I was living in the Fire Lotus Zen Temple in Brooklyn when another student came into the library and asked for a history of Zen. The only one available was the two-volume work by Heinrich Dumoulin (1905–95), first published in English in 1988. I believe this is the only attempt anyone has made at a comprehensive Zen history in a Western language, or in any language as far as I know. In recent years, many scholarly studies have been published dealing with aspects of Zen history, but there’s no other single work walking the reader through the whole thing.
Dumoulin’s history is a worthy effort, but much of it has been contradicted by more recent scholarship. Further, Dumoulin was a Jesuit theologian, and his understanding of Zen itself went only so far.
I never heard how the other student got along with Dumoulin. But the experience made me think about how much I wanted a better history of Zen, especially one that was more succinct and better explained how Zen developed through the centuries. So I decided to write it myself. I hope this narrative will be useful to Zen students, providing background to their practice.
This book is also written for those who see the word Zen tacked onto everything from tech products to soap and wonder what it is. Since the Beats introduced Zen into Western popular culture in the 1950s, the term Zen has come to signify something wonderfully commercial if not definable. The word can, apparently, mean whatever one wants it to mean.
But the Zen tradition is far from a blank slate. It is a school of Buddhism that developed a unique approach to the Buddha’s teachings. It has a rich heritage of literature. And it has a long and messy history.
This task is complicated by the fact that many of Zen’s traditional stories about itself are contradicted by historical scholarship. For that matter, modern scholars don’t always speak with one voice about what really happened either. This makes the crafting of a single narrative quite the challenge. Which story do I tell? And what do we do with the traditional stories that don’t match historical records?
Zen history as described in Zen centers and monasteries follows an established trajectory. The story begins with the life of the Buddha and then moves on to the development of Mahayana Buddhism, the major tradition of which Zen is a part. This is followed by the story of the Six Patriarchs, the founders of Zen in China.
After the Six Patriarchs period comes Tang dynasty Zen, sometimes called the Golden Age of Zen. Here we meet the great masters remembered in the enigmatic koans that Zen is famous for. Zen is transmitted to Korea and Vietnam. As we approach the end of the first millennium C .E ., we see the emergence of the schools of Zen that exist today. Zen takes root in Japan and flourishes. And, finally, we reach the modern era and the establishment of Zen outside Asia. The thread that runs throughout this story is the unbroken lineage of awakened masters who transmitted the Buddha’s enlightenment directly to each other through the centuries.
This is the standard story, but much of the standard story suffers from a lack of historical corroboration. And in recent decades several academic histories have been published that contradict the standard story and dismantle much of the lineage.
However, many of the academic efforts to document Zen’s history are unsatisfactory in their own way. While I rely on scholarly research into names, dates, and who did what, a remarkable number of current scholars specializing in Zen history seem not to grasp anything about what Zen Buddhism is. Academic histories dealing with Zen, and many about Buddhism generally, are like books about the history of opera written by tone-deaf people who know nothing about music. And some of them clearly hate opera and don’t know why anyone listens to it.
So telling the story of Zen involves diplomatic negotiation between Zen’s traditional narratives and historical scholarship, and that isn’t simple. I also want to emphasize that this is a history of Zen, not the history of Zen or everything that ever happened in Zen, which would take a library full of books to tell. Instead, it’s a story of how Zen came to be what it is today, and it’s as honest a story as I can tell given the challenges to telling any story at all.
Any history of Buddhism logically begins with the presumed founder, the man named Siddhartha Gautama who came to be called the Buddha—the One Who Is Awake. That said, we don’t know much about him. In fact, outside of Buddhist scriptures, records, and commentaries, there is so little evidence of his life that we cannot say for certain that he lived at all.
The sad truth is that we know nearly nothing for certain about early Buddhism. The few records we have of the early centuries appear to have been written by people with doctrinal or institutional axes to grind. Particularly given the near absence of contemporary corroboration and that the records often contradict each other, we cannot assume any of it is factual.
Buddhist literature says that the Buddha was a prince who left his privileged life on a quest to realize enlightenment and be relieved from suffering. After much difficulty he succeeded, and then he spent the rest of his life teaching others how to realize enlightenment also. This beloved story evolved over time, reaching its classic form in Ashvaghosa’s epic poem, the Buddhacarita, in the second century C.E .
