The spirit of zen sam van schaik

“After the Tibetan Emperor Tride Tsutsen (Me Agtsom, 704–55 CE) invited the Zen teacher Moheyan from Dunhuang to Tibet, the Zen teaching was widely spread in Tibet. Jingjue, the student of Xuanze, wrote Record of the Masters and Students of the La’ka. Although this text, based on a gradual approach to the Zen teachings, was translated into the Tibetan language, the sudden enlightenment teachings of Zen were already widespread in Tibet, and they were the subject of the Samye debate. The Chinese character Zen (禪) has two parts that mean ‘symbolize the single’ or ‘inseparable meaning,’ while the great Kagyu master Phagmodrupa says nonduality is Mahamudra. Therefore, there is no essential difference between Zen, Mahamudra, and Dzogchen teachings.”

—His Holiness the Drikung Kyabgon Chetsang, author of The Practice of Mahamudra

“Zen points directly to the heart mind, but it does so from within particular cultures, particular perspectives. This collection of the teachings of a long lost and now found Tibetan school of Zen gives us another of those perspectives. Master Moheyan and the other teachers of the Tibetan school of Zen are clearly our relatives on the Zen way. And I’ve found their unique perspectives enriching my own understanding, both encouraging and challenging. I was particularly taken with the Tantric influences on Tibetan Zen. This selection of some core texts of Tibetan Zen provides us another map through the mysteries of our human hearts and minds and helps us walk our own way to realization. How wonderful!”

—James Ishmael Ford, author of If You’re Lucky, Your Heart Will Break and Zen Master Who”

“Tibetan Zen is a title both provocative and evocative— provocative because such a tradition is supposed never to have existed, evocative because it invites its readers to imagine a lost world of profound religious exchange, a time before Buddhist sectarianism had set in, when monks along the ancient Silk Road explored innovative new practices across cultures. In this beautifully written book, Sam van Schaik guides his reader into this world, bringing the Dunhuang manuscripts to life through his careful analyses. The result is a comprehensive presentation of an extinct and in many ways unique Buddhist tradition, a study whose brilliant insights into early esoteric ritual, the bodhisattva precepts, and much more raise the field to new levels of sophistication, shedding light on the origins of both Tibetan Buddhism and Chinese Chan/Zen.”

—Jacob P. Dalton, author of The Taming of the Demons

“Tibetan Zen is an unprecedented work. Van Schaik’s explanations expand our notion of just what Tibetan Buddhism was—and is—while his translations offer contemporary readers the opportunity to expand their own minds by engaging classic Zen writings from a deeply creative period of Buddhism.”

—Kurtis R. Schaeffer, University of Virginia

ABOUT THE BOOK Until the early twentieth century, hardly any traces of the Tibetan tradition of Chinese Chan Buddhism, or Zen, remained. Then the discovery of a sealed cave in Dunhuang, full of manuscripts in various languages dating from the first millennium CE, transformed our understanding of early Zen. This book translates some of the earliest surviving Tibetan Zen manuscripts preserved in Dunhuang. The translations illuminate different aspects of the Zen tradition, with brief introductions that not only discuss the roles of ritual, debate, lineage, and meditation in the early Zen tradition but also explain how these texts were embedded in actual practices.

SAM VAN SCHAIK received his PhD in Tibetan Buddhist literature from the University of Manchester, England. He currently works at the British Library’s international Dunhuang Project in London, researching early Tibetan manuscripts, and is the author of Tibet: A History (Yale, 2011).

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http://www.shambhala.com/eshambhala
Tibetan Zen Discovering a Lost Tradition

Sam van Schaik

SNOW LION BOSTON & LONDON

2015

SNOW LION An imprint of Shambhala Publications, Inc. Horticultural Hall 300 Massachusetts Avenue Boston, Massachusetts 02115 www.shambhala.com

Cover design by Katrina Noble

© 2015 by Sam van Schaik All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Van Schaik, Sam, author. Tibetan Zen: discovering a lost tradition / Sam van Schaik. —First edition. pages cm eISBN 978-0-8348-0284-1 ISBN 978-1-55939-446-8 (paperback: alk. paper) 1. Zen Buddhism—Tibet Region—Doctrines—History. 2. Zen literature—China—Dunhuang Caves—Translations into English. I. Title. BQ9262.9.T53V36 2015 294.3′92709515—dc23 2014042693

http://www.shambhala.com
To Ananda

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction

1. Orientations

2. Masters of Meditation

3. Teachers and Students

4. The Practice of Genealogy

5. Encounter and Emptiness

6. Debate

7. Observing the Mind

8. Authority and Patronage

9. Funerals and Miracles

10. Zen and Tantra

Notes

Works Cited

Index

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PUBLISHER’S NOTE

This book contains diacritics and special characters. If you encounter difficulty displaying these characters, please set your e- reader device to publisher defaults (if available) or to an alternate font.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has its beginning in work that I did with Jacob Dalton on the Tibetan Dunhuang manuscripts during the years 2002 to 2005. In the years that followed, I was able to spend time with John McRae and other Sinologists, from whom I learned much about Chinese Zen, or Chan. In 2010 I was awarded a three-year grant by the British Academy to study and translate the Tibetan Zen manuscripts. During this project I had the privilege of working with Drikung Kyabgön Chetsang Rinpoche to create online editions of all the Tibetan Zen texts, now available at the website of the International Dunhuang Project. I have been lucky to work with many great colleagues at the British Library and would especially like to thank Burkhard Quessel and Susan Whitfield for their support. My erstwhile colleague Imre Galambos has always been willing to answer my questions about Chinese sources. Finally I’d like to thank Nikko Odiseos of Shambhala Publications for his interest in this book, and Michael Wakoff for his sympathetic copyediting.

