Essays in Zen Buddhism · 32 of 66

History of Zen: Bodhi-dharma to Hui-neng, Part 8

Hung-jên died, A.D. 675, four years after the Dharma was transmitted to Hui-nêng. He was seventy-four years old. But Hui-nêng never started his mission work until some years later, for in accordance with the advice of his master he lived a secluded life in the mountains. One day he thought that it was time for him to go out in the world. He was now thirty-nine years old, and it was in the first year of I-fêng (A.D. 676) during the T‘ang dynasty. He came to Fa-hsing temple in the province of Kuang, where a learned priest, Yin-tsung, was discoursing on the Nirvāna Sūtra. He saw some monks arguing on the flattering pennant; one of them said, “The pennant is an inanimate object and it is the wind that makes it flap.” Against this it was remarked by another monk that “Both wind and pennant are inanimate things, and the flapping is an impossibility.” A third one protested, “The flapping is due to a certain combination of cause and condition”; while a fourth one proposed a theory, saying, “After all there is no flapping pennant, but it is the wind that is moving by itself.” The discussion grew quite animated when Hui-nêng interrupted with the remark, “It is neither wind nor pennant but your own mind that flaps.” This at once put a stop to the heated argument. The priest-scholar, Yin-tsung, was greatly struck by the statement of Hui-nêng, so conclusive and authoritative. Finding out very soon who this Hui-nêng was, Yin-tsung asked him to enlighten him on the teaching of the master of Yellow Plum Mountain. The gist of Hui-nêng’s reply was as follows:

“My master had no special instruction to give, he simply insisted upon the need of our seeing into our own Nature through our own efforts, he had nothing to do with meditation, or with deliverance. For whatever that could be named leads to dualism, and Buddhism is not dualistic. To take hold of this non-duality of truth is the aim of Zen. The Buddha-Nature of which we are all in possession, and the seeing into which constitutes Zen, is indivisible into such oppositions as good and evil, eternal and temporal, material and spiritual. To see dualism in life is due to confusion of thought; the wise, the enlightened see into the reality of things unhampered by erroneous ideas.”

This was the beginning of Hui-nêng’s career as Zen master. His influence seems to have been immediate and far-reaching. He had many disciples numbering thousands. He did not however go around preaching and proselyting. His activities were confined in his own province in the south, and the Pao-lin monastery at Ts‘ao-ch‘i was his headquarters. When the Emperor Kao-tsung learned that Hui-nêng succeeded Hung-jên as one of Dharma’s spiritual descendants in the faith of Zen, he sent him one of his court officials with an imperial message, but Hui-nêng refused to come up to the capital, preferring his stay in the mountains. The messenger however wished to be instructed in the doctrine of Zen that he might convey it to his august master at Court. Said Hui-nêng in the main as follows:

“It is a mistake to think that sitting quietly in contemplation is essential to deliverance. The truth of Zen opens by itself from within and it has nothing to do with the practise of dhyana. For we read in the Vajracchedikā that those who try to see the Tathagata in one of his special attitudes, as sitting or lying, do not understand his spirit, and that the Tathagata is designated as Tathagata because he comes from nowhere and departs nowhere, and for that reason he is the Tathagata. His appearance has no whence, and his disappearance no whither, and this is Zen. In Zen therefore there is nothing to gain, nothing to understand; what shall we then do with sitting cross-legged and practising dhyana? Some may think that understanding is needed to enlighten the darkness of ignorance, but the truth of Zen is absolute in which there is no dualism, no conditionality. To speak of ignorance and enlightenment, or of Bodhi and Kleśa (wisdom and passions), as if they were two separate objects which cannot be merged in one, is not Mahayanistic. In the Mahayana every possible form of dualism is condemned as not expressing the ultimate truth. Everything is a manifestation of the Buddha-Nature which is not defiled in passions, nor purified in enlightenment. It is above all categories. If you want to see what is the nature of your being, free your mind from thought of relativity and you will see by yourself how serene it is and yet how full of life it is.”

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While Hui-nêng was working for the cause of Zen in the south, Shên-hsiu representing another school was active in the north. Before he was converted into Buddhism, he was a learned Confucian and thus destined from the start to cut a different figure, compared with his brother-disciple, Hui-nêng. The Emperor Wu of the T‘ang dynasty was one of the devoted followers of Shên-hsiu, and naturally around him were gathered a large number of courtiers and government officers. When the Emperor Chung-tsung came to the throne, A.D. 685, he was all the more treated with reverence, and it was Chang-shuo, one of the state ministers, who inscribed a biographical sketch and eulogy on the memorial stone erected over his grave when he died. One of his sermons recorded reads:

“The teaching of all the Buddhas In one’s own Mind originally exists: To seek the Mind without one’s Self, Is like running away from the father.”

He died in A.D. 706, seven years prior to Hui-nêng. His school known as the Northern in contrast to Hui-nêng’s Southern School prospered in the north far better than the latter did in the south. But when Ma-tsu (died 788) and Shih-t‘ou (700–790) began their active propaganda in the south and finally established the foundations of Zen teaching, Shên-hsiu’s school failed to find able successors and finally disappeared altogether so that all the records we have of their movements come from the rival school. It thus came to pass that Hui-nêng, and not Shên-hsiu was recognised as the sixth patriarch of Zen Buddhism in China.

