Kyle P. Bond
Transmission of The True
Dharma Eye:
An Application of Oral
Theory to the Mahayana Buddhist World
Abstract: Religious texts in their written form are
often treated as powerful cultic objects. That is, in their sheer materiality, religious
texts are often viewed and handled as embodiments of sacred tradition and as
living icons capable of issuing miraculous powers and effects. But within
religious communities, sacred texts are also largely “oralized,” which
describes not only how texts become spoken and heard, but also how scripted
discourses become part of the initiate’s very mind and body, ingested as it
were, through daily rounds of ritual practice, performance, and devotion. This
dynamic of “oralization” in a broad sense of incorporation of sacred tradition into
the body and mind seems to be especially intense in contexts of
monastic discipline, where regimes of memorization, recitation, and commentary have
historically held sway. This essay situates one text, the Eihei Kōroku within such a framework, asking how this text might have been performed
and “oralized” within the training context of the Buddhist monastery from which
it emerged. Interestingly, the text
itself speaks to the dynamic of “oralization,” often valorizing and demanding a
type of practice that embodies the Buddhist tradition. A central motif that expresses
this point well is implicated in the word Shōbōgenzō. Though Shōbōgenzō will be associated with a celebrated collection of Dōgen’s
essays, written in a unique Chinese-Japanese hybrid style, in the Eihei
Kōroku, I have not found a single instance where the word Shōbōgenzō is used to represent
a written document. Rather, the discourses persistently represent Shōbōgenzō as the living tradition of
Buddhism itself, a “continuous praxis” of the true teaching handed down through
the “skin-flesh-bones-marrow” of patriarchs and generations of “entwining” teachers
and disciples. In which case it would seem that Shōbōgenzō functions not so much as the title of a written work, but as a motif
for the oralization of Buddhist tradition, a motif valorizing monastic praxis and the monastic environment by conflating
its way of life with the true praxis of the Buddha and all “buddha
ancestors,” a true praxis, which gets expressed as a kind of oral tradition incorporated into the body and mind, transmitted in and through the relationships
of masters and disciples. But to what
extent Zen Buddhism, an extremely ideological tradition of East Asia, truly handed
down tradition through oral dynamics remains an open and highly contested question.
The
first ancestor, Bodhidharma, came from the west, and did not engage in various
activities or give lectures on sutras or commentaries, but simply faced the
wall in zazen for nine years at Shaolin. Sitting is exactly the true Dharma eye
treasury of the wondrous mind of nirvāṇa. Generation after generation give
face-to-face transmission, intimately receiving the secret seal, actually
transmitting the bones and marrow between teachers and disciples.
…
The way of the buddha ancestors is like
this. Descendants of buddha ancestors should carve this in their bones and etch
it in their skins.
Introduction
In the wake of his teaching career, the medieval Zen Master that came to be known as Eihei Dōgen left behind a remarkable corpus of writings
that are historically important precedents of the Chán/Seon/Thiền/Zen Buddhist monastic tradition in Japan.
With the support of his disciples, Dōgen produced the first major religious
treatise that—rather than using traditional Chinese Kanbun—employed a Japanese
script, which represented a medieval Japanese vernacular. This text—or rather
this collection of texts—which is popularly known as the Shōbōgenzō, or Treasury
of the True Dharma Eye,
offered commentary on select texts from the “Zen canon” as well as other Buddhist
scriptural traditions. Dōgen also oversaw the
construction of the first “Monks Hall” (Jp. sōdō)
on Japanese soil, a building especially designed for the training of monks and
nuns in a Song Chinese Chán style.
Another important but less studied text produced out of Dōgen’s monastic
community is the Eihei Kōroku, the Extended Record of Eihei, which
is a large collection of Dōgen’s ritual oral lectures or “recorded
sayings” delivered to his discipleship circle during the last decade of his
teaching career at Kōshō-ji and then Eihei-ji monasteries.
With respect to the Eihei Kōroku, Dōgen’s attendant scribes
committed about five hundred of Dōgen’s ritualized “sayings” to the
written medium in a chronological order, using the Chinese Kanbun script in (of
course) a Chinese word order.
According to William Bodiford, this compilation is the first instance of the
“recorded sayings” yulu (Jp. kōroku or goroku) genre of Chinese Chán Buddhist literature produced in
Japan, sedimenting the performative sayings of a single Japanese Zen master. Although the Kōroku and Dōgen’s other written works remained largely unimportant during their
time and furthermore unknown to the secular world largely until the early
modern period, Zen Master Dōgen now
looms large as a major figure within the fields of Buddhist Studies, Religious
Studies, premodern Japanese Literature, and Comparative Philosophy.
Perhaps because Zen Master Dōgen looms so large as a literary
figure, no scholar to my knowledge has ever ventured to analyze his written
corpus using the findings and methodologies of contemporary Oral Tradition
Studies.
A recent English translation by Taigen Dan Leighton and Shohaku Okumura of the “recorded sayings” of Zen Master Dōgen provides an opportunity to experiment with this methodological
possibility, beginning to work out its problems for the first time, using an allegedly
“understudied” and “undervalued” text.
In organization, this
essay first summarizes the genre and structure of this “recorded
sayings” document. Second,
this essay explicates an “oral theory” that can help spotlight the oral aspects
of this text and other Buddhist writings that emerge from the cultural context
of East Asia. Thirdly, this essay juxtaposes the Zen Buddhist tradition’s
infamous slogan about being a “transmission outside of the scriptures” with the
ineluctable role that scripture, words, and letters have historically played
within this tradition. At this crux, I suggest that a theory of orality
provides an avenue out of this classic conundrum, avoiding both the naiveté of the insider’s emic perspective and the
reductionism of the outside scholar’s hermeneutic of suspicion on the issue of
transmission. Finally, this essay tries to situate two of Dōgen’s
“recorded sayings” within a framework of an oral theory.
Part One: Dōgen’s
Kōroku as an instance of the “Recorded Sayings” Genre
The Eihei Kōroku, the Extended Record of Eihei,
is a compendium of documents in the Kanbun
script that conforms to the “recorded sayings” (yulu) genre of Chán
literature, a genre that had gained momentum among other Chán writings in Song China approximately when Dōgen was
travelling and training there. One can thus surmise that Dōgen took the idea of this tradition from the writings
he encountered during his travels in
China. Upon his return to Japan, he must have reapplied the genre to his own
context to produce the Kōroku. Apparently, Dōgen was
the first Japanese master to do this. Here is how one authoritative historian William
Bodiford describes and contextualizes the text:
The
vast majority of Dōgen's literary works
from 1246 on, however, are transcriptions of the lectures on Zen kōan and
daily events that he presented to his disciples at Eiheiji as part of the schedule of monastic rituals. These lectures were compiled into his goroku (i.e., Chinese-language recorded
sayings), the first Zen goroku
produced in Japan.
Dōgen's goroku has not attracted the attention it
deserves. Perhaps this neglect is
because at first glance the stiff Chinese seems less “Dōgen-like” than his innovative Shōbō genzō.
Nonetheless, his goroku
reveals an invaluable portrait of Dōgen as a Zen master, presenting a living example of Zen
for his disciples. It is especially
important for studying the last eight years of his life. Almost no other writings can be dated to
these final years.
They
represent the mature Dōgen, the daily teachings
that would have left the strongest impression on his disciples.
Despite is importance and novelty in the context of medieval
Japanese Buddhism, the text was of course by no means created ex nihilo. According
to Steven Heine, the Eihei Kōroku was “particularly influenced by
the record of Hongzhi, a leading Caodong school master in China from the
generation prior to Dōgen’s mentor, Rujing.”
In addition to following the general editorial architecture of Hongzhi’s
“recorded sayings,” Dōgen often pulls traditions directly out of this
text, sometimes quoting at length. Suspending the opportunity for an extended analysis
of the possible intertextuality of these two documents, let us just note that
the Eihei Kōroku is an instantiation of a larger
genre of medieval Chinese Buddhist literature, reappropriated and transplanted
in Japan, and thus participates within larger historical movements of Sinitic
Buddhist culture.
The movement of medieval Chinese Buddhist literature in which Dōgen’s record participated was of course the
yulu “recorded sayings” genre. This
genre became distinct from other genres found in the canon of texts deemed
sacred within the Chán/Seon/Thiền/Zen family of Sinitic Buddhism. The
major genres that coalesced in the “Zen canon” include
“transmission of the lamp” anthologies, which prune down Chán lineage
as a whole by stringing together the sayings and doings of generations of
masters into a cohesive narrative of a “school.” There are also “recorded
sayings” texts, which prune the large family tree down to single branches,
which collate the sayings and doings of a particular master. These “recorded
sayings” texts, rather than representing the whole Chán school, often represent a specific sub-lineage and “house style”
of the tradition. Gleaned from a wider
body of Zen tradition and lore, there are also “case record” or “public record”
collections, which are compendiums of the utterances, actions, and/or questions,
posed between venerated masters of the past and their disciples. These “case records” (more popularly known by
their Japanese pronunciation “kōans”) were treated as
traditional precedents of Chán wisdom
and praxis, which came to serve as standards for Chán pedagogy. Thus, these collections magnify the “kōans”
as precedents of the Buddha Dharma rather than focusing on the masters
themselves. Where the earlier “transmission of the lamp” records were
interested in pruning a Chán genealogy
as a whole, considering that they constructed an overarching Chán School narrative, which followed
generations of important masters, the yulu
or “recorded sayings” genre of Chán
literature in contrast traced the performative sayings of a single master. The Eihei Kōroku of course is an
instance of this
yulu
genre as it traces the “sayings” of Zen Master Dōgen.
The
dating of the materials of the Eihei Kōroku is a bit complicated because the text
is collation of assorted documents. The dating ranges from around 1233 when Kannon-dōri-in (later renamed Kōshō-hōrin-ji) was established as Dōgen’s
first practice center, to as late as 1253 shortly
before Dōgen died of illness en route to receive treatment. In total,
the Kōroku is organized into ten volumes. The first seven volumes represent
the bulk of the “recorded sayings” material. In these first seven volumes we find
531 “recorded sayings,” which transcribe,
more or less chronologically, the
oral lectures that Dōgen gave
to his monastic community. The first 136 of these discourses were
delivered at Kōshō-ji
monastery in modern-day Uji prefecture
from 1236-1243. The remaining 259 were given at Eihei-ji monastery in the mountains of modern-day Fukui prefecture from 1245-1252. There are two important editions of the Kōroku, the Monkaku
version copied in 1598 and the Rofu-bon
version edited by Manzan Dōhaku (1636-1715) in
1672.
Leighton and Okumura’s English translation follows the Monkaku version, with references in the endnotes to the significant
differences of Manzan’s Rofu-bon edition.
The
structure of each lecture follows a Song
Chinese jōdō style, where jōdō
literally means “ascending to the hall,” the “hall” here being the Dharma Hall (hattō) of the monastery. Usually brief
and formal, these lectures were public in the sense that they were given to the
whole assembly of monks and visiting lay supporters during the day. This
contrasts with what Steven Heine calls the “jishu style” of discourse
that characterizes the essays of Dōgen’s popular Shōbōgenzō. Jishu
discourses seem to have been individual instructions given in private quarters
of the monastery to select monks, nuns, and lay supporters at length and during
the evening.
The jōdō discourses, in contrast, were given in the Dharma Hall of the
monastery, where Dōgen ascended to an elevated lecture platform and sat
in front of a standing assembly of monks. Heine judges that Dōgen probably
wrote down these lectures in some form first and then delivered them orally;
the monastery scribe would then record the oral performance and redact
it later, probably with Dōgen’s oversight.
Roughly cohering to a common structure, each
“recorded saying” or jōdō discourse begins by introducing a select tradition
or intertextual string of traditions with a form such as “I remember…”
or “Here is a story…” This primary text is then trailed by Dōgen’s commentary,
which retells and penetrates the tradition’s supposed wisdom, showing how it is
particularly fresh, alive, or appropriate for the communal praxis of their
monastic community. Following the primary tradition and subsequent commentary, Dōgen
usually poses a final question to his monks regarding the crucial meaning of
his lecture point(s). These final questions typically take a form such as “Monks,
would you like to understand what goes beyond this?” Or, “Would you like
to understand the essential meaning of this?” Here, the scribe usually represents
a moment of silence into the text with the line “After a pause Dōgen said.”
This imposed literary silence is usually followed by a “capping phrase”
by the master, which concludes the lecture. This “capping phrase” is usually arcane
and may function more as a sacramental proclamation,
or as new primary text for some future interpretation, than a final exegetical
point that closes the investigation of the primary text. Moreover, sometimes the
scribe records this “capping phrase” as a gesture, which typically takes forms
such as Dōgen throwing down his staff, raising his fist, withdrawing
abruptly, or drawing a circle in the air with his whisk.
These gestures reveal the character of Dōgen
as a living Zen Master, an exemplar of Zen praxis for his discipleship circle
as Bodiford has argued. The performativity of the “record sayings” also reminds
us that these oral lectures were formal ritual events, enacted with a
concomitant expectation of karmic benefits.
These ritual lectures occurred on a fixed schedule five to six times a month
and on special occasions such as the Buddha’s birth/enlightenment day as well
as memorial services for Dōgen's former masters, Rujing (1163-1228)
and Myōzen (1184-1125).
Thus, these “recorded sayings” are not only a Zen Master’s words
committed to writing; they are also and perhaps more importantly “sedimentations” or documentations that preserve and yet obscure
what were once living, performative, ritual texts incorporated into the regular
life of an active monastic community.
Part Two: The Problem of Orality in the context of East Asia
How do we get to these so-called “living,
performative texts” when all we have to go by are documents that have been
handed-down, copied, and redacted for some 800 years now? In addition to this theoretical
and somewhat non-historical problem, we have looming cultural and contextual problematics
to consider. One immediate problem presents itself in the fact that Dōgen
(and Zen Buddhism generally) arise from the socio-cultural-politico milieu
of Sinitic civilization.
In China as well as the
nations directly influenced by the legacies of Chinese empires, notably Korean
and Japan, we generally find cultures that exalt the technology of writing. In
other words, authoritative, sacred texts in these regions must be written down.
Part of their prestige, authority, and even sacrality comes from the aura and
aesthetics of the written medium itself. Commenting on the materiality of texts
within East Asian contexts, Fabio Rambelli explains,
In many
cases, in fact, a text had value not necessarily and not only for its meaning,
its "immaterial" part, but also and primarily for its material
aspect. As particular material entities
with spiritual power, texts were endowed with all the characteristics of sacred
objects and were not essentially different from relics, icons, and talismans. In this sacred materiality is found the
"value" of those texts…
To relate to writing as a kind of
“sacred materiality” is not of course culturally specific to Sinitic
civilizations. Indeed, it can be found throughout the world where writing
systems are developed and held in esteem. Nonetheless, the tendency to revere
writing is particularly pronounced in East Asian culture and interestingly
enough, this paradigm contrasts sharply with the manner in which early Buddhists experienced and
transmitted their canons of scripture in premodern South Asia.
Within the framework of a traditional Indic religious paradigm, primacy is usually given to speech
as the ultimate medium and method for learning and transmitting sacred
tradition. In the case of early Indic Buddhism in South and South East Asia, traditional
Buddhist scriptures or sūtras were basically textualized or scripted oral
traditions. Using conventions and mnemonics such as lists, repetitions, chiasms,
ring structures, rhyme, and meter, which are common methods for textualizing a
discourse in oral societies, early Buddhist communities formalized the alleged
“words of the Buddha” (Buddhavacana)
into “texts” for preservation, but these “texts” we should remember were
“oral-aural-memory texts” inscribed into the specialist’s heart and delivered
in speech—in an almost sacramental manner.
Essentially then early Buddhist “texts” were memorized,
collated into canons, and performed orally
by groups of specialists, who first gathered in monastic centers around the
Gangetic River Plain and later diffused throughout ancient South Asia and its
trade routes. Significantly, even after the introduction of the technology of
writing systems into Indic societies, it appears that Buddhist communities
continued to transmit their traditions in large part in an oral format.
Beyond the cultural influences of traditional Indic society, there may have
been theological reasons for this privileging of orality. According to David
McMahan, after the Buddha’s death, the preserved words of the Buddha came to
substitute for the Buddha’s bodily presence.
According to David Lopez, early Buddhist communities recognized that the preserved
words of the Buddha required the performative medium of speech in order to be
fully alive and reactivated as the Buddha’s self-presence.
In contrast to this stress
on orality in the cultures of premodern India, in China, Korea, and Japan, the
very materiality of Buddhist
scripture becomes crucial for its ritual and sacramental functions as icons and
even “relics” of the Buddha-dharma.
In Japan, for instance,
written Buddhist scriptures came to stand in for the śarīra or “relics” of the Buddha’s body. Theologically
interpreted as “relics,” written scriptural texts were (and still are) frequently
imbedded inside icons and temples. They were also buried in natural
and agricultural locations such as mountains and fields. Sometimes a buried
scripture in a natural setting functioned as a kind of “time capsule” that was submerged
so that it may be unearthed again with the coming of the future Buddha, Maitreya, to aid his utopic mission to
liberate the realms of suffering. In any case, a “this-worldly” rationale and an
expectation for practical benefits seem to have stood behind these sūtra burial
practices. Indeed, the burial of scriptures and the impregnation of “scripture-relics”
into objects seem to have had the purpose to infuse these objects and places
with the power, presence, and protection of the Buddha Dharma.
Now, the purpose of exposing
these “material” Buddhist practices is to illustrate a larger trend that held
sway in the context of East Asia: Writing functioned historically and
culturally as an ultimate sacred medium, a tendency that perhaps found its
earliest expression in the divination practices seen on the famous oracle bone
inscriptions dated to the Shang
Dynasty
(1600–1046BCE). For perhaps the most dramatic
example of this cultural privileging of writing, look to the Korean Kingdom
of Goryeo, where the entire
Tripitaka Canon was printed through
woodblock in the 11th and then again in the 13th century
for its karmic benefits and theurgical protective power—as the Korean Kingdom at these times
was under threat of Mongol invasions. Despite the fact
that Chinese cultures generally celebrated (and still celebrate) the technology
of writing, scholars nonetheless
take the oral dimensions of East Asian Buddhist culture and its scriptural
texts seriously.
Daniel Stevenson for example argues that typical features
of oral societies like reading aloud, recitation, and memorization remain
integral to how Chinese communities recognize and practice their classic texts.
Indeed, one need only reflect on the fact that “reading” in the ancient world
(be it Sinitic or Semitic) meant reading aloud, and recitation meant reading
aloud from heart. As William Graham argues, the technology of silent reading
only became widespread with the onset of modernity.
Another authority on East Asian Buddhist culture and language Willa Tanabe
points out how in Heian Japan (794–1185CE), where scripture copying (in both quantity and quality) became a
widespread practice of merit cultivation and ritual devotion, “lecture series” were
also representative features of popular Buddhist culture. These “lecture series”
were public ritual events of competitive, oral exegesis between champions of
the Japanese Buddhist establishments. Clearly, these were ritual performances, which
were expected to generate karmic benefits such as improving the rebirth of dead
ancestors and protecting the nation. According to Tanabe, these lecture series
“especially the hakkō [the annual eight lectures on
the Lotus Sutra], were one of the most representative expressions of Buddhist
practice.” These brief examples merely
allude to the fact that even within the premodern Sinitic world, which was a
culture of writing, texts also came alive in oral, aural, and somatic modes of
presentation. In which case, people in medieval Japan, who revered and
practiced written scriptures, must
have also accessed, practiced, and experienced Buddhist literature in its oral
and aural forms. And even today in modernized Japan, one can hear echoing in
temples and shrines the Heart Sutra chanted aloud—from heart.