ABBREVIATIONS

BD Dunhuang manuscripts in the National Library ofChina D The Derge edition of the bka’ ’gyur and bstan ’gyur IOL Tib J Tibetan Dunhuang manuscripts in the British Library Or.8210 Chinese Dunhuang manuscripts in the British Library

Or.15000 Tibetan manuscripts from Central Asian sites in theBritish Library Pelliot chinois

Chinese Dunhuang manuscripts in the Bibliothèque nationale de France

Pelliot tibétain

Tibetan Dunhuang manuscripts in the Bibliothèque nationale de France

T Taisho Tripiṭaka: the Chinese Buddhist canon

When references are given to manuscripts, r refers to the recto (front) and v refers to the verso (back). The method of numbering depends on the format. Pothi folios are numbered 1r, 1v, 2r, 2v, and so on. Concertina folios are numbered r1, r2, r3, and so on, until one reaches the verso, where the manuscript is flipped over and continues as v1, v2, v3, and so on. Scrolls in vertical format are numbered simply as r or v followed by line numbers, while those in horizontal format are numbered r1 for the first column of text, r2 for the second, and so on (and v1, v2, and so forth, on the verso).

INTRODUCTION

A LOST TRADITION?

Censured in Tibet, forgotten in China, the Tibetan version of Zen was almost completely lost. Zen first came to Tibet in the eighth century, when Chinese teachers were invited there at the height of the Tibetan empire. According to traditional histories, doctrinal disagreements developed between Indian and Chinese Buddhists at the Tibetan court, and the Tibetan emperor called for the situation to be resolved in a formal debate. When the debate resulted in a decisive win by the Indian side, the Zen teachers were sent back to China. Though this story has been questioned, it is clear that the popularity of Zen declined in Tibet, and its original texts were all but forgotten.

This changed at the beginning of the twentieth century with the discovery of a sealed cave full of ancient manuscripts in Dunhuang in Chinese Central Asia. The Tibetan manuscripts from the cave have been dated to the ninth and tenth centuries, making them the earliest known source materials for Tibetan Buddhism. Among them are some fifty manuscripts containing the only surviving original Tibetan Zen texts, the primary source material for understanding Tibetan Zen. Since the manuscripts offer a snapshot of the early Zen tradition in the eighth to tenth centuries, they are significant sources for the study of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Zen as well. Furthermore, Tibetan Zen appears to have developed into a distinct tradition, incorporating elements of tantric Buddhism, and this fascinating synthesis remains little understood.1

The sealed cave at Dunhuang was part of a complex of Buddhist cave shrines, cut into a cliff at the edge of the Central Asian desert. We know tantalizingly little about the cave: neither why it was filled with manuscripts nor why it was sealed. But we have the results of this accident of history, in the thousands of books in Chinese, Tibetan, Turkic, Sanskrit, and other languages, along with Buddhist paintings and temple banners. In fact, the term “library cave” is misleading, for if one thing is clear, it is that this cache of manuscripts does not form any kind of coherent library collection. Alongside Buddhist scriptures and treatises are notebooks,

shopping lists, writing exercises, letters, contracts, sketches, and scurrilous off-the-cuff verses.

So rather than the orderly and carefully selected contents of a library, what was put into the cave was a jumble of material from the everyday life of this town and its monasteries. For many scholars who have studied texts from the cave over the past century, this has seemed an obstacle, but for our project of understanding a once- living tradition that since died out, it is an advantage. In the Tibetan tradition, we already have a Buddhist canon containing over one hundred volumes of scriptures, commentaries, and treatises. Yet a canon does not represent the day-to-day practice of a religious tradition. It is mediated by the decisions of editors and patrons, which may have more to do with the politics of canonization—by which a tradition defines itself—than with everyday religious life. In a canon, texts are grouped into rubrics alongside similar texts, and these rubrics stratify texts that are, outside of the canon, much more mixed up and heterogenous.

This is the advantage of the cache of manuscripts from the cave in Dunhuang. They might be “sacred waste”—as the first European to visit the caves, Aurel Stein, referred to them—but they have not been carefully selected and ordered to present an idealized image of a tradition, as canonical collections are. In this disorderly jumble, texts rub up against each other in a way that would never be allowed in the cold piety of the canon. We can ask, and perhaps answer, the questions: what did people do with these texts; what they were they used for?

Let’s take an example: the earliest surviving Tibetan Zen manuscript. This is a scroll fragment found not in Dunhuang but in the ruins of a Tibetan fort farther to the west. This fort, now known by its Turkic name, Miran, was built and used by the Tibetans to guard the border of their empire from the mid-eighth to mid-ninth centuries. The traditional textual approach to this unique object would be to transcribe the Zen text, append the place where it was found and the range of dates in between which it might have been written, and then proceed in the realm of pure textuality, with comparisons to other similarly context-free texts.

