Records of the Transmission of the Lamp (Jingde Chuandeng Lu): Volume 8 (Books 29&30) – Chan Poetry and Inscriptions

景德傳燈錄

Records of the Transmission of the Lamp

Up to the Era of Great Virtue [of the Song Dynasty 1004–8 CE]

(Jap: Keitoku Dentōroku)

Compiled by

Daoyuan

of the Chan School, of the Song Dynasty

in 30 fascicules.

The Hokun Trust is pleased to support the eighth and final volume of a complete translation of this classic of Chan (Zen) Buddhism by Randolph S. Whitfield. The Records of the Transmission of the Lamp is a religious classic of the first importance for the practice and study of Zen which it is hoped will appeal both to students of Buddhism and to a wider public interested in religion as a whole..

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Abbreviations

Book Twenty-Nine

Book Thirty

Addenda

Afterword

Finding lists 1–30

Endnotes

Bibliography

Index

Preface

The many incarnations of the Chinese Buddhist Canon are a treasury of human wisdom we cannot do without. Similar to treasuries from other spiritual traditions, the perennial appeal of the Records of the Transmission of the Lamp (CDL) stands outside the tortured vicissitudes of the local mundane conditions that engendered it; even when its integrity is still imputed through having been produced by the very desire and hunger for power which its own contents decry, it still comes up unsullied, like the proverbial lotus emerging from the mud.

This eighth and final volume of the translation of the Jingde Chuandeng Lu (CDL) is really a celebration of its liberation from the confines of an arcane, classical Chinese accessible to almost no one, into a universal language available to an English-speaking world that can now appreciate this core Chan (Zen) Buddhist work as a whole for the first time.

It is the contents of this masterpiece of Chinese Buddhist literature that have necessarily occupied me during its translation, but there is clearly a way to go yet in appreciating the scope and depths of this work.¹ The study and practice of Buddhism was the forte of the cream of the Chinese monks and laymen of old who became translators and scholars of the first rank. They managed the perilous equilibrium of balancing an awakened in-depth-appreciation of Buddhist practice with the rational faculty of doubt requiring proof through experience; these two truly human faculties merged and produced works still relevant today.

There are still people who think that ‘Zen’ came from Japan: they do not realise that the word is indeed Japanese, but is the pronunciation of the Chinese word ‘Chan’ (itself a transliteration of the Indian word dhyāna) which means ‘meditation’. When Buddhism found a new home in China at the beginning of the Christian era (a parallel development), it took some time to grow into the new soil, despite its similarity to the agnostic humanism of the original teaching of Confucius.² The Chan phenomenon, a Buddhist meditation practice, way of life and literary legacy unique to China, later spread to many countries: to Korea, to Japan, to Tibet, to Mongolia, later to the United States and to Europe, where it is still flourishing today.

This work is a summation of proto-Chan works that had gone before and an introduction to the vast corpus of Chan / Zen literature that was to follow. Since it is still of interest to us today, might this be due to actual human experience and insight emerging from centuries of Confucian, Daoist and Buddhist study and practice, expressed so consistently in this all-encompassing Buddhist work? The fine blend of an authentic life, the co-evolution of cosmos and consciousness, is the subject of these records.

Acknowledgements

In gratitude

To Soko Morinaga Roshi of Kyoto and to the Venerable Myokyo-ni of London who both pointed out the way of Master Linji (Rinzai) for many years.

Thanks to the Hokun Trust of London for granting funds for this translation and its publication.

Thanks to the Venerable Sohaku Ogata, whose work continues.

Thanks to Carman Blacker for her far-sightedness.

Thanks to the Ven. Myokun of The Hermitage of the True Dharma (Shobo-an) London, for real enthusiasm and practical help.

Thanks to Michelle Bromley for much practical help and encouragement, without which this book would never have come into being.

Thanks to Professors Albert Welter and Christian Wittern for friendly encouragement and their contributions.

Thanks to Professor Wilt Idema for discussions on the Baozhi poems.

