Monks, Rulers, and Literati: The Political Ascendancy of Chan Buddhism [Hardcover]

It was bound to happen. Just as studies of the New Testament based on scientific historical scholarship transformed the field of Bible studies, so now it is transforming Zen studies. The same kind of critical scholarship that can be seen in Elaine Pagels' The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans, and Heretics to help understand how the construction of New Testament Gospel texts were shaped by historical events in the years following the death of Jesus has now been used to illuminate the rise of Chan Buddhism.

This is a outsider approach to Chan Buddhist history as opposed to the insider approach used by Heinrich Duomoulin in Zen Buddhism: A History : India and China With a New Supplement on the Northern School of Chinese Zen (Nanzan Studies in Religion and Culture). It doesn't blindly accept what the Zen texts say but reviews them in light of other historical information. In doing so, it suggests possible motives for what is written.

Welter worked with historical documents heavily including the Chan transmission records. He looked at connections between Chan Buddhist leaders and Chinese political leaders, who provided key support to the Chan Buddhists. He shows how in the time from the Tang to the Song dynasty, Chan was able to gain dominance in China by presenting itself as iconoclastic, spontaneous and not dependent on doctrine and texts, all the while working closely with Chinese political leaders as it sold its story via the careful construction of its transmission records. Basing its appeal heavily on dharma transmissions, Chan tweaked history so as to construct first multi-lineage tranmissions which, over time, were reduced to a single lineage as the Linji school gained dominance. The prominance of Northern Chan Buddhism was challenged sucessfully by the Southern School, as documented by the Southern School in the The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch. Records of transmission became a tool within lineage to pass control from one master to another.

During the Song Dynansty, Chan was able to present itself as a new kind of Chinese Buddhism, free of the perceived failure of Buddhism during the Tang Dynasty. While claiming to be free of reliance on text, it relied heavily on transmission records. The koan collections (some major ones are The Blue Cliff Record, No Barrier: Unlocking the Zen Koan - A New Translation of the Zen Classic "Wumenguan" (Mumonkan) and The Book of Serenity: One Hundred Zen Dialogues) that derived from these records were a unique literary production that seemed, unlike that of other Buddhist schools, somehow free of doctrine and narration ... and above all seemed spontaneous. Actually, as the historical records Welter examines reveals, they derived from considerable institutional and political influences. Chan's status as a "separate practice outside the teachings" was a creative solution to unify Chan branches which otherwise, like other Buddhist schools, might have appeared as just so many variations requiring a resort to the "time-honored" Buddhist appeal to "skillful means" to pull together. Although carefully constructed, stories of iconoclastic practices including beating and shouting were ideally suited to appeal to the religious longings of a Chinese elite increasingly caught up in bureaucratic activity.

What then of enlightenment? Was it simply a way of designating the passage of authority from one Buddhist leader to another? Such a suspicion might indeed explain the puzzling instant moments of awakening found in the transmission records. Like the Christian story of a physical resurrection, Chan stories of enlightenment might be just that, stories less intended to awaken an individual Chan practitioner than to pass control from one leader of a monastery to another, monasteries that depended on government support.

Just as the application of scientific scholarship to Christianity has enriched our understanding of how human beings construct and find meaning in a religion, so hopefully its application to Chan Buddhism will free us of misguided submission to false authority and the manipulation of "enlightenment" so that we may find the real value in Chan we may have otherwise overlooked. Ironically, as Welter points out, Chan may not have survived were it not for its political entanglements.

With eyes open, Chan practice still seems powerful, for which try Sheng Yen's Hoofprint of the Ox: Principles of the Chan Buddhist Path as Taught by a Modern Chinese Master.