Meditation (Chan) Buddhism
Meditation,
or Chan, Buddhism is perhaps the most Sinicized (rendered Chinese) of all Buddhist
denominations. Because of the initial difficulty and obscurity of Buddhist sutras
to the Chinese audience, many of whom were Daoists, the Chinese emphasized an
intuitive understanding with or without the reading of the sutras, which is the
original meaning of Chan, or meditation. The development of Chan Buddhism reached
its height in the Tang Dynasty (618-906), which was, after the Han Dynasty, the
greatest Chinese dynasty in history and the most prosperous, when Chinese cultural
exchanges with the outside world reached its height. Chinese monks went to seek
Buddhist sutras in India, and Indian monks such as Bodhidharma came to preach
in China (520- ) in the Sui Dynasty, a short lived dynasty before the Tang Dynasty.
The Silk Road linking China to India and to central Asia allowed many cultural
exchanges between China and western/southern Asia, and the many Korean and Japanese
students studying in China spread Buddhism to Korea and Japan.
The Chan school
of Buddhism emphasized long meditation followed by "sudden" awakening
to the Truth. Of all the Buddhist denominations in China, Chan and Pure Land give
the least emphasis on doctrine, but they also differ. While Pure Land emphasizes
prayers to Amita, Chan calls for meditation, and the transmission of the message
from master to disciple without words and phrases. Thus in a Chan meditation session,
master and disciples may be doing nothing but meditating in total silence for
hours. This emphasis on silent transmission is also reflected in Zen Buddhism
in Japan. When you see art influenced by Zen, such as bonsai (small manicured
plants or trees in a pot), or a Zen style garden, you may notice the emphasis
on peace and tranquility, which are conducive to meditation.
Because their
emphasis is on intuitive understanding, Chan Buddhism is not big on explaining
things, but often uses parables to illustrate things, such as the parables given
by the Buddhist teacher Yunmen, in the form of the highly esoteric statements
"the old buddhas commune with the pillars," "Clouds on the southern
mountains...(even a knife cannot cut through)," If clouds gather on the southern
mountains, rain falls on the northern mountains," and "Rain on the northern
mountains (not a single drop of rain can fall...)." (de Bary, 515-516) All
three impossible situations.
The reason why Yunmen gives these examples is
to suggest that the very reason why we think these are impossible scenarios is
because we have used our intellectual abilities and consciousness: we have reasoned
that old monks could not possibly have had sexual intercourse, and it is not possible
to have rain but not a single drop of it falling, and so on. Also, our separation
of things in this world (e.g. into the northern and southern mountains, into rain
and air, into soft clouds and hard objects ) makes it impossible for us to understand
why clouds on the southern mountains leads to rain in the northern mountains,
and why there is rain but it is not falling, and why there is cloud but it cannot
be cut through. All this has violated the Chan teachings on cutting off consciousness,
conceptual thinking, and phenomenal existence.
Yet, Yunmen is not asking his
disciples to completely demