This book [Zongmi’s Chan Prolegomenon] is not only a means for coming to know of matters related to Zen; it is also a book that is valuable for coming to know Buddhism in general.
—Ui Hakuju, Zengen shosenshū tojo (1939)
Modern Japanese Zen has tended to foster a rather one-dimensional characterization of the Chan/Zen school’s slogan “mind-to-mind transmission; no involvement with the written word [yi xin chuan xin bu li wenzi].” For Japanese Zen it is common to imply that textual learning (gakumon) in Buddhism in general and personal experience (taiken) in Zen are separate realms. For instance, Yamamoto Genpō (1866–1961), the most famous Rinzai Zen master of early Shōwa Japan and sometimes called the second coming of Hakuin Ekaku (1685–1768), said that the crucial requirement for a Zen monk is the “mind of the Way” (dōshin), and that adding learning (gakumon) to this is like making a ferocious demon hold a metal cudgel (oni ni kanabō). Supplying a cudgel is like adding superfluous strength to a demon that is already strong.1 Even in Zen scholarship such a dichotomy between Zen mind and the word shows up. The Great Dictionary of Zen Studies (Zengaku daijiten), a multivolume Zen dictionary published by the Sōtō Zen school in Japan in the 1970s, begins its entry for “no involvement with the written word” with the following:
The slogan “no involvement with the written word; a separate transmission outside the canonical teachings” is spoken of as a special characteristic of the Zen school. Scholars of the teachings took as the main thing only the written words and theories of the sutras and treatises and thereby lost the true spirit of Buddhism. In the Zen school, the true dharma as real Buddhism does not depend upon the mere written word and the sutra teachings but is something transmitted from mind to mind. And so, valuing personal experience [taiken], Zen advocated the slogan “no involvement with the written word; a separate transmission outside the canonical teachings.”2
The career and writings of the Tang dynasty Chan master Guifeng Zongmi (780–841) serve to undermine the foundational assumptions of this commonly accepted model of the separateness of Zen mind and canonical word. Zongmi, a renowned Chan master as well as one of China’s greatest scholars of the Buddhist scriptures, with many years of rigorous Chan practice at his mountain hermitage, held that the first patriarch of Chan in China, Bodhidharma, propagated the slogan “a mind-to-mind transmission; no involvement with the written word” in order to inform his Chinese audience, bogged down in Buddhist writings, that the moon does not lie in the finger pointing at the moon (Chan Prolegomenon, section 11). Zongmi explained Bodhidharma’s silent mind transmission as a silent pointing to “Knowing” (zhi),3 the very substance of mind, but held that Bodhidharma did not eschew all words (Chan Prolegomenon, section 30):
It was just because this land [of China] was deluded about mind and grasped the written word, took the name for the substance, that Bodhidharma’s good skill [in teaching devices] was to select the phrase “transmission of mind.” He raised this term (“mind” is a term), but was silent about its substance (Knowing is its substance)…. To the very end, [Bodhidharma] did not give others the previously mentioned word “Knowing.” He simply waited for them to awaken of their own accord and then, for the first time, said: ‘That is how it really is [fang yan zhenshi shi]!’ Only when they had personally realized the substance [qin zheng qi ti] did he seal them, cutting off remaining doubts. This is why [his teaching] was called “silent transmission of the mind seal [mo chuan xinyin].” The word “silent” means only that he was silent about the word “Knowing,” not that he did not say anything [fei zong bu yan].
Zongmi cogently and persuasively argued that Chan realizations are identical to the teachings embedded in canonical word and that one who transmits Chan must use the sutras and treatises as a standard (Chan Prolegomenon, section 13). In fact, the teachings serve as precedents that legitimize the Chan realizations (Chan Prolegomenon, section 49). He strongly favored the model of all-at-once (sudden) awakening (to Knowing) followed by step-by-step (gradual) practice found in the Perfect Awakening Sutra (Yuanjuejing). But Japanese Rinzai Zen has, since the Edo period, marginalized the sutra-based Chan of sudden awakening–gradual practice propounded in Zongmi’s Chan Prolegomenon and continued in its successor text, the Mind Mirror (Zongjinglu) of Yongming Yanshou (904–976), favoring instead the rhetorical and iconoclastic Chan found in such texts as the Record of Linji (Linjilu) and the Extensive Record of Yunmen (Yunmen guanglu). In the rhetoric of the Record of Linji the sutras are just old toilet paper. Many modern Rinzai Zen masters, including Yamamoto Genpō mentioned above, have thoroughly immersed themselves in the Record of Linji (Genpō, in fact, vowed to read it one hundred times), and modern Rinzai scholarship has produced a stream of translations and studies of this text (leading to a stream of translations into English, French, and German). Since the West, because of developments in modern East Asian history, has received its overall impression of the Chinese Chan tradition from Japanese Zen, the Western perspective as now constituted reflects the emphases, shadings, deletions, and blindspots of its Japanese informant.
The first step toward reevaluating the history of Chan in East Asia as a whole is to read Zongmi (and Yanshou) and then look afresh at the Chinese Chan of the Song, Yuan, and Ming dynasties, as well as regional traditions such as Korean Sŏn, Tangut/Xixia Chan, and the neglected Five Mountains Zen of Ashikaga Japan (a text-based form of Rinzai Zen not emphasized in the modern Rinzai Zen genealogy). The outcome of such a reevaluation is likely to be a growing realization that Zongmi-style sutra-based Chan was much more normative in East Asia than we have been led to believe. In time this approach would surely lead to a revised version of Chan history that has less shouting, hitting, tearing up of the sutras, scatological sayings, and so on, and more sober sutra study combined with a highly ritualized practice gradually carried out over time. This introduction will examine Zongmi’s career, the content of his theoretical works on Chan, and his effects on Chinese Chan, Tangut/Xixia Chan, Korean Sŏn, and Japanese Five Mountains Zen. Following this introduction are complete translations of his three surviving Chan works.