In such a manner, this essay follows a line of argument
found in recent oral tradition studies, which maintains that even in highly
literate cultures such as China, Korean, and Japan oral dynamics of
transmission and presentation remained (and remain) in play. Though the early arguments
dealing with the issues of orality and literacy as represented in the works of
Walter Ong and to a lesser extent Jack Goody, treated “oral societies” and “literate
societies” as if they were polar opposites, the contemporary field of oral tradition
studies now views such theorization as overdrawn.
Works such as William A. Graham’s Beyond
the Written Word have become the new standard.
Graham’s scholarship does not hypostasize “orality” and “writing” in a
dichotomous and mutually exclusive relationship. Rather, he works with a
hermeneutical model, which frames speech and writing in a tense but ultimately complementary
dialectical relationship, wherein writing and orality interweave,
interpenetrate, and imply each other. Graham
observes how in religious cultures such as Islam, elements of oral performance
often entered into the written medium and conventions of writing in turn reentered
the stream of oral culture. This weaving back and forth of orality and writing
is not exclusive to Islam however; it is a regular dynamic of most living
religious traditions. Thus it may be that the boundaries separating oral and
written traditions are not so much boundaries as they are intersections, where elements
of oral performance often enter into the written medium and conventions of
writing in turn reenter the stream of oral culture. In which case, pedagogical
religious literatures may not simply be written traditions expressing
ideologies of orality. They may be a kind of oral-written hybrid material,
indicating processes of transmission involving both oral performance and
writing. In any case, the interweavement of writing and orality does appear to
be a regular feature that can be found “sedimented” or frozen in the scriptures
of many of the world’s religious traditions that have come down to us in their (more
or less) final written redactions.
For those who prefer a
historical argument, we can already see how most of the
scripture and scriptural traditions of the world’s religions have come down to
the present age through the scriptoriums and didactic processes of the monastic communities of the ancient world, which exercised
powers of memory and recitation that are all but astonishing from a modern point
of view. With
respect to the Buddhist tradition, students of religious studies are probably
aware of the Pali, Tibetan, and the Taisho Canons of Buddhist scripture. But as
textual scholarship reveals, these groupings of sacred Buddhist traditions
emerge rather late and as crystallizations of long processes of creation,
collation, and ongoing oral-written transmission.
In their introduction to the volume Readings of the Lotus Sutra Stephen Teiser and Jacqueline Stone for
instance discuss how early Buddhist scriptures or sūtras were essentially “communal
institutions” that were spread out in ancient South Asia as “local canons,”
governed by specific monastic communities of custodianship supported by specific
sources of patronage. Groups of specialists, in other words, were collectively responsible for the
creation, management, and performance of sacred Buddhist texts. “Authorship” in the premodern world then was not so much the
subjective task of an individual as we moderns tend to think of it, but rather
an ongoing intersubjective project of
a networked group of specialists, whose work of creating, compiling, repeating,
and redacting sacred texts was largely “written” in the medium of speech,
controlled through the mechanisms of memorization, recitation, and gesture.
In the premodern world, not
only was the modern sense of authorship absent, but also the modern sense of a
“text” as a specifically written thing
seems to have been missing. Describing the dynamic of innovation in early Buddhist scholasticism,
Collet Cox points out that what counted as “the text” was not as
straightforward as one might at first assume. In her analysis of early Abhidharmic
traditions, what was involved in a given scriptural text’s transmission was an
“unbroken” dialectical cooperation of a stable, mnemonic written form and a
“continually transforming” and ever-innovating commentarial oral tradition
delivered by a living authoritative teacher. In such a manner, the technology
of writing did not displace the oral dimensions of early Indic Buddhist
scholasticism. Rather, the dynamic of writing generated a new dialectic wherein
writing proffered a stable medium for the preservation of “primary texts,”
which functioned as primers for didactic oral commentary, exegesis, and
argumentation. Notice how these two levels of textuality ran parallel to each
other and their “unbroken,” ongoing interaction generated “the text.” Of
course, seminal oral commentarial traditions themselves often came to be
written down. But these commentaries too, in their written form, became new
launching pads for a new oral commentary—a kind of “super-commentary” if you
will. Thus, even when writing entered the scene of early Buddhist scholasticism
in the form of condensed mnemonic aids, the dialectical cooperation of the
written text and the oral commentary of a teacher continued to form “the text.”
Now, the point of problematizing the issue of orality and writing from such theoretical
and historical perspectives is to help frame our understanding of the phenomena
we organize under the categories of “religion” and “scripture.” Studying
religion and scripture using an oral theory helps to illuminate how religious
traditions are not things but processes, processes that depends on specific “intersubjective
linguistic communities”
and their modes of transmitting tradition through various media and performance.
Where a traditional textualist approach has tended to posit a single written source at
the origin of a traditional religious text, say as a kind of “original text,” with
an oral theory framing the investigation, we can see how the generation of
traditional texts emerges overtime and from a larger body of tradition, which
involves both static sedimentations of tradition in writing and genetic
reactivations of tradition in orality. By “orality” I
refer to the fluid life of traditions in contexts of ritual, teaching,
listening, memorization, performance, praxis, etc. By “writing” of course I
refer to the traditions that have become represented in script, concretely
affixed and preserved on tablets, icons, monuments, scrolls, codices, etc. Again,
these distinct categories are not always firm, fast and unambiguous, for they
often interpenetrate—as one can see in texts, which combine elements of oral
culture such as prose, verse, and lists. In which case, we can frame the
origination of traditional texts as emerging from a heterogeneous combination
of both oral and written elements. In addition, this model can help explain the
problem of “intertextuality” recurrent in the scriptures and scriptural
traditions of the world. Different texts often overlap and correspond, as well
as engage each other through allusions, creative retellings, and direct
references because they emerge from a larger cultural deposit of
oral-written tradition. Accordingly, an oral theory can help explain the
difficult problem of repetition and difference: Traditional texts can be
similar because they draw on and riff on a common well of traditions found in a
given intersubjective linguistic culture. Yet, traditional texts can be
different because communities are somewhat free to remember, select, and weave
together traditions in different ways. They are also somewhat free to adapt
performances to contexts in impromptu fashions. Consequently, an oral theory
does not frame textual
variants as aberrations from a hypothetical “original text.” Instead, textual
variants are understood as different written moments in the processual life of a community’s ongoing, performative transmission of
tradition. To use Martin Jaffee’s metaphor, we can imagine different written redactions of a
traditional text as different “snap-shots.”
Any given “snap-shot” implies both a past and a future of transmission that is
elided by the limits of the written recension.
Because an oral theory does
not erase the ritual significance and function of writing within religious
traditions, but rather highlights the dialectical relationship of writing and
orality in the transmission of tradition, this model is applicable to texts
emerging from the context of the East Asian Buddhist
world, where writing remains predominant as the ultimate medium of sacred
tradition. If we apply this hermeneutical model to the works of Eihei Dōgen, for example, we can
study how his writings are
treated by the Sōtō Zen sect of Japanese Buddhism as sacred in their very materiality,
regardless of whether they are reactivated in oral recitation, commentary, etc.
We can also see how these writings may be static records, “snap-shots” and
“sedimentations” if you will, which point back to larger genetic processes of pedagogy and performance within the setting of a Buddhist monastery. But before we test out this model on a few “recorded sayings” of Dōgen, I would like to situate the
document and my argument about its possible oral aspects within a
larger scholarly debate concerning the role of writing within the East Asian
Buddhist monastic tradition popularly known as “Zen.”
Part Three: The Role of Writing in the Zen Monastic Tradition
It is
well known that the Zen monastic tradition has generally represented itself as “a separate transmission outside the scriptures (Jp. kyoge-betsuden),” with “no reliance upon
words and letters (Jp. furitsu-monji),” which “directly points to the minds of humans (Jp. jikishi-jinshin),”
and “sees the nature and achieves Buddhahood (Jp. kensho-jyobutsu).” In my understanding, Zen Buddhists generally
conceive their tradition to be “outside of scriptures” because they claim to
embody a living transmission of
Buddhism that is handed-down “face-to-face” and “mind-to-mind” through chains
of masters and disciples, who, since the time of the Buddha and his coterie of
eminent disciples, have enacted the
mind-body of the Buddhist way of life and thus have not simply “relied on words
and letters” (as they implicitly accuse their peers in the more scriptural and
scholastic Chinese Buddhist schools [presumably Huayen and Tiantai] to
have done). Yet, for all this rhetoric about being “outside of scriptures” and
not “relying on words and letters,” Zen schools were (and are) highly literate,
“producing,” according to Steven Heine and Daniel
Wright in their introduction to The Zen
Canon, “by far the most voluminous and important canon of sacred texts in
East Asia.”
This “Zen Canon” as Heine and Wright are calling it, probably
developed out of manuscripts, oral traditions, and other lore originating in
the Tang Dynasty (618-907CE) and Five Dynasties Period (907-960CE), which experimented with
mapping out the lineages of ancestral teachers in dynamic configurations and retelling
stories of the private discourses between Chán
masters and their disciples. But until the discovery of the caches of manuscripts from the caves of Dunhuang in Central Asia, there was a
paucity of evidence for early Chán Buddhism
in Tang. Indeed, before the Dunhuang “discovery,” there were very
few Chán writings available to
scholars that could actually be dated to the Tang.
