Leaving for the Rising Sun: Chinese Zen Master Yinyuan and the Authenticity Crisis in Early Modern East Asia by Jiang Wu (review)

Tracking transnational social exchanges between China and Japan as well as Korea, Vietnam, and Ryūkyū has increasingly become a major focus in studies of East Asian Buddhism and other historical phenomena in which the mutuality and reciprocity of cultural influences played an important role. Jiang Wu’s first monograph, Enlightenment in Dispute: The Reinvention of Chan Buddhism in Seventeenth-Century China (Oxford University Press, 2008), offered an impressive examination of the late-Ming revival of Zen. In a well-researched and thought-provoking new volume that is very much a sequel to his earlier work, Wu shows that one of the more intriguing examples of transnational themes is the story of the Chinese monk Yinyuan Longqi (Jp. Ingen Ryūki; 1592–1673), who traveled to Japan and exerted a surprisingly strong and long-lasting impact on not only Zen Buddhism but also religion and society in general during a time of relative isolation from and even disdain for foreign visitors and the institutions they represented or promoted.

After receiving dharma transmission in 1633 under the guidance of the monks Miyun and Feiyin at Mount Huangbo temple in Fujian province, Yinyuan came to Nagasaki in 1654 with about thirty followers including Muan (Jp. Mokuan), his main disciple. His mission was exceptionally well received, due to a fortunate set of circumstances involving the growth of Nagasaki trade as part of the consolidation of early Tokugawa power and the bakufu’s rising interest in Chinese intellectual endeavors to help substantiate Japan’s claim to being a major civilization rather than a barbarian backwater. By 1661, with the support of the government, Yinyuan and Muan had established the Ōbaku sect of Zen. Yinyuan also became founding abbot of the impressive Manpukuji temple, which was opened the same year in Uji near Kyoto; he retired from the abbotship just three years later and died a decade after that, but the temple and sect remained significant carriers of Chinese Buddhism and culture for at least a century. While a report from 1827 indicated that the school “remains silent and sadly dispirited … forgotten and lost” (cited, p. 241), Ōbaku continues to function today as the third Japanese Zen wing, with numerous sub- and branch temples, even if the much larger and more dominant Rinzai and Sōtō sects have for the most part long overshadowed its status within the religious tradition.

How important is the role of Yinyuan and his movement? Is his a matter of anomalous temporary success, or did it reflect broader trends by bridging China with Japan in a way that contributed to the ensuing disintegration of the China-centered order in East Asia? Seen primarily in terms of Chinese history, Yinyuan’s journey to eastern shores may be relegated to a historical footnote about a disgruntled southern group of Ming loyalists who fled their homeland with the onset of Manchu rule to find safe harbor abroad. The aftermath of their departure is important mainly in terms of understanding how Qing-dynasty sovereigns responded to this and similar attempts at subversion or escape from the realm.

From the standpoint of Japanese history, the Ōbaku sect is generally thought to have exerted a considerable, yet in the end rather limited, significance that was relevant for its original era. Several styles of religious practice featured by Yinyuan had an effect on the other branches of Zen, including his restoration of disciplined adherence to rigorous rules and regulations as expressed in the Ōbaku shingi (Pure Rules) collection, which influenced Zen monastic training procedures; his eclectic integration of nenbutsu (Ch. nianfo, chanting the Buddha’s name) recitation borrowed from Pure Land schools with the more conventional Zen devices of zazen (sitting meditation) and koan (Zen enigma) studies, coupled with criticism of the various missan (esoteric) aspects of koan practice that had infiltrated many late-medieval Rinzai...