Introduction

 
The movement known as Chan in China is better known to us by its Japanese name Zen  The name derives from d^hyAna, the Sanskrit word for meditation whose Chinese transcription was chan-na (禅那) which was then abbreviated to just the first character. Zen is the Japanese pronunciation of that character. Meditation is not really a central interest for our study of Chinese philosophy but there are certain elements of the philosophy behind Chan which are revealed in its meditative practices so that we will be required to say something about them. These elements include, in particular, the Chan claims concerning epistemology and what it is possible to know and how it can come to be known. We will see that Chan takes to an extreme the tendencies towards irrationalism (or perhaps one should say anti-cognitivism) that we have already noted elsewhere – with the Neo-Taoist apophasis, for example, and their version of the via negativa to the Dao. Chan adds to this native tendency a claim that we all possess an innate perfect knowledge (but of what sort?) – a claim derived from some of the forms of Buddhism popular at the time. In this respect we may take Chan to be the culminating form of the syncretic tendencies of Chinese philosophy acting upon Taoism and Buddhism to create a novel synthesis, an original form of Buddhism distinct from anything which had existed in India.
 

Precursors 

 
The doctrines and attitudes and practices that are thought of as typical of the Chan school arose early but gradually after Buddhism had been introduced to China. In particular, the two early Chinese Buddhist scholars Sengzhao and Daosheng are considered to have laid the philosophical groundwork for the Chan school.

Sengzhao

The first of these precursors of Chan, Sēngzhào (僧肇) (384-416,) was, so it is said, originally a Taoist who upon reading an old translation of the Vimalakirti Sutra became an enthusiastic Buddhist, and eventually a disciple of Kumarajiva – whom we mentioned in the last lecture as one of the most productive of the earliest translators and interpreters of Buddhist documents. In Xi’an (which was then the capital Chang’an) Sengzhao assisted his master in the translation and interpretation of Indian texts but he also began to make his own contributions. These can be found in his Book of Zhao (肇论, Zhao Lun,) a collection of essays, of which three are of primary significance in preparing the ground for Chan. It is particularly worth noticing that the arguments made in all three essays might be made in essentially the same way by a Neotaoist as easily as by a Buddhist.

1.       Objects Do Not Move (物不迁, wù bù qiān)

In the essay on mutability and immutability Sengzhao argued the paradoxical point that there is at once no change and no immutability; or equivalently, that everything is both changeful and immutable; or even better that changefulness and immutability are equally vacuous terms referring to nothing. To make this claim he observes that any entity that is in the past never becomes an entity in the present because it is always in the past. Everything is therefore absolutely immutable, frozen in the instant of its existence (whether present or past.) On the other hand, since the passage of time must necessarily involve the sequential being and non-being of all things absolutely, there is nothing but mutability. By way of a clarifying example he gives us the man who left his village as a youth and returns as an old monk. We observe here that everything about the man has changed so he is a different entity, but he is nevertheless still the same man (called Fanzhi) so he is the same entity, so what is the same and immutable is also different and mutable. Unfortunately, this is just the old problem of the preservation of identity through change that we recognise from such classic examples as the Ship of Theseus, and rather detracts from than advances the purely conceptual argument that it is supposed to illustrate.

2.       Unreal Emptiness (不真空, bù zhēn kōng)

In the essay on Being and Not-being he argues that nothing purely exists or does not exist; in everything that exists there is the quality of non-existence and in everything that does not exist there is the quality of existence. Of everything, whether it exists or not, it may therefore be said that it both exists and does not exist. His argument is that if something purely exists and has no quality of non-existence, then it would always be so qualified and so could never fail to exist. In particular, its origination is not dependent on the operation of causes in the world – contrary to what the Buddha claimed about all existent things. Similarly, for anything that does not exist, if it has no quality of existence within it then it can never do other than not exist, with all the same unwelcome consequences as for necessary existence. This is a marvellously paradoxical result, but its conviction for modern audiences is undermined by the inadmissibility of the assumption upon which the argument is based: that existence – and non-existence too, for that matter – may be treated in the same way as property predicates like ‘tall’, ‘happy’, or ‘blue.’ This assumption is known to lead to all sorts of problems and is almost universally rejected now.

3.       Wisdom Has No Knowing (般若无知, bō rě wú zhī)

Finally, in the essay on wisdom he argued that that could not be considered as a kind of knowledge – or at least not any kind of propositional knowledge. Such knowledge, we observe, is knowledge of something – we cannot speak having that sort of knowledge without acknowledging that there is an object of knowledge. Such knowledge essentially involves an apprehension of the qualities of a known thing. If prajña (般若, bō rě), or sage-wisdom (圣知, shèng zhī) as Sengzhao calls it, is an apprehension of the Absolute Truth, then, given that the Absolute Truth is that there is nothing to be apprehended, sage-wisdom cannot involve the apprehension of the qualities of some object, and therefore cannot count as knowledge in the normal sense. In fact sage-wisdom is more like knowledge by acquaintance of Non-being, or even an actual identification with that state, a kind of knowing how to be non-existent. Claims of this sort have an impact on the kinds of methods by which one might aspire to gain sage-wisdom: the thing’s particular nature recommends a certain method of achievement.