Rather than rushing to leave the fort, text in hand, we can stay for a little longer and look at some of the other objects that were found there alongside this scroll by the archaeologist Aurel Stein. There are a soldier’s things: leather scales from armor, an arrowhead, and a feathered arrow shaft. There are things that anyone might have used: leather pouches, a comb, a key, a wooden-handled knife, a six- sided die. Then there are things used in the production of manuscripts: a split-nibbed pen and three seals with horn handles, used to stamp official letters and contracts. These were the companions of the earliest Tibetan Zen text for over a thousand years, and we should not be too quick to separate them.

As for the other manuscripts from the fort, most of them are

official communiqués between different outposts of the Tibetan empire. The shorter day-to-day messages were sent on strips of wood, sometimes on two pieces that could be bound together with string and sealed with clay. When supplies were requested, the wood slip was marked and the bottom right corner cut off, as a chit that could be compared with the original order when the supplies arrived. What unites the objects found in the fort with these official documents is that we tend to approach them by trying to work out what people used them for. What were the patterns of behavior behind these objects? Was the die used for divination, or gambling, or both? How often did the soldier have to use those arrows? And did he also use the pen to dash off quick messages, or was there a trained scribe in the fort? Once they were written, who took them to the nearest military headquarters, and who brought back food and other supplies? Though it might not always be possible to answer these questions, the asking of them seems obvious, and sensible.

So, what if we were to ask the same questions about the Zen text from Miran (or rather, the manuscript from which the text has been abstracted) as we want to ask about the die, the arrows, and the leather pouch. We would ask: How was it made? Who brought it here? Who used it, and for what purposes? And as they do for archaeologists, these questions would become questions about wider patterns of behavior. By taking a range of objects from a complex of sites and placing them in relation to each other, we may be able to discern these patterns. This would allow us to consider not just the meaning of the text but its use, the practice in which it was embedded.

The Tibetan Zen scroll was brought to Miran, for there were no papermaking facilities there, for some purpose. Of course, we may never discern that purpose, but by paying close attention to the manuscript, we might find a few clues. For example, turning it over, we find another text written on the verso, in slightly scruffier writing than the Zen text. This is a tantric text, an explanation of the practice of making offerings to Buddhist deities in order to accomplish the four activities of pacifying, increasing, magnetizing, and subjugating: practices that could well be of interest to soldiers in a remote fort. So the Tibetan Zen text could just have come along for the ride, rather than being brought to be practiced. On other hand, it might also have been part of a practice, brought by a lay or monastic Buddhist. But can we really get from objects like this to the everyday practices of which they were a part?

MANUSCRIPTS AND PRACTICES

Approaching the Tibetan Zen manuscripts as active participants in everyday social practices does not just mean looking for texts that describe social practices. It means seeing all texts as practices, in their embodied nature as physical manuscripts. To show how this

might work, let us look at the most important and most widely studied of the Tibetan Zen manuscripts, Pelliot tibétain 116, a compendium of ten different texts.

This is a big and beautifully written manuscript, folded in the concertina format into 124 panels, each seven by thirty centimeters, and filled with four lines of text. With a concertina manuscript, you read with two panels facing you, and turn them over as you go; when you reach the end, you turn the whole thing over and start reading the back of the manuscript in the same way. The construction of a concertina of over one hundred panels required many sheets of paper, and a combination of folding, gluing, and stitching. It became popular in the mid-ninth century and seems to have been particularly favored by the Tibetan speakers at Dunhuang: there are around 260 of them in the British and French collections, and 90 percent are written in Tibetan.

The first and second texts of Pelliot tibétain 116 are not Zen texts per se. They are Buddhist texts whose popularity spans most traditions: the Prayer of Excellent Conduct and the Vajracchedikā sūtra. Presumably because of the ubiquity of these two texts, the reproduction of the manuscript, which formed the basis for most studies of it, simply omitted the first 107 panels. The first two texts, the reason for their inclusion, and their laborious copying by a scribe were simply removed from consideration.

In the textual approach, even the most immediate context, the proximity of other texts to the text in question, can be forgotten once the text is extracted. Thus most studies of Pelliot tibétain 116 have focused on one of its ten texts, with little or no reference to any of the others, and certainly not to the two “non-Zen” texts at the beginning of the manuscript. In fact, these two texts are vital to understanding the manuscript, for they offer us a suggestion about why it was made and how it was used. The presence of the Prayer of Excellent Conduct at the beginning of the manuscript indicates that it was made to facilitate the performance of a ritual, the ceremony of taking the precepts of a bodhisattva. This is a series of vows found only in the Buddhism of the greater vehicle (mahāyāna) and directed to the aspiration of the bodhisattva: to strive for the enlightenment of all sentient beings. The bodhisattva precepts ceremony originated in India but became especially popular in China, where mass precepts ceremonies were held on specially constructed platforms.

These bodhisattva precepts ceremonies complemented the ceremonies of conferring the monastic prātimokṣa vows. The bodhisattva precepts could be taken by lay people as well as already-ordained monks and nuns. Furthermore, the precepts had the advantage over the monastic ordination of needing only a single master to confer them. This made it possible for charismatic masters like Reverend Kim and Shenhui to use the precepts platform to teach and to lead group meditation practice.

