In Part 2 of this episode, I continue giving my “2,500 years’ worth of Buddhist texts in a nutshell,” an overview of texts in my Zen lineage. In Part 1 I explained what makes a Buddhist text considered legitimate enough to be passed down through the ages. I also introduced the idea of a Buddhist family tree and discussed the original Buddhist canon, the rising of the Mahayana, and the Mahayana sutras. In this episode I cover Mahayana philosophers, Chinese Chan literature, and the writings of two of the main Japanese Zen ancestors in my lineage.
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Early Mahayana Philosophers
Chinese Chan Literature
Japanese Zen Literature
Early Mahayana Philosophers
So, I ended Part 1 at the point – moving through time from Shakyamuni Buddha to the present – where Mahayana Buddhism and Vajrayana Buddhism diverged in the Buddhist family tree. Before I get to Chan, the meditation tradition that spread to Japan and Korea and became known as Zen or Sŏn (pronounced somewhere between sun and soon), I need to say a few words about the texts we have from Mahayana philosophers like Nagarjuna.
As I mentioned earlier, the Mahayana Sutras arose between 100 BCE and 300 CE or so and did not have identifiable authors. Obviously, people composed them, but they were likely compiled over time with numerous contributors. In the early centuries CE, individuals began to compose Buddhist commentaries and philosophical works. Those that were greatly valued by Mahayana Buddhists were studied, preserved, and exported to China and other places, allowing them to survive the eventual decline of Buddhism in India starting in the 4th century CE.
Some of the major early Mahayana philosophers include:
- Ashvagosa, an Indian Buddhist scholar, poet, and philosopher who lived somewhere between 80 and 150 CE. He is traditionally credited as being the author of the text The Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana.
- Nagarjuna, a monk from South India who lived somewhere between 150 and 250 CE. He is considered a great champion of the Mahayana and is particularly well known for his treatise on emptiness, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, or Mūlamadhyamakakārikā.
- Vasubandhu and Asanga, brothers who were both Indian Buddhist monks, scholars, and prolific writers. They live from the 4th to 5th century CE and were cofounders of the Yogacara school of Mahayana Buddhism. One of Asanga’s much-studied works is Summary of the Great Vehicle, and one of Vasubandhu’s is Twenty Verses on Consciousness Only.
If flowery, supernatural Mahayana Sutras aren’t your thing and you find Chan and Zen too poetic or cryptic, you might enjoy the early Mahayana philosophers. I know some Zen folks who love Nagarjuna and Yogacara. In fact, Soto Zen priest Ben Connelly has recently published accessible books on Vasubandhu’s teachings.
However, most people are going to find early Mahayana philosophers very rough going. From my point of view, what the Buddha and later Chan teachers encouraged their students to experience for themselves, the philosophers try to explain. Thoroughly, at great length, with carefully constructed arguments. For example, here are some of the first verses of Nagarjuna’s Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way:
Not from itself, not from another, not from both, nor without cause: Never in any way is there any existing thing that has arisen.
The intrinsic nature of existents does not exist in the conditions, etc. The intrinsic nature not occurring, neither is extrinsic nature found…
An action does not possess conditions; nor is it devoid of conditions. Conditions are not devoid of an action; neither are they provided with an action.
They are said to be conditions when something arises dependent on them. When something has not arisen, why then are they not nonconditions?[i]
For the most part, I am including the early Mahayana philosophers in my overview of Buddhist texts in the Zen lineage largely because you’re bound to run into their writings, or references to them, if you do much exploration of Buddhist texts. If you find these texts fascinating and helpful, great. If they encourage you to go down a bottomless intellectual rabbit hole, I suggest you avoid them. If they aren’t of interest to you, I don’t feel they are essential to a Zen education, although there will certainly be teachers who disagree with me (and even find this whole section vaguely sacrilegious… sorry).
