because, paradoxically, to seek the buddha nature is to separate oneself from it. How best to express this and how to lead practitioners toward an insight into their own true nature was an ongoing struggle for the Chan school and caused its teachers to experiment with different rhetorical strategies. Over time, this led to a number of new developments within Chan that are reflected in later versions of the Platform Sūtra, which became longer and more detailed as time passed. The final version of the Platform Sūtra that came to be considered canonical in the thirteenth century is more than twice as long as the Dunhuang version. The study of the Dunhuang version of the Platform Sūtra allows us to return to the roots of Chan, so to speak, and appreciate the basic message that became the foundation for later developments.
Philip Boas Yampolsky (1920–1996) was a leading scholar of Chinese and Japanese Buddhism, especially well known for his translations of Zen Buddhist texts. Most of his academic career was spent at Columbia University, from where he received his Ph.D. in 1965. The grandson of the legendary anthropologist Franz Boas (1858–1942), Yampolsky began his study of Japanese when he was trained as a translator in the U.S. Navy during the Second World War. Later, he received a Fulbright scholarship to study Buddhism in Japan, where he lived from 1954 to 1962. During this time, Yampolsky was part of the Zen research group organized by Ruth Fuller Sasaki (1892–1967), and came in close contact with Yanagida Seizan and Iriya Yoshitaka, who later emerged as Japan’s leading Zen scholars. Yampolsky returned to the United States in 1962 to continue his studies at Columbia University. He soon began working at the East Asian Library at Columbia, of which he became the head in 1968. He was named a full professor of Japanese in 1981. Yampolsky retired from Columbia in 1990 but continued as a special lecturer until 1994.
The publication in 1967 of Yampolsky’s analysis and translation of the Dunhuang manuscript of the Platform Sūtra was a monumental event in the study of Zen Buddhism in the West. Although the longer thirteenth-century version of the Platform Sūtra had been translated into English in 1930, the Dunhuang Platform Sūtra and the story of early Chan that especially Japanese scholars had begun to unravel were not well known among Western academics and others interested in Chan/Zen Buddhism. Yampolsky’s erudition, his great skill with Buddhist classical Chinese, and his thorough knowledge of Japanese Zen scholarship enabled him to produce a book at a level not previously achieved in Western Zen studies. In an age when the study of Zen in English was dominated by popular books by writers like D. T. Suzuki and Alan Watts, Yampolsky demonstrated how critical and careful scholarship could significantly advance our understanding and appreciation of Chan and Zen. In many ways, Yampolsky’s Platform Sūtra signaled a new era in Western Zen studies where Chan/Zen became the object of serious academic inquiry. Yampolsky himself helped train a new generation of scholars, and his impact on Buddhist studies is still very present.
Partly sparked by Yampolsky’s own efforts, Zen studies in the West have advanced considerably since the first publication of his Platform Sūtra, and new methodologies and discoveries have led to new insights into the development of early Chan. However, Yampolsky’s book is still highly valuable for its careful study of the different historical sources of early Chan surrounding the Platform Sūtra, and for its skillful and generally reliable translation of the Dunhuang manuscript, which has yet to be surpassed. In publishing this second edition it was decided that it would be impossible to try to update Yampolsky’s study to reflect newer research, and that it would also not be feasible to make corrections to the translation. The original text and pagination have therefore remained unaltered in this edition. However, since pinyin transcription of Chinese is now becoming the standard and Yampolsky’s book uses the older Wade-Giles system, a new glossary has been included in the back that will enable readers to easily switch between the two systems.
In conjunction with this reissue of Yampolsky’s book on the Platform Sūtra, Columbia University Press is also publishing a new volume with a collection of up-to-date studies of the Platform Sūtra that addresses different aspects of the text and its background, and opens it up to college students, general readers, and anyone interested in Zen/Chan Buddhism. Entitled Readings of the Platform Sūtra, it is the second volume in the series Columbia Readings of Buddhist Literature, and is edited by myself and Stephen F. Teiser.
Yampolsky’s book conveniently includes the Chinese text of the Dunhuang version of the Platform Sūtra. The Dunhuang manuscript that Yampolsky used is full of scribal errors, missing words, and garbled passages. To make better sense of the text, Yampolsky partly relied on the emendations made earlier by D. T. Suzuki with Kōda Rentarō and by Ui Hakuju, but he also used a Japanese edition of a Chinese version of the Platform Sūtra, likely from 1031 (known as the Kōshōji edition) to make corrections. However, in recent years a second Dunhuang manuscript of the Platform Sūtra has come to light (discovered in the Dunhuang County Museum). The Dunhuang County Museum manuscript is in much better condition than the manuscript Yampolsky had to work with, and we can now see that some of his corrections made unwarranted changes to the text. Also, consensus on how the addendum to the very long title to the Dunhuang Platform Sūtra should be understood has changed since Yampolsky’s time, and the colophon in full should probably be translated: “Southern School Sudden Doctrine, Supreme Mahāyāna Great Perfection of Wisdom: The Platform Sūtra Preached by the Sixth Patriarch Huineng at the Dafan Temple in Shaozhou, one roll, concurrently bestowing the Precepts of Formlessness. Recorded by the spreader of the Dharma, the disciple Fahai.” The precepts of formlessness (or formless precepts) were clearly of central importance to the Dunhuang Platform Sūtra, a point that Yampolsky acknowledged but did little to address.
The Platform Sūtra and the complex history of early Chan are subjects that are not likely to be exhausted soon. New studies and translations will no doubt appear in the future, and new discoveries and interpretations will challenge our current understanding. But no matter what this future scholarship may bring, it will continue to be indebted to Yampolsky’s groundbreaking work.