Indeed, the crystallization of what Heine and Wright are calling the “Zen Canon”
by and large can be dated to the Song
Dynasties (960-1279). Naturally, the traditions of
this canon can be seen to generally reflect the editorial views and interests
of Song Buddhists. But until a new
generation of scholars (notably Yanagida Seizan and his students John McRae and
Bernard Faure) began to question the classical narrative espoused in these
documents, scholarship in the West and in Japan tended to act as an echo
chamber for the Song Chán Buddhist account of its own “history.”
This new school of scholars, armed with the hermeneutic of
suspicion and fresh evidence provided by the Dunhuang manuscripts, argued that the classical crystallization of
the story of the origin of “Chán School”
could not be trusted. For one reason, the documents that supported the narrative
were generally hagiographical in nature and thus were not “historically true”
in the first place. Beyond hagiography, the texts were ideological: they worked
to construct a “Chán School” identity by retrojecting into the Tang period a “Golden Age” narrative, where charismatic masters stimulated
realization in their students through the idiosyncratic and counterintuitive actions
and repartee that has come to define “classical Chán.” But there is no way of knowing whether these idealized, literary
events actually happened in historical fact.
Not only does the reportage of the Zen canon lack historicity,
but also it generally presents us with only one among many ideological
narratives that competed for legitimacy during the Tang. Thus, to faithfully follow the classical narrative strand of a
singular esoteric transmission of the “true Buddhist teaching,” which passes
through the 28 legendary Indian patriarchs and the five Chinese patriarchs, culminating
in the succession of the sixth ancestor Dajian
Huineng (638-713) and the “sudden” awakening teaching of his Southern
School, is to succumb to an ideology that occludes from scholarly view the
important contributions of other Chán
groups, notably the Northern School and Oxhead traditions.
Finally, within this “school” of critical scholarship on Chán history there is Griffith Foulk, who takes the revisionist
argument to its logical conclusion, contending that beyond the literary
representations of Chán texts, one is
hard pressed to find evidence for an institutionalized “Chán School” in imperial China at all. Foulk’s reasoning is that the so-called “Chán School” was never cut off from the larger
state institution and cultural milieu of medieval Chinese Buddhism. In which
case, the very supposition of institutionally independent “Chán School” is misguided.
For our purposes we need only note that what Heine and
Wright are calling “the Zen Canon” appears to be more or less mediated by the
work of Song scribes, who redacted what
might be called the “proto-Chán”
traditions of the Tang and Five
Dynasties Period into fixed writings and formal collections, which came to
represent Chán in its “classical”
form. While the origins of the Chán tradition
may extend back to the Tang and Five
Dynasties Period, Song Buddhists ultimately
put their interpretive and editorial seals on the tradition and its collection
of sacred texts. In addition to having an editorial voice in presenting older
sources of the Chán tradition, Song scribes also penned new texts,
which represented contemporary masters and their “house-styles” or sub-lineages
within the larger family of Chinese Chán
Buddhism. Song Buddhists also
codified “Rules of Purity”
for the monastic life. They also collated compendiums of the utterances/questions
posed between former masters and students, which sometimes served as curriculums
for the training of novices. Of course, in committing their tradition to
writing, Song Chán Buddhist scribes employed the conventions of the Chinese
writing system. They also seem to have catered to the tastes and genres of medieval
Chinese literati culture of which they were a part. Evidently, the literary
distinction of some Chán Buddhist groups
even earned them the somewhat ironic title of “Literary Chán.” The irony of course is that this movement
representing perhaps a high point of Chinese literary culture ostensibly does
not rely on words and letters.
The conflicts
and contradictions that must have accompanied the Chán tradition as it amplified its scholastic and literary
activity in the Song may form part of
the background picture that helps to explain the legends, which portray Chán masters as occasionally
seeking to destroy and defame their own literary heritage in iconoclastic outbursts.
For a striking example, see the recorded sayings of the late Tang master Línjì Yìxuán (d. 866CE), which portray this master as equating scripture and other sacred
documents with the function of “toilet paper.” Another Zen legend holds that the very popularizer of the utterances of
former masters as pedagogical devices forming a component of monastic training Dahui Zonggao (1089–1163CE) attempted to destroy and ban the
circulation of his master’s own revered compendium The Blue Cliff Record. The list of such examples goes on. But even if there were Buddhists
such as Dahui and Linji, who were ambivalent towards the place of the written medium with
the Chán monastic
tradition, there views did not, in the final analysis, prevail. Indeed, their
iconoclasm towards sacred writ became, in the end, part of the “Zen canon” that
they allegedly sought to destroy.
Fitting with the classic “Golden Age” narrative of Chán its decline in the Song, one could argue along with Linji and Dahui that the accrual of writings, the sedimentation of the Zen
tradition beginning in the late Tang and
accelerating in the Song, threatened
the vitality of this living tradition. Indeed, as William Graham observes in a
different context,
The fixing of the holy word in writing
always carries with it potential threats to the original spontaneity and living
quality of the scriptural text, for it places it ever in the danger of becoming
only a “dead letter” rather than the “living word.”
From an oral theory point of view, the potential threats that
writing poses to a living tradition materialize when written documents lose
their relationship with the oral traditions of linguistic communities, whose ritual
devotion, interpretation, and performance sustains the life of scripture. One
could also add as Dōgen does his 1231
essay Bendowa that reciting and studying
scriptures without a concomitant life of praxis is like reading and studying medical
prescriptions without attempting to cure any disease.
It is like reading cookbook recipes and starving to death. While writing may have posed such
hermeneutical and soteriological threats to the Zen tradition during the Song, one must equally take into account
the fact that the Zen Canon as a body of stabilized tradition, proved to be
sustainable source of a fully-fledged communal identity and praxis for generations
of future Buddhist communities. As seen in Dōgen’s monastic communities at Kōshō-ji and
Eihei-ji, written traditions of the “Zen Canon” were reactivated in creative ways to fulfill
ritual and didactic functions within the monastery.
The saying quoted above about “not relying on words and
letters” thus exemplifies an important problematic that must be cleared up in order
to critically appraise the role of writing within “Zen” and by extension Dōgen
and his written corpus: In this infamous
slogan is contained the contradiction between the Zen monastic tradition’s
self-image as a transmission outside of writing and the historical reality that
reveals textuality and literacy as integral the Zen
monastic institution’s success. But how
can one in the final analysis make sense of the contradiction that a tradition,
claiming to be a kind of “oral transmission” outside of scripture, writing, and
doctrinal formulation nonetheless is a tradition replete with writing and literary
activity?
Of course, from a historical perspective, one can dismiss the idea
of esoteric transmission altogether. While Zen tradition generally attributes
the saying “a separate transmission outside the
scriptures” with “no reliance upon words and letters,” which “directly
points to the minds of humans,” and “sees the nature and achieves Buddhahood,” to the legendary
5th century Zen patriarch Bodhidharma, who is held to be the 1st Chinese patriarch and the 28th
Indian patriarch in a sacred lineage of masters and disciples, stemming back to
Śākyamuni Buddha (and the six
Buddhas, who taught eons before him), Chán historians deems this tradition to actually be a collation of sayings
that circulated separately, before becoming engraved into popular Buddhist
discourse as a set of verses under a Bodhidharma attribution during the Song.
At this time, of course, the “Chán School” was positioning itself against rivals as the dominant
form of state Buddhism in China. In this context of competition for cultural
dominance, the historian adds, the ideology and rhetoric of esoteric transmission,
which this set of verses instantiates, allowed Chán Buddhist
groups to fashion for themselves a self-serving narrative and communal identity,
which also provided a source of authority and legitimization that was independent
from rival Chinese Buddhist schools, notably Huayen and Tiantai. Where
other schools perhaps Huayen and Tiantai tended to stake their authority
on a particular scripture and a particular systemization of doctrine, the “Chán
School” claimed to house the tradition in their very bodies, personhood, and
praxis. It was precisely through their illustrious output of polemical writings
such as the famous Bodhidharma verses, the historian might add, that Chán rose
to prominence in East Asia: In producing and organizing a distinct canon of authoritative sacred
texts, Chán Buddhists were able to
record and generate a distinct communal identity that was legitimized through exclusive
connections with Indian Buddhist authorities such as Bodhidharma, who supposedly handed-down the esoteric essence of the
Buddha’s teaching and the special pedagogical techniques to perpetuate its ongoing
realization.
In McRae’s Seeing Through Zen, we find a strong version of this socio-historical
argument. In McRae’s account, the Chán
School’s ideology of transmission essentially served as a narrative, fabricated
to generate the Chán School’s hegemony over other groups: Where the Chán
School transmits the actual experience and practice of the Buddha, says the
narrative, rival schools can only offer derivatives. Now, for an outside
scholar to catch this contagious narrative of the Zen School’s hegemony and
echo it in his or her scholarship, McRae argues furthermore, represents a kind
of “intellectual pathology.”
While the strong historicist line of argumentation, which typically
imagines Chán literature as religious
fiction serving the ideological needs of Song
Buddhists rather than an honest account of Tang
historicity strikes me as fairly cogent, it also strikes me as rather one-sided
and one-dimensional. Indeed, the strong historicist line of argumentation unfortunately
reduces religious phenomena
such as the Zen tradition’s claim to be a transmission outside of words and
letters, to an ideology that serves only external historical and sociological functions.
At risk of sounding naïve, redundant, and perhaps “intellectually pathological,”
I would like suggest possible internal sociological and soteriological reasons
for such claims to orality. I submit that while the Chán/Seon/Thiền/Zen
school’s slogan about being “outside of scriptures” with “no reliance on words
and letters” can be understood externally as ideology and rhetoric serving the stratagems
of certain configurations of socio-cultural power, it can also be understood internally
as the rationale of a monastic tradition that places real and literary stress
on praxis.
