Origins of the Two Main Schools of Chan, Cont.

The Empress began her career as a rather ordinary, second-string concubine, one of the batallion of young women impressed into servicing the emperor. Her talents went unnoticed until a fortuitous coincidence enabled her to showcase them to just the right person: She happened to pass the privy while the heir to the throne was sitting on the toilet. Seizing the moment, she seduced him en situ, an act of such audacity and novelty that the prince would be titillated by her for years to come. As was the custom, however, when the old emperor died, she was sent to a Buddhist convent along with his other concubines. (Burying them alive had gone out of fashion.)

The prince, now the new emperor, settled into court life in the "second" capital of Xian with his new wife who, regrettably, was unable to produce an heir. He quickly grew tired of her and turned his amorous attentions to one of his young and beautiful concubines. His wife, trying to divert him from this diversion, summoned Wu, of scatological fame, from the convent. It was to be the wife's gruesomely fatal mistake. Wu gave birth to a son then murdered it after carefully planting evidence of the act on the wife and the 'diverting' concubine. Convinced of their guilt, the emperor permitted Wu to oversee their punishment. First, she had their hands and feet amputated and then she boiled them alive. That done, the Emperor elevated his Goddess of Mercy to the more exalted rank of Empress of China.

The good Empress Wu insisted that the court be moved from Xian to the old capital, Loyang, where she immediately proceeded to finance the construction of huge monastic centers.

During this Golden Age, Orthodox Buddhism saw its responsibility as more or less ministering to the whole man, not to just his spirit. Accordingly, many urban Buddhist convents functioned as brothels. And why not? Tantric Buddhism had proven to be an infection to which the traditional Buddhist body had become inured. Sex and salvation not only coexisted, they became synonymous. Even Daoism's Single Cultivation quickly became Dual Cultivation, i.e., sexual yoga that required its adherents to maintain private harems or at least to reside near houses of prostitution. The truly spiritual who sought salvation alone and in private were by definition beyond public scrutiny.

Monastic sex centers provided an additional service: They dispensed aphrodisiacs. Daoist pharmacology had provided Chinese medicine with an array of substances guaranteed to stimulate sexual activity, and Buddhist nuns special- ized in their purveyance.

It so happened that when the Empress was in her sixties there appeared at court on one otherwise ordinary day an extraordinary fellow, a man who functioned as a kind of traveling ponce and pharmacist for one of Loyang's largest Buddhist convent/brothels. This fellow was clearly his own best advertisement and his prodigious work in the bedchambers of titled ladies quickly gained him the Imperial patronage. Wu, ever the madcap, was so pixilated by him that she appointed him abbot of Loyang's principal monastery, a post, considering the state of orthodox Buddhism, for which he was eminently qualified.

When, however, the fellow failed to remember the font from which his blessings flowed and he two-timed the empress once too often, Wu had his neck wrung. The Goddess of Mercy failed, unfortunately, to anticipate the vacuum his absence had created. Hell, through the fissures of overstimulated ladies, spewed up its fury upon Wu. She became the target of a drenching scandal.

Poor Wu found herself with few allies. She could not rely upon the unified strength of the Imperial family. According to some accounts, she was at the time scheming to manipulate succession to the throne to suit her personal preference, an effort which gained her the support of the few at the expense of the many.

Buddhist clergymen, considering her appointment of a common huckster to such high priestly office, were hardly likely to rally to the side of one who had sold their honor so cheaply.

Therefore, those whom she had most counted upon - the powerful members of the Buddhist hierarchy - turned against her and joined with Daoists, resurgent Confucianists, disgruntled Imperial family members, and an assortment of civic leaders in a righteous campaign to restore moral order. Players now in a private political game, each group sought to deal for itself an unbeatable hand. But the Empress/Goddess was still popular amongst the aristocracy, and so her enemies saw the necessity of first shuffling 'public' opinion against her. The demands for new moral leadership grew as did the sup- position that the empress was unfit to provide that leadership.

We will leave Wu, the consummate gameplayer, studying her cards and wondering how an incarnation of Guan Yin should best respond to orthodox Buddhism's ingratitude and betrayal, and turn to our other two principals.

Along about the time that the empress was merely an ambitious concubine trying to position herself on the imperial lap, another power game was being played in the headquarters of that unimportant, non-orthodox sect of Buddhism: the so-called Dhyana or Chan Sect of Buddhism which Bodhidharma had founded one hundred thirty years earlier.

At East Mountain Monastery, Fifth Patriarch Hung Jen, while looking for a suc- cessor, set in motion a crucial power play.