The popularity of these precepts ceremonies coincided with the emergence of self-conscious Zen lineages during the eighth century, so that, as Wendi Adamek has put it, “Chan can be said to have been born on the bodhisattva precepts platform.”2 The ceremony of receiving the precepts of the bodhisattva took place in the context of a Zen lineage and was expanded to include an introduction to the Zen style of meditation. The importance of the platform ceremony in Zen lineages is also evident among the Dunhuang manuscripts. For example, one of the most popular early Zen texts, the Platform Sutra (which is found in several versions among the Dunhuang manuscripts), is constructed around an ordination sermon by the sixth patriarch Huineng. Another platform sermon by Huineng’s disciple Shenhui is also found in the Dunhuang manuscripts.

How does the arrangement of the texts in Pelliot tibétain 116 suggest the context of a precepts ceremony? The Prayer of Excellent Conduct is an aspirational text written in the first person, expressing the aim of bringing about the welfare and enlightenment of all beings. This is the aspiration of the bodhisattva, which is formalized in Buddhist praxis by the ceremony of taking the bodhisattva precepts. The presence of the Prayer of Excellent Conduct at the beginning of the compendium is the first clue that the manuscript may have been made for use in such ceremonies. The prayer is followed by the Vajracchedikā (better known in English as the Diamond Sutra), one of the most popular expositions of the concept of emptiness, which states that all things are interdependent, and thus nothing can have an intrinsic essence. In this scriptural text, the Buddha repeatedly makes contradictory statements, celebrating the virtuous path of a bodhisattva and the qualities of a buddha at the same time as denying that that they exist. This approach is a challenge to dualistic concepts of self and other, existence and nonexistence, and the like. This use of deliberate paradox as a teaching method had a strong influence on the development of the Zen tradition.

The Vajracchedikā also occupies a central place in the Platform Sutra, which begins with the story of how Huineng became the sixth patriarch of the lineage. Huineng is said to have left home and gone in search of the fifth patriarch after hearing the Vajracchedikā being recited in the marketplace. Later in the narrative, the fifth patriarch transmits his authority and wisdom to Huineng by explaining the Vajracchedikā to him. After this biographical sketch, the Platform Sutra turns into a sermon given by Huineng in a ceremony of bestowing precepts. This ceremony begins with taking refuge in the Buddha, his teachings, and the community of monks and lay practitioners. Then follows the vow of the bodhisattva and an exposition of the meaning of emptiness, with particular reference, again, to the Vajracchedikā.

Thus the first and second texts in Pelliot tibétain 116 mirror the themes of ordination sermons like the one we find in the Platform

Sutra: bestowing the precepts of the bodhisattva and expounding emptiness. And they continue to follow the same path as we read the other texts in Pelliot tibétain 116—an introduction to the basic theme of Zen Buddhism, the immanence of the enlightened state in the ordinary person, followed by instructions on meditation, and ending with an inspiring song. This ceremony would be the central ritual of an event that was often planned well in advance, giving monastics and lay people time to travel to the site of the ceremony, and could last over several days or weeks, the transmission of the precepts being followed by a meditation retreat.3

A look at the other texts in Pelliot tibétain 116, and indeed its great length, suggests that it was perhaps not merely read from beginning to end. Several of the texts in this compendium are themselves anthologies of paraphrases from Zen teachers and passages from scriptures. Others are written in a question and answer format from which individual passages can be easily extracted. The manuscript was probably used as a sourcebook for the ceremony, rather than a strict liturgy, just as catechisms and compendia of scriptural passages and paraphrases have been used in other contexts, in different forms of Buddhism as well as in other religious traditions.4 Another close look at the manuscript gives a suggestive clue that this was the case—somebody has marked various points in the texts with a small cross, perhaps a visual reminder to make use of a particular passage.5

So, we can now suggest why somebody, or perhaps several people, took the time and expense to create this manuscript, why it became much worn by use, and why it was worth repairing again. It was created for a purpose; it had a function, and this function can tell us as much about the practice of Tibetan Zen as the contents of the texts. This shows the value of looking at manuscripts as things that play active roles in human practices. And, of course, the texts are a part of this approach, but if our reading of texts can happen without discarding the physical manuscript, we have the potential of a much richer understanding of the way the texts were used.

In the early phase of Western interest in Zen, it was thought to be opposed to any form of ritual observance. It is now generally accepted that this was a false picture informed by the Protestant sensibilities and antiestablishment politics of the era. In fact, as the editor of a recent volume on Zen ritual puts it, “Zen life is overwhelmingly a life of ritual.”6

Of course, it is not so easy to evoke the ritual life of a tradition that no longer exists. While this book offers translations of Tibetan Zen manuscripts, I have also attempted to evoke, to some extent, the community in which they once played a part, and in so doing, get closer to a sense of the range of practices in which they functioned. Probably a word about the way I am using the term “ritual” is necessary here. The word is used to denote a variety of things, as many have noted. Here, I use the term to refer to a specific kind of

practice: a group activity, performed self-consciously and in a conventional manner, in order to achieve an end. This use is analogous with “ceremony,” and I use the two terms interchangeably.7

In the translations in this book, along with the ceremonies and daily recitation practices that we have already discussed, we will also look at the role of teaching and the receiving of teachings, of which the manuscripts also have much to tell us. And in this context, we will see how the legitimation of practice and the way it is positioned in a tradition are among the most important heuristic methods used by teachers. Through these manuscripts, I hope to communicate a sense of how an emerging tradition is propagated by teachers, strengthened and expanded through group rituals, internalized through meditation, supported by patrons, and defended against external threats.

