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4 The Sudden Practice and the Ch'an Meditation Discourse In the preceding chapter I have suggested that, whatever the supposed precedents for the Tso-ch'an i, Tsung-tse's manual is best understood as a new kind of Buddhist text, created in a new religious environment and intended for a new audience. Despite what Dogen and the Zen tradition may have thought, it is probably not based on the Ch'an teachings of Po-chang; contrary to the approach of one prominent modern interpretation , it is not merely the abbreviation ofa T'ien-t'ai manual by Chih-i. Still, if we can question the historical premises of these two views, their disagreement over the religious character, or ideological filiation, of the text is not without some reason; in terms at least ofour usual notions ofsectarian styles, the Tso-ch'an i is somewhat difficult to place. It seems to combine a portion of the kind of standard Buddhist material found in the T'ien-t'ai text with a dash ofthe particular approach to meditation characteristic ofsome earlier Ch'an writings. Yet the resulting mix—and the simple, colloquial style in which it is served—gives Tsung-tse's Buddhism a very different flavor from Chih-i's sixth-century scholastic version and, at the same time, leaves his meditation teachings with a philosophically conservative, matter-of-fact quality that contrasts with much of the intervening Ch'an literature on the subject. This freedom from both the technical conventions of traditional scholarship and the philosophical obscurities of classical Ch'an makes Tsung-tse's little manual unusuallyaccessible and may, in fact, have been an important factor in its popularity; but it also makes the work—for all its seeming innocuousness—rather controversial. If the text itself is new, from the The Sudden Practice 79 perspective of Ch'an in the Sung dynasty, its teachings appear as something of a throwback to an earlier, less theologically developed treatment of Buddhist practice—a treatment in some ways more akin to that of the Hsiao chih-kuan than to the received position of the school. Despite the widespread acceptance of the Tso-ch'an i, this heterodox character of the work was not entirely lost on its early readers. To seewhy D5gen and his contemporaries felt obliged to improve on Tsung-tse's teachings, we shall need to recall the way in which the tradition had dealt with meditation. In Chapter 5, where I take up the teachings of the Fukan zflzen gi, we will have an opportunity to examine in some detail Tsung-tse's concrete instructions on the preparation for, and practice of, meditation. We will see certain obviouscontinuitiesbetween Dogen and Tsung-tse, on the one hand, and between Tsung-tse and Chih-i, on the other. Some important differences among the three will also become apparent. Of these differences, none is more striking nor more central to an understanding of the problematics both of Dogen's shikan taza and of Zen meditation in general than the disagreement over the basic question of how to employ the mind during practice. This disagreement is not merely a matter ofdiffering psychological techniques: it may be that, but it is also closely tied to disparate approaches to some fundamental issues in the interpretation of Buddhism—issues that have been debated in Zen since its inception. As an introduction to this debate, then, let us look here at what Tsung-tse has to say on the central technique of meditation and how it is related to the sort of material we find in a scholastic work like the Hsiao chih-kuan. If some passages in the Tso-ch'an i resemble material in the Tien-t'ai hsiao chih-kuan, the brief explanation of the mental technique does not. In his discussion of the basic procedures of meditation, Chih-i follows the description of the posture with an account of the methods for regulating the mind (t'iao hsin) so as to avoid the twin obstacles of torpor (ch'en, Iqya) and agitation (fu, audatya).1 In later chapters he goes on to recommend various other mental antidotes for different spiritual problems. But the core of his meditation—what he calls "the practice proper" (cheng hsiu]—is, of course, the traditional exercises of calming (chih, Samatha] and discernment (kuan, vipafyana) from which his manual takes its name. In the chapter devoted to these exercises, Chih-i divides them intofive types, depending on...

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