This is the English translation of the original Chinese words Dongshan Famen. Dongshan (“East Mountain”) refers to one of the two mountains (or two peaks) of Mount Shuangfeng at Huangmei (in present-day Hubei province), on which Hongren established the first Chan Buddhist community in the history of China during the 7th century. The term Dongshan Famen was used in two related senses. One refers to the East Mountain teaching, namely, the Chan teaching of Hongren, and also of his teacher Daoxin. The other refers to the East Mountain lineage or community, namely, the lineage of Daoxin and Hongren. Since Shenxiu was Hongren’s disciple and identified his own teaching as the transmission of the East Mountain teaching, it would be legitimate to include Shenxiu and his teaching in the Dongshan Famen. However, the qualitative development of Shenxiu’s teaching from the Dongshan Famen is also commonly acknowledged. Although Shenxiu never regarded himself as an initiator of the Northern school of Chan, and the demarcation between the East Mountain teaching and the Northern school can never be clear-cut, scholars have generally agreed to borrow the convention and treat Shenxiu as the leading figure of the Northern school for reasons of convenience.
A Chan master of the Tang dynasty and a disciple of Mazu Daoyi, Dayi was born into a family of Xu in Xujiang of Quzhou (in present-day Zhejiang). At the age of 20, he received the monastic precepts. Around 770, he joined Mazu’s monastery. Before 779, the end of the Dali era, he moved to Mount Ehu in Xinzhou (in present-day Shangrao, Jiangxi). During his stay at Mount Ehu, he met many officials and literati. One was Liu Taizhen (?–789), who invited Dayi to come down from the mountain to teach in the nearby city. Due to his fame, the imperial court invited Dayi to the capital. Dayi arraived in Changan in 803 and took up residence at Cien Temple. He lectured to Emperor Dezong (r. 779–805) and attended Dezong’s birthday celebration to debate with other religious scholars. His lucid expression of the non-dualistic perspective of Chan won great respect from the royal court and from monks and ordinary people alike. When the next emperor, Shunzong (r. 805–806), was just a crown prince, Dayi lectured to him and impressed him by defeating a dharma teacher’s criticism of the southern Chan. Dayi retured to Mount Ehu in 805 and remained there until his death. Dayi’s preaching at the capital and his success helped the Hongzhou school to be recognized nationally as orthodox Chan.
The fourth son of Emperor Kangxi (r. 1661–1722), Yongzheng was chosen by his father to be the third emperor of the Qing dynasty. A strong and diligent emperor, he ruled the empire for 13 years. His interest in Buddhism started in his youth. He had a close relationship with Buddhist monks such as the Tibetan master Zhangjia Hutuketu (1642–1714) and the Linji Chan master Jialing Xingyin (1671–1726). Even when he was just a prince, he sponsored Chan temples like the Bailin monastery, where he participated in the practice of meditation. His support of Buddhism during his reign included ordering the compilation of the Dragon Edition of the Buddhist canon (longzang) and loosening of policy on official ordinations. However, what is most interesting about Yongzheng is that he was perhaps the only Chinese emperor in history who claimed to have attained enlightenment. It was said that his teacher, the Tibetan master Zhangjia Hutuketu, confirmed his enlightenment. Yongzheng also led a small group of practitioners to study Chan in the imperial court, where he acted like a Chan master to help others attain enlightenment.
Yongzheng compiled the Yuxuan Yulu (Imperial Selection of Recorded Sayings) in 1733. It demonstrated his confidence in his own authority to rewrite the history of Chan Buddhism in accordance with his own criteria, attempting to go beyond sectarian biases by remaking the list of Chan masters and reselecting the Chan yulu. For example, the Chinese Madhyamaka master Sengzhao was selected as the first Chan master; Danxia Tianran and Deshan Xuanjian, on the other hand, were excluded because of their iconoclastic behavior; Yunqi Zhuhong was included, even though Zhuhong’s lineage and dharma transmission was not so clear in the eyes of many of Yongzheng’s contemporaries; and the Daoist master Zhang Boduan (987–1082) made the list as well, under the terms of Yongzheng’s syncretistic perspective. In 1734, Yongzheng compiled the Yulu Zongjing Dagang (Imperially Recorded Essentials of Records of the Source Mirror) to condense Yongming Yanshou’s Zongjing Lu into 20 fascicles. In 1735, Yongzheng compiled the Yulu Jinghai Yidi (Imperially Recorded One Drop from the Sea of Scriptures). He thus aligned himself with Yanshou’s syncretistic position on uniting Chan and scriptural teachings. However, the combination of political power and religious authority that Yongzheng believed he rightly had led to his unnessary interference in the Chan sectarian polemic between disciples of Miyun Yuanwu and Hanyue Fazang, and he sided with one sect and severely condemned the other with the imperial order.