ZEN IN CHINA

Modern scholarship is fairly united in the conclusion that there was no Zen “school” as such before the advent of the Song dynasty in the late tenth century. Rather, there were a variety of groups—generally composed of a single master and his disciples—teaching and practicing an approach that emphasized meditation (dhyāna or in Chinese, chan).8 Therefore, if we are to talk about Zen or Chan before this time (and this includes Tibetan Zen), we should remember to consider it an umbrella term sheltering these various practices, brought together not by a shared essential trait but by a complex of family resemblances. These include but are not limited to instructions on how to meditate, teachings on the immanence of enlightenment in the mind, the ritual of bestowing the bodhisattva precepts, and allied with this, the transmission of lineages that in most but not all cases include the figure of Bodhidharma. However, the radical antinomianism and illogical dialogue associated with the later, full-fledged Chan tradition are not very evident in the Tibetan and Chinese lineages on which it was based.

Traditionally, the history of Chan in China is presented as an unbroken lineage, coming from a single source that can be traced back to Śākyamuni Buddha, brought to China by the Indian monk Bodhidharma, and then dividing, tree-like, into different schools. Modern scholarship has concluded that this is an idealized image, presenting the tradition as a lineage like a “string of pearls” rather than the heterogenous, distributed, and varied phenomenon that we see when we investigate early sources—in particular the Dunhuang manuscripts. An alternative picture of the historical development of Chan up to the fourteenth century has developed in the work of Japanese and American scholars in the twentieth century, largely based on the Dunhuang manuscripts. The following schema by John McRae (2003) is indicative:

Proto-Chan (ca. 500–600) Early Chan (ca. 600–900) Middle Chan (ca. 750–1000) Song-Dynasty Chan (ca. 950–1300)

As McRae points out, it is a curious and not yet fully explained fact that the Dunhuang manuscripts provide no sources for Middle and Song-Dynasty Chan, despite being dated from as late as the early eleventh century. This shows at least that the success of the exponents of Middle Chan was limited to specific regions and in Dunhuang, Chan continued to develop with minimal influence from them and their followers. Thus in Dunhuang we are dealing with Early Chan, with Proto-Chan being evident only through its role in lineage accounts and in the practices of the Early Chan teachers. There are two plausible explanations for this: geographical and chronological. The geographical explanation is that movements that later became influential across the Chan tradition as whole began as local developments, like that of Mazu (709–88) and his followers, which began in Jiangxi in the southeast of China, about as far away from Dunhuang as could be. Until much later, these local lineages simply did not have an impact across the whole of the Chinese cultural sphere.

The second explanation is that such movements did not exist in the way that they are portrayed in later sources. Thus the “encounter dialogues” that came to typify Song-Dynasty Chan purport to represent the teachings and teaching styles of earlier masters, but may be misleading in this respect, as John McRae argues:

What is being referred to is not some collection of activities and events that actually happened in the eighth through tenth centuries, but instead the retrospective re-creation of those activities and events, the imagined identities of the magical figures of the Tang, within the minds of Song-Dynasty Chan devotees.9

Thus, if Middle Chan is primarily a retrospective construct of Song- Dynasty Chan, we should not expect to find it in preeleventh-century sources. The Chan that we find at Dunhuang is not necessarily marginal; rather it is one of many local complexes of Chan practice, predating the emerging Chan orthodoxy of the eleventh century. In a context in which there is no “Chan school” and various versions of Chan lineages are found across China and Tibet, turning our attention to the local avoids anachronistic references to Chan as if it were a single entity.

A brief historical sketch of Early Chan begins with the figure of Bodhidharma, whose obscurity as a historical figure is matched by his vivid presence in the Chan lineage. During the sixth century, the followers of Bodhidharma and his Chinese student Huike promoted a

text called Treatise on the Two Entrances and Four Practices that emphasized the enlightened nature present in the awareness of all living beings (“the entrance of the principle”) and that also briefly described how to practice (“the entrance of practice”). Essentially, the text enjoins a form of practice that is without the concept of practice, so that “even when you are practicing the six perfections, you are not practicing anything.”

In the following century, Chan lineage based on the teachings embodied in the Treatise on the Two Entrances and Four Practices flourished in rural locations such as the “East Mountain” at Huangmei. Writings from the East Mountain monks describe meditation practices in more detail, including the practice of “observing the mind.”10 At the very end of the seventh century, one of the heirs to the East Mountain lineage, a monk called Shenxiu (606?–706), was invited to the imperial capital by the Empress Wu Zeitian (r. 690–705), and this marks the beginning of the ascent of Chan to becoming the dominant force in Chinese Buddhism. Working in both of the imperial capital cities of Loyang and Chang’an, Shenxiu was an influential teacher and author, and many of his students were also influential figures.

