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6 SCHISM OF THE HONGZHOU SCHOOL DURING THE LATE TANG AND FIVE DYNASTIES: DECONSTRUCTING THE TRADITIONAL GENEALOGY OF TWO LINES AND FIVE HOUSES
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Chapter Six SCHISM OF THE HONGZHOU SCHOOL DURING THE LATE TANG AND FIVE DYNASTIES: DECONSTRUCTING THE TRADITIONAL GENEALOGY OF TWO LINES AND FIVE HOUSES 107 Since the Song dynasty, all historians of Chan Buddhism have described a genealogical diagram of two lines and five houses after the sixth patriarch Huineng. This genealogical diagram has not only been passed on within the Chan school for more than a thousand years, but also constituted the basic framework for presenting historical narratives in modern studies of Chan Buddhism for nearly a century. Some scholars have questioned the historical reliability of this traditional lineage. In a letter to Yanagida Seizan in 1961, Hu Shi proposed that during the mid-Tang, Huineng’s successors divided into two lines—the Heze and the Hongzhou; the Shitou line did not arise until much later, and Qingyuan Xingsi’s apprenticeship with Huineng may have been a later creation.1 Du Jiwen and Wei Daoru suggest that the rise of the Shitou line may have started from the ZTJ with its obvious sectarian inclination toward this school.2 Suzuki Tetsuo points out that during the late Tang and Five Dynasties various houses arose, but it was not until the mid-Northern Song that the designation of the Five Houses became fixed.3 Other scholars have challenged this tradition from the perspective of methodology. John McRae terms the approach of treating Chan in terms of its lineages as a “string of pearls” fallacy and advocates a deconstruction of the diagram by a synchronic approach.4 In this chapter, I adopt McRae’s idea about deconstructing the lineage diagram, but proceed mainly in a philological investigation of historical facts, in order to present a more exact picture of the changing fortunes of the Hongzhou school and the rise of the various houses during the late Tang and Five Dynasties. In our discussions in chapter four, we have seen that the Hongzhou doctrines of “ordinary mind is the Way” and “Buddha-nature manifests in function” drew strong criticism from contemporaries of Mazu and his disciples in the mid-Tang. Furthermore, at the beginning of the late 108 CHAN BUDDHISM IN EIGHTH- THROUGH TENTH-CENTURY CHINA Tang, during the Huichang reign-period (841–846), the catastrophe of the Huichang persecution of Buddhism occurred. Almost all monasteries were destroyed or removed, and monks and nuns were laicized.5 Since one of the reasons for the government persecution was the degeneration and violation of the otherworldly spirit of the Buddhist clergy, reflections on their religious doctrines and practices became inevitable in the rehabilitation of Buddhism after the persecution. Both the mid-Tang criticism of the Hongzhou doctrines and the destructive blow of the Huichang persecution urged the successors of the Hongzhou school to reflect on and complement their doctrines. Among the reflections and discussions, two major controversies arose. These controversies in turn resulted in the schism of the Hongzhou school and the rise of various houses. CONT R OVER SIES OVER AND DEVELOPMENT OF T H E HONGZHOU DOCTRINE Based on the tathāgata-garbha theory, Mazu put forward the new doctrines “ordinary mind is the Way” and “Buddha-nature manifests in function” to affirm positively the value of ordinary human life. His unconditional identification of Buddha-nature with the ordinary mind of good and evil, purity and defilement, and truth and delusion attracted the attention of some conservative critics. Huizhong and Zongmi commented sharply that Mazu wrongly regarded the deluded mind as the true mind. These criticisms actually caused some doubts among Chan students. For example, Pei Xiu, who had previously been Zongmi’s student, later asked Huangbo Xiyun to which mind the patriarchs referred, the ordinary mind or the sacred, when they said that “this mind is the Buddha.”6 In an encounter dialogue attributed to Zhangjing Huaihui and a student, the latter asked whether the mind transmitted by the patriarchs was the mind of Thusness or the deluded mind, or neither true mind nor deluded mind.7 This encounter dialogue was possibly created in the late Tang period, and it reflected the same doubt as Pei Xiu’s. Out of the responses to those criticisms and doubts, two major controversies were raised during the late Tang period. The first controversy focused on the relationship between the two propositions , “this mind is the Buddha” and “neither mind nor Buddha.” As discussed in chapter three, none of the encounter dialogues involving Mazu’s preaching of “neither mind...