We have no way to know if any of this story is based on the actual life of a once-living man. This is not to say the story has no value. Great myths don’t need to be factual to express truths; see Joseph Campbell or Carl Jung on that point. From the perspective of history, however, the Buddha is more of a hypothesis than a person.
Standard scholarship places Siddhartha Gautama’s hypothetical life somewhere in the fifth or sixth century B.C.E . Academically proposed dates for his death range from 486 B.C.E . to as late as 350 B.C.E .
In 2013 traces of an older, Vedic-style shrine—from between the eighth and the seventh century B.C.E .—were discovered in Lumbini, Nepal, at the site long venerated as the Buddha’s birthplace. This may mean that the Buddha lived longer ago than we thought. Or—more likely, I think—it may mean that early myth makers settled on an established sacred site as the place the World Honored One was born.
This leaves us with the teachings, and those are disputed also. The texts assumed to be the oldest scriptures unquestionably were rewritten over the centuries, although it’s hard to say how much. Even so, some scholars find the teachings in these early scriptures to be the only compelling argument for a historical Buddha. “This mass of teachings all has a consistency and a coherence that point to a single original intelligence,” writes Karen Armstrong, “and it is hard to see them as a corporate creation.” 1 Some of the sermons recorded in early scriptures might really have been spoken by the Buddha, Armstrong continues, although we can’t say for certain which ones those might be.
I am inclined to agree with Armstrong. However, I can remember my first Zen teacher, the late John Daido Loori, saying that if research proves that the Buddha never existed as a historical person, it wouldn’t matter. The teachings, tested and practiced for twenty-five centuries, speak for themselves.
According to the standard history of early Buddhism, the Buddha spent most of his life in northern India, mostly in an area now occupied by the Indian states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. If that is so, he probably spoke Magadhi, which was a Prakrit, or a Middle Indo-Aryan language related to Sanskrit. And if that’s so, at the time he probably lived there would have been no written language in which to record what he said.
At first, Buddhist scriptures were preserved by monks and nuns who memorized and chanted them. This is not at all impossible; the much more ancient Vedas, texts related to Hinduism, had already been passed on for centuries in the same way. In the first century B.C.E ., the Buddhists of Sri Lanka are said to have committed their entire scriptural canon into writing. This was the basis of the Pali canon, so called because it was written in another Prakrit called Pali. Note that the oldest extant copy of the Pali canon dates to about the eighth century C.E ., however, and we don’t know how much that copy resembles the first-century B.C.E . version.
The Pali canon has three major sections: the Suttapitaka, which are sutras or sermons of the Buddha and his chief disciples; the Vinayapitaka, or just Vinaya, which are the rules of the monastic order; and the Abhidhamma, detailed commentaries explaining natural and physical processes and how the teachings relate to them. Of these, the Suttapitaka and Vinaya have some claim to being old enough to be the words of the Buddha. The Abhidhamma was almost certainly composed and added somewhat later.
Meanwhile, back on the Indian subcontinent, multiple Sanskrit chanting lineages were established. Only fragments of these remain, but before the Sanskrit sutras were lost many were translated into Chinese and some into Tibetan, and from these translations another version of the Suttapitaka has been patched together. Corresponding Chinese and Pali texts are sometimes similar and sometimes not, and which version might be closer to an “original” is often a matter of opinion.
To confuse matters further, in the 1990s scroll fragments unearthed in Afghanistan and Pakistan proved to be the oldest existing copies of these earliest Buddhist scriptures. The scrolls are in Gandhari, another Middle Indo-Aryan language, and date from the first century B.C.E . to the third century C.E . Scholars at first hoped the Gandhari scrolls would shed some light on which scriptures, the Chinese/Tibetan or Pali, were more “original,” but that was not to be. Here and there, analyses of chronology and language reveal that something was added or changed. But the consensus at the moment is that most of what we have of these scripture lineages are less like branches of a tree and more like a braided river—a single river with multiple channels that have come to be separated by sediment deposits. 2
I have written this book assuming that the core teachings of these early scriptures originated with a person we identify as the Buddha, but I acknowledge that we don’t know that for certain. And please note that in identifying the uncertainty concerning the dating of early Buddhist scriptures, I don’t intend to disparage them; there is considerable wisdom in these texts. It’s important to understand that Buddhism has a different relationship to its scriptures from that of the Abrahamic religions—the “people of the book”—more familiar in the West. We tend to think that scriptures must come with some sort of divine authority to be believed without question. Buddhists would argue that what is written in scriptures should stand or fall on its own merit.
