Introduction: Buddhist Meditation in China
The earliest surviving Chinese translations of Indian Buddhist texts are those traditionally attributed to An Shigao 安世高(fl. 149–168),1 active in the Chinese capital of Luoyang 洛陽during the waning years of the Han dynasty. An Shigao coined dozens of Chinese translations for the technical vocabulary of Indian Buddhism, most of which continued to be used for centuries,and many of which remain part of the standard Chinese Buddhist lexicon to this day. His basic approach was remarkably consistent—titles of people or offices (such as bhikṣu, śramaṇa, orbuddha) were transcribed, but other technical terms were translated. Though some of these translations were of dubious philological accuracy, An Shigao evidently felt comfortable at least trying to find Chinese equivalents for a host of difficult terms, such as nirvāṇa, saṃsāra, andkarma,words that, by way of comparison, often remain untranslated in modern writings on Buddhism. There was, however, one important term that An Shigao might have tried to translate but did not, dhyāna, which in its Chinese transcription chan 禅 became and has remained the most basic Chinese word for “Buddhist meditation.”That An Shigao did not attempt to translate this word suggests that the practice of Buddhist meditation had no satisfactory parallels in the pre-Buddhist Chinese imaginaire.
ndeed unlike in English, where we must preface “meditation” with “Buddhist,” in China there never was anything other than “Buddhist” chan. More so even than fo 佛, buddha, which on the popular level ultimately becomes a more or less generic designation for a god, the term chan remained exclusively Buddhist.3 As scholars have pointed out, despite the ubiquity of “Buddhist meditation” in the modern West, and the claims made concerning the centrality of this discipline in traditional Buddhism, it is surprisingly difficult to specify precisely what we mean by thisword or to find an exact equivalent for it in Indian Buddhist languages.4 In China, however, the1All dates are CE unless otherwise specified. For the sake of convenience I will refer to An Shigao as if he were a single person solely responsible for the translations carried out under his name.
In reality it is almost certain that these texts were translated through a complex process involving numerous actors, and as with many later Indianor Central Asian “translators” in China An Shi gao’s own role may have been rather limited.2It has often been argued, in contrast, that perceived similarities between Buddhist and “Daoist” meditation fostered initial Chinese interest in these practices. I have elsewhere argued that this conclusion is largely without foundation. See Eric M. Greene (n.d.), “Healing Breaths and Rotting Bones: On the relationship between Buddhist and Chinese meditation practices during the Han-Three Kingdoms period,” unpublished paper.
There does eventually develop in China a pan-sectarian notion of “meditation,” captured in modern Mandarin using expressions such as da zuo 打坐 (“sit [in meditation]”). Note that the practices often seen as pre-Buddhist Chinese parallels to Buddhist meditation do not specify a seated posture, and indeed often explicitly recommend that they take place while lying down (Maspero 1987, 501–515). Eventually, however, some forms of Daoist cultivation do come to take place in the Buddhist posture for seated meditation, and by the Song dynasty (960–1279) even the Confucians were proposing that “silent sitting” (jing zuo 靜坐) be done in the Buddhist cross-legged (jia fu 跏趺) posture (Gernet 1981, 292). It is interesting to note that what links these activities is a physical posture, not a mode of thought, and in this respect the perceived connection is rather different than in the diverse disciplines united by the English word “meditation.”ponberg 1986. As Sponberg points out, the terms in Indian Buddhist languages denoting what we would like
situation is clearer, perhaps because unlike their Indian counterparts Chinese Buddhists were not obliged to explain how their program of cross-legged exertion differed from outwardly similar practices of other sects.5 So too prior to the seventh century, when new debates within Chinese Buddhism occasionally gave the word chan a polemical status, there was little disagreement about the importance or value of chan, at least theoretically. Accordingly whatever the difficulties of circumscribing the topic of “Buddhist meditation” within Buddhism as a whole, inthe case of Chinese Buddhism the practice and theory of chan provides a clear object of study.
This dissertation is an attempt to explicate certain aspects of the Chinese understanding of chan as it developed between roughly 400 and 600 CE, with an emphasis on sources dating from the first half of the fifth century. My reasons for focusing on this time period in particular are twofold. First, though texts discussing chan had been known in China since the time of An Shigao, as I will argue in chapter one only beginning in the early fifth century did appreciable numbers of Chinese Buddhists actually take up this practice in an organized or regular form.Second, this is when Chinese compositions (as opposed to translations of Indian texts)specifically devoted to chan first appear, something almost certainly connected to the increasing importance of chan as an actual practice.