Comparatively speaking,
in a monastic environment, what is primary is not the maintenance
of texts per se, but rather the
enculturating/transformative process of a monastic way of life in which texts
nonetheless play important roles. This privileging of the training process, however,
sometimes coincides with a tendency to place a secondary importance on the
written word per se over the oralization
of tradition. We have already noted such a tendency in early Indic Buddhist monastic
communities. But other historical examples are to hand such as the early
Rabbinic discipleship circles of the Galilee and Babylonian in the 2nd
to 6th centuries.
Rabbinic Judaism for example authorizes itself through the myth of
“Oral Torah,” which claims that Moses received oral instructions directly from
the Mouth of God on Mt. Sinai in addition to the written instructions that were
handed-down by Moses as the five books. As the myth goes, this living Oral
Torah was handed-down through chains of transmission that extended through
centuries of masters and their disciples who carried this Oral Torah “in the
mouth” down to this day.
Now, it is well known that the “Hebrew Bible” crystalized as a
three-part canon during the 2nd Temple Period. In part, this written
canon of scripture functioned as a source of legitimization and social control
for the Ezra regime of returning exiles, who rebuilt the Temple and ran its
ritual system. Significantly, there was no ideology of Oral Torah in this
period. Indeed, in the 2nd Temple Period it was writing that gave a tradition weight. The ideology Oral Torah, in
contrast, came into focus the 3rd century in the Galilee with Judah
the Patriarch and his disciples, who are accredited with forming the first
authoritative compendium of Oral Torah, the Mishnah. Significantly, the rabbis
did not just legitimize themselves through the traditional written canon of the
Temple. Quite to the contrary, the rabbis, arising in the power vacuum created
by of the destruction of the Temple, made a distinction. Precisely in a context
where the writing down of a tradition made a tradition sacred, the rabbis
legitimized themselves through an oral canon of texts, which were delivered and
maintained in ways designed precisely to preserve their orality. Rabbinic
ideology furthermore privileged the Oral Torah, making it requisite for
fulfilling and understanding the Written Torah. Perhaps it was the very distinction of rabbinic Judaism,
with its new ritual system of prayer and study of Oral Torah, its monastic-like
control on the behavior of disciples and Jewish communities, and its prestigious
lineage of transmission going back to Moses, which helped to justify and
divinely mandate the emergent rabbinic academies in the Galilee and Babylonian
as new sites of sacred cultural capital, legitimating new arrangements of social
power. Perhaps the development of the monastic movement in East Asia which has
become to be called Zen is comparable.
Recall that according to oral theory “texts” can be either
written, oral, or a combination of both. Thus, the textualization of tradition,
the canonization of authoritative texts, the attribution of these texts to some
divine origin or supernal source, whether in writing or orality, plays the same
sociological functions: The textualization of tradition helps to forge the
identity of a community vis-à-vis a cultural other, legitimize the authority of
the group’s leaders, and maintain the power of these elite guardians over the
delivery of sacred tradition. The key ingredient that produces shifts in social
power then is not a matter of orality vis-à-vis writing. Rather, shifts in cultic and social power occur when distinctions get made.
It is the very distinction
that some groups generate through writing and orality, which legitimates them
in the eyes of others.
So, shifts in social power are not a matter of orality
and/or writing per se but rather
functions of distinction. Look to at the emergence of Mahayana Buddhism for a
possible example where a culture maintaining a canon of oral texts shifts to a culture
maintaining a canon of written texts.
It
is well known that Buddhist scripture was transmitted orally for about three to
four hundred years after the death of the Buddha. Notice how every Buddhist sutras begins with the form “Thus
have I heard.” This phrase underscores the pseudo-historical, ontological claim
that these sacred texts ultimately originate from the Buddha’s mouth. This phrase also implies the presence of the
guardians over the Buddha’s words: the “voice-hearers” (sravaka) and “the reciters” (bhanaka).
In early Buddhism, these words of the Buddha came to substitute for the
Buddha’s bodily presence after his death. Early Buddhist communities recognized
that the texts of the Buddha-words required the performative medium of speech
in order to be fully alive and activated as the Buddha’s self-presence. Thus,
the voice-hearers and reciters, with their oral mastery of canonical groupings
of sacred texts were in a position of control over the incarnation of the
Buddha’s teaching and self-presence.
Approximately when writing systems entered South
Asian societies around the turn of the Common Era, Mahayana Buddhism arose. It may
be no coincidence. Notice how in contrast to traditional Buddhist scriptures,
which betray features of oral culture such as lists and repetitions, Mahayana scriptures
display characteristically literary features such as detailed imagery. Thus, it
appears possible that Mahayana Buddhism arose precisely through the technology
of writing.Indeed, Mahayana Buddhism seems to have emerged on the margins of
mainstream Buddhism in the Indian subcontinent as a ‘cult of the book,’
alongside and in competition with more orthodox cults.
Mahayanist groups became ‘cults of the book,’ because they maintained an
ideology, which equated written texts with the relics of the Buddha’s body. The
medium of writing gave Mahayana Buddhism as a heterodox movement, the power to
create a distinct canon, through which they could break off from mainstream
Buddhism and establish new sacred sites, practices, and sources of authority
using writing and written texts as forces for the legitimizing of authority,
the forging communal identity, and the maintenance of social power.
In which case, the Zen monastic tradition is not unique in the way
that it rationalizes and privileges its process of enculturation and
oralization. And
as Victor Sōgen
Horin pointed out in his critique of McRae, the Zen tradition
is not also unique among the world’s religions in promoting a self-serving version
of its own “history.”
Finally, the transmission of religious tradition, while often rationalized in rhetorical
and ideological ways, actually does, anthropologically speaking, go beyond the
written word: In religious communities and especially in a monastic centers,
written texts often interface with oral, aural, and somatic modes of
communication, which together preserve and perform the transmission of sacred
tradition.
Part Four: Oral
Aspects of the Eihei Kōroku
In a ritualized performance in the Dharma Hall of Eihei-ji
in April of
1251,
Dōgen delivered
an oral version of the following Dharma Hall Discourse recorded by the attendant scribe
at the time Gien (d. 1313):
428.
Dharma Hall Discourse
Here
is a story. The World-Honored One, staying with the assembly at Vulture Peak,
held up and twirled an udumbara flower in front of a million beings, and
announced, “I have the true Dharma eye treasury, wondrous mind of nirvāṇa, which I
entrust to Mahākāśyapa.” At that time, Mahākāśyapa had broken into a smile.
In ancient
days, the World-Honored One wished to transmit the Dharma. In front of a
million beings, he held up and twirled a flower, blinked his eyes, and
announced, “I have the Dharma.” [Mahākāśyapa] broke into a smile, and alone met
his father.
This is what I attained through
study on the sitting platform, but what goes beyond that? Great assembly, do
you want to understand this clearly?
After a
pause Dōgen said: Do not ask what kind of
livelihood is here. Zhaozhou’s tea exists in India.
Perhaps because of
his belief in the universal of orthodoxy of Buddhist traditions, Dōgen often distanced himself from the term “Zen” and the ready-made slogans
attributed to this school. Though at times mocking the idea of a separate “Zen
School” and even demonizing those who explain Zen, this Dharma Hall Discourse nevertheless
reactivates the classic narrative of the origin of the Song Chinese Buddhist literary and monastic movement that has come
to be known for better or worse as Zen.
Sitting on an elevated lecture platform in
front of a standing assembly of monks, Dōgen introduces a crucial moment of this story
of the origin of the Zen school as his primary text. This
tradition has been called the “Flower Sermon” for obvious reasons: “The World-Honored One, staying with the assembly at Vulture
Peak, held up and twirled an udumbara flower in front of a million beings…” In this simple act the
Buddha’s whole way of life, all eight folds of his Noble Path, are supposed to
be expressed and contained. Among an assembly of a million beings, only one
disciple apparently “got it”: The
Buddha announced, “I have the true
Dharma eye treasury, wondrous mind of nirvāna,
which I entrust to Mahākāśyapa.” At that time, Mahākāśyapa had broken into a
smile.”
Of course,
from a critical perspective, it comes as no surprise that Zen Buddhists when
coming to fabricate their genealogy of transmission would chose Mahākāśyapa as their first Indian patriarch, over say Ānanda or Śāriputra, who were also eminent disciples of the
Buddha. As Ānanda is remembered as
a virtuoso memorizer/reciter of the Buddha’s discourses and rules for monastic
life, and Śāriputra as a wizard of doctrine and
exegesis, Mahākāśyapa is eulogized in tradition as the practitioner and meditator par
excellence. For a tradition emphasizing the rigors and devotion of monastic
life, it is significant that Mahākāśyapa, the paragon
of Buddhist ascesis, is represented as receiving the Shōbōgenzō, “the
true Dharma eye treasury” on Vulture Peak as their
originary myth.
Now,
one can also see how this myth of origins associates well with the Zen polemic
to be “a separate transmission outside the scriptures,” with “no reliance
upon words and letters,”
etc. This passage represents transmission as an intimate
relationship between a master, the Buddha, indeed he is called “father” and his
disciple, who implicitly would be the son. This kind of family structure is, cross-culturally
speaking, common to the environment of textual transmission in the ancient
world, where guardians of tradition usually formed around actual family units,
where the nuclear sons of a given master became his disciples and other
disciples were adopted and called “sons.” Dōgen’s writings for their part
frequently employ familial categorizes such “son,” “father,” “ancestors,”
“family style,” etc. There may be a connection here. Now, the primary text which
this Dharma Hall introduces stresses the Buddha’s bodily
conduct, Mahākāśyapa’s smile, and the
Buddha’s confirmation of this response in rather terse language. Rather than handing down a scripture or specific teaching, this
primary text has the Buddha say, “I have the true
Dharma eye treasury, wondrous mind of nirvāṇa,
which I entrust to Mahākāśyapa.” What is this true Dharma eye treasury, this Shōbōgenzō? Is it that the “father” confirms in his “son”
the principles for the ongoing generation of tradition? The World Honored One
entrusts to Mahākāśyapa the “eye” for the correct teaching and the “mind” of enlightenment?