Everyone in his monastery had assumed that he would pass the Mantle to Shen Xiu (605 - 706), an aristocratic priest and former Confucian scholar, whose integrity, erudition, refinement, and dedication to the practice of "mind-blanking" meditation had gained him considerable fame as a most deserving man. But as Fifth Patriarch Hung Jen well understood, enlightenment was not a matter of morality, trance, intellectuality, dedication, or taste; and he despaired of anyone's futile attempt to gain salvation by trying to deserve it. He therefore declined to name the patrician Shen Xiu to the Patriarchy and instead decided to have candidates compete for the honor. They would vie for the post with poetry. In no more nor less than four lines they were to reveal the depths of their understanding of enlightenment's "cardinal meaning".

Since none of his peers had cared to come forward to compete against him, Shen Xiu composed his quatrain without ever imagining that working in the kitchen of the monastery there was an illiterate, impoverished, long-haired, young, dark-skinned barbarian from South China waiting to defeat him.

This man, Hui Neng (638 - 7l3), though uneducated, was spiritually quite precocious. He had experienced enlightenment upon hearing someone recite a verse from the Diamond Sutra - the scripture that was so near and dear to Hung Jen's heart. Asking where he should go to study these marvelous words, Hui Neng was told, "To East Mountain, the monastery of Hung Jen."

In rags which might just as well have been a jester's motley, Hui Neng went north and presented himself to the accomplished priests of East Mountain who, we are told, laughed at his appearance and his presumptuousness and put him to work in the kitchen. Eight months later, on the fateful night of the poetry contest, he was still working there as a grain thresher. He had not yet so much as set foot inside the meditation hall.

Shen Xiu inscribed his entry on a corridor wall. His lines, loosely translated, were, "Our body is the Bodhi Tree. Our mind is the frame of a bright mirror. We must constantly polish this mirror so that no dust collects on it." Clearly, Shen Xiu equated enlightenment with virtue and regarded ethical conduct and vigilant self-discipline as evidence of the illumined life. Rub out your tendencies to sin! Act righteously and you will be rewarded! This is the slow, methodical path, the so-called Gradual School; but to Fifth Patriarch Hung Jen, its goal had more to do with Orthodox Buddhism than with Chan.

When Hui Neng heard Shen Xiu's verse, he challenged it, asking someone to write his response alongside: "Bodhi Trees? Dirty mirrors? The Buddha Nature is always pure! What can dirty it? The ego does not exist! How can it polish anything?" This was an intellectual slap in the face! Uh, Oh. Trouble on East Mountain.

The Fifth Patriarch thought he knew an insightful poem when he saw one and summoned Hui Neng from the kitchen to give him Bodhidharma's robe. His poor servant had demonstrated that even an illiterate man can attain Wisdom. And even more! Hui Neng could personally testify to just how suddenly the grace of Wisdom comes. Grace! The unmerited love and favor of the Buddha Self! Enlightenment! By way of celebration the two men discussed their beloved Diamond Sutra. We can imagine their joy: Hung Jen reading it to (Praise the gods!) an enlightened disciple; Hui Neng hearing it in its entirety for the very first time.

Anticpating the uproar that followed his decision, Hung Jen advised Hui Neng to keep a very low profile for awhile; and the latter, heeding this advice for longer perhaps than was necessary, went back to South China and stayed in the mountains there for sixteen years before re-emerging in Guangzhou (Canton) as the Sixth Patriarch.

Immediately upon the announcement of the accession, Shen Xiu, understandably miffed, moved out of East Mountain monastery with a group of his supporters who indignantly insisted upon conferring the title of Sixth Patriarch upon him anyway. He founded his own monastery in which he adhered to tradi- tional Buddhist methods. His practice continued to include daily sessions of mind-blanking meditation. To Shen Xiu, simply living like an enlightened person was all that was necessary for a person to claim to be enlightened, and that was that! Already renowned for his personal integrity and erudition, he had no difficulty in securing a reputation for being a great Chan master.

So, while few people may have known or even cared about the creed of this pecu- liar Buddhist sect, everyone knew about this exemplary master. And that is why when the Empress Wu increasingly found her name being sullied and her ambitions being stymied and her priests being wickedly disloyal, she thought of Shen Xiu.

Then, as her enemies played their high cards against her, she calmly countered with her trump. She summoned to court His Eminence, Shen Xiu, Sixth Patriarch of Northern Chan.

And when this old man was finally ushered into her inquisitive court, the mighty Wu did something Chinese empresses simply did not do: she descended from the Imperial throne and to everyone's utter astonishment curtsied deeply to him. The upstart sect of Chan Buddhism had scored a grand slam.

