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Introduction The Zen school is the Meditation school, and the character of Zen can be traced in the tradition ofits meditation teaching. Historians have shown us that the origins of the school in China are considerably later and more complicated than the traditional account of the lineage of Bodhidharma would have it and that the early history of the school is in fact a history of the teachings and traditions of several Buddhist meditation communities of the seventh and eighth centuries. If the masters of these communities did not yet see themselves as members of a Ch'an, or Meditation, school, and if—as is clear from their own reports—they did not always agree on their interpretations of Buddhism, still they were bound together by a common concern for the immediate, personal experience of enlightenmentand liberation and, hence, by a common emphasis on the cultivation ofspiritual techniques conducive to that experience.To this extent they may be spoken of as participants in a single reform movement, which sought to cut through the scholastic elaborations of the medieval Chinese Buddhist church and to translate the yogic traditions of north China into a popular modern idiom acceptable to the T'ang Buddhistcommunity. By the end of the eighth century the Ch'an reformation had established itself as a distinct Buddhist school, complete with its own history, literature, and dogma. Nevertheless, the emphasis on practice and immediate experience remained a hallmark of the faith. Indeed some scholars have held that it was precisely this emphasis that allowed the school to weather the persecutions of the late T'ang and emerge as the sole surviving form of Chinese monastic Buddhism. On several counts such a view is probably overdrawn; but, ifthe number ofCh'an books from the late T'ang and Sung suggests that there was considerably more to Ch'an religion in those days than simply "seeing one's nature and becoming a Buddha," there is much 2 Introduction in the content of these books to indicate that the ground of the religion continued to be the meditation hall and the daily round of the monastic routine. Again, historians may rightly question the common claim that it was the school's practical bent and ascetic rigor that account for the subsequent adoption of Zen by the medieval Japanese warrior class; but there isno need to doubt that, quite apart from its obvious cultural appeal as the dominant form of Sung Buddhism, the Ch'an traditions of monastic discipline and meditation practice made the religion an attractive option for those in the spiritual turmoil of Kamakura Japan who sought concrete means to the direct experience ofBuddhist enlightenment. Even today in the midst of our own turmoil these same traditions continue to characterize the school and attract adherents both inJapan and abroad. Given the centrality of meditation to the school, it is hardly surprising that the interpretation ofthe practice should have formed a major—perhaps the major—issue of Ch'an and Zen doctrine, and that when the school has bothered to argue over doctrine, it has tended to do so in terms of thisissue. We may recall that the most famous such argument, that between the "Northern" and "Southern" factions of the eighth century,revolved around the supposed differences between two accounts of the meditative path— one describing a "gradual" mental cultivation, the other emphasizing a "sudden" spiritual insight. Again, in the twelfth century, the well-known dispute between the Lin-chi and Ts'ao-tung houses of Ch'an was cast in terms of two competing meditation styles—one recommending the investigation of the hua-t'ou, or kung-an, the other advocating something known as "silent illumination" (mo-chao). This latter dispute was carried over to Japan, where to this day it remains—albeit in somewhat altered forms—the primary ideological rationale for the separation of the two major Japanese schools of Rinzai and Soto. Throughout the long and sometimes stormy history of Ch'an and Zen meditation teaching, probably no single figure has been more closely identified with the practice than the Zen master Dogen (1200-1253), a pioneer in the introductionof the religion toJapan and the founder ofwhat is today the largest of its institutions, the Soto school. For Dogen, seated meditation, or z.az,en, was the very essence of the Buddhist religion—what he called "the treasury of the eye of the true dharmd" (shobo genzo) realized by all the Buddhas and handed down by all the...

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