Though these texts quickly entered the Chinese Buddhist canon and are normative and prescriptive in character, they were composed in an environment in which chan practice was fast becoming a regular part of Chinese Buddhist monastic life, at least for some. Thus while we do not know to what extent the specific meditation techniques they proposed were ever put into practice, these texts are not merely theoretical reflections. Even if the authors of these texts did not themselves engage in any of the stipulated practices, contemporaneous readers would have taken them as attempts to explain practices that were just then beginning to have a real presence within Chinese Buddhism.
Indeed it was during this time period, I will suggest, that certain key ideas about the nature, meaning,and practice of Buddhist meditation became established, ideas that would continue to inform the Chinese approach to this discipline in the ensuing centuries.The importance of this period in the development of the Chinese understanding of Buddhist meditation has, moreover, generally been overlooked. This is owing at least in part to the historically strong influence of Japanese sectarian considerations on the study of medieval Chinese Buddhism. Since the later lineages of Chinese Buddhism most associated with“Buddhist meditation” to denote tend to be either too narrow, referring to specific states of absorption (dhyāna,samādhi, samāpatti), or too broad, referring to nearly all aspects of religious practice (bhāvanā).
The word yoga may also be an appropriate equivalent to “Buddhist meditation,” but this term is not used in early Buddhist writings, and was adopted only later when Buddhism entered into a period of more direct dialog and confrontation with Brahmanism (Bronkhorst 2011, 165–167). Thus Sponberg (see previous note) ultimate concludes that what we usually call “Buddhist meditation” is“dhyāna undertaken for the sake of bhāvanā,” and this caveat is necessary because the tradition considers thatdhyāna is something also practiced by non-Buddhists.
In China, however, chan 禪 was usually assumed to be something undertaken to achieve Buddhist goals. Throughout this dissertation, unless otherwise specified, the words “meditation,” “Buddhist meditation,” or“meditation practice” can be assumed to be English translations of chan, though in chapter three I will propose that when chan refers to a specific state of consciousness, that is to say the hoped-for fruit of the practice of meditation, it should be translated as “trance
meditation practice were Chan (禪)7 and Tiantai (天台), both of which eventually became distinct institutions in Japan, Japanese scholars have tended to approach the early development of Chinese Buddhist meditation through the traditional historiography of these schools. This has led to a great deal of interest in the distinctive approach to meditative cultivation associated with early Chan (beginning primarily from the late seventh century), as well as a large scholarly output concerning the meditation teachings associated with Zhiyi 智顗 (538–597), founder of the Tiantai tradition. ne problem with the sectarian approach is that it tends to ignore everything that came before.
The early Tiantai writings in particular have generally been seen as the wellspring from which most later Chinese approaches to meditation derive, even though from a historical point of view they loom as large as they do in the minds of scholars only because almost all other sixth-century Chinese writings on chan, of which we know there were many,have been lost.9 But perhaps more perniciously, each side tends to see its founders as the progenitors of a unique and unprecedented form of meditation, viewing all other approaches as representative of“traditional” Indian understanding.
Those studying Chan have thus tended to see Zhiyi as promoting a traditionally Indian “gradual” conception of meditation, one that Chan went beyond through its teachings of “sudden” awakening.10 In contrast Tiantai scholars have seen in Zhiyi’slater writings (which in Tiantai historiography are the full expression of Zhiyi’s thought) a criticism of the exclusive emphasis on concentration meditation (dhyāna, i.e. chan) characteristic of both early Chan and generic “Indian” or “Hīnayāna” meditation practice. Regardless of which side one chooses to exalt as its final flowering, the Chinese understanding of Buddhist meditation is thus assumed to have had little or no independent development prior to the late sixth century.
Indian approaches, on the level of both theory and practice, are accordingly assumed to have arrived in China at an unspecified date and simply continued unaltered until being revolutionized by either Zhiyi or Bodhidharma depending on one’s chosen perspective. Common sense suggests that this model, more often implied than actually argued for, cannot be entirely correct. Nevertheless Chinese approaches to Buddhist meditation prior to the late sixth century have remained more or less unexplored.
