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Chapter 7 The Hagiography of Bodhidharma: Reconstructing the Point of Origin of Chinese Chan Buddhism John R. McRae The Historical Relationship Between Chinese Chan and Pan-Asian Buddhism What is the historical relationship between Chinese Chan and Buddhism in the rest of the first-millennium world? No one could deny that there is a deep connection over the long term, since no matter how quintessentially “Chinese” Chan may have been, it arose only as part of the massive historical event that was the propagation of Buddhism across Asia. Previous scholarship has focused on longrange connections between Indian Buddhism and Chan, suggesting continuities from Buddhist meditation practice or the doctrinal impact of the perfection of wisdom and Mādhyamika philosophy. Are such analyses sound, and are there other such continuities that we should consider? Then again, if the longue durée relationship between pan-Asian Buddhism and Chinese Chan were not difficult enough to evaluate, what about short-term or roughly contemporaneous connections? Since Chan arose within the complex religious and cultural context of sixth- through eighth-century China, it might also be possible to identify particular aspects of pan-Asian Buddhism as secondary factors in its emergence. Given the exertions of missionary monks and the multiple routes of communication throughout Asia during the early centuries of the common era, is it possible that Chinese Chan emerged somehow in dialogue with religious developments in South Asia, Central Asia, and/or Southeast Asia? 126 John R. McRae One of the problems that has hampered treatment of these issues in the past has been a fixation on images of the mature Chan school from the Song dynasty (960–1279) and later. If in contrast we limit our focus to the emergence of Chan in the sixth to eighth centuries, how might that event have been related to developments outside China from the fifth century or so onward? As far as I am aware, the questions just posed have not been given rigorous consideration by any scholar in any relevant academic language (i.e., Chinese, English, French, German, or Japanese). Perhaps this neglect should not be surprising . No doubt the issues are simply too vast and unwieldy, requiring too much background information in too many areas of study. Specialists in the study of Chinese Chan, Korean Sŏn, Japanese Zen, and Vietnamese Thiền Buddhism have focused on the texts of their own chosen traditions, while scholars with broader interests in East Asian Buddhism and other religions have found those very texts highly resistant to integrated analysis. In addition to these very real factors of overall complexity and individual scholarly inclination, though, I suspect the topic has gone unconsidered due to a number of other factors, including distaste for the teleological rhetoric of earlier comprehensive histories of Zen, a postmodern disinfatuation with historical narrative in general, and the assumption that Chan was an intrinsically Chinese phenomenon properly explained in terms of purely Chinese factors. To cite one very important case that will constitute the major focus of the present paper, readers have been dissuaded from considering the possibility of any contemporaneous relationship between pan-Asian Buddhism and Chinese Chan because of the biographical obscurity of Bodhidharma (d. ca. 530), the hallowed forefather of Chan and the most likely nexus of any early relationship. This chapter represents the second part of a larger endeavor. In the initial stage of this project, being published in a volume edited by Tansen Sen and based on a conference on “Buddhism Across Asia: Networks of Material, Intellectual, and Cultural Exchange” hosted by the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, National University of Singapore on February 16–18, 2009, I sketch the intellectual background to the issues just described, focusing on the foundation of Chan scholarship at the beginning of the twentieth century. There I concentrate on the first volume of a comprehensive history of Chan/Zen in India and China, History of the Thought of Zen Training (Zengaku shisōshi), published in 1923 by Nukariya Kaiten (1867–1934).1 Nukariya was a gifted thinker, a versatile scholar, and a productive writer, altogether an impressive example of the religious leadership of the Meiji (1868–1912) and Taishō (1912–26) periods. His magnum opus of 1923 was ultimately concerned with a unique type of religious training that .141.244.201] Project MUSE (2024-04-23 18:59 GMT) The Hagiography of Bodhidharma 127 distinguished the Chan/Zen tradition from earlier approaches based on meditative contemplation and, indeed, from the rest of Buddhism...

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