Chinese orthodox Buddhism, so obviously in its decadent phase, virtually collapsed when confronted by such an unassailable obstacle as the venerable Shen Xiu. Who could fail to pay him obeisance when Wu appointed him Lord of the Dharma? Who could oppose his imperially sponsored reforms or fail to support the new monasteries which Wu constructed in his honor? Under the new regime, Buddhist priests and nuns got out of the flesh trade and put their pharmacological expertise to work by treating less challenging conditions than sexual dysfunction: Buddhist monasteries actually became hospitals for sick people. And, having not too much else to do with their spare time, Buddhist priests also managed to invent printing. (The oldest printed document in the world happens to be a copy of the Diamond Sutra printed in A.D. 868. It is a work of such technical refinement that experts estimate that the actual invention of printing had occurred at least a hundred years earlier.)

Wu, fit at last to be called a benefactress of her religion, survived to live out her reign.

Regal Northern Chan would live on long enough to allow its offspring, under the regency of the formidable Dogen Zenji, to emigrate to Japan as Soto Zen, the vehicle of gradual enlightenment. The School did not die out entirely in China: A few isolated monasteries managed to survive and are still viable institutions today.

Southern Chan, persisting in its "What, me worry?" attitude, continued to perfect the Buddhist-Daoist synthesis. Hui Neng, considering himself a simple man of Dao, gathered many followers at his monastery, Bo Lin (Fragrant Wood) which he founded at "Ts'ao Ch'i" located near the city of Shao Guan, about l20 miles north of Canton. The monastery is popularly called Nan Hua Si which means Elegant (in the sense of classic) South China Monastery. (Note: Nan Hua Si is the monastery in which the author of this work was ordained.)

So thoroughly identified with Daoism is the Sixth Patriarch's Chan that even today Daoists have their own shrine inside his monastery's gates. Until recently, when the practice was outlawed by civil authorities, Daoists set off firecrackers everyday to drive away any evil spirits who might wish to molest him. (His body, preserved, lacquered, and dressed in priestly garb, is still displayed there.)

On August 28, 7l3, Hui Neng, the gentle saint of Buddhism and humble man of Dao, died without, as far as we know, naming a successor. A few years later one of his disciples, a priest named Shen Hui, motivated either by a personal claim to the title of Seventh Patriarch or by a sincere desire to restore throughout China the rightful title of Sixth Patriarch to his master, took exception to Shen Xiu's usurpation of the title and decided to set the record straight. He lobbied mightily against Shen Xiu's successors in an effort to restore the title to its southern claimants. Being a rather eloquent speaker, he attracted much attention.

The Tang emperor, one of Wu's grandsons, was at the time having critical money problems. Expensive civil wars had virtually bankrupted him and as he cast about looking for new sources of revenue, he saw in Shen Hui's crusade a way by which he could circumvent the moral order that Shen Xiu had installed and get some much needed cash out of wealthy Buddhist laymen. The Emperor summoned the agitating southern priest and made a deal with him: The Crown would recognize southern claims to the patriarchy if Shen Hui would raise money for the Crown by selling ordination certificates and other spiritual goodies to laymen. Religion, always a boon to tax dodgers, once again came to the rescue of the rich. For one large and quick payment, years of tax-free living could be enjoyed. Hordes of idle gentlemen received an overnight call to priestly glory. And when the Emperor decreed that henceforth Hui Neng of the Southern School was to be the one and only Sixth Patriarch, everybody who was anybody murmured "Amen." The problem of succession was finally solved.

This infusion of new talent into Buddhist ranks did little to improve priestly performance. Northern Buddhism, demoralized by such imperial venality, forgot new reforms and remembered old iniquities. Once again, it proved receptive to the contagion of tantric practices.

Northern Chinese Buddhism soon became something that civilized men could very well do without. And in droves, civilized men opted to do just that. More and more of the intelligentsia sought refuge in Confucian morality. This brain-and-decency drain alarmed no one in the hierarchy. Many priests continued to use Buddhism as a shield for licentiousness and greed until, finally, a hundred years after one Tang emperor had overseen a swelling of Buddhism's rank and file, another Tang emperor ordered that all offending Buddhist monasteries be sacked, their lands and property confiscated, their hierarchies purged, and their temple slaves freed.

Southern Buddhism, as usual, did not notice much in the way of inconvenience. Southern Chan had always followed the 'no work, no dinner' rule. Southerners, inured to the refinements of Daoist sexual yoga and the excesses of Daoist magic were not titillated by gauche tantric rituals. Few people had the resources or felt the need tobuy their way into heaven; and thus, having given no offense, southern monasteries usually escaped Imperial punishments. The religion had found a simple formula for prosperity; and Chan Buddhism despite being manhandled by Wu's eventual successor, Chairman Mao, is still alive and well and living in South China.

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