These are what I will attempt to uncover in this dissertation. And though the sources that give us access to these earlier Chinese traditions do not necessarily reveal the nuances of their historical development Following scholars such as T. Griffith Foulk I restrict the word Chan (capital “c”) to those groups who beginning in the late seventh century traced their spiritual lineage to Bodhidharma (Foulk 2007). While those claiming such lineage did often attempt to appropriate the word chan, i.e. “Buddhist meditation,” this appropriation was multifaceted, and they did not simply endorse meditation practice as it was understood by other Chinese Buddhists.
Moreover other groups continued to use the word chan in a non-sectarian way, though this became more difficult as the influence of the Chan lineage grew and the word chan became more and more associated with it. Zhiyi would not have thought of himself in these terms, and the notion of a Tiantai lineage developed only slowly in the years after his death (Penkower 1992 and 2000; Chen 1999).9The Tiantai texts were preserved only because they were taken to Japan and Korea during the Tang dynasty,from where they were reintroduced to China in the tenth century (Brose 2008).
See for example Bielefeldt 1988, 78–106 who, though providing a nuanced account of how early Chan meditation teachings departed from the standards set by Zhiyi, tends to equate Zhiyi’s approach with“traditional” Indian methods of meditation. A similar approach is taken by McRae
during the fifth and sixth centuries, they do allow us to reconstruct some of the most important and shared features of how chan was thought about during this time, and what mastering and practicing itwas thought to entail.Most of the sources I will draw from have been known to scholars of Chinese Buddhism and are contained within the so-called Chinese Buddhist canon (da zang jing 大藏經).
Despite their ready availability, their importance for our understanding of the history and development of Chinese approaches to Buddhist meditation during the fifth and sixth centuries has not been sufficiently appreciated.12 Here again at least some blame can be laid at the feet of the Japanese sectarian approach to Chinese Buddhist history, as the two key texts I will draw from, the Scripture on the Secret Essential Methods of Chan (Chan mi yao fa jing 禪祕要法經, ChanEssentials hereafter) and the Essential Methods for Curing Chan Sickness (Zhi chan bing mi yaofa 治禪病秘要法; Methods for Curing hereafter), have usually been examined not in connection with later Chinese writings on chan, which given their titles and content one might expect to be the logical point of comparison, but as the background material for understanding the Immeasurable Life Contemplation (Guan wu liang shou fo jing 觀無量壽佛經), a so-called apocryphal Chinese scripture compiled sometime during the fifth century that serves as a keytext in the Japanese Pure-land (Jōdo 浄土) schools.
As I will discuss in chapter two there is indeed a close historical connection between these texts, and also a larger corpus of fifth-century Chinese scriptures known as the Contemplation Scriptures (guan jing 觀經). If the goal is to contextualize the Immeasurable Life Contemplation,the Chan Essentials and Methods for Curing are thus indeed quite helpful. The problem, however, is the tendency to approach these sources only as precursors to the Immeasurable Life Contemplation. On the one hand this results in examining primarily those features of the texts that directly pertain to their supposed successor(s).13 On the other hand it means that scholars have tended to overlook the importance of these texts for understanding later Chinese approaches to chan.
This is because in the traditional Japanese reading the key import of the Immeasurable Life Contemplation is the promotion of a non-meditative practice of intoning the name of Amitābha, something that supposedly replaced the various complex meditative practices previously considered necessary for salvation.15 The Chan Essentials and Methods for Curing have thus been seen as part of a tradition of meditation practice that, while perhaps popular in Central Asia, was superseded in China by the “Pure-land” practices of the Immeasurable Life Contemplation, practices that were, supposedly, sharply distinguished from chan per se.
In English, the most detailed study of many of the major sources I will use in this dissertation is Yamabe 1999b,and Yamabe’s studies have been instrumental in my work on this material. Thus most Japanese studies of the Chan Essentials have focused on how this text treats “contemplating the Buddha” (guan fo 觀佛) or “bringing to mind the Buddha” (nian fo 念佛), the main practice promoted in the Immeasurable Life Contemplation.14In the traditional terminology, san 散 as opposed to ding 定 (this later word, it must be noted, is usually considered equivalent to chan 禪).