In Buddhism, the scriptures are to truth what a road sign is to a destination. They are valuable pointers to insight, but not insight itself. In these same scriptures, the Buddha advises us to not believe anything on someone else’s authority but to realize the truth of it for ourselves. 3
As soon as Westerners first distinguished “Buddhism” as a distinctive part of Asian spiritual tradition, they began to impose on it their own ideas of what it should be. Indeed, the term Buddhism itself is a Western invention, first used by a British writer in a text published in 1797, which I’m told has no precise counterpart in Asian languages.
Westerners from the nineteenth century to the present have expressed the belief that there must be an “original” or “true” Buddhism—the pure teachings of the historical Buddha—that has been all but obliterated, buried under centuries of Asian mysticism and cultural bric-a-brac. Further, it’s presumed this original Buddhism was something very much like the modern, humanistic philosophies many educated Westerners embrace.
The historian David McMahan wrote of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Buddhologists:
Orientalist scholars located “true Buddhism” in the texts of the ancient past and delimited it to carefully selected teachings, excluding any consideration of living Buddhists, except reformers who themselves were modernizing their tradition in dialogue with western modernity…. Sympathetic Orientalists presented the Buddha as a protoscientific naturalist in his own time. 4
Romantic if improbable notions that the Buddha was an ancient, Asian sage whose teachings were entirely compatible with modern, Western ideals persist to this day. All the messy, mystical, unmodern stuff that permeates Buddhist scriptures is a result of later interpolation, the argument goes.
I acknowledge that many things are possible. As I’ve said, the few records we have of very early Buddhism are fragmented, contradictory, and largely uncorroborated. There may very well have been an early Buddhism that bore little resemblance to what it became later, and perhaps that early Buddhism was somehow more scientific, egalitarian, and less mystical than the religion’s later incarnations. But regardless of how appealing that may sound, the true contours of early Buddhism are lost to us.
It may be tempting to sort which parts of scripture are “original” and which are not by judging them against our twenty-first-century worldview. For example, we might want to dismiss supernatural elements as additions but accept nonsupernatural passages as authentic. But Karen Armstrong issues a warning. “We cannot be certain that the more normal incidents are any more original to the legend than these so-called signs and wonders,” she writes. 5 And it should be obvious that to judge authenticity according to which texts are in accord with what we already think is to succumb to the ancient demon tempter Confirmation Bias.
Some recent popular books also have speculated that the Buddha wasn’t from Nepal and India at all but was perhaps a Persian or Scythian. This hypothetical Persian or Scythian Buddha wouldn’t have been in contact with the Brahmanic culture of the Ganges plain, and the elements of Brahmanism that permeate the early scriptures must have been added later, it is argued. Anything is possible; but again, I see more wishful thinking and projection in such views than corroborated history.
My purpose in this book is to trace the history of Zen, a tradition that emerged in China more than a thousand years after the presumed life of the Buddha. I make no claims about any fabled original Buddhism. Instead I will discuss the Buddhism that reached China in the first century C.E . And the theory that best explains the development of that Buddhism, the theory that fits the available data and critical analyses, is that it first developed alongside Brahmanism within the culture of the Ganges plain in the middle first millennium B.C.E . Even so, there was plenty of opportunity for other cultures and religious/philosophical traditions to influence it before it reached China.
The early history of Zen in China also is hard to pin down. Even academic scholars must resort to piecing fragments together from very few sources, none of which can be trusted completely. Further, what records that do exist have been edited and reedited over the years by many hands. At times the story of early Zen turns into a story about the story: What do we know? How do we know it?