This is a special form of pracrice that helps to inspire, trigger, and verify a student’s enlightment through conversations or questions and answers between a master and a student. It gradually developed and became a famous expedient means characteristic of Chan Buddhism. “Encounter dialogue” is an English translation of the modern Japanese phrase kien mondo (Chinese: jiyuan wenda), derived from ancient Chinese words such as yingji (“responding to opportunities”), linji wenda (“questions and answers at the opportunity of encounter”), and jiyuan yuju (“words and sentences uttered in terms of opportunities and conditions”). It appeared in the 9th-century text of the Beishan Lu and in the later texts of the Zutang Ji and the Jingde Chuandeng Lu. Often Chan encounter dialogues are seen as equivalent to, or representative of, Chan yulu (recorded sayings). It is true that the nature of the encounter dialogue texts is recorded sayings or transcribed oral teachings; however, the concept of yulu as a Chan literary genre involves the collection of public sermons (shangtang shuofa, or shizhong), poetic writings (jisong), and records of activities and biographies (xinglu or xingzhuang), more than just encounter dialogues.
Contemporary scholars have pointed out the antecedents of Chan encounter dialogues in the early phase of Chan and in the early years of the middle phase of Chan. Chan encounter dialogues did not fall from the sky suddenly in mature form. They were the result of an evolving process in the search for a new rhetorical style, a new heuristic means, and a new form of religious practice within Chan Buddhism. The early Chan texts already involved the image of the master responding spontaneously to his students, the practice of “pointing at things and asking the meanings,” the use of metaphorical explanations, the justification for the social and interpersonal dimension of Chan practice, the ritual use of dialogues between teachers and students, the widespread employment of anecdotal materials and dialogue transcriptions, the fabrication of enlightenment narratives, and the genealogical structure making possible the transcription of both teachers’ and students’ sides of dialogue. All these antecedents paved the way for the advent of formal encounter dialogues.
The development of formal encounter dialogues underwent two stages. The first was the emergence of formal encounter dialogues in the mid-Tang period, roughly from the mid-8th to the mid-9th centuries, a period during which Mazu Daoyi, Shitou Xiqian, and their immediate disciples were active. This stage was marked by the fashion of using witty, indirect, paradoxical, and abrupt phrases in the dialogues of teachers and students. Zongmi’s Chan Prolegomenon (Chanyuan Zhuquanji Duxu), written around 833, clearly confirmed the popularity of this type of encounter dialogue and offered typical examples of how the masters followed the conditions and responded to the encounters at the given moment to clear the latter’s attachments: when someone asked how to cultivate the way, the master answered that there was no need for cultivation; when someone sought liberation, the master asked who bound him. At this stage, the fictionalized accounts of enlightenment experiences also started to develop, as witnessed by the Baolin Zhuan and other texts, in which one could find such made-up stories as Mazu’s awakening by Huairang through an encounter dialogue. They are the forerunners of the later mature encounter dialogues.
The second stage occurred during the late Tang and Five Dynasties, roughly from the mid-9th to the mid-10th centuries, a period during which encounter dialogues reached their full maturity. This maturity was marked by the emergence and development of diverse forms of formal encounter dialogues, especially those using absurd, illogical, and iconoclastic language; non-verbal, graphic symbols such as drawing circles; and physical gestures/actions, such as shouting and hitting. Beginning with Mazu’s third-generation disciples, such as Yangshan Huiji, and becoming influential in the hands of masters such as Linji Yixuan, Deshan Xuanjian, Xuefeng Yicun, and their disciples, these mature dialogues tended to create shock effects and served to interrupt the students’ procession of thought or their conventional way of thinking. It was also during this period that creating fictional, mature encounter dialogues and attributing them retrospectively to the mid-Tang or even earlier masters became a fashion. Thus both lively oral encounter dialogues and retrospectively created encounter anecdotes were mixed up and transcribed in various kinds of texts, including the Xuanmen Shengzhou Ji (Collection of the Sacred Heir of the Mysterious School), compiled in 898–901, and the Xu Baolin Zhuan (Supplement to the Biographies from the Treasure Groves [Temple]), compiled in 907–910, and some of them were preserved in various epitaphs written by literati and officials. The compilation of these transcribed and created mature encounter dialogues from the late Tang and Five Dynasties culminated in the Zutang Ji, produced in 952, and later became the essential constinuents of all three genres of Chan literature: the transmission of the lamp history, the yulu collection, and the gong’an literature.
This is the English translation of the Chinese term wu (Jap. satori). It is also rendered as awakening. Chan enlightenment models the Buddha, who attained nirvana under the bodhi tree. It is a synonym for the attainment of Buddha-hood in Mahayana Buddhism. However, in the Chan Buddhist context, enlightenment also means the realization of one’s own Buddha-nature (jianxing). It marks a successful transformation of the human mind and personhood and is considered the goal of all Chan soteriological practices. Chan traditions also believe that many Buddhas, patriarchs, and masters achieved this goal. Although enlightenment is often described as ineffable, many Chan texts are Chan discourses on enlightenment and have been seen by the Chan followers as the records of enlightenment.