Chinese Chan Literature
The Chan tradition began to develop in China somewhere around the 5th or 6th centuries CE. It was profoundly influenced by Taoist philosophy, as described by David Hinton,[ii] and was certainly a new form of Buddhism with a distinctly Chinese flavor. It emphasized meditation practice (Chan was the Chinese term for dhyana, which was the word for meditation imported from India) and – once Chan developed into a distinct school looking to differentiate itself from other schools – it claimed to be based on a transmission of the Dharma, or truth, “outside of the scriptures.” Chan teachings and texts were offered as “fingers pointing to the moon,” where the moon is a truth you must experience for yourself, through practice. The moon can’t be explained to you. As a famous line from the pre-Taoist Chinese text the I Ching states:
When there’s talk, there’s no sincerity, no accuracy. Revere words, and you soon wither impoverished away.[iii]
Consequently, Chan texts primarily took the form of evocative poetry, personal exhortations to students to awaken to their true nature, and accounts of pivotal interactions between teachers and students called kung-ans (Japanese: koans). Chan wedded the Mahayana teaching of Buddha-nature to the ontological substrate of Taoism and began to focus on what came to be called “sudden awakening.” The idea was that our sense of alienation, self-centeredness, and suffering are the result of our delusion of separateness. Meditation plus teachings (and teachers) who challenged our delusion could result in immediate clarity and liberation. “Sudden awakening” was contrasted to “gradual awakening,” the idea inherited from original Buddhism that liberation was a process of purification that required many lifetimes to complete. This is, of course, a glaring over-generalization, but it speaks to flavor of Chan teachings and texts compared to what had come before in the Buddhist tradition.
The use of poetic imagery and language in Chan is remarkable and deliberate. Some people find it off-putting because it may seem like the writers are trying to gratuitously obscure their meaning. However, when words are considered to be fingers pointing at the moon, there are many ways in which poetry is superior to prose explanations. Rather than engaging your intellect and inviting you to seek a definitive understanding, poetry seeks to evoke something in you, based on your own experience or intuition. Rather than giving you immediate comprehension, poetic language dances just outside of the realm of discriminative conclusions. Very often, once you gain a personal experience of what a teaching is pointing to, you realize that the concise poetry described it perfectly, better than a volume of a prose possibly could.
The personal exhortations to students in Chan differ greatly from the teachings of the Buddha. In original Buddhist texts, the Buddha (or one of his disciples) is usually giving detailed instructions on practice or describing the nature of the human mind and its defilements. Such teachings have a very educational feel to them. If someone in the Buddha’s audience suddenly achieved awakening, it was because they finally understood the teachings after already having spent a long time in practice. There is a sense that it would be advantageous to memorize the teachings and follow them carefully.
In Chan, you get much more of a sense that you are listening in on an energetic exchange between teacher and their students – almost more like a pep talk than a teaching. The underlying message is always, It’s right here, under your nose. Don’t you see it? Stop looking elsewhere. Wake up!
Some notable Chan texts and teaching poems that are not kung-an/koan collections include:
- Bodhidharma’s short and pithy teachings, including Outline of Practice and the Bloodstream Sermon. Bodhidharma is revered as the first Chan ancestor in China and is believed to have lived during the 5th or 6th century CE.
- Seng-ts’an’s poetic teaching poem Faith in Mind. (6th century)
- The Platform Sutra of unknown authorship, which tells the story of the life and teaching of Hui Neng (638-713),[iv] the sixth ancestor after Bodhidharma in the Chan lineage. This text departs from the poetry/koan/exhortation pattern somewhat in its inclusion of a biographical story about Hui Neng (believed to be more legend than fact).
- The famous teaching poem The Harmony of Difference and Sameness, or written by Shih-t’ou (700-790).
- The Record of Lin-chi (Japanese: Rinzai). Lin-chi lived in the 9th century and his spiky exhortations to his students have been treasured ever since.
- The Precious Mirror Samadhi by Tung-shan Liang-chieh (807-869).
- The Mozhao Ming, or commentary on silent illumination, by Hongzhi Zhengjue (1091–1157).
Chan kung-ans (most people are more familiar with the Japanese word koan) were something new to Buddhism. These are the cryptic anecdotes and exchanges recorded, collected, and studied by Chan practitioners over the ages. The most well-known kung-ans are probably “Does a dog have Buddha-nature,” and “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” Although they are commonly cited as evidence of the inscrutability of Chan – inscrutable meaning impossible to understand – kung-ans are, in fact, another way to use language to point beyond what language can convey.
Kung-ans aren’t meant to be read casually or studied for intellectual understanding. Instead, they are meant to be engaged at a very personal, existential level, generally with the close guidance of a qualified teacher. You have to sit with them for a while, setting aside your effort to understand them with your discriminating mind. At the same time, it’s not just a matter of you deciding for yourself what they mean, because there’s a reason particular koans have been handed down for 1,000 years.
There are plenty of books out there that give you an introduction to working with kung-ans (I recommend Joan Sutherland’s Through Forests of Every Color: Awakening with Koans), so I won’t talk about them long. However, perhaps a brief personal story might help you appreciate what kung-ans are about if you aren’t familiar with them. During a sesshin (7-day silent retreat) I was assigned a kung-an by one of the teachers leading the retreat. It was from the Gateless Gate collection, or Mumonkan, number 9:
Daitsū Chishō Buddha sat in the meditation hall for ten kalpas, but the Dharma of the Buddha did not manifest itself and he could not attain Buddhahood. Why was this? [v]
In the context of sesshin I didn’t have a copy of the Mumonkan to reference, or any commentaries (besides, there was no reading allowed during the retreat). The teacher declined to give me any more context the verse I just read. In the meetings with the teacher, called sanzen or dokusan, I was asked to demonstrate the koan non-verbally, and this was daunting and awkward.