For a consideration of the difficulty in separating “Pure-land” and “Chan” approaches to liberation in somewhat later times, see Sharf 2002b, though his study concerns Chan more so than chan.16A further point is that both the Chan Essentials and Methods for Curing are, with only a few exceptions, patentlynon-Mahāyāna in both narrative style and assumed soteriology, while the Immeasurable Life Contemplation
In this dissertation I thus aim to break free of the sectarian typologies that have informed scholarly approaches to early Chinese Buddhist meditation and in the process uncover certain features of a basic Chinese understanding of chan that, I will argue, crystallized during the first half of the fifth century. The traditions of meditation that developed during this time, both the concrete regimes of practice (whose existence can be known only indirectly) and the texts that those who followed or promoted such practices produced, seem to have come into being in south China during the Song dynasty (420–479 CE), a time and place during which were active a large number of Indian missionaries claiming to be, or at least remembered as,
“meditation masters”(chan shi 禪師), a title not used in Chinese Buddhism prior to this time. The Chan Essentials and Methods for Curing can be read, I will suggest, as stemming from this milieu, and as reflecting the understanding that developed among the followers of these foreign meditation masters, who seem to have established the first enduring traditions of Buddhist meditation practice in China.
Such is the basic historical context within which I will situate my study of fifth- and sixth-century Chinese Buddhist meditation texts. As for the questions I will attempt to answer,stated in broadest terms they are twofold. The first concerns the nature and meaning of the experiences Buddhist meditation was thought to produce; the second concerns the way these experiences were understood to relate to other forms of Buddhist ritual and practice. Put slightly differently, what was meditation thought to do, and what were people thought to do with meditation? Although these questions are quite general, they are, I believe, foundational.
To a great extent the concept of “meditation” has been naturalized in scholarly discussions on Buddhism, such that “meditation texts” and “meditation practices” are often mentioned without feeling the need to specify just what kind of thing “meditation” really is or was thought to be in these cases. Part of my aim in this dissertation has thus been to question some of these assumptions, or at least to look at them afresh in the context of a careful analysis of a cohesive body of primary sources usually described using this word.I thus begin with the question of experience, and in particular the “meditative experiences” thought to result from meditation practice.
Because my own approach to this question will differ somewhat from them, I must first discuss, if only schematically, the principal ways that scholars of religion, and so-called mysticism and Buddhist meditation more particularly, have approached this at times controversial topic. For heuristic purposes three basic methodologies may be distinguished, which I will refer to as the “perennialist,” “constructivist,”and “performative.”17(and indeed the remainder of the Contemplation Scriptures) are in contrast written in the style of Mahāyānascriptures and present distinctly Mahāyāna ideas.
As I will discuss in chapter one, scholarly analysis of the history of Chinese Buddhist meditation has tended to conflate “Hīnayāna” with “Indian.” Apparently“Hīnayāna” texts such as the Chan Essentials and Methods for Curing are often assumed to have been of little interest or influence in China, and to have served only as the precursors or raw materials out of which Chinese approaches to meditation were devised.17The designations “perennialist” and “constructivist” are relatively common in the literature (e.g. Forman
In the perennialist approach “religious experience” explains religion.18 The doctrines,rituals, and literature of religious traditions are explained as the expressions of one or many experiences. The “constructivist” approach, which became dominant in the academy beginning in the 1970s,19 is the precise opposite of this—experiences become what need to be explained.Among scholars favoring this understanding so-called mystical experiences, taken by theperennialists as prior to language and culture,
are discussed as “constructed” from the beliefs,practices, and expectations of those who have them, and exploration of these domains is taken a sa way of explaining those experiences. Scholars studying Buddhist meditation have if not followed then at least mirrored these contrasting approaches. It was thus once common to interpret Buddhist doctrines as elaborations of meditative experiences. The contrasting approach, which emerged later, was in keeping with the constructivists—rather than explaining Buddhist doctrines as interpretations of meditative experiences some scholars began to think of Buddhist meditation as the generation of“deliberately contrived exemplifications of Buddhist doctrine.”
In this understanding Buddhist meditation texts are not records of the experiences of past virtuosos, but practical guidebooks for inculcating experiences that conform to the expectations of the tradition. What I will dub the “performative” approach can be seen as a criticism of both the perennialists and the constructivists.23 Rather than positing experience as an explanation (in the manner of the perennialists) or trying to explain the experiences people claim to have (as would the constructivists), the “performative” approach questions the explanatory value of the category“experience” at all, since “experience” as an inner event to which the subject has privileged access by definition cannot impinge on publicly available discourse.