Would these principles for the generation of tradition be the meaning of Shōbōgenzō?
Carl Bielefeldt points out how Dōgen first
used the phrase Shōbōgenzō to entitle his collection of 300
collated ‘case-records’ without commentary, the so-called Mana Shōbōgenzō. In this
regard, Bielefeldt reasons that Dōgen probably borrowed
the term from the
famous Song Chán Master Dahui Zonggao (1089–1163), who also used the title for his
‘case record’ collection with commentary. Bielefeldt
further reasons that Dōgen probably extended his use of the
title to authorize his (now famous) collection of informal essays.
Yet, Bielefeldt also indicates that the Shōbōgenzō is deeply
embedded in Zen lore. In Zen lore, Shōbōgenzō
“true Dharma eye treasury” has
been handed down intimately through generations of patriarchs, whose
“face-to-face” relationships in and around the monastery constituted the field
where the Buddha’s teaching came alive, was learned and was taught. These
teaching relationships are believed to concatenate as a continuity of living
tradition that stretches all the way back to the Buddha and his coterie of
eminent disciples. This whole mythology would then be implicated in the meaning of Shōbōgenzō.
While
some Zen exegetes have tended to interpret the moment of transmission of Shōbōgenzō
between Mahākāśyapa
and the Buddha as an event of secret, non-verbal
communication, Dōgen goes to lengths to reject this view. In the 1243 essay
Mitsugo or “secret talk” he comments:
How do
those others understand Mahākāśyapa’s
breaking into a smile? Let them try to say something! If it is as they say,
this [smile] should also be called “secret talk.” But they call it “nothing
being concealed.” This is doubly foolish. Later the World-honored One says, “I have the
right Dharma-eye treasury, and the fine mind of nirvana. I transmit them to Mahākāśyapa.” Is such an expression
speech or is it non-verbal communication? If the World-honored One hated speech
but loved picking up flowers, he would have picked up a flower at the later
time too. [And even in that case,] how
could Mahākāśyapa fail to understand,
and how could the assembly fail to hear? The tales told by the people described
above are not to be relied upon.
As
we can see in this commentary, if the point of the Buddha’s Flower Sermon is to
reveal the inherent inadequacies of speech and the supremacy of a non-verbal “secret
talk,” then why did the Buddha choose to speak at all? And if words and letters were so useless, why did the Buddha after all say
“Mahākāśyapa I entrust the Shōbōgenzō to you”? And if the Buddha hated
speech, moreover, why didn’t he speak first and twirl
the flower after? In a similar probing manner, the
Mitsugo asks leading questions, which
betray a radically
nondualistic and performative understanding of language, writing, and the transmission. This nondual position is
clearly evidenced in Mitsugo as
well as other essays such as Kattō, Dōtoku, and Gabyō: Words and letters are part of the Buddhist way of life just as
all aspects of this world form part of the Buddhist way of life. It is
self-defeating moreover to maintain a dualistic approach to language. Indeed, for
those wishing to deny language a place within the Buddhist tradition, “Let them try to say something!”
The real issue then is not what language is, in and of
itself, but how one relates to language and how one enacts language—skillfully,
tactfully, situationally—in order to help relieve beings from suffering. On
this point, Dōgen would not be unique but would participate in a
long-standing tradition within mainstream Buddhism, which emphasizes the
soteriology and (in the case of Mahāyāna Buddhism) the “skillful means”
of the Buddha’s teaching.
An image that Dōgen often employs expresses the
point well: The Buddha is a Great Physician, who applies various medicines to
treat various ailments. Not only does this image draw close attention to the
pedagogical style and soteriological intention of the Buddha’s teaching in that
a skillful physician proffers diagnoses and treatments appropriate to each
patient’s specific ailments, but also the simile reveals the necessity of a final
reflexive move, which is necessary for liberation: In the case of medicine, one
should not continue taking a drug once one’s illness is cured. Indeed, what was
once meant as medicine can become a new cause for suffering. Such then would Buddhist
language and all the sūtras. In other words, the Buddhist way of
life obviously involves language and writings but in the end one should not be
so attached. Zen Buddhism generally and Dōgen specifically seem to stand in or flow with this current of
Buddhist tradition, which emphasizes the soteriology of the teacher over the
systematization of the teaching.
This stress on oralization relates back to the myth of Vulture
Peak presented in the Dharma Hall Discourse offered above: What is being handed
down seems to be the principles for the generation of Buddhist tradition, the “eye”
for the teaching and the “mind” of enlightenment, which would be embodied in living
breathing authorities, indicating the that Shōbōgenzō,
Treasury of the
True Dharma Eye would be first and foremost the transmission of praxis and the concomitant ability to discern orthopraxis. From such a
perspective, it is possible that what is being handed-down in the Buddhist
tradition would not be special kinds of medicine but rather the training of skilled
physicians.
Now, in privileging what might be called religious literacy
in oral tradition and praxis over specific sutras and doctrinal formulations,
Zen Buddhists such as Dōgen would have obvious stakes in legitimizing
their authority, maintaining control over tradition, and forging communal
identity. In the Dharma Hall Discourse presented above, for instance, which presents two variations of the Flower
Sermon tradition, we find Dōgen’s short commentary: “This is what I
attained through study on the sitting platform…” While the text remains somewhat
ambiguous as to what “this” refers to, from the context we can infer that
“this” is the very same Treasury of the
True Dharma Eye entrusted to Mahākāśyapa. In
which case, Dōgen’s proclamation
of his attainment, “This is what I
attained through study on the sitting platform…” and the motifs of
transmission and arguments he employs to support it, have undoubted ideological
dimensions. Such ideology probably functioned to imbue the hierarchical social
reality of the monastery with symbolic meanings and associations that reinforced
Dōgen’s power and
authority as a patriarch embodying the
sacred tradition of the World Honored One, teacher of gods and men.
While representations of Shōbōgenzō in this primary text and its brief
commentary play undoubted ideological and rhetorical functions, they also
emerged from and thus probably spoke to the very real sociological and
historical situation of a Master handing down Buddhist tradition to his
disciples. This transmission certainly included not only writing, speaking and
hearing, but praxis, devotion, and disciplined communal life. Remember that this Dharma Hall Discourse was once a performative, oral
text delivered in the context of an ascetic community sharing a life of meditative
training and devotion. Thus, the text probably helped to explain and encourage a real ritual life supported by real
social structures such the master-disciple relationship, and real oral
performances of tradition such as ritualized commentary and argumentation.
In this regard, notice the import of the “capping phrase,” which concludes
the Dharma Hall Discourse:
This is what I attained through
study on the sitting platform, but what goes beyond that? Great assembly, do
you want to understand this clearly?
After a
pause Dōgen said: Do not ask what kind of
livelihood is here. Zhaozhou’s tea exists in India.
Though this “capping phrase” seems to function more as a
sacramental proclamation, or as new primary text, than as the consummation of a
nice argument. It also seems to strengthen the argument that the performance of
this ritualized discourse beyond its clear ideological and rhetorical purpose, probably
functioned to explain and encourage praxis within the life of monastery.
First of
all, “Zhaozhou tea” is an intertextual reference to a “recorded saying” of
Zhaozhou’s record. Dōgen’s discipleship circle would have
known this text because Dōgen frequently commented on it. This tradition
represents
the Chan Master Zhaozhou Congshen (778-987) as asking various monks coming into his
monastery whether they have been “here” before or not. Whether they answer yes
or no, Zhaozhou replies, “You should
have some tea.” When an attendant monk asks the Master why he replies the same way
to both, Zhaozhou answers, “You
should have some tea.” Now, reading into this tradition the Chan school’s commitment to the
Buddha-nature doctrine, which maintains that sentient beings always already
have the ability to become enlightened, one can imagine that the point of Zhaozhou’s instruction seems to be that whether
students have been “here” or not, all students should just practice “here,” now,
and as they are, which is always already the perfect place and time for realizing
the truth of the fundamental nature of the self. Such a practice is carried
out, furthermore, in everyday activities: “You should have some tea.”
Dōgen’s capping
phrase further instructs: “Do not ask what kind of livelihood is here. Zhaozhou’s tea
exists in India.” Playing on the
word “here,” which seems to refer to their monastic community in rural Japan, with
the “here” of Zhaozhou’s recorded saying,
Dōgen seems to be valorizing the everyday activity of their modest monastery. In other words, Dōgen’s
injunction appears to be that there is nothing wrong with “here.” Perhaps contrary to the
assumptions of his discipleship circle, now and here is actually the perfect
field for the practice of the “family style” of the Buddha. In which case, he seems to be helping
his disciples overturn dualistic notions of space and time: Though poor Japanese
monks living in the age of Final Dharma as they are, without haven had the
privilege to go to India (the often romanticized birthplace of the Buddha’s
teaching), the good news is that a monk happily does not need to be in India in order to
practice the right livelihood taught by the Buddha. Indeed, “Zhaozhou’s tea exists in India.” The same
livelihood, in other words, taught by the Buddha is embodied in Zhaozhou’s tea and Dōgen’s
practice community is
drinking that the same tea, the same
everyday continuous practice. Furthermore, Dōgen seems to be claiming that the
same tradition of Song Buddhist orthopraxy that came directly from the
Buddha is being transmitted here in Japan through his very body and mind: “This is what I attained through study on the sitting
platform…”
Of course, the meaning and intention of Dōgen’s
arcane capping phrase “Do not ask what
kind of livelihood is here. Zhaozhou’s tea exists in India” is ultimately
anybody’s guess. Moreover, it may not even have served a hermeneutical function
or have a semantic content. Nonetheless, my reading of the phrase fits within the larger stratagem of the
discourse, which seems to be to present a continuity of living authoritative tradition
between the Buddha, Mahākāśyapa,
Zhaozhou, and
Dōgen. One could then
argue that the discourse as a whole serves not only an ideology, but also as
encouragement and explanation for the praxis of Eihei-ji monastery.
