Zen Koans by Steven Heine (review)

No! We have Buddha Nature.” In addition, there are cross-references between the historical material of kōan texts and contemporary Western literature and poetry (e.g.: “The significance of the Mu Kōan might also be examined in light of other instances of Western cultural expressions of nothingness or the de-centeredness of the universe in the schools of thought of American Transcendentalism, Dadaism, and Existentialism,” p. 71), and ranging to “Whitehead’s holistic metaphysics” and “Einstein’s quantum physics.” Whereas cross-references to more contemporary discourses might be useful for addressing a Western readership, these references remain too fragmentary and blurry, and do not really add anything substantial to the understanding of the topic discussed. As a consequence, when reading the book, at times it was difficult for me to figure out for what audience the book was written: although providing a wealth of interesting material, the treatment of it is often too unfocused and “jumpy” for a specialized reader. On the other hand, a more general audience might have difficulties in dealing with the overload of methodological reflections and—occasionally—very detailed discussions of kōan features . As such, I regard the publication as a brave attempt of “performative scholarship” by a very accomplished scholar who got a bit too much carried away by the subject he was dealing with (sometimes even adopting the rhetorical features of the kōan texts discussed), and occasionally overloading it with too ambitious methodological endeavors. Based on my subjective reading of the publication, this approach was not quite convincing for me. CHRISTOPH ANDERL Ghent University STEVEN HEINE, Zen Koans. Dimensions of Asian Spirituality. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014. ix, 195 pp. US $17 (pb). ISBN 978-0-8248-3974-1 Even though Steven Heine’s Zen Koans seems not to be written for specialist readers with a background in Chinese religions—it provides no diacritical marks for Japanese words like kōan (gong’an 公案) and no Sinitic logographs, for example—this short monograph is an important book that ought to be read by anyone with an interest in the literary and philosophical history of Zen Buddhism. But let me make one point very clear: Steven Heine knows Zen. By Zen, I mean the Zen traditions in Japan (Sōtōshū 曹洞宗, Rinzaishū 臨濟宗, and Ō bakushū 黄檗宗), the thriving discourse of Zen studies in Japan (at universities such as Komazawa 駒澤 大學 and Hanazono 花園大學), and Zen literature—especially collections of kōans, or public cases. In Zen Koans, Heine uses more than 26 of the 48 cases of the seminal Gateless Gate (Wumen guan, Mumonkan 無門關) collection from China—in addition to thirty-two references to other normative Zen texts (see pp. 189-192)—to provide the target audience of non-specialist readers with a condensed overview of the philosophical, historical, intellectual, and institutional contexts of a kōan tradition in East Asia (China, Japan, Korea). Heine accomplishes this feat in two chapters and in only 70 pages. The remainder of this short monograph is where Heine seems to distill decades of prolific study of Zen, chiefly focused on either Sōtōshū Zen in Japan or Dōgen 道元 (1200-1253), into another 90 pages and three chapters. Heine can do this with relative ease because he has published 82 BOOK REVIEWS (or coedited, with Dale S. Wright) more than a dozen books on the topic of kōans, and another seven on Dōgen studies. The last chapter of Zen Koans, chapter 6 (“Whither Koans, or Wither? Current Trends and Possible New Directions,” pp. 160-188), is perhaps the most thought provoking of this densely packed monograph , because Heine addresses at least three rousing issues intimately connected to Zen (and kōans) in the 21st century. First, what are we to make of the fact that Japan remains the stimulus for academic research on Zen while South Korean Sŏn and Chinese Chan communities, respectively, grow by leaps and bounds in rapidly changing societies where corruption, both within and beyond the monastic grounds (e.g., gambling in Korea, p. 171), is as much of an issue as practice-based matters related to reading kōans? Second, how are kōans read today by East...