As more opportunities developed for monks teaching from Chan lineages to gather students and wealthy patrons, Chan became both more widespread and more various. In the eighth century, new groups of Chan teachers and students sprang up in (modern) Sichuan province. The spread of Chan outside of the palaces and monasteries was effected through mass ceremonies of lay ordination, in which the vows of the bodhisattva (the greater vehicle aspiration to save all sentient beings) were conferred at the same time as the nature of one’s own awareness as a fully enlightened buddha. These ordinations were performed on platforms and often included sermons by charismatic and radical teachers like Shenhui and Wuzhu. Shenhui used his sermons to directly criticize influential rivals like the students of Shenxiu, with a somewhat crude critique of meditation practice in all its forms. Wuzhu, on the other hand, eschewed all forms of religious activity apart from meditation practice. Thus, by the end of the eighth century, Chan teachings had spread across China, and indeed to Tibet, without yet having been shaped into a single consistent tradition as such.11

The Chan manuscripts from Dunhuang (Tibetan and Chinese) present an inclusive and evolving state of affairs during the ninth and tenth centuries, bringing together most of what had gone before. Bodhidharma is here as an important figure in the lineage of Chan teachers, but not necessarily the founding figure, and in one lineage, he does not appear at all. Nor is Bodhidharma always cited in collections of the teachings of Chan masters. These masters are mainly from the seventh and eighth centuries and include both those who are well known to the later tradition and many others who have disappeared into obscurity. Though the manuscripts are

mainly from the ninth and tenth centuries, it is these seventh- and eighth-century teachers (or at least the later representation of them) who dominate; thus we seem to be seeing a Chan tradition in the process of defining itself through the image of these masters and the teachings attributed to them.

A key figure on the Dunhuang scene, in both Chinese and Tibetan sources, is the Chan master known as Moheyan. Teaching in the second half of the eighth century, he was part of the generation that followed Shenhui’s polemical attacks on established Chan meditation practices. What remains of Moheyan’s teachings are clearly attempts to marry practices taught by preceding generations with the antipractice rhetoric of Shenhui. Moheyan studied with Xiangmo Zang, one of the established teachers criticized by Shenhui, and may also have spent time as a student of Shenhui. But his attempt at reconciling meditation practice with the ideal of an immanent buddha nature that is only obscured by practice was shared with others of his generation. The Oxhead school, which also flourished in the late eighth century, produced texts that reconciled the apparent distinction between gradual and instantaneous methods of practice, including the Platform Sutra and the Treatise on the Transcendence of Cognition (the latter surviving in Tibetan translation in a Dunhuang manuscript).12

Thus it seems that there was nothing unusual in Moheyan’s teachings for a Chan teacher from the late eighth century. His writings negotiated skillfully the balance of teaching meditation practices within a worldview in which there is no difference between the awareness of a buddha and that of an ordinary being. He was forgotten by the later tradition in China but, by several quirks of history, came to be the single representative of Chan, indeed of Chinese Buddhism in general, for the Tibetans.

ZEN IN TIBET

It is likely that Zen teachers played a role in the Tibetan assimilation of Buddhism during the period when Buddhism was adopted as the imperial religion, from the second half of the eighth century to the first half of the ninth. Unfortunately, we have no records from the time to confirm this. The only Tibetan historical accounts of the activities of Zen teachers in imperial Tibet come from a single narrative compiled much later, probably in the eleventh to twelfth centuries. This narrative is known as the Testimony of Ba, named for the clan whose role in bringing Buddhism to Tibet is celebrated in it. The role of the Testimony is to create an origin narrative of Buddhist Tibet and, at the same time, give the Ba clan a major role in that narrative. This, and the fact that the text as we have it is several centuries later than the events it describes, makes it clear that the Testimony is not a reliable source for the events it describes. An early Dunhuang fragment of one of the stories in the Testimony

shows how much it was altered over the centuries.13 Although they cannot be taken as reliable historical sources, the

stories told in the Testimony about Chinese teachers are interesting when read in conjunction with the manuscripts. In the earliest complete version of the Testimony, all of these stories occur in the reign of Tri Song Detsen, one of the most successful rulers in the Tibetan imperial line, who expanded the borders of the Tibetan empire. The Testimony says almost nothing about his political activities, dealing only with his role as the founder of Buddhism as the state religion of Tibet. At the beginning of Tri Song Detsen’s reign, Buddhism was at a low ebb in Tibet, unpopular with many of the powerful clan leaders, and it was partly in defiance of them that Tri Song Detsen, in his rise to power, came out in support of Buddhism. In the Testimony, the challenge facing Buddhism at the beginning of Tri Song Detsen’s reign is represented by the expulsion of a Chinese monk from the temple at Ramoche. However, the monk leaves one sandal behind as a sign that he will return.

Some years later, when Tri Song Detsen is attempting to found a major Buddhist temple in Tibet, he invites an Indian scholar monk called Śāntarakṣīta. However, due to problems caused by the local deities, the attempt to establish the temple is unsuccessful and the monk is sent back. Instead, three Tibetans are sent to China to find a Chinese teacher. According to the story, they meet a monk called Kim Heshang, who gives them instruction, and also have an audience with the Chinese emperor, who gives them a prophecy about the Buddhist activities of the Tibetan emperor. Whether these meetings ever took place, it is interesting that the Korean master Kim Heshang appears here, for he was otherwise forgotten in Tibet, and the references to him in the Testimony are highly obscure even in the time of the earliest versions that we have. However, he does appear in the Dunhuang manuscripts, as we will see later.

