Organizer: Steven Heine, Florida International University
Chair: Linda Penkower, University of Pittsburgh
Discussant: Robert Buswell, University of California, Los Angeles
The spiritual authority of Ch’an Buddhism rests on its claim to a unique access to the Buddha’s enlightenment through an unbroken succession of enlightened masters. This claim was embodied in the kung-an, the enigmatic and often shocking anecdotes for which Ch’an is so well-known. In Ch’an self-representation, the kung-an is both the tool by which enlightenment is brought about and an expression of the enlightened mind itself.
Despite extensive studies of Ch’an Buddhism and its reliance on the symbolism of the kung-an, it is only in recent years that scholars have begun to free themselves from the Ch’an tradition’s self-narrative. This panel highlights recent trends in scholarship that examine the kung-an tradition from a critical historical perspective.
The four papers in various ways examine the Ch’an school’s uses of kung-an and show this to be deeply embedded in the context of political, social, and popular cultural forces. The papers uncover and clarify hidden layers of the kung-an tradition, including muted relationships between the Ch’an school and the power structures of government as well as popular culture. Each paper challenges the traditional representations of Ch’an Buddhism and kung-an in order to show the richness that alternative methodologies, including literary criticism, social scientific analysis, and phenomenology, can uncover. The discussant will comment on the papers from the standpoint of Critical Theory.
"Before the Empty Eon" Versus "A Dog Has No Buddha-Nature": Competition and Fission in Sung Dynasty Ch’an
Morten Schlutter, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
Scholars and popular writers alike often treat Ch’an Buddhism as an unchanging and monolithic tradition, and kung-an as a simple, though difficult to grasp, tool of sudden enlightenment. However, such a view ignores the development of different strands within Ch’an and overlooks the fact that kung-an practice is deeply embedded in specific doctrinal and soteriological contexts. This is also an ahistorical view which fails to place the claims to authority in the Ch’an sect and the evolution of the kung-an in their appropriate cultural and political contexts.
This paper investigates the two different approaches to kung-an practice that developed with the Ts’ao-tung and Lin-chi schools in the twelfth century. The Ts’ao-tung school’s emphasis on inherent enlightenment was most pointedly expressed in the kung-an "Before the Empty Eon," while the Lin-chi tradition taught an intense concentration on the kung-an "A Dog Has No Buddha-Nature" as an effective means of attaining a sudden and dramatic moment of awakening.
The paper argues that these two kung-an exemplify competing claims to orthodoxy and authority with the Ch’an sect, and that the struggle between the two schools is inextricably linked with competition for state and lay patronage. This led to a sectarian awareness which came to define the Ch’an sect for several centuries thereafter (and still characterizes Japanese Zen today).
The Structure and Function of Kung-an Language
T. Griffith Foulk, Sarah Lawrence College
Focusing on the origins of the kung-an tradition, this paper surveys the evolution and the roles played by the genre of medieval Chinese Ch’an kung-an collections, of which more than twenty examples survive in standard Buddhist collections.
The paper shows that these collections generally adhere to a complex pattern of multi-layered, interlinear prose and verse commentaries on the records of paradigmatic cases which were formed according to models of precedent used in the legal system of the time. Foulk uses methods of form (literary) criticism to analyze the complex structure of the literature, describe the social and institutional contexts in which it was compiled and used, and show how its ritual function followed its literary form (and vice versa).
Giving Voice to the Silent Transmission: The Politics of Ch’an as "A Special Transmission Outside the Teaching"
Albert F. Welter, The University of Winnipeg
Neither the koan tradition nor the characterization of Ch’an as "a special transmission outside the scriptures" are implicit to the Ch’an tradition but developed out of a social, political, and religious context around the beginning of the Sung Dynasty, culminating in the classic koan compilations of the Sung period, the Wu-men kuan ("The Gateless Gate") and the Pi-yen lu ("The Blue Cliff Records"). The principles implicit in Ch’an as "a special transmission outside the scriptures" are clearly represented in the koan tradition, where the traditional study of Buddhist literature is forsaken in favor of initiating the experience of enlightenment in individual practitioners. The purpose of the current presentation is to examine the use of this slogan in the religious and political context it developed in, particularly in relation to the development of the koan tradition. The following aspects of the development of the koan tradition as "a special transmission outside the scriptures" will be examined: (1) koan cases as predicated on the principle of "a special transmission outside the scriptures"; (2) the textual history of the use of the expression "a special transmission outside the scriptures" (chiao-wai pieh-ch’uan), demonstrating how it came into currency in the early Sung around the same time the koan tradition was forming; (3) the religious debate within Ch’an and Buddhist circles at the time over the characterization of Ch’an in terms of "a special transmission outside the scriptures" vs. "harmony between Ch’an and the teaching"; and (4) the affect that political alliances had on the promotion of Ch’an as "a special transmission outside the scriptures" at the Sung court.
Vision, Division, Revision: The Encounter between Iconoclasm and Supernaturalism in Kung-an Cases about Mt. Wu-t’ai
Steven Heine, Florida International University
This paper examines the role of popular religiosity expressed in several kung-an dealing with the sacred mountain, Mt. Wu-t’ai or Wu-t’ai-shan, especially case no. 35 in the Pi-yen lu collection of 1128, along with an alternative version in the Ch’ing dynasty collection, the Yu-hsuan yü-lu, in addition to case no. 31 in the Wu-men kuan that is similar to no. 10 in the Tsung-jung lu as well as Pi-yen lu no. 24. The Pi-yen lu kung-an (a complete translation will accompany the paper) focuses on a specific hieratic locale infused with cosmological symbolism.
Mt. Wu-t’ai, the earthly abode of Manjushri (Wen-shu), was a primary pilgrimage spot in popular, especially esoteric, Buddhism, where seekers traveled to attain visions of the bodhisattva of wisdom (prajna) who often revealed himself there. The kung-an case, dealing with a pilgrim who conversed with Manjushri but was ultimately denied the opportunity to fulfill his vision of a magical temple, reflects a double sense of encounter: the personal encounter between disciple and master, who in this instance is an other-worldly being, in the story told in the kung-an text derived in large part from popular Buddhist literature; and the larger, ideological encounter between Ch’an iconoclasm and supernaturalism in the story behind the story, or the contextual background of the text, which this paper seeks to recover.