Indeed, the text generates a discourse which conflates the monastic life at Eihei-ji
with that practiced by the Buddha, Mahākāśyapa, and Zhaozhou.
In a ritualized performance in the Dharma Hall of Kōshō-ji sometime between April and August of 1241,
Dōgen presumably
delivered an oral version of the following Dharma Hall Discourse recorded by the attendant scribe
at the time Senne (n.d.):
46.
Dharma Hall Discourse
Here
is a story. The first ancestor [Bodhidharma] requested to his disciples, “The
time [of my passing] is finally coming. Why don’t you each speak of what you
have attained?”
Then his disciple Daofu replied, “My
understanding is, without attaching to words and without separating from words,
to perform the function of the way.”
The ancestor said, “You have my
skin.”
The nun Zongchi said, “My present
understanding is that it is like Ānanda seeing the land of Akṣobhya Buddha
once, and never seeing it again.”
The ancestor said, “You have my
flesh.”
Daoyu said, “The four great elements
are fundamentally empty. The five skandhas do not exist; and my view is that
there is not even one Dharma to attain.”
The ancestor said, “You have my
bones.”
Lastly, [Dazu] Huike made a
prostration, and then stood at his position. The ancestor said, “You have my
marrow.”
The teacher Dōgen said: Later people believe that these are shallow or deep
[levels], but this is not the ancestor’s meaning. “You have my skin” is like
speaking of lanterns and standing pillars. “You have my flesh” is like saying,
“This very mind is Buddha.” “You have my bones” is like speaking of the mountains,
rivers, and great earth. “You have my marrow” is like twirling a flower and
blinking the eyes. There is no shallow or deep, superior or inferior. If you
can see like this, then you see the ancestral teacher [Bodhidharma], you see
the second ancestor, and you can receive transmission of the robe and bowl.
This legendary tradition reporting the transmission between the 28th Indian successor
Bodhidharma and the first Chinese
patriarch Dazu Huike (487-593) is
well known by scholars and practitioners alike: Bodhidharma gathers his four disciples, tells them it is time to
designate a successor and so express their understanding of the Buddha Dharma. In
seeming increasing levels of penetration, each report their understanding and Bodhidharma confirms to each disciple respectively,
“You have my skin.” “You have my flesh.” “You have my
bones.” Then
comes the last disciple Huike, who without
a verbal utterance “made a prostration,
and then stood at his position.” To which “The ancestor said, ‘You have my marrow.’” One infers from the logical
progression of the primary text that Huike’s
action, “without relying on words and letters,” confirms Huike as the 29th patriarch in a succession of ancestors
“holding hands and pulling” since the time of Śākyamuni. A well known but crucial point
to notice is how Dōgen's
gives this event a
nondual spin in his commentary: “There is no
shallow or deep, superior or inferior.”
In the 1243 essay Kattō, Dōgen elaborates on his reasoning:
The
ancestor's body-and-mind is the
ancestor-skin, flesh, bones, and marrow. It is not
that the marrow is
close and the skin is far.
…
You
should know that even to the Second Ancestor he could have said, "You have attained my skin." Even saying, "You have attained my skin," he could have transmitted the treasury of the true dharma eye to Huike as the Second Ancestor. It does not go by the superiority or inferiority of attaining the flesh or attaining the marrow. Even to Daofu, Daoyu, or Zongchi he could have said, "You have attained my marrow."
…
However, those
who have not yet received correct
transmission think that the ancestor's
words "skin,
flesh, bones, and marrow"
are not equal in shallowness
and depth, and because the views of
the four students vary, one may seem to be closer
than the others. They think that
skin and flesh are nor
as close as bones and marrow. They
think that the Second
Ancestor was acknowledged as
attaining the marrow because his view
was better than those of the others.
People who speak in
this way have not yet studied with buddha
ancestors and do not
have transmission of the
ancestor way.
Dōgen goes on to argue
in Kattō that although Huike received the robe and bowl of Bodhidharma, all four disciples attained
the whole “skin-flesh-bones-marrow” of their teacher. Moreover, what is
understood as “mind-to-mind” transmission is actually thoroughly somatic: As
“gourd vines entangle with gourd vines” teachers and students have been entwining
together and budding forth through direct and intimate study of the way. Dōgen’s
interpretation
of the Bodhidharma-Huike dharma
transmission tradition, which nondualizes the normative reading of levels of
penetration, while attending to the particularity of each disciple, is of
course well known and needs no comment. But what is not often discussed is the very somaticity or
esoteric character of the motif involved. This story among others within Dōgen's “recorded
sayings” collection, suggest an intimate, internal relationship between the
Buddha’s teaching and the body. If we take the efficacy of “body language” seriously
and I think we should, then it follows that the tradition of the Buddha would
not merely be a tradition of discourse represented in written texts. Indeed,
there is something more basic and perhaps more fundamental about this
“religion” we call “Buddhism.”
This “something more fundamental” suggests itself in “Lastly, Huike made a prostration, and then stood at his
position.” Though
Zen exegetes have read this tradition as an event of secret, nonverbal “mind-to-mind”
transmission, one could just as easily read this passage as the transmission or
confirmation of proper ritual conduct. In bowing, Huike’s expressed his sincerity
and veneration of Bodhidharma as his
teacher, as one emboding the sacred teaching of the Buddha. In turn Bodhidharma confirms in Huike the very same embodiment: “You have marrow.”
Such a reading seems underpins
Dōgen's Raihaitokuzui essay or “Prostration and
Attaining the Marrow” in which he argues among other thins for the legitimacy
of female teachers, who have attained the teaching. Anyone who has attained the
virtue of the Buddha is a rightful teacher and deserves proper veneration. This
imperative transcends rank and gender and other forms of human organization
because the Dharma stands as the ultimate authority. Furthermore, it is precisely
through proper ritual prostration before this ultimate authority, which the
teacher embodies that transmission occurs. This transmission furthermore seems
to be thoroughly somatic and esoteric in that it entails a mutual embodiment,
an entwining of the “skin-flesh-bones-marrow” of teacher and disciple. On this
point, we see for example Dōgen in
Kattō instruct to his disciples deeply penetrate
the saying, “You have attained my realization." "This is the moment,” he explains, “when "you" are now an ancestor and this is the time when "you" are
now Huike.”
In such a manner, one can begin to see in
the Dharma Hall Discourse above coupled with Dōgen's commentary a suggestion that “what” is being handed-down in the
Buddhist religion is not simply a discursive knowledge, handed-down solely
through erudition and textual transmission. But also, and perhaps more
fundamentally, Buddhist teaching is a tradition of body language and ritual
technique, transmitted through visual and somatic modes. In this Dharma
Hall Discourse Huike’s bow display concretely as well as
metaphorically how the body, both ideologically and phenomenologically, becomes
a carrier of Buddhist tradition. Certainly, mastery of practices such as
meditation, visualization, mudra, and
the oral appropriation and performance of scriptural texts involves more than
“understanding.” Certainly, regimes of textual memorization and ritual
performance shape the human being in dimensions beyond the cognitive. Perhaps
then there is some truth to the infamous slogan of “a
separate transmission outside the scriptures.”
We have seen how in Zen traditions practitioners claim to transmit the original
practice of the historical Buddha, which as Zen apologetics contend is “outside
the scriptures.” The authority of Zen tradition then comes not from the scriptures,
which may be widely circulated in cultures of writing and print, but through a genealogy
of patriarchs, which goes all the way back to Śākyamuni Buddha on Vulture Peak with his intimate
coterie of disciples. These ideological constructions of lineage, these ideas
of “history,” help to organize and sanctify the power of Zen institutions,
partly through the cultural capital generated through their very distinction as
an oralized tradition vis-à-vis a
written tradition. In which case, persistent motifs
such as “face-to-face” transmission and representations of the genealogy of
handing down tradition would have undoubted ideological dimensions. But such ideological
dimensions seemed at the same time to be grounded in ritual life and social
structures such as the master-disciple relationship, monasticism, and regimes
of scriptural memorization and performance. Anthropologically speaking, moreover, ideas of
transmission and lineage speak to the real situation of the pre-modern world,
where oral/aural (and visual) modes of communication dominate as forms of
cultural media. Furthermore, such ideology were probably fused with the
doctrinal matrixes of training environments, where they probably functioned as
rationales, encouragements, and explanations of praxis.
Of course many scholars will dismiss Zen ideologies of orality in
light of the abundance of writing in Zen Buddhism generally. But this often
cited critique, fails to see how the abundance of scripture and commentary
within these traditions may not in fact refute the possibility of oral dynamics
of transmission but corroborate them. Contemporary work in oral tradition studies has
shown that the boundaries separating the oral and the written are not so much
boundaries as they are intersections, where elements of oral performance often
enter into the written medium and conventions of writing in turn reenter the
stream of oral culture. In other words, in the processual formation and
reformation of religious writings, an intertwining of “orality” and
“textuality” often occurs, which would entail the possibility that pedagogical
texts such as recorded sayings and kōan collections would not
simply be written traditions, they would be a kind of oral-written hybrid
material, indicating larger processes of the transmission of culture that
involved both oral performance and writing.
Conclusion
In organization, this essay first
summarized the genre and general structure of the Eihei Kōroku “recorded
sayings” of Eihei Dōgen.