The last Chinese teacher to appear in the Testimony is the most important. Known to Tibetans as Heshang Moheyan (the first part of the name is simply the Chinese word for “monk” but used by Tibetans to mean “Chinese monk”), Moheyan was a popular teacher at the Tibetan court, but new problems arose for the Tibetan emperor as tensions developed between the different groups of foreign Buddhist teachers and their Tibetan disciples. According to the Testimony, the Indian teachers taught a graduated path in which the tantric and sutric teachings were carefully laid out as steps to enlightenment, whereas the Chinese emphasized the result rather than the path and a straightforward concept-free meditation rather than the multitude of methods offered by the Indian teachers.

When the tension between the Indian and Chinese camps threatened to erupt into violence, with some of the Zen disciples wounding themselves in protest and threatening suicide, Tri Song Detsen called for the situation to be resolved in a formal debate. The debate would decide which nationality, and which teaching method,

would henceforth be supported by the monarchy and which would be banned from Tibet. The Indian side chose Kamalaśīla, a leading light in scholastic Indian Buddhism and the graduated path. The Chinese side chose Moheyan. The debate episode in the Testimony is clearly constructed from other sources; it begins with a brief exposition by Moheyan, a one-sided version of early Zen representing only the discussion of the immediate presence of enlightenment in the mind and omitting the discussion of how this is manifested in practice. This brief statement sets the scene for several pages of lengthy arguments for the validity of graduated practices, drawn from the written works of Kamalaśīla. Moheyan is not heard of until these arguments are finished, at which point he concedes defeat.

In the Testimony, the defeat of Moheyan results in Tri Song Detsen’s giving his full support to the graduated practices and the Indian scholar monks who teach them. The episode is immediately followed by the establishment of a translation bureau to bring the entirety of the Buddhist scriptures into the Tibetan language. This proximity suggests that the main function of the account of the debate is to confer full authenticity on the Indian teachers and their Tibetan disciples who translated most of the Tibetan canon. Later, subsequent versions of the Testimony and other religious histories used the debate to make the point more clearly that India alone was the valid source of Buddhist scripture and that China was suspect, associated as it was with the “instantaneous” approach of Moheyan.14

As we have already noted, it would be naive to see this episode in the Testimony as having any documentary value. Though it came to be widely accepted in Tibet, it is not found in other early Tibetan histories, and when it does start to appear in other works, it is clear that the Testimony is the only original source. Furthermore, the story came to have a useful function in Tibetan religious life. As well as validating new lineages brought to Tibet from India as coming from the only genuine source of Buddhism, it served to confirm the importance of religious practice against those who emphasized the immanence of the enlightened state and immediate access to it. Thus the ultimate success of this debate story in Tibet owes much to its usefulness in subsequent centuries.15

This does not mean that no dispute ever took place. In 1952, the French Sinologist Paul Demiéville published a book based on a single Dunhuang manuscript: Pelliot chinois 4646, a collection of Chinese Zen texts including one called Ratification of the True Principle of Instantaneous Awakening in the Greater Vehicle. The manuscript consists of a series of questions and answers on Zen doctrines, with a preface by a student of Moheyan’s called Wangxi explaining the background to these questions and answers. Wangxi relates how Moheyan was invited to the Tibetan court, where he granted a “secret Zen initiation” to the nobility. Moheyan’s success at court

seems to have been greatest among its women: one of the queens is said to have taken monastic vows, while the emperor’s maternal aunt and thirty other women converted to Buddhism. After his departure from Tibet, the Indian teachers at the Tibetan court complained to Tri Song Detsen that the Chinese method was not a proper Buddhist path. In contrast to the Tibetan debate narrative in the Testimony, this did not lead to a single staged debate in Tibet, but rather a series of exchanges, by letter it seems, of questions posed by the Indian teachers and answers returned by Moheyan. The other major difference from the later Tibetan version is that Wangxi’s preface concludes with an edict from the Tibetan emperor supporting Moheyan’s teachings as genuine Buddhist practices.16

Wangxi’s compilation of the questions and answers, and his writing of the preface, must have been done in the first half of the ninth century, and therefore predates the earliest version of the Testimony by at least two centuries. Thus Wangxi’s version has at least a chronological authority over the Tibetan version. Yet it too cannot be accepted uncritically as documentary evidence. The questions and answers that are supposed to represent the letters sent back and forth between the Indian teachers and Moheyan look very much like many other question and answer texts found among the Zen manuscripts, which have nothing to do with hostile debates and everything to do with the way Zen was presented to a sympathetic audience. The questions in Wangxi’s text generally set the stage for Moheyan’s answers, just as in the Tibetan version of the debate, Moheyan’s brief argument sets the stage for a lengthy refutation. Nevertheless, this account by Moheyan’s students of this Zen teacher’s having to defend his teachings at the behest of the Tibetan emperor (though not in a formal debate) may well be close to the truth, and is certainly closer than the later Tibetan version.