Most koans, if you think about them for a while, make sense. In this case, you can say, well, Daitsu Chisho was already a Buddha so there was nothing to awaken to. Awakening is a dream! There you go. But when I brought this to the teacher, he said, “That’s not what this koan is about. Rephrase it, ‘Domyo Burk Buddha sat for ten long kalpas but did not awaken, why not?’” Unable to find any kind of clever answer, I just sat with my lingering sense of wanting not just to “awaken,” but to know I am awakened. To be free of this constraining and limiting self.
I sat at length with the koan, and naturally it aroused my lingering doubts. Why, after my 25 years of practice, was I still so far from anything approaching perfection? Why was my understanding so limited? What was in my way? I sympathized with poor Daitsu Chisho Buddha, striving for eons, unable to complete the Buddha path.
Eventually, toward the end of the retreat, I just went in, humble and open, and said, “90% isn’t bad.” I knew I had experienced a great deal of transformation over the last 25 years and was ready to stop pretending to be anything more than I really was. Then the teacher said, “90% is 100%. For 25 years you have been 100% Domyo.” As he said this, something in me broke wide open. I experienced a deeper level of self-acceptance and peace than ever before. It was like wandering all over, looking for the Buddha, and then having him tap you on the shoulder, saying, “I’m right here.” An intellectual appreciation of how you already are Buddha-nature can be encouraging, but liberation only comes with an experiential, whole-body-and-mind realization that just this person is Buddha.
Other people’s experience of this particular koan might be quite different, but I am grateful to koan practice for challenging me to go beyond my comfort zone and explore new territory. It is precisely in the tension created between teacher and student, understanding and not understanding, that something new arises. If I had not struggled with this particular koan and with expressing it to a teacher, I would never have experienced the opening I did.
Most kung-ans are brief anecdotes about interactions with, or statements by, ancestral teachers. Over time, kung-ans were collected and commentaries were added. The main kung-an collections were compiled during the Sung dynasty (960–1279):
- The Mumonkan, or Gateless Gate (48 kung-ans)
- The Hekiganroku, or Blue Cliff Record (100 kung-ans). According to Katsuki Sekida, “The Mumonkan and Hekiganroku were composed in China in the Sung dynasty, and are the two best known and most frequently studied collections of koans.”[vi]
- The Shoyoroku, or Book of Equanimity (100 kung-ans)
These kung-an collections are studied in a methodical and formal fashion in many Chan/Zen lineages. In Soto Zen, my lineage, we often encounter kung-ans in our study and deeply appreciate them. Sometimes students even work with them. However, traditionally Soto Zen focuses on themeless zazen and not on formal koan work.
The Chan literature is rich and vast. A very helpful overview of Chinese Chan and then Japanese Zen ancestors and their writings can be found in The Roaring Stream: A New Zen Reader, edited by Nelson Foster and Jack Shoemaker. (It’s not new anymore, having been published in 1997, but it’s great, and you could say it’s new relative to the history of Zen.)
Japanese Zen Literature
Relatively recent Buddhist texts are, of course, more likely to still exist than much older ones. Therefore, the further we go down the Buddhist family tree, the more texts we will find. A given Chan, Zen, or Korean Seon lineage will have its own revered authors and texts. I can only speak to those in my own lineage because of my limited study and exposure. After all, there’s quite enough to study if I just trace my own lineage back 2,500 years! I know that the writings of masters in Chan, Zen, and Seon – not to mention Vietnamese Thiền [Tee-en] and other Buddhist traditions – can be very enlightening and inspiring, but each lineage usually picks its ancestral favorites to concentrate on.