Secondly, this essay explicated an oral theory that emphasized the interweaving
of written and oral traditions. Here, this essay argued that such a theory may open
up the possibility of studying Buddhist texts emerging from the cultural context
of East Asia from an oral traditions studies perspective. Thirdly, this essay
juxtaposed the Zen Buddhist tradition’s infamous slogan about being a “transmission
outside of the scriptures” with the ineluctable role that scripture, words, and
letters have generally played within this tradition. At this crux, a theory of
oral and written interpenetration provided a possible avenue out of this
classic conundrum, showing how written texts can be situated within the performative
contexts of monastic training. Finally, this essay tried to apply its general argument
and theory of orality to Dōgen’s “recorded sayings,” hoping this
analysis might begin to reveal how transmission involved
both real and ideal, oral and written dynamics. But here, the analysis was incomplete and the data lacking. Without more
research and the application of a wider range of methodological approaches, the
question as to the realities and idealities of the transmission of Zen Buddhist
tradition must remain open.
On the other hand, Dōgen’s “recorded sayings” did reinforce the argument that was primary in the
monastic training environments of Kōshō-ji and Eihei-ji was not the
production of texts per se, but
rather the continuous practice of a disciplined way of life, which texts nonetheless
helped to generate, record, and regenerate. We also saw how Dōgen
placed stress on the oralization of Buddhist tradition in his oral lectures
with the motif of Shōbōgenzō, which pointed to the idea that the Buddha’s
teaching was not simply something that could be put in writing but was more
fundamentally a living tradition transmitted through authorities, who had the “eye”
for skillful praxis and proper ritual devotion. On this point, we seem to have
uncovered a fresh web of questions.
Though scholars
and practitioners of Zen refer quite naturally to Dōgen’s celebrated collection
of informal essays as “the Shōbōgenzō,” it now appears that this term unleashes
a host of unexpected questions and problems, the first being nature the Shōbōgenzō
itself. It is a text? Is it an oral tradition? Is it a kind of oral-written
tradition? Steven Heine’s scholarship has shown how “the Shōbōgenzō” has
appeared in 75, 60, 12, 28, and 95 fascicle versions and this estimate excludes
the more obscure and possibly undiscovered versions. In other words, depending
on time and place, “the Shōbōgenzō” changes. This leads one to wonder
whether there is in fact a single text “the Shōbōgenzō,” or whether
there is rather a family of texts governed by a single idea “Shōbōgenzō.”
To make matters even more complicated, there is also a separate record of Dōgen’s
oral teachings at Kōshō-ji monastery and a collection of 300 ‘case-records’
collated by Dōgen after his return from Song China, which also bear the
title “Shōbōgenzō.” So which is the
real Shōbōgenzō? Are all versions the Shōbōgenzō? Or, is each
version but a “snapshot” of the more ongoing, performative Shōbōgenzō of
Dōgen’s teaching career, which weaved in and out of writing? Or, is it
simply that none are the Shōbōgenzō? In any event, we know
that the Shōbōgenzō is not in truth a closed, written work. On the other
hand, there is evidence in a colophon written by Dōgen’s senior disciple
Ejō, which indicates that Dōgen sought to create a 100-fascicle compilation
during his lifetime.
Nonetheless, this version was not completed and what has come down to us an
family of textual variants, which of course is not unusual in manuscript
cultures. Still, studying these writings, one is hard pressed to find places where
Dōgen refers to Shōbōgenzō as a written work of which he is the
author. By and large, references to Shōbōgenzō function as allusions to
the living tradition of the Buddha of which Dōgen claims to be no author
but a transmitter. But the nature of this tradition and the dynamics of its
transmission will remain open questions, contested by researchers and
practitioners in the study of Buddhism.
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With respect to these historical
precedents, I rely on William M. Bodiford, Sōtō
Zen in Medieval Japan (Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press, 1993).
See for example Masao
Abe and Norman Waddell, trs., The Heart
of Dōgen’s Shōbōgenzō, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002).
Here I am relying on the work of Steven
Heine for these descriptions of the jishu
and jodo styles. See Steven Heine, Did Dōgen Go to China? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006),
2-3 and 26-29.
Heine 2010, 57. On the diglossic problem of classical Chinese
and Kanbun in relation to orality, I
imagine that Dogen’s lectures were not delivered in the Chinese language that
the Chinese script represents. I imagine
that the lectures were delivered in Japanese with Chinese loan words mixed
in. I imagine that were redacted into
the classical style in order to conform to the conventions of the ‘recorded
sayings’ genre of Song Dynasty Chán literature after the fact. But this problem remains a problematic
question for someone trying to understand the oral aspects of this text.
Now, I am borrowing this term
“sedimentation” from a late essay of German Philosopher Edmund Husserl, the
“father” of phenomenology. See Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction, (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1989). Effectively, Husserl uses the term of
“sedimentation” to describe the dynamic of writing and the work of sharing
knowledge through writing. Analogous to the way layers of stratification
preserve and yet cover-over the geological developments of the earth’s crust,
writings or “sedimentations” preserve and yet cover over the achievements and
movements of human culture. Technically speaking, sedimentation describes a transformation of the ontological state of
“meaning” or Sinn, which occurs when
“meaning” gets written-down. For Husserl it seems that when “meaning” is
written down, it ontologically transforms from an actively meaningful
linguistic life in speech into a deactivated, latent state of meaning in writing. Using writing, moreover, a literate community
documents and formalizes a traditional accomplishment and hands it down
“ready-made.” For Husserl, a “ready-made” tradition is useful to advance
tradition as a whole, but also such a “ready-made” tradition is somewhat
problematic for a philosopher seeking full disclosure of evidence and
meaning. In the form of a document, a
tradition is only a “communiqué made virtual” and as linguists point out,
writing is not language but the representation of language in graphs. A text sedimented in writing is therefore
handed-down in a state, which requires “reactivation” to be resuscitated into
meaningful language. “Reactivation,” another important technical term of
Husserl’s, is more than reading aloud however.
“Reactivation” is a critical re-engagement with handed-down,
“ready-made” tradition, which intends to excavate and activate the originary
meanings, activities, and possibilities that contributed to a “ready-made”
text’s creation. Rather than simply
taking the meaning of the written text for granted, the phenomenologist
essentially tries to reenter the horizon of a given text’s invention in order
to understand and experience how it was done and what it meant. While distancing myself from Husserl’s
essentialism, I shall use the word sedimentation loosely to describe how
linguistic texts, which are more fluid and dynamic, transform into written
texts, which are often more stabile and condensed. In turn, I shall sometimes use the metaphor
of “reactivation” to describe how written texts can become re-oralized within
ritual and didactic contexts.
See Fabio Rambelli, Buddhist
Materiality: A Cultural History of
Objects in Japanese Buddhism, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007),
90.
David McMahan, “Orality, Writing, and Authority in
South Asian Buddhism: Visionary Literature and the Struggle for Legitimacy in
the Mahayana,” History of Religions, No. 3 (1998): 252.
On the topic sutra burial see D. Max,
Moerman, “The Death of the Dharma: Buddhist Sutra Burials in Early Medieval Japan,”
in The Death of Sacred Texts: Ritual
Disposal and Renovation of Texts in World Religions edited by Kristina Myrvold, (Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2010),
71-90.
Daniel B. Stevenson, “Buddhist Practice
and the Lotus Sutra in China,” in Readings of the Lotus Sutra, eds.
Stephen F. Teiser and Jacqueline I. Stone (New York: Columbia University Press,
2009), 132-150.
Willa Jane Tanabe, Paintings of the Lotus Sutra (New York: Weatherhill, 1998), 39.
See Jack Goody, The Interface Between the Written and the Oral, (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1987), and Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy, (New York: Routledge, 1982).
Stephen F. Teiser and Jacqueline I. Stone, eds., Readings of the Lotus Sutra, (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), 5.
Steven Heine and Dale S. Wright eds., The Zen Canon: Understanding the Classic
Texts, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 3.
This is John McRae’s term. It fits into his larger argument that Chan comes to its apex (not is nadir) in
the Song. See McRae,
2003.
See Yifa, The Origins of the Buddhist Monastic Code in China (Honolulu:
University of Hawai’i Press, 2002).
“Toilet paper” of course is an anachronism
for something like “dried shit stick.” See
Burton Watson, The Zen teachings of Master Lin-chi: a translation
of the Lin-chi lu, (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1993), 13 and 47.
David McMahan, “Orality, Writing, and
Authority in South Asian Buddhism: Visionary Literature and the Struggle for
Legitimacy in the Mahayana,” History of
Religions, No. 3 (1998): 249-274.
Carl Bielefeldt, Dogen’s Manuals of Zen Meditation, (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1988), 46-47.
Commonly translated at “skillful means”
though perhaps better translated as “liberative way-making,” upaya is basically a teaching about teaching. The idea of upaya-kausalya is that
the Buddha taught various ways out of suffering according to the conditions and
capacities of his audience, using the materials available in a given context.
The simile of the raft gives form to this somewhat instrumental view of the
Buddha’s teaching: In the Alagaddupama
sutta (Discourse on the Simile of the Snake), the Buddha describes his
teaching as a raft, as a device expediting the traverse of a waterway to a safe
and secure shore. Though the raft is
cherished as an effective means to cross to the other shore, the raft is not
the shore. Here the Buddha is saying
that the methods alone do not constitute the final goal because they are simply
ways to make liberation—not liberation itself.
Comically, the Buddha suggests in the raft simile that the practitioner,
seeing the usefulness of the raft, is likely to burden himself, carrying the
raft around on his head once the crossing is complete. The implication though of course is that to
make the teaching into another attachment is not encouraged. See Michael Pye, Skilful
Means: A Concept in Mahayana Buddhism, (London: Gerald Duckworth & Co.
Ltd.), 1978.