The records of monastic libraries from the early ninth century suggest that Zen was a known, but relatively minor, aspect of Buddhism at the Tibetan court, as they record only a handful of Zen manuscripts, including a “Zen Book” attributed to Bodhidharma.17 It seems that Zen was still of significance to Tibetan Buddhists at the beginning of the tenth century, when the author Nub Sangye Yeshe —one of the few whose work survived the turbulent period following the collapse of the Tibetan imperial dynasty—wrote his Lamp for the Eyes of Contemplation. In this work, the “instantaneous approach” of Zen was accepted as a genuine Buddhist path but ranked only second in a hierarchy of four ways of approaching enlightenment: the gradual approach, the instantaneous approach, the tantric meditation of mahāyoga, and the formless approach of atiyoga. In particular, Sangye Yeshe was concerned that Tibetans were mixing up Zen and atiyoga, and as we will see later, there is evidence from the Dunhuang manuscripts that this was so.

In any case, several sources, including the Dunhuang manuscripts, but also the writings of Central Tibetan Buddhists like Sangye

Yeshe, strongly suggest that Zen was not abandoned by Tibetans at the end of the ninth century as the later debate story claims. As we will see in the following section, there is evidence from Dunhuang that Tibetan Zen lineages were still flourishing into the tenth century. They were still active in the eleventh, when the Amdo master Aro Yeshe Jungne is said to have held two lineages, one Chinese and one Indian. And the contents of Zen texts were still known in the twelfth century, when Nyangral Nyima Özer discussed several key Zen works in his history of Buddhism in Tibet.

We have little or no specific historical data that would allow us to say anything for certain about the demise of Zen practices in Tibet. Yet I would suggest that it was more than anything else the pressures of the “later diffusion” of Buddhism in Tibet—the introduction of new practice lineages from India from the eleventh century onward, represented by influential teachers and authors like Sakya Paṇḍita—that led to the decline and eventual demise of Tibetan Zen. The new (gsar ma) schools based on Indic lineages were often quite aggressive in promoting India as the only source of the authentic dharma. In this environment, it would have been increasingly difficult for those holding Chinese lineages to assert their authority. Still, it seems that Zen texts and practices were being transmitted as late as the thirteenth century, when the Sakya master Künpang Chödrag Palzangpo was teaching them. And as late as the seventeenth century, the historian Tāranātha read a copy of the Tibetan Zen treatise Drawn from Eighty Sutras. Yet these seem to have been rare cases, long past the time when Zen played a significant part in Tibetan religion.18

ZEN AT DUNHUANG

There is no disputing the fact that Dunhuang is a long way from the centers of power in China, the capital cities of Chang’an (in the Tang period) and Kaifeng (in the Song), and Luoyang, with its many Buddhist monasteries. Henrik Sørensen has argued that the differences between the kind of Zen found in Dunhuang and the Zen that later sources tell us existed during the ninth and tenth centuries in central China is due to the distance between Dunhuang and these centers, and its political isolation after it was conquered by the Tibetan army in the late eighth century.19

Yet this isolation is perhaps overstated. After the Tibetan hold over Dunhuang was broken in the middle of the ninth century, Chinese monks did journey between Dunhuang and central China. We have the example of Wuzhen (816–95), who traveled to Chang’an to have an audience with the emperor, before returning to Dunhuang. I would suggest that we should consider the Dunhuang manuscripts to have been part of a local tradition of Zen, one that might have had its own peculiarities, but that we also consider that all Zen traditions were local. If other manuscript caches from the

same period had been found at various locations in China, the local nature of the Dunhuang manuscripts would be more obvious, and the differences between their contents and the Zen described by the later tradition would seem less of an aberration. Also, scholars would perhaps be more careful about using the Dunhuang manuscripts as straightforward sources for “Tang Dynasty Zen,” which would not be a bad thing.20

Since few of the Zen manuscripts from Dunhuang are explicitly dated, it is difficult to be certain of when they were written. Daishun Ueyama has suggested three periods for the manuscripts: (i) Chinese manuscripts from roughly 750–80, either brought from central China or written on imported paper, (ii) Chinese and Tibetan manuscripts from the period of Tibetan occupation, roughly 780 to 850, written on locally made paper, and (iii) Chinese manuscripts from the late ninth and tenth centuries, written on local paper. This periodization is really only relevant to the Chinese manuscripts. The Tibetan conquest cut off the Tang dynasty’s trade route through Central Asia and probably did stem the flow of manuscripts from the center. Even after the fall of the Tibetan empire and the reconquest of Dunhuang and the surrounding area by local Chinese rulers, the situation did not revert to what it had been before the Tibetan conquest, as the Tang dynasty was severely weakened, and finally fell in the early tenth century.21

However, Ueyama’s schema is based on a misconception about the Tibetan Zen manuscripts. Like most previous studies of Tibetan Zen, he assumed that the manuscript sources date from the period of the Tibetan occupation of Dunhuang; yet much of the Tibetan material from Dunhuang has now been dated to after the end of the occupation. In fact, as we have seen, Tibetan Zen survived into the tenth century and beyond. In the light of the fact that the Tibetan Zen manuscripts from Dunhuang come from exactly the same period as most of the the Chinese ones, that is, the ninth and tenth centuries, and were also produced locally, we should be looking at Tibetan and Chinese Zen not as two different traditions but simply as Zen practices presented in two different languages.