THE PRIMARY PROJECT OF THIS BOOK IS A DIRECT AND philosophical one: to describe the native conceptual framework of Ch’an in ancient China, to make it available to contemporary philosophical understanding and spiritual practice. This native understanding and practice of Ch’an is largely missing in contemporary American Zen because that conceptual framework was mostly lost in Ch’an’s migration from China through Japan to America. Indeed, that conceptual framework appears already lost in Japan, for little trace of it appears in the writings of the great Japanese scholar D. T. Suzuki, whose many books introduced Zen to the Western world. The reasons for this are surely complex and beyond the scope of this book. But as a generalized beginning toward that understanding, it could be said that Japan’s cultural proclivity was toward paring things down to elegant essentials, a minimalist aesthetic defined by simplicity and order, stillness and emptiness. Japan sent an army of cultural figures to China beginning in the eighth century (just after the Sixth Patriarch) to master and bring to Japan all of Chinese culture: arts, philosophy, even the language itself. Over the centuries that followed, this adopted culture seems to have been pared down to its minimalist essentials in every field. China’s poetry based on landscape images is purified in haiku to the briefest imagistic gesture. Much the same thing happened in painting, calligraphy, architecture, and even the tea ceremony, where a formalized ritual of tranquil emptiness replaced China’s relaxed Taoist practice. An it appears much the same thing happened to Ch’an, its philsophically complex and messy earthiness giving way to clean framework of stillness and order—the institutional Zen that migrated to America and Europe.
An unavoidable secondary task for this book is to document how the various aspects of Ch’an’s native understanding are misrepresented or altogether absent in the literature of American Zen. It is true that Ch’an/Zen is described as direct teaching from master to student outside of words and ideas. But again, the nature of such teachings and their goal of enlightenment is in fact defined by words and ideas, the conceptual framework within which they operate—and that framework has little to do with original Ch’an. It would be impossible to examine the private teachings of all modern American Zen teachers, but the absence of original Ch’an in the entire literature of American Zen, including all books by Zen teachers, seems good evidence that it is absent from those direct teachings as well.
To avoid disrupting China Root’s primary philosophical project, this secondary task is addressed in the Appendix. The near absence of original Ch’an in books about Zen (many by Zen masters) is a simple fact, and could only be documented by citing the entire literature. But Ch’an’s absence in contemporary Zen can be tellingly documented in the modern translations of original Ch’an texts (many also done by Zen teachers). The Appendix compares many of the translations in this book (all of them my own) with the standard translations that have shaped contemporary Zen, to show in detail how Ch’an’s conceptual framework is fundamentally misrepresented or simply lost in the translations. Translations that have comparisons in the Appendix are indicated with reference numbers.
On a larger scale, I have already translated the most widely used sangha-case (koan) collection, No-Gate Gateway (Wu Men Kuan), because it displays the whole Taoist/Ch’an conceptual framework especially well, using the root terms and concepts extensively. The intent was to show Ch’an returned to its native philosophical ground, a project that I explicitly address in the book’s introduction and apparatus. The distortions of previous translations can be seen by comparing passages of philosophical interest. And future translations will continue this reclamation of original Ch’an, including first a companion to this volume: a “Sourcebook of Original Zen.” This sourcebook will contain selections from Ch’an’s essential texts, thereby presenting Ch’an’s native conceptual framework in its own words. It will also trace China Root’s historical argument through texts that show how Ch’an’s native conceptual framework begins not in Indian Buddhism but in the early Taoist texts, and how that framework evolved through proto-Ch’an texts and on into mature Ch’an.
Finally, a note on names. Artist-intellectuals in ancient China adopted names having meanings that somehow represented their natures. This was strikingly true in the world of Ch’an, where the names adopted are especially colorful and philosophically revealing. Names are therefore translated here, rather than the usual strategy of leaving them in their untranslated romanized form (another way modern Zen translations fail to render the native world of Ch’an).