The difference between the Southern and the Northern school of Zen is one inherent in human mind; if we call the one intellectual or intuitional, the other would be regarded as pragmatical. The reason why the Southern school is known as “abrupt” or “instant” (yugapad) against the “gradual” (kramavṛittya) school of the North is because it upholds that the coming of enlightenment is instantaneous and does not allow any gradation, as there are no stages of progress in it; whereas the Northern school emphasises the process of arriving at enlightenment which is naturally gradual, requiring much time and concentration. Hui-nêng was a great advocate of absolute idealism, while Shên-hsiu was a realist and refused to ignore a world of particulars where Time rules over all our doings. An idealist does not necessarily ignore the objective aspect of reality, but his eyes are always fixed at one point which stands by itself, and his surveyings are done from this absolute point. The doctrine of abruptness is thus the result of looking at the multitudinousness of things in absolute unity. All true mystics are followers of the “abrupt” school. The flight from the alone to the alone is not and cannot be a gradual process. The teaching of Shên-hsiu is to be heeded as the practical advice to those who are actually engaged in the study of Zen, but it fails to describe the character of experience known as “the seeing into one’s own Nature,” which was the special message of Hui-nêng as distinguished from those of the other Buddhist schools. That the school of Shên-hsiu could not survive as a branch of Zen was natural enough, for Zen could not be anything else but an instantaneous act of intuition. As it opens up all of a sudden a world hitherto undreamed of, it is an abrupt and discrete leaping from one plane of thought to another. Hsiu missed the ultimate object of Zen when he emphasised the process to reach the end. As a practical adviser he was therefore excellent and full of merit.

The ideas of instantaneity and gradation in the realisation of the truth of Zen originally comes from the Laṅkāvatāra (Nanjo’s edition, p. 55), where this distinction is made in regard to cleansing one’s mind of its stream of ideas and images. According to the Sutra, this cleansing is in one sense gradual but in another abrupt or instantaneous. When it is regarded as like the ripening of a fruit, the modelling of a vessel, the growing of a plant, or the mastering of an art, which takes place gradually and in time, it is an act of gradual process: but when it is comparable to a mirror reflecting objects, or to the Ālaya reproducing all mental images, the cleansing of mind takes place instantaneously. Thus the Sutra recognises the two types of minds: with some the cleansing to a state of enlightenment can be obtained gradually after a long practice of meditation, perhaps through many a successive life; but to others it may come all of a sudden, even without previously conscious efforts. The division of the two schools as regards the abrupt realisation of enlightenment is based not only on the statements in the Sutra but ultimately on facts of psychology. The point at issue however was not a question of time; whether enlightenment took place as an act of one moment or not, ceased to concern them; for the difference now developed into that of their general philosophical attitude and outlook towards the fact of enlightenment itself. The question of physical time has thus turned into that of psychology in its more profound aspect.

When process is emphasised, the end is forgotten, and process itself comes to be identified with end. When a disciple of Shên-hsiu came to Hui-nêng to be instructed in Zen, he asked what was the teaching of Shên-hsiu, and the disciple informed him thus: “My master usually teaches us to stop the working of our minds and to sit quietly in meditation for a long time at a stretch, without lying down.” To this Hui-nêng responded: “To stop the working of mind and to sit quietly in meditation is a disease and not Zen, and there is no profit whatever to be gained from a long sitting.” Then he gave him the following gāthā:

“While living, one sits up and lies not, When dead, one lies and sits not; A set of ill-smelling skeleton! What is the use of toiling and moiling?”

This shows exactly where Hui-nêng stands in relation to his rival Shên-hsiu who is so taken up with the practical details of the process of Zen. Those two gāthās inscribed on the monastery wall at Yellow-plum Mountain while they were yet under the tutorship of Hung-jên, are eloquent enough to bring out the characteristic features of the two schools.

When Hui-nêng further asked the monk from the north as to the teaching of his teacher in regard to morality (śīla), meditation (dhyāna), and wisdom (prajñā), the monk said, “According to my master Hsiu, morality consists in not doing anything that is bad; wisdom in reverently practising all that is good; and meditation in purifying the heart.” Replied Hui-nêng: “My view is quite different. All my teaching issues from the conception of Self-Nature, and those who assert the existence of anything outside it betray their ignorance of its nature. Morality, Meditation, and Wisdom—all these are forms of Self-Nature. When there is nothing wrong in it, we have morality; when it is free from ignorance, it is wisdom; and when it is not disturbed, it is meditation. Have a thorough understanding once for all as to the being of Self-Nature, and you know that nothing dualistic obtains in it; for here you have nothing to be particularly distinguished as enlightenment, or ignorance, or deliverance, or knowledge, and yet from this nothingness there issues a world of particulars as objects of thought. For him who has once had an insight into his own Nature, no special posture as a form of meditation is to be recommended; everything and anything is good to him, sitting, or lying, or standing. He enjoys perfect freedom of spirit, he moves along as he feels, and yet he does nothing wrong, he is always acting in accord with his Self-Nature, his work is play. This is what I call ‘the seeing into one’s own Nature’; and this seeing is instantaneous as much as the working is, for there is no graduating process from one stage to another.”