In modern Soto Zen, most of us are pretty crazy about Zen master Eihei Dogen (1200-1253). Dogen was a prolific writer and is considered the founder of Soto Zen in Japan (the school was known as Caodong in China). His writings range from the practical (such as instructions to the monastery cook) to the poetic and profound (such as his essays on Buddha-nature). You can now access all of Dogen’s extant writings along with many books of commentaries. However, as Zen priest and translator of Dogen Taigen Dan Leighton writes:
It is ironic that Dogen’s writing has been so meaningful to the introduction to the West of Zen (and even Buddhism generally) in the last half of the twentieth century. In terms of Dogen’s importance to the historical development of Japanese Soto Zen, study of his writings was nearly insignificant. Since a generation or two after Dogen, his writings were basically unknown for many centuries except to a small number of Soto scholars and priests, until the popular revival and interest in Dogen in Japan beginning in the 1920s. In terms of the historical development of Japanese Soto Zen, Dogen was much more important, firstly, for his training of a fine core group of dedicated and skilled Soto disciples, and secondly, for his emphasis on precepts, and his introduction of the lay bodhisattva precept ceremony, which helped develop wide Soto Zen support throughout the Japanese countryside.[vii]
It’s also ironic that, despite how many of Dogen’s words were recorded for posterity, he probably would have approved of subsequent generations focusing on practice rather than on intellectual study. Still, I appreciate Dogen’s writings primarily for how they challenge ideas that we may not even be aware we are holding on to, rather than giving us more ideas to clutter up our minds. Dogen’s writings include (but are not limited to):
- The Shobogenzo, or the Treasure of the True Dharma Eye. There are different versions of this text, but the English translations of the text generally include 95 fascicles, which are like free-standing essays. You could easily make a lifetime study of just the Shobogenzo, or even a few key chapters of it.
- The Shobogenzo Zuimonki, a relatively short, sweet, down-earth compilation of Dogen’s instructions to his monks.
- The Eihei Shingi, a compilation of Dogen’s writings in Chinese about monastic community practice.[viii]
There are certainly more Japanese Zen masters who left writings I look forward to encountering, but the other major Japanese figure in my lineage is Keizan Jokin (1268–1325). He was a direct Dharma descendant of Dogen (four Dharma generations later) and is affectionately regarded as the “other founder” of Soto Zen in Japan because of how he managed to popularize, spread, and share the tradition. Keizan’s most celebrated writings are:
- Zazen Yōjinki (Points to keep in mind when practicing zazen), a relatively short and pithy text.
- The Denkōroku (Transmission of the Light), a book with 53 chapters, one for each Dharma ancestor starting with Shakyamuni Buddha and continuing with the lineage through Bodhidharma, Dogen’s Chinese teacher Rujing, Dogen, and ending with Dogen’s first Dharma heir, Koun Ejo. Every story includes an anecdote about the pivotal moment of the ancestor’s awakening (essentially a koan), plus a commentary by Keizan.
- The Keizan Shingi, or Keizan’s Rules of Purity, his instructions for conduct and function in a Soto Zen monastery.
Dogen’s and Keizan’s writings, for the most part, continue the tradition established in Chan of teaching through evocative poetry, personal exhortations to students to awaken to their true nature, and accounts of pivotal interactions between teachers and students (koans). Naturally, each author has his own flavor and is deeply appreciated in our tradition.
Contemporary Zen, Chan, and Buddhists sources – that is, those published within the last 50 years or so – are plentiful. Practitioners regularly make use of them. However, it goes without saying that these contemporary texts have not yet stood the test of time on a Buddhist scale, which is measured in hundreds, if not thousands, of years. For the most part, contemporary texts are appreciated as commentaries and explanations of older writings, helping modern audiences understand and practice with them.
Clearly, there is no way to compile a Buddhist bible – in the sense of a single, authoritative volume containing the essence of the tradition – even if we were to limit it to texts within a particular lineage. This means Buddhist and Zen study can be daunting, but if you don’t worry about comprehending (or even reading) it all, you can relax and enjoy the richness and diversity of the available texts. Even after decades of study, you can always find something new!
Endnotes
[i] Siderits, Mark; Katsura, Shoryu. Nagarjuna’s Middle Way: Mulamadhyamakakarika (Classics of Indian Buddhism) (p. 22). Wisdom Publications. Kindle Edition.
[ii] Hinton, David. China Root: Taoism, Ch’an, and Original Zen. Boulder, CO: Shambala Publications, 2020.
[iii] Hinton, David. The Way of Ch’an: Essential Texts of the Original Tradition (p. 23). Shambhala. Kindle Edition.
[iv] Dates from A New Zen Reader edited by Nelson Foster and Jack Shoemaker.
[v] Yamada, Kōun. The Gateless Gate: The Classic Book of Zen Koans. Wisdom Publications. Kindle Edition.
[vi] Sekida, Katsuki. Two Zen Classics: The Gateless Gate and The Blue Cliff Records (p. 13). Shambhala. Kindle Edition.
[vii] https://www.upaya.org/2012/05/reflections-on-translating-dogen-by-taigen-leighton/
[viii] Leighton, Taigen Daniel. Dogen’s Extensive Record: A Translation of the Eihei Koroku. Wisdom Publications. Kindle Edition.
