The Hongzhou School of Chan Buddhism in Eighth- through Tenth-Century China

4 CHAN DOCTRINE AND PRACTICE OFTHE HONGZHOU SCHOOL

Chapter Four CHAN DOCTRINE AND PRACTICE OF THE HONGZHOU SCHOOL 67 As discussed in chapter two, Mazu’s ability and commitment as a Buddhist teacher allowed him to attract the largest number of promising young students of Chan Buddhism during the period. After Mazu passed away, those talented disciples began to strive for the orthodoxy of their lineage and finally made it a fully fledged and dominant school of the Chan movement. The rough road of those disciples toward orthodoxy will be described in chapter five, and this chapter focuses on an analysis of the Chan doctrine and practice of the Hongzhou school based on the reliably datable discourses and texts of Mazu and his immediate disciples identified in chapter three. Like early Chan, the doctrinal foundation of the Hongzhou school was mainly a mixture of the tathāgata-garbha thought and prajñāpāramitā theory, with a salient emphasis on the kataphasis of the former. Mazu was well versed in Buddhist scriptures. In the six sermons and four dialogues that are original or relatively datable, he cited more than fifteen sūtras and śāstras thirty-five times.1 He followed the early Chan tradition to claim Bodhidharma’s transmission of the Lan . kāvatāra-sūtra. He used mainly this sūtra and the Awakening of Faith,2 as well as other tathāgata-garbha texts such as the Śrı̄mālā Sūtra, the Ratnagotravibhāga, and even the Vajrasamādhi,3 to construct the doctrinal framework of the Hongzhou lineage and introduce some new themes and practices into the Chan movement. These new themes and practices marked a new phase of Chan development—middle Chan or the beginning of “classical” Chan. “OR DINARY MIND IS THE WAY” Earlier studies define the proposition “this mind is the Buddha” (jixin shi fo) as the core of Mazu’s teaching.4 Nevertheless, in his Tō Godai zenshūshi, Suzuki Tetsuo collects plentiful examples of the use of this proposition to show that it antedated Mazu’s teaching.5 Among these sources, however, the authenticity 68 CHAN BUDDHISM IN EIGHTH- THROUGH TENTH-CENTURY CHINA of some is problematic, such as the works attributed to Baozhi (ca. 418–514) and Fu Xi (497–569),6 and the encounter dialogues recorded in the ZTJ, ZJL, and CDL, which involve the second patriarch Huike (487–593), Huineng (638–713), Sikong Benjing, Qingyuan Xingsi (d. 740), Nanyue Huairang (677–744), Niutou Huizhong (683–769), and Shitou Xiqian. Others are more reliable, including the Rudao anxin yao fangbian famen (Fundamental Expedient Teachings for Entering the Way and Pacifying the Mind) attributed to the fourth patriarch Daoxin and included in the Lengqie shizi ji (Record of Masters and Disciples of the Lan . kāvatāra), Heze Shenhui’s (684–758) discourse preserved in the Dunhuang manuscripts, Nanyang Huizhong’s Extended Discourses in Juan 28 of the CDL, and the decree attributed to Emperor Gaozong (r. 649–683) in the Caoxi dashi [bie]zhuan ([Separate] Biography of the Great Master of Caoxi;7 though the attribution is not believable, the text was compiled in 781 and was probably a creation of the Heze line).8 However, the expression “this mind is the Buddha” in the Fundamental Expedient Teachings is a citation from the Sukhāvatı̄vyūha-sūtra (Guan Wuliangshoufo jing), which means that, by commemoration of the Buddha, the mind and the Buddha become identical.9 This was somewhat different from the later idea of “this mind is the Buddha.” Nanyang Huizhong was an older contemporary of Mazu, and it is not clear whether his use of this expression antedated Mazu’s. Thus, Shenhui is the only one who can be determined to have used this expression earlier than Mazu. However, it appears only once in Shenhui’s discourses, in which “this mind” refers to the pure, tranquil Buddha-nature inherent in all sentient beings, and it does not become a major theme in his theoretical framework.10 This proposition appears frequently in the reliably datable discourses of Mazu and his disciples, and, more important, “this mind” was changed to the ordinary, empirical human mind. Hence, it can still be regarded as a hallmark and new theme of the Hongzhou school. Mazu and his disciples sometimes used another proposition, “Ordinary mind is the Way,” to express their new idea more clearly. As Mazu preached to the assembly: If you want to know the Way directly, then ordinary mind is...