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  • How Zen Became Zen. The Dispute over Enlightenment and the Formation of Chan Buddhism in Song-Dynasty China
  • John Kieschnick
Morten Schlütter. How Zen Became Zen. The Dispute over Enlightenment and the Formation of Chan Buddhism in Song-Dynasty China. Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press. 2008. Pp. x +289. $48 (cloth); $27 (paper). ISBN 978-0-8248-3255-1.

In recent years Chan studies have flourished like no other area of Buddhist studies. Just the past few years have seen the publication of a half dozen original, carefully researched works on Chan.20 Although the emphasis has [End Page 150] been on the formation and development of Chan Buddhism in the Tang, most Chan scholars have long since abandoned the stereotype that Chan reached its apogee in the late Tang and fell into decline soon thereafter; on the contrary, even scholars who focus on early Tang Chan have called repeatedly for further research on the Song period when so many of the distinctive characteristics of Chan took shape, including its monastic ideal, its literary canon, its historiography and its most original forms of practice.

How Zen Became Zen provides just such a study, contributing a powerful critique of the “widespread perception that Chan, together with all of Chinese Buddhism, lost its true spirit after the Tang dynasty” (p. 2); indeed, the perception of post-Tang decline is no longer so widespread among specialists in Buddhism, and owing to studies like these, it is fast fading in related fields as well. But more than a defense of the importance of Song Buddhism, Schlütter’s book tackles one of the key issues in Chan history: a debate in the twelfth century over how to achieve enlightenment, a problem particularly puzzling in Chan since perhaps the most fundamental and oft-repeated Chan doctrine is that we are all fundamentally enlightened to begin with. In the twelfth century, “silent illumination Chan” (mozhao chan 默照禪) emphasized the need to recognize that we are inherently enlightened through a form of nondualistic meditation in which one engages in “quiet sitting”—with eyes closed—and does not intentionally strive for enlightenment. On the other hand, kanhua Chan 看話禪 advocated the use of gong’an (Jap. kōan) to force a decisive, breakthrough event, signaling enlightenment. This split had important consequences for the subsequent development of Chan Buddhism, and perhaps even greater consequences in Japan, where similar rhetoric continues to this day.

The basic contours of this twelfth-century split and the key figures involved— Hongzhi Zhengjue 宏智正覺 as the representative of silent illumination Chan, and Dahui Zonggao 大慧宗杲 as the representative of kanhua Chan—are well known. Schlütter reviews the evidence for who these monks were and what they wrote, but his main contribution is in reconstructing the social milieu in which they lived.

Most of what we know about silent illumination Chan comes not from its proponent, but from the biting invective of its most prominent critic, Dahui. Dahui insisted that the practice of silent illumination was aberrant and dangerous, its proponents wasting their time in a futile exercise. They “sit immovable [End Page 151] in the ghostly cave under the black mountain until they get calluses on bones and buttocks, and saliva is dripping from their mouths” (p. 127). They “discard everything, and, having gobbled up their provided meals, they sit like mounds in the ghostly cave under the black mountain. They call this ‘being silent and constantly illuminating’ or call it ‘dying the great death’ or ‘the matter before your parents were born’ or ‘the matter before the empty eon’ or ‘the state of beyond the primordial Buddha’” (p. 131). For Dahui the chief problem of silent illumination Chan was that, whatever therapeutic value it might have, it did not lead to enlightenment. Instead, Dahui emphasized a focus on a key word or phrase (huatou 話頭) of an “old case,” that is, one of the famous Chan dialogs between master and disciple, the most prominent example being the word “no” in the exchange in which Zhaozhou responds to the question “Does a dog have the Buddha nature” with “no.” Dahui singled out the single word “no” in this dialog, insisting that concentration on this huatou...

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