In 1900, a Daoist monk named Wang Yuanlu discovered a long-hidden door in the centuries-old Magao cave complex in Dunhuang, China. Behind the door was one of the most significant archeological finds of modern times—a library of twenty to thirty thousand scrolls and other documents that had been untouched for at least nine hundred years.
The collection did not remain intact for long. Soon European and Japanese archeologists arrived to scoop up scrolls for their museums, unfortunately before the library was properly cataloged. Today the Dunhuang scrolls are scattered around the world in dozens of collections. This has frustrated systematic study of the texts, although scholars now are collaborating to publish images of the texts online to make them available to other scholars. Only a portion of the Dunhuang library scrolls touch directly on Zen history, but some of those that do open quite the can of worms.
Most of the familiar stories told today about Zen’s origins or about the revered early Chinese masters come from sources compiled in China during the Song dynasty (960–1279) or later. However, the Dunhuang scrolls reveal that many of the Song dynasty sources are more fan fiction than history. The storyteller writing about these masters is put into the awkward position of trying to sort which parts of their stories might really date to their lifetimes and which are legends that emerged later.
During the time of Zen’s development in China—roughly, the sixth through the thirteenth centuries—the Zen tradition changed course several times as rival teachers and sects gained and lost popularity and imperial favor. Along the way, archival records were revised to enhance the status and authority of the winners. Beneath the serene and enigmatic surface of the traditional narratives are a tangled mess of ancient rivalries and doctrinal disputes.
Many of these centuries-old disputes are relevant to us today, because they are still part of Zen, even if we aren’t conscious of them. Traces of them remain in koans, commentaries, and liturgies. Current historical scholarship that brings these old disputes to light isn’t always reflected in Zen centers and temples.
At the same time, the academic studies suffer from their own blind spots and bizarre conclusions. Academicians have adopted the astonishing attitude that they must not consider what Zen clergy and teachers say about their own tradition, because “insiders” cannot be objective. This seems to me to be akin to discounting the work of Catholic theologians in deciphering Saint Augustine or the meaning of the Eucharist. One strongly suspects that Western academics would take a different attitude toward a similar tradition that had developed among people who were not so, well, not Western.
A theme running through some recent scholarship is that Zen is mostly fakery—a game of deception that doesn’t take its own rhetoric seriously. I’ve found current scholars who are openly antagonistic to Zen, apparently to demonstrate to their peers that they haven’t fallen for the hoax. This is not “objective.”
It’s also the case that there are still big holes in historical research. Zen in Vietnam is largely unexplored, and much less Western academic concern has been given to Korea than to Japan. Even robustly plowed-over Japanese Buddhist history could use more attention paid to the Edo period. Just a hint, Buddhologists.
I hate jargony books, too, but sometimes modern English won’t stretch to cover ancient Asian concepts. So, like it or not, I’m going to have to use some terms that may not be widely understood.
Let’s start with the term dharma. This is a Sanskrit word with no English equivalent. Its root word means “to uphold” or “to support.” It’s a word found in the Vedas, the ancient scriptures of India that are centuries older than Buddhism. In those texts, the word dharma often refers to sacred rituals as well as the cosmic law that binds the universe. By the time the Bhagavad Gita was written (fifth to second century B.C.E .), it had come to mean “sacred duty”: the obligations and conduct required of a righteous person. It’s as close a word as can be found in Sanskrit to mean “religion,” in a broadly understood sense.
In Buddhism, dharma (in Pali, dhamma ) often is defined as “the teachings of the Buddha.” But the word usually is used by Buddhists to mean not just doctrine and practice but also the ineffable reality to which the teachings point.
As in Hinduism, dharma in Buddhism can be understood as the law or principle that orders the cosmos. In some contexts, dharma can refer to an event or phenomenon as a manifestation of reality. The meaning of the word expands as insight deepens. Definitions don’t do it justice.
Sometimes the terms Buddhism and buddha-dharma are used as synonyms, but I like to make a distinction between them. Buddhism is about history, anthropology, institutions, culture, a body of doctrines. Buddha-dharma is something else.
The word practice comes up a lot, in Zen centers and in this book. This is practice in the sense of application—the way a doctor practices medicine—as well as practice in the sense of gaining in skill. Zen is very much a tradition of practice rather than a tradition of theory or philosophy, although of course some philosophy is involved.
