Zen and the Pure Esoteric School

Zen and the Pure Esoteric School
By : Michael Jordan B

The cultivation practices of Tibet evolved from the spiritual traditions of both India and China. The spiritual practices of other countries have also often been shaped by foreign imports. In the case of Japan, its spiritual history has many parallels to that of Tibet but to understand this country's cultivation practices, we must look to China rather than India for the roots of foreign influences. In particular, we must investigate the cultural influences of China's Tang dynasty (618-907 A.D.) since it was this period of Chinese history that had the greatest impact on Japan's spiritual schools.

China's Tang dynasty can be described as a great mixing period when Indian, Japanese, Korean and Tibetan cultural trends interacted with China at their fullest. The most obvious proof of even earlier foreign interaction is the fact that the word "China" comes from the Ch'in dynasty, when foreigners mistook the name of the dynasty for the name of the country. Anyway, the Tang dynasty itself was a period of continuous and concentrated contact between various countries and Mainland China.

During China's Tang dynasty, there were three main pillars of Chinese society and culture: Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. The Buddhism of this period had by now developed into ten different schools of study, but the central sect in Chinese Buddhism was the Zen school established by Bodhidharma. It was because of Bodhidharma's pilgrimage from India that the Indian form of Zen had entered China. After its initial introduction, the Zen transmission continued through five successive Patriarchs until Zen finally became fully assimilated into Chinese culture.

Bodhidharma and his five successors, including the famous monk Hui-neng, were called "Patriarchs" because they had all attained enlightenment. They could not be called "Buddhas" as they would be delineated as the second Buddha, the third Buddha and so on. They were the founders of the Chinese Zen school who had achieved enlightenment and greatly influenced Chinese culture, and this is why they were therefore honored with the title of "Patriarch."

The Sixth Patriarch of Zen, Master Hui-neng, was an illiterate peasant before he became enlightened. The very fact that an individual who could not read became the Sixth Patriarch says much about the Zen school and the nature of the times. The Sixth Patriarch dispensed with much of the religious trappings of Buddhism that had developed over the years, and his way of explaining spiritual teachings to the people was very down to earth. Zen therefore became quite popular because it touched the people's hearts and minds, and became embodied in a form of expression that the common man could understand. As a result of this development, Buddhism's impact on the politics and culture of the times became so substantial that it ended up transforming the co-existing schools of Confucianism and Taoism as well.

In the Tang dynasty, the Chinese cultural influences, such as Zen, spread all over Asia, and even reached distant regions. America today is considered a superpower and wants to exert this type of influence, but it has never seen its culture infiltrate Europe nor the Orient in the same way that Tang China established a presence throughout Asia. While United States has definitely influenced the world, the transmission of its influence has not been due to a world-wide recognition of American life as representing "high culture."

During the Tang dynasty, many scholars came to China from Japan and Korea because they respected the Tang culture and wanted to learn everything that it possibly had to offer. The Chinese Emperor built a gigantic complex in Xian for all these visiting scholars. He welcomed them to stay for as long as they liked and allowed them to leave whenever they desired. There was no pressure on these visiting scholars, and many stayed in China to become citizens or even court officials. Others took what they learned back to their home countries, thus influencing their native cultures.

When you go to another country, one of the first things that usually impresses you is the environment, particularly the architectural structure of the buildings and layout of the land. At that time, the Tang architecture was perhaps the best in the world, hence it was imitated in other countries and was one of the ways in which Tang culture made a big impact on other nations. The visiting scholars from other countries also closely observed China's arts, its political system, the people's clothing and every other facet of Chinese culture, including the cultivation concepts of Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism. In the world today, Japan and Korea are the only two remaining places that have preserved any of the highest cultural developments of the Tang dynasty, for in China itself, practically nothing is left. But both Japan and Korea are also quickly losing what is left of their Tang dynasty heritage.

At the beginning of the Tang dynasty, since Emperor Tang Taizong's family name was Li, he started searching for a great religious master of the same name among the Buddhist, Taoist and Confucian schools of the time. The official state religion ended up becoming Taoism, rather than Buddhism, simply because of this emphasis on the last name; the founder of Taoism was Lao Tzu, who was also known as Li Lao-chun. Because of this similarity of names, Taoists priests during the Tang dynasty were accorded a slightly higher rank than Buddhist monks although both spiritual groups were greatly respected. Due to the imperial patronage, it was also during this period that Taoism finally congealed into a more formalized religion. Thus from the Tang dynasty on through to the Sung dynasty, Taoism became the official religion of the state.

Beneath the surface, most people felt that this was right because Buddhism was a cultural import whereas Taoism was "home-grown." However, the practice of Taoism in the Tang dynasty was entirely different from the original Taoism of the Han dynasty since anapana, the skeleton visualization method, Zen and many other features of Buddhist cultivation had already entered into it and become assimilated into its body of knowledge. In fact, one could say that Taoism had become a second Buddhism. As an example, when two Buddhists bumped into each other they would extend greetings by saying, "Amitofo." The Taoists, on the other hand, would say, "Wu liang shou fo," which meant, "The Buddha of Infinite Life." In fact, this was simply Amitofo's name translated into Taoist terms.

Buddhism by the period of the Tang dynasty had filled in most of the teaching gaps left by the lack of original Indian material. The Mahayana and Hinayana schools of Buddhism therefore existed side-by-side together due to the fact that a lot of the original source material had already been transmitted to China from India. The famous monk Xuan Zang (Hsuan-tsang) also returned from his studies in India during the reign of Emperor Tang Taizong. The Emperor so respected him that he had a team of nearly a thousand scholars assembled to help translate the Buddhist materials that Xuan Zang had brought back. All sorts of people helped in this translation project--Taoists, Confucians, even Manichaeists--and the result was a body of work that had a tremendous, almost immeasurable impact on Chinese culture. Because of this translation effort, the Consciousness-only prajna teachings of Maitreya Buddha (which form the Yogacara tradition) finally became available in Chinese, and this made the set of Chinese Buddhist translations virtually complete.
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