Daosheng

The second of the philosophical precursors of Chan, the monk Dàoshēng (道生) (c. 360-434,) was also for a short time a student of Kumarajiva at Chang’an, but is more associated with Huiyuan in Lushan. He is best known for the defence of several theses which were eventually accepted and expanded by the Chan school.

1.       Sudden Enlightenment

Daosheng was not the first to suggest that enlightenment could be sudden. The monk Zhidun (支遁) (314–366) had previously argued that at the 7^th stage of the Bodhisattva Path, when the candidate is prepared to reached nirvana without cessation of this life, enlightenment can come suddenly – but incompletely. Complete illumination might not come until the final stage, when it might be suddenly achieved. Daosheng extended this idea to the claim that enlightenment might be sudden and complete at any point. Unfortunately, Daosheng’s own works containing his arguments for this claim haven’t come down to us: we have to infer the arguments from the texts of other later authors whom we conclude were appealing to Daosheng’s ideas. Nevertheless, we can suppose that Daosheng pointed out that to become enlightened is to become one with Non-being (Wu) [You might remember Sengzhao making something like this claim in his essay on wisdom.] and that because Non-being has no parts but is a single thing (or non-thing) there can be no question of partial identification. To be identified at all is to be identified completely.

This was a particularly controversial claim and occasioned a great deal of debate. Some contrasted the Indian practitioners and the necessity for them of gradual enlightenment with the Chinese practitioners and their ability to short-circuit that process. The difficulty with accepting the possibility of sudden enlightenment is that it seems to set at nought all the effort that previous monks and bodhisattvas had made, and to call into question the worth of the protracted study and contemplation of the Buddhist literature. Those who did not accept the universal possibility of sudden enlightenment but believed rather in a process of gradual enlightenment held that the practitioner was able to gradually learn the various truths about the universe – like the four noble truths, or the Eight-fold Path, and so on, and that the enlightenment that thus slowly emerged was the result of the apprehension of the truth and consequences of all those facts. We think that Daosheng, however, would not have disagreed with the value of all this work, but would have seen it as merely preparatory – like a golfer checking the lay of the ground, the wind, the obstacles, etc. and selecting the proper club for his attempted shot: even though all of that contributes to the success of the shot, it is not the same as the shot itself, which is either successful – putting the ball in the hole – or not.

2.       Buddha-Nature

The Buddha-nature (佛性, fóxìng – which translates Sanskrit tathāgatagarbha meaning the ‘matrix of the thus gone’ or buddhadhātu meaning ‘the realm of the enlightened one’) was the subject of the second of Daosheng’s teachings that we will consider. The Buddha-nature was supposed to be that part of a being’s nature which made it possible for the being to achieve the enlightenment that the Buddha achieved. It was thus that part of the Being’s nature that approximated to (shared in / was identical with / what you will) the essential nature of the Buddha. Although most schools would agree on the purely functional characterization just given, yet there is little agreement on what exactly it was that instantiated the function or realised the potential. Some considered it to be a quality of Mind, or the undefiled mind, or (in the Lankavatarasutra) the universal mind (of the Yogacaras,) while others considered it to be simply nothingness or non-being itself. In any case, it was disputed whether every sentient being possessed the Buddha-nature and was thus able to achieve enlightenment. Daosheng was amongst those who thought that it was a universal quality of sentient beings and that certain important consequences followed from this fact.

Since his treatise on this has not survived his relevant arguments have to be extrapolated from his other commentaries, but they seem clear enough in general. From his reading of the various sutras he concludes that every being does have the Buddha-nature, although not every being realises that they do. The task for each being is to achieve this realisation and to use that realisation to become enlightened and thus fully actualise their Buddha-nature. Daosheng envisioned the Buddha-nature as being whatever it was that was able to enjoy nirvana given that according to the most basic truth of anatman there was ‘no self.’ He further held that Buddha-nature was identical with nirvana and sunyata. His arguments for this point are not specified but we might assume that since nirvana (extinction) and sunyata (emptiness) are without characteristics or parts it is not possible to enjoy them or to participate in them while having characteristics and parts; therefore this thing, if it was to ‘enjoy’ extinction and emptiness could only do so as a kind of participation – and by the nature of extinction and emptiness, participation in them could only be identification with them. This being the case, and Buddha-nature being thus without characteristics, there would be two further consequences. First, being indivisible into parts, it could not be grasped in parts: it was all or nothing, which supported the claim of sudden enlightenment. Second, being inapprehensible from outside – since it has no qualities for any perception or comprehension to grasp – to know the Buddha-nature is to participate in it; so that the understanding of the Buddha-nature leads to instant enlightenment and liberation.
 

Founders 

Philosophical Postures