Throughout this book I refer to Zen teachers more often than Zen masters. “Zen master” can come across as a smarmy Western construct imbued with mystical baggage that is often better avoided. In Japan, one with authority to guide the Zen practice of others is called sensei, “teacher.” An older sensei may be called roshi, “old master.” Note that there are no official, across-the-board criteria for who is designated “roshi.” A teacher who is called “roshi” shouldn’t be presumed to be more qualified than one who isn’t. In Japanese, “Zen master” is zenshi , but that’s a title used only for especially venerated deceased teachers, not living ones.
Koans are the cryptic and paradoxical questions asked by Zen teachers. They defy rational answers—the “What is the sound of one hand?” stuff. Formal koan introspection first became part of Zen during the Song dynasty and will be more extensively discussed in that part of our story. However, koans do come up in the earlier chapters, so the word needs to be defined.
Readers may be confused by my use of temple , monastery, or sometimes convent as synonyms. In the West we think of a temple as a single building, but in Asia the equivalent of a temple is a complex of buildings with separate designated purposes. Sometimes there are separate living quarters for monastics, but in some parts of Buddhist history monastics ate, slept, and meditated in one stand-alone hall but attended lectures in another and engaged in liturgy services in a third.
About “monastics”: I have followed the practice of Zen Mountain Monastery of Mount Tremper, New York, and adopted monastic as a gender-neutral noun, standing in for “monk or nun.” The Zen record is silent on the activities of nuns for long stretches of time, but there are many clues that nuns were engaged in the same challenges and developments as monks. To say monastics instead of just, always, monks acknowledges the silent presence of nuns.
And, finally, there’s the word Zen itself. Zen is the Japanese name for a tradition that originated in China, where it was called Chan. Although we might think of Chan as originating in the late fifth century, when Bodhidharma (probably) arrived in China, I was surprised to learn that the tradition itself wasn’t commonly known as Chan until the tenth century or so.
Chan is a Chinese rendering of the Sanskrit dhyana, a deeply absorbed meditative state. Zen is called Son or Soen in Korea and Thien in Vietnam. For the sake of simplicity, most of the time I will just call it Zen, a word that has been absorbed into English.
A note on proper names: Many people in Zen history have multiple names. They have birth names, ordination names, sometimes other honorific names. In this book I have stuck to whatever name is most commonly used for a historic figure rather than clutter up the narrative with explanations that the person originally named John Smith was ordained Dharma Peace, but later he took the name Great Effort, and as abbot he was Glorious Mountain, but the emperor posthumously named him That Old Guy. Standard Pinyin spelling is used for Chinese names and revised romanization for Korean names.
The dreaded R word that sends many people scrambling for the exits in screaming panic is, of course, religion. Is Buddhism, including Zen, a religion? There are Zen teachers I respect very much who say it isn’t and others I respect just as much who insist it is. Although I lean toward the latter opinion, on the whole it’s not something that’s worth arguing about. However, even though Buddhism teaches that all classifications and nomenclatures are artificial, sometimes when writing a book one must resort to naming things. So sometimes I refer to Buddhism as religion. But let me provide my own definition of religion for you.
The standard definition of religion in English dictionaries refers to something that primarily involves worship of gods, and Zen is not that. But Zen is not entirely alone in being not that. If you look at all the traditions in the world that get labeled religion, the one thing they all have in common is that they are all about experiencing or connecting with something greater than the limited, individual self, but that something is not always understood to be an omnipotent or supernatural being.
The word religion has obvious Latin roots, but etymologists disagree on exactly what those roots are. One guess is that it comes from religare. Ligare means “to bind or join together”; the re- prefix suggests binding together something that was severed. Buddhism can be understood as a means for people lost in illusion to reconnect to reality, including the reality of who they truly are. I think religare fits it nicely.
I point also to the definition of religious faith by the twentieth-century Christian theologian Paul Tillich. “Faith is the state of being ultimately concerned,” he wrote in his lovely book Dynamics of Faith (1957). He was explicit that the faith he described had nothing to do with merely believing religious doctrines and claims. “Faith as ultimate concern is an act of the total personality. It happens in the center of the personal life and includes all its elements,” Tillich said. 6 Not a bad description of Zen practice, I say.