The English translation of this original Chinese title is Treatise on the Two Entrances and Four Practices. It is a work attributed to Bodhidharma, who was considered the first patriarch and founder of Chinese Chan Buddhism. The Continued Biographies of Eminent Monks (Xu Gaoseng Zhuan), which was first completed in 645 by Daoxuan (596–667), was the earliest source to mention and quote this work of Bodhidharma. Among the Dunhuang documents discovered in the 20th century, the Records of the Masters and Disciples of the Laṅkā[vatāra] (Lengqie Shizi Ji), by Jingjue (683–ca. 750), completed during 713–716, also contained a longer version of this work with a preface by Tanlin (a lay follower, not synonymous with Monk Lin, the friend of the second patriarch, Huike). A more complete version of the Erru Sixing Lun was later recovered from the Dunhuang documents by D. T. Suzuki and published in 1935.
This newly discovered version includes not only the treatise itself and Tanlin’s preface, similar to the version included in the Lengqie Shizi Ji, but also two parts of the record of dialogues. The first part involves some lecture materials and anonymous dialogues between master and student. The second part involves both named and anonymous dialogues, many of which are attributed to an otherwise unknown master, Yuan, and to Huike. Scholars have debated the authorship of these two parts. A leading view is that the first part is the sayings of Bodhidharma, recorded probably by Tanlin, and the second part is likely a product of Huike and his disciples. The colloquial language used has made these two parts significantly different from the literary style of the treatise itself. Attention has been called to the importance of these records of dialogues as the precursor for the Chan yulu genre.
Needless to say, much of the study of Bodhidharma has been focused on the treatise itself. The text, probably written by Tanlin, summarizes the doctrines taught by Bodhidharma as remembered by the disciples. His doctrines involve two major aspects: to enter into or realize enlightenment through principle (liru) and through practice (xingru). The first aspect teaches a student to experience one’s true nature through meditation and to go beyond written teachings. The second aspect involves four types of practice: to accept suffering as past karma without complaint, to remain unmoved while going through all circumstances, to stop craving, and to follow the dharma and perform the six perfections. Both aspects lead to the final awakening to principle (li), which equals one’s true or pure nature. The text obviously utilizes the teachings of emptiness, non-duality, and Buddha-nature from the Perfection of Wisdom literature, Madhyamika philosophy, and the tathāgatagarbha tradition of Indian Buddhism. Its emphasis on the transformation of the mind and on the correlation between enlightenment and the samsaric world captures well the imagination of later generations of Chan.
The English translation of the Sanskrit term upāya-kauśalya and its Chinese equivalent, fangbian or shishe. Upāya-kauśalya has also been translated in English as “skillful means” or “skill in means.” It is an extremely important concept in Mahayana and East Asian Buddhist traditions. The concept of expedient means originated in early Mahayana texts such as the Lotus Sūtra. It is said that the Buddha introduced the idea and demonstrated how he skillfully used various expedient means to lure unenlightened people onto the path to liberation. The notion of expedient means reveals the provisional nature of the Buddha’s teachings. Although Mahayana Buddhism uses this notion to legitimize its intended changes to Theravada Buddhist doctrines and considers it to be a practical virtue and stage of bodhisattva, the philosophical meanings underlying this concept and their influence are more profound than that.
The notion of expedient means presupposes that all Buddhas, bodhisattvas, or the dharma teachers’ instructions must adapt themselves to different environments, to different times, locations, and capacities of people. It regards all Buddhist teachings as student- or audience-oriented, and as situational and contextual. As a result, it allows for change and variety in Buddhist teachings. What stands behind such a liberal attitude toward the teachings is the ethical and pragmatic concern that all teachings must aim at effectively and flexibly helping other people to liberate themselves from suffering. It is only for this ethical and pragmatic purpose that all teachings, doctrines, or moral precepts are used as means. Once liberation is attained, there is no use for any teaching. The notion of expedient means thus gives a hand up to the liberal side in its battle against any fundamentalism. All teachings, no matter how great, have no ultimate legitimacy.
Chan Buddhism further develops this Mahayana trend. Despite the fact that many Chan masters use the teaching of emptiness or Buddha-nature, they assert that either emptiness or non-emptiness, Buddha-nature or no-Buddha-nature, are all but expedient means. They call these teachings, including their own, fangbian or shishe at the very moment they are using them, reminding their students to see these teachings as expedient means only. Sometimes they also use the expression yaofang (“medical prescription”) to describe the expedient nature of their various teachings. In practice, Chan Buddhism invents a lot of new teaching devices, such as gong’an (public cases of encounter dialogue), riddles, paradoxes, tautology, unconventional behavior, poetry, and so forth, offering great examples of using expedient means.