The Hongzhou School of Chan Buddhism in Eighth- through Tenth-Century China

INTRODUCTION

INTRODUCTION 1 The Hongzhou school of Chan Buddhism in eighth–tenth century China, with Mazu Daoyi (709–788) and his successors as its central figures, represents a crucial phase in the evolution of Chinese Chan Buddhism. It inherited and creatively developed the abundant legacy of Sinitic Buddhism and the early Chan movement and exerted great influence in later developments of Chan Buddhism with its doctrinal, practical, genealogical, and institutional paradigms . This work aims to present a comprehensive study of this school, including its literature, formation, doctrine and practice, transmission and spread, road to orthodoxy, and final schism and division. To examine Chinese Chan Buddhism in terms of specific schools, we first need to clarify three interrelated concepts—school, lineage, and orthodoxy . Scholars of Chinese Buddhism have noted that the widely used English term “school” is the conventional translation of the Chinese word, zong. Zong originally denoted ancestral temple (zumiao) and later evolved into many different meanings, including “ancestor,” “lineage,” “leading personage,” “principle doctrine or theory,” and so forth.1 Tang Yongtong was the first to discern the different senses of zong in Chinese Buddhist texts, and he was followed by Mano Shōjun, Hirai Shun’ei, Stanley Weinstein, and others. According to these scholars, zong is used in three main senses in Chinese Buddhist texts: (1) a specific doctrine or an interpretation of it; (2) the theme or theory of a text, or an exegetical tradition of it; (3) a group or tradition that traces its origin back to a founder and shares some common doctrines and practices among its lineal successors.2 Whereas scholars in general agree that zong as in the third sense can be translated as “school,” recently some scholars suggest an alternative term “lineage.”3 “Lineage” is surely one of the basic connotations of zong, and there is evidence that the Chinese Buddhist concept of lineage, especially that of Chan Buddhism, was strongly influenced by the tradition of ancestor cult.4 Under the Chinese patriarchal clan system of legitimate and collateral lineages, lineage was closely associated with notions such as identity, legitimacy, and orthodoxy. 2 CHAN BUDDHISM IN EIGHTH- THROUGH TENTH-CENTURY CHINA As a matter of fact, the original meaning of the term “orthodoxy,” zhengzong or zhengtong, refers to “orthodox lineage.” However, lineage has also always been an important organizational framework in the Buddhist tradition. In Indian Buddhism, as early as about one century after the Buddha’s nirvān .a, there were already accounts of different lineages descending from immediate disciples of the Buddha, and these were considered to be sacred issues for monks because tracing a lineage back through a series of preceptors and disciples was an acknowledged way of proving the orthodoxy of a person’s ordination.5 During the period of schism, lineage further became a means of sectarian disputation, as various schools developed lineages tracing back fictitiously to immediate disciples of the Buddha in order to claim legitimacy and authority for their doctrines.6 In Chinese Buddhism, the Tiantai tradition was the first to create a lineage of “sūtra-transmission” tracing back to twenty-three (or twenty-four) Indian patriarchs based on the Fu fazang yinyuan zhuan (Biographies of the Circumstances of the Transmission of the Dharma Collection).7 However, it is in the Chan tradition that lineage became a central concern, because, as Bernard Faure indicates, it represents the desire of the marginal group to become the party of the orthodox.8 According to the Xu Gaoseng zhuan, from the early sixth century to the mid-seventh century, there were at least six meditation groups active in China. While the other five groups were brought to the capital during the Sui dynasty, the group in the line of Bodhidharma-Huike was excluded from the national meditation center.9 In the early Tang, the Dongshan/Northern group connected itself to the Bodhidharma-Huike line, which was marginal in the Sui, and eventually to the Buddha. This genealogy helped them to advance from marginal to orthodox. Then, the Heze, Niutou, Baotang, and Hongzhou groups further revised and recreated the genealogy in order to become the party of orthodox.10 Historically, from both the broader cultural and specifically Buddhist contexts, zong in the sense of Buddhist group, with its actual or fictitious founder(s) and lineal successors, may indeed be most correctly translated as “lineage.” However, there were two major types of lineage: (1) some major and influential, not only comprising founder(s) and lineal...