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4 The Kõan and the Chinese Literary Game Among buddhist meditation practices, meditation on the Zen kõan is surely one of the more unusual forms. Why did Buddhist meditation practice in Ch’an/Zen take the form of kõan training? And where did the kõan come from? Are there more primitive forms out of which the kõan evolved? This chapter conducts a short investigation into these questions to establish, ³rst, that kõan training has many features in common with other Chinese practices, which on the one hand help explain why kõan language is so bafµing, yet on the other hand show more clearly how an experience said to be “not founded on words and letters” can be so intimately tied to literary practices. Second, this chapter tries to make a contribution to the still unanswered question as to the origin of the kõan. Although there is speculation that the kõan may have evolved from the “pure conversation” tradition of the philosophical Taoists, and although there are strong similarities between the kõan dialogue and the dialogues in Shih-shuo Hsin-yü: A New Account of Tales of the World ›ßGB (Mather 1976), there is to my knowledge no substantial scholarship explaining the origin of the kõan. This chapter advances the hypothesis that one of the parents of the kõan is the Chinese literary game, that the kõan is the child of a mixed marriage between the Chinese literary game and Buddhist teaching and training practices. Judith Berling (1987) has argued that the emergence of the Ch’an/Zen Recorded Sayings genre must be understood against the previous history of Buddhist sutra literature , which it both continues and undermines. In this essay, I am advancing a parallel argument that the kõan practice also both continues and undermines a prior culture of secular literary and poetic practices. The result is a training practice with many features similar to literary games (competition, on-the-spot spontaneity, turning the tables, and, especially, mind-to-mind transmission) but in the service of a non-literary insight, an awakening “not founded on words and letters.” commentarial practices Although the Zen kõan is a unique teaching technique, as a literary genre it still has “family resemblances” to several other institutions and practices in early Chinese culture. First of all, it has a family resemblance to the traditional Chinese 41 commentarial practice in which scholars appended commentaries to a classical text, sometimes in the form of verse, sometimes in the form of prose essays, sometimes in the form of line-by-line annotations. As we have already seen, in the Hekigan-roku and the Mumonkan the compiler has appended a verse to each kõan in the collection. In the Chinese tradition, since structured and rhymed verse was the vehicle of much writing both formal and informal, writers often responded to an original text in verse, especially if the original text was itself composed in verse. A writer was considered skillful to the extent that he could use the rhyming scheme and imagery of the original verse but make these express his own ideas. Commentaries on philological and philosophical matters took the form of prose essays appended to the text. In China (as in other cultural traditions), these essays tended to get longer and longer, to the point where eventually entire volumes were written to explicate a title or single sentence. With the passage of time, commentaries that originally served merely as an aid to glossing a text ballooned into entire encyclopedias whose categories of knowledge were pegged to the words of the canonical text they were meant to illuminate (Henderson 1991, 77–81). In the Hekigan-roku, Engo Zenji appends two commentarial essays to each kõan, one for the main case of the kõan and one for Setchõ’s verse. Although he does not engage in philosophical or text exegesis, his long, discursive prose essays are very much in this style of traditional commentary. Unlike religious traditions that tried to maintain a distinction between the “sacred text” and the commentary literature written by ordinary humans, in the Chinese commentarial tradition, the stature of the commentary often grew in time to that of the original canonical text, thus blurring the line between canon and commentary. Chu Hsi’s commentaries on the Confucian texts, for instance, came to be revered and studied as seriously as the original Confucian texts they were meant...

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