To this methodological question about how we might use, or not, the category“experience” to interpret or explain our data, Robert Sharf adds a historical conclusion specific nly beginning in the late 18th century was “religious experience” discussed in the now familiar terms. This idea is usually traced to Schleirmacher, who argued that the essence of religion was an inner, personal “intuition” or“feeling” (Proudfoot 1985). However Schleirmacher did not himself use the word “experience” (Erlebnis), and his ideas were linked to debates about “religious experience,” a term originally used in the context of conversion experiences among Anglo-American Protestants, only towards the end of the 19th century (Taves 2004).
he 1978 publication of Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis edited by Steven Katz, though not the beginning of the revolution, marks the moment when it had gotten fully under way. Precursors to the constructivist trend can be found from the very beginning of the modern study of mysticism, and one scholar has noted Rufus M.Jones’Studies in Mystical Religion from 1909 as perhaps the earliest example (Almond 1990, 212). Wayne Proud foot’s Religious Experience stands as the most articulate presentation of this position. Scholars must, he suggests, ultimately provide an explanation, an account of “why the subject was confronted with this particular set of alternative ways of understanding his experience and why he employed the one he did”(Proudfoot 1985, 223).21See for example Conze 1968, 213. For a sophisticated attempt to demonstrate this in the case of one particular doctrine, see Schmithausen 1973.
For a more recent analysis in this vein, see Obeyesekere 2012, 19–30. Gimello 1978, 19323 For the purposes of this introduction the “performative” approach is that articulated by Sharf 1995 and 1998. For criticisms of Sharf’s attempts to apply this approach to Buddhism and Buddhist meditation, see Gyatso 1999 and Dreyfus 2011.24As Sharf puts its, “while experience—constructed as that which is ‘immediately present’—may indeed be both irrefutable and indubitable, we must remember that whatever epistemological certainty experience may offer is gained only at the expense of any possible discursive meaning or signification” (Sharf 1998,
to Buddhism—namely, that taking the telos of religious forms to lie in a special kind of personal experience is a modern rather than traditional way of approaching Buddhism in general and Buddhist meditation in particular. Buddhists, Sharf argues, did not partake of our post-Cartesian sensibilities in which inner experience stands over and against outward performance. Not judging personal experiences privileged sources of authority or knowledge, they did not seek them out through meditation (its commonly understood purpose) but rather aimed to embody the Buddhist teachings, to “enact” rather than generate ideal states of experience through, loosely put, “ritual,” an activity that Sharf insists should not be thought of as mere show.
Sharf does not deny that Buddhist meditators had experiences, but he suggests that such experiences “were not considered the goal of practice,” and moreover considers that Buddhists themselves, at least the sophisticated ones, appreciated the epistemological problems inherent in any attempt to ground public claims to authority in private experiences. My own approach to these questions begins with the recognition that what we have before us are texts, not experiences. The primary subject of my investigation is thus not meditative experiences per se, but the understanding of meditative experience that fifth-century Chinese chan texts presuppose. And indeed these texts speak of little else, such that we cannot help but confront this question.
Their “rhetoric of meditative experience,” however, is indeed very different from what Sharf identifies in the case of modernist Buddhist movements, the“extolling [of] experience as a superior form of knowledge, i.e. superior to ‘second-hand’knowledge gleaned from teachers or texts,” and in contrast to this our texts patently assume that the significance of meditative experiences will not be transparent to the subject.
Accordingly though I will follow Sharf and refrain from applying what he calls the “hermeneutic of experience” (invoking “experience” as either an explanation or what is explained),28 I will not ignore what these texts have to say about the importance of the personal experiences obtained through meditation. Rather I will take as the object of my study the strategies the texts themselves use for interpreting or explaining the significance of the experiences they assume people will have.The most important meditative experiences discussed by texts such as the ChanEssentials and Methods for Curing are what I will call “verificatory visions,” a concept that I will introduce in chapter one.
I use the term “visions” because they are presented as the suddenarising of new objects of consciousness described in primarily visual terms, as something themeditator suddenly “sees.” By “verificatory” I mean that these visions are not significant merely as acts of perception or as the acquisition of knowledge relative to the object seen. Rather the occurrence of the vision—having this particular experience—is deemed to signify something about the person to whom it appears.
Indeed given the assumption that meditation is part of a path to liberation, all meditative experiences in Buddhism must have been understood to have this quality, at least in part. Even when the results of meditation are said to be insight into some25Sharf 1995, 269; Sharf 200526Sharf 1998, Sharf 1995, Sharf ascribes a “hermeneutic of experience” to modernist Buddhists or modern scholars who interpret the ultimate referent of Buddhist rituals, doctrines, or texts as specific, identifiable experiences in the minds of practitioners (Sharf 1995)