The term lineage means a lot of things in Buddhism. For example, to this day most Buddhist monks and nuns are ordained under the rules and vows of one of the three extant versions of the Vinaya. Because the Vinaya provides that fully ordained monks (and nuns, for nuns’ ordinations) be present at any full ordination, it’s understood that these ordination lineages have been unbroken since the time of the Buddha.
In Zen, lineage refers to a lineage of teachers who have worked face-to-face with each other through the generations. A Zen teacher is one who has received authority to teach from his or her Zen teacher, who received authority from his or her teacher, and so on. These student-teacher relationships have been charted going back many centuries. A Zen teacher is sometimes referred to as a dharma heir or lineage holder. Some parts of Japanese Zen have developed grades of lineage holders in which lineage holding by itself doesn’t necessarily confer teaching authority. But in most of Zen, through most of its history, it hasn’t been that complicated.
This passing of the dharma torch through the centuries is referred to as transmission . However, most Zen teachers will tell you that nothing is “transmitted.” Transmission is more a matter of a teacher recognizing that the student has realized and clarified the dharma and is ready to begin guiding others. As we’ll see, however, the history of the lineages leads us into controversial territory.
If anything is sacred in Zen, it’s lineage. Through lineage, Zen presents itself as a tradition that goes back to the historical Buddha, and even to mythical buddhas before Buddha. In most if not all temples, the names of the ancestors are chanted weekly if not daily. One of my teachers, the late Jion Susan Postal, described having to write the names of her dharma ancestors—all twenty-five-plus centuries of them—in black ink on white silk as part of the preparation for her transmission ceremony. “Thank goodness for Wite-Out,” she said.
In truth, the lineage charts were first created in Tang dynasty (618–906 C.E .) China, and they were revised several times before they reached their current form. I believe the ones we have today are accurate—well, mostly accurate—going back eight to nine hundred years, at least, which is still impressive. And I don’t see any reason to change the transmission tradition going forward; it’s proved to be a useful if not perfect way to maintain the integrity of the tradition. But viewing the history of Zen through the prism of lineage creates a distorted view.
For one thing, the dominance of patriarchal lineage as the defining characteristic of Zen effectively erased women from Zen history. We know there were communities of Zen nuns wherever Zen established itself, but only a scant handful of nuns from centuries ago are remembered today. In some cases, male teachers who don’t fit on the charts were brushed aside by history also, although it was more common to alter the charts to fit them in.
It’s also the case that for most of Zen’s history, monks (and possibly nuns) rarely worked with only one teacher. In the early centuries it was more common for a monk to stay with one teacher only temporarily—a few months or years—before moving on to another. This created connection and a healthy cross-pollination among the Zen communities. It also means that, as a teaching tradition, Zen was far more dynamic and complex than one might guess from the charts.
In this book I have attempted to put less emphasis on the Lives of Great Men and more on the development of practice and doctrine. Wait, did I just say doctrine ? Zen has doctrines ? Don’t Zen teachers say that Zen doesn’t teach doctrines?
It’s generally true that Zen doesn’t teach doctrines, especially if we define doctrines as a set of beliefs. Zen discourages merely believing things. However, “doctrines” can also be teachings and principles, and as we’ll see, Zen formed and developed within a particular stream of teachings and principles that flowed from India into China and eventually to the rest of the world.
Zen teachers rarely just blurt out that “Zen teaches X,” however, because memorizing and accepting doctrines is not the Way. Belief, or intellectual accord, is not enlightenment. The danger of teaching doctrine is that too many people will accept the doctrine as truth without developing genuine insight.
What is realized and called “enlightenment” (or, in Asian languages, “awakening”) is a reality so far removed from the way we normally perceive reality that explaining it simply doesn’t work. Language itself developed to describe conventional reality by slicing it into verbs and nouns, subjects and objects. How does one explain that which is unsliced? Nothing we can say is going to be exactly right.
Most schools of Buddhism have some sort of mediated or incremental system that will, if faithfully practiced, open the student to her or his genuine insight. These systems usually involve learning doctrines that provide a provisional or approximate stand-in for insight until the real thing comes along. The danger with this sort of practice is that people often mistake the provisional for the ultimate. Instead of realizing enlightenment, they become lost in a weed patch of beliefs and opinions.
Zen takes a more direct approach. Most new students are taught little else but how to meditate. Few teachings one might grasp conceptually are offered. The teacher’s formal presentations of dharma to assembled students will often be incomprehensible until the student has developed the insight to comprehend them.
The incomprehensible dharma talks and the literature filled with outrageous non sequiturs (“A monk asked Yunmen, ‘What is Buddha?’ Yunmen answered, ‘Dried dung.’ ” 7 ) give the impression that Zen is little more than exotic Asian Dadaism, which is not at all the case. Zen draws upon a rich body of principles developed from many generations of practice and insight. These are not meant to be believed uncritically but used as guides under the mentorship of a teacher. In time, the student breaks through the conceptual fog and clarifies what is being expressed.
Zen is famous for deemphasizing the study of sacred texts. Zen is said to be a “mind-to-mind transmission of dharma without reliance on words and letters.” Yet, remarkably, it has managed to accumulate vast amounts of commentaries and other literature over the centuries. Should all those words and letters be ignored?
I think reliance is the key word here. Trying to understand Zen through the written word alone is foolish. Zen is a practice of directly engaging with reality without conceptual filters. Words and letters are representations of reality, not reality itself, and they can’t be relied upon alone.
On the other hand, it’s important to remember that Zen developed in a Confucian culture that venerated mastery of philosophical literature. Men and women entering into Zen practice probably assumed that studying the literature was the key to enlightenment. Chinese masters must have often admonished students to get their faces out of scrolls and spend more time in meditation.
However, it’s a mistake to assume those same Chinese masters would have advised students to ignore the scriptures, commentaries, poems, sermons, and koans they left us. This vast literature offers invaluable support for practice and guidance on the path to insight. It’s also the case that many of the revered Zen teachers of history who advised against reliance on scriptures had themselves studied scriptures as young monks, and they often drew upon those scriptures in the talks they gave to their students, who were presumed to be familiar with those same scriptures. To not rely upon words and letters is not the same as avoiding them. So this book will take note of the teachings that Zen does present, albeit in its own subtle and enigmatic way, and provide brief introductions to them.
But what is history but stories about people, including Lives of Great Men and Women ? And Zen ancestors do tend to make great stories. There’s the story of the revered patriarch who faced exile and execution. There’s the story of a Chinese peasant girl who walked away from a life of farm labor to become a fearsome debater. There’s the story of the illegitimate son of an emperor who spent his life rebelling against authority. Along the way there is birth and death, war and peace, intrigue and inspiration—the stuff human life is made of.
Some years ago, I received jukai. Jukai is a ceremony in which a lay Zen practitioner vows to observe the precepts and walk the Buddhist path. As preparation, I sewed a rakusu, a miniature monastic robe worn over the chest like a bib. Doing this required stitching little strips of cloth together in a pattern meant to suggest rice paddies, all the while reciting the ancient refuges—“I take refuge in the Buddha; I take refuge in the dharma; I take refuge in the sangha.” Sangha refers to the fellowship of Buddhists, whether one community or all Buddhists everywhere.
One day, while the rakusu project was ongoing, I came across a photo of a Laotian monk’s robe drying on a clothesline. The robe was sewn with the same rice paddy pattern I was stitching into my rakusu.
And this moved me deeply. Time and distance collapsed; cultural and sectarian differences melted away. With my vows and stitches I was entering the great sangha, the community of people walking the Buddha’s path throughout space and time.
In ways that may be hard for an observer to understand, Buddhist history is not simply a matter of intellectual interest to those who practice it, because that history is subtly but inextricably woven into the living practice. And this is true because Buddhism is not a belief system, a philosophy, or something that can be done in isolation. It is the ongoing, collaborative effort of the students and teachers, the monastics and laypeople, who receive teachings from the ancestors and pass them on to new generations.
Zen is one stream of that collaborative effort, now branching into Western lineages even as it continues to flow in Asia. And, if I may say so, the history of Zen is a great story. I hope you enjoy it.