Last but not least, thanks go to my wife Mariana, who has supported me all along the Way.

Introduction

Who said the ancient mirror

Is without form?

Ancient, modern, coming, going

What gate?

The gate when you look

But can’t see it

Just this

Is your naked manifestation

Complete³

Buddhist China in the fifth and sixth centuries of the common era was a golden age of meditation practice and austerities, at least seen from an eleventh century Song dynasty in the throes of a major technological revolution, looking back with nostalgia to that early halcyon period, seemingly far away in the mists of a protean past. Buddhabhadra, Bodhidharma, Sengzhao, Daosheng and many others were followed by Ven. Baozhi, Mahāsattva Fu Daishi, Meditation Master Huisi and Tiantai Zhiyi, more or less contemporaries, men who played a vital role in establishing a new phase of Chinese spiritual and social culture. For example, the great influence of Ven. Baozhi (418–514 CE?), also referred to as Bao Gong, a Buddhist priest at the court of Emperor Wu (r.502–549 CE), founding father of the Liang dynasty (502–557 CE), persisted for centuries after his death. He was invoked more than four hundred years later by the first two Song Emperors as a kind of talisman, as is clearly reflected in the number of poems attributed to him at the head of this last book of the CDL.

‘According to prophecies circulated in 963 and 966, the sixth-century thaumaturge Baozhi predicted that twenty-one rulers of the Zhao clan would reign for 799 years. The prophecies were taken seriously. In 980, his [Taizu’s] successor and younger brother Taizong (r. 976–997) founded a new temple in the capital of Kaifeng to store the mummified body and silver staff of Baozhi, and in 982 he gave a posthumous title to Baozhi after seeing Baozhi’s apparition in the palace. In this newly established state, then, appealing to Buddhist prophecies to justify their claim to legitimacy and consolidate their power proved an irresistible attraction for the founding emperor and his brother.’⁴

Four years after the fall of the Liang dynasty (557 CE), Dharma-master Huisi met his end, without illness and Song Toutuo (alias Bodhidharma?)⁵ entered quiescence at Lingyan Temple on Mount Ke (柯山靈巖寺). Mahāsattva Fu Daishi then predicted, ‘The honourable Song awaits me in Tuşita, remaining here will certainly not be long.’ (27.2; 1.1)

The Song dynasty’s support of Chan Buddhism is revealed in the imperially sponsored compilation of the CDL, the first and most influential of Chan texts, incorporated into the canon in 1011 CE. Looking back on its progress over the last thousand years, it seems clear now that something had to be preserved, an extract ephemeral, delicate and yet malleable enough to accommodate all kinds of interpretations into a distant future. These records had also put a brake on the urge to trivialise such wisdom writings into consumable bytes that digest too easily. Their durability, their very indigestibility, was proof against such reductive activity, its original language a formidable and protective barrier that preserved its pristine message through the centuries. Even so, the somewhat arduous descent to mine the depths of the message contained in the CDL has already paid rich dividends in scholarly activity and meditative insight in both the East and the West. On this way there are these signposts, the very writings preserved from of old, which we learn slowly to appreciate by undertaking the journey, now in a fresh change of clothes. This first complete translation of the CDL is itself a rebirth.

The rebirth also means that the study and exegesis of the CDL as an organic whole is yet to begin, composed as it was in an arcane Chinese in which its chief redactors, Yang Yi, already presented at court as a child prodigy at the age of eleven, and Li Wei, were masters. Yang Yi later became a government minister, advisor to two emperors, Hanlin academician, ennobled Duke, poet and discoverer of Li Shangyin, China’s most exotic and difficult poet. He was also a Chan master,⁶ as well as one of the chief architects of the early Song dynasty’s policies for building a new world, then in the throes of a social and technological upheaval only comparable to events in the twenty-first century.

Yang Yi’s team also ‘clarified’ the Chan School’s family tree, the CDL. The usual story of the genesis of the work itself tells of how Chan monk Daoyuan, the first to compose the work, had entitled it Anthology of the Uniform Practice of Buddhas and Patriarchs (佛祖同參集, FZTCJ). Although the work has not survived, Yang Yi’s Preface to it has (translated in vol. 5 of the present work), in which he states that Daoyuan’s original work contained twenty chapters. When Yang Yi and his team redacted the FZTCJ, they renamed it the Jingde Chuandeng Lu (CDL) and expanded it to thirty chapters, with a new preface by Yang Yi (translated in vol. 1).⁷ The story concludes with the thirty-chapter Chinese text published in 1011 CE, which has for centuries been the root text of the Chan School. There were updates following from the CDL, which spawned a completely new genre of Buddhist literature, but they lack the originality of the root text, perhaps due, not only to the redactor and his team’s literary mastery, but also to the fact that Yang Yi himself had personal contacts with many eminent Chan masters of his day, especially the remarkable Fenyang Shanzhao, master of paradoxes, for whom he also wrote a preface to this master’s Record (T. 1992) at the same time as he was redacting the CDL.

* * *

Let us try now to catch a bird’s eye view of the contents of the CDL as a whole, beginning with the frequently met rhetorical question, ‘What is the meaning of Patriarch Bodhidharma coming [to China] from the West?’ The first thing to note with regard to this question is that the responses in the CDL use a vocabulary wholly unfamiliar to a Western world brought up on Christian concepts, though the insights are universal.⁸ The term Śūnyatā and its many other names, such as the Dharmakāya, the Void, the Ancient Mirror, Emptiness, Thusness, Buddha-nature, the Original Nature, the Dao, The Great Ocean, the True-Face-before-mother-and-father-were-born, the Heart-seal and the Sun Buddha Vairocana⁹ occur repeatedly, not only in this volume of poetry but throughout the whole of Chinese Chan Buddhism, including the CDL.

The root of Buddhism is called śūnyatā, in Chinese xukong 虛空, translated as voidness or emptiness. The key image here is the mirror. This voidness of many names has been described as a sentient holosphere of resonating synchronicities whose one characteristic is a total connectedness beyond any human capacity to envision, though not to embrace.¹⁰ Huineng, the Sixth Patriarch of Chan, adds the human touch by telling us that the [original] nature rays out wisdom, a self-seeing, self-knowing depth (28.2).¹¹

If the root of Buddhism is śūnyatā, the key function of this ancient mirror is to reflect. Bodhidharma’s wall is an example of this wonderful function. The nature of Thusness is purity, wisdom reflected inexhaustibly, Master Shenhui tells us (30.6). It is always and everywhere intimately near (Xuansha Shibei, 29.8), though we are not directly aware of this. Being energetically connected to each other and to all that is, in a morphogenetic field in which any gain or loss, anything done or left undone is reflected back to us, has effects resonating like shock waves throughout the sphere, irrespective of a time and space constructed ad hoc by an enclosed and fragile human consciousness. Outside of this fragile enclosed consciousness, we do reflect each other constantly, in the smallest ways; it is called relatedness. The Chan master is a bright, accurate, high-definition reflector. This capacity to mirror accurately, without gross personal biases, is called in Chan ‘the great functioning’. It is called great because this function has been decoupled from the entanglements of an enclosed consciousness and can therefore reflect the more truly.

The message the CDL expounds then, is that we all live in and from this mystery difficult to fathom (Danxia, 30.20). From this numinous realm, three-dimensional holographic homo sapiens, bubbles of flesh and blood, are rayed out, creating a seeming alter orbis, a discontinuous world of birth and death, which we experience as our reality.

Initially due to the raindrops, water became bubbles

But by virtue of the wind’s arousal, bubbles return to water

Unknown is that the nature of bubbles and water are not different

But by following other paths they are taken to be different

(from Ven. Lepu, Floating Bubbles Song, 30.16)

This bubble world takes on the characteristics of materiality and solidity, the only realm, ironically, where the Buddhist (or any other) practice can be undertaken, if being alive is defined as the gift of sentience at its most focussed. Due to the existence of the border created by this rain sent from the Void, we are naturally not aware that our physical bodies are an outcrop projected by the deep embeddedness of the heart, another name for the Void within: we are our own bubble, scintillating with the life of original voidness.¹² This scintillating life, the most mysterious thing, which exists as a no-thing, is our physical existence. Being fluid, it is naturally subject to birth and death, to impermanence. No wonder then, if we wholly identify with our bubble, that we become confused and frustrated, for genuine awareness does not, cannot, belong to a bubble except by proxy. A material bubble, itself full of emptiness, performs actions somehow permeated by all kinds of karmic proclivities. So the confusion is actually double: the physical bubble is confused and disorientated by obvious impermanence, whilst the heart / sun / void is ever of a shining lucency, even in the realm of a cloudy world, and is in no way deluded by its own confusions: yet both inhabit the same ‘body’ and this body, sentient by proxy, knows the Way! Perhaps this is what the Channists are pointing to with their extraordinary use of language, which itself comes from the Void: that this material world is only one side of the coin, the same as ‘my’ bubble created by the rain. My bubble is cast by something that it has not yet become aware of. Woe is me! I can neither grasp my own bubble nor grasp the Void within that is raying out my own reflection of myself! No surprise then that the Chan masters have such fun with words! Again, how could we ever become aware of the Void within, without this bubble? Why do we need to become aware of it? What really is the meaning of Bodhidharma coming to our world? Where has he come from? What exactly is the transmission? Does this journey really lead us into a region of the inconceivable, where all borders become an open pass – no gates? No words?¹³

Texts do have a vital role in this live play (Liu Fei, 30.27). The CDL, although its records are laden with political karma, has its origin in the wisdom gained by experience. The clear warning contained in the work is that we should not cover this inner wisdom with too much outwardness, chasing rainbows, because then the source of the luminosity is lost, whilst the two aspects of awakening, clarity and profundity, are the main essential of awakening. (Daochang Weijin, 29.11).

Inwards, having once looked into the face of this mystery, uncertainty is put to rest, making room for realisation as an ever-ongoing process. As Chan master Fenyang Shanzhao said, ‘When there is accord with the innate endowment, there are no shadows,’ – which is the entry into the realm of reality.¹⁴

A perforated holo-man¹⁵ seemingly separated from the Void within / without and from its self-seeing, self-knowing depth, is quite a formidable burden to be carrying around. The border (perforated)¹⁶ between these two intellectually separated realms is referred to, by another analogy, as ‘the river’ or, ‘the stream’ in Buddhist texts. In order to cross this stream to the other shore bound for the motherland of prajñā, a raft is necessary; the Buddhist teachings. Yet once the crossing from this shore has been made with the aid of the raft, the raft is laid down. It is not carried on the back, is not an object of attachment, but is left by the shore so that the one who has made the crossing into the unmapped spaces of the beyond within, euphemistically called ‘the other shore’ in conventional Buddhism, can make further use of the raft, by returning, ferrying himself and others backwards and forwards from the realm of birth and death, braving the dangerous currents of the river, to the ‘other’ shore of openness, where there are no gates. This unimaginable to and fro activity of the Chan masters, this not being stuck in the one realm or the other, renders both sides of the shore even and equal, and the river itself becomes a navigable stream which has lost many of its terrors though none of its dangers.

The Sixth Patriarch said, ‘From the very beginning not a thing is.’¹⁷ The realm of the liberated heart is also referred to as vast openness. Yet it is not the purpose of the Buddhist way of liberation to produce even ‘enlightened’ clones, all marching in unison. Clones belong to the shadow world of the bubble, where lust for power reigns. Openness, an attribute of the heart, is total relatedness; there is no centre (there are many suns), there are no permanent knots of karma and yet, unlike ‘infinity’, this openness is not an abstraction but expresses itself optimally through the living physical body.¹⁸ The Buddhas point the Way into this openness, where nothing is mapped or absolutely known, where everything is numinous, naked and revealed as being just as it is, where only the truly human attributes can flourish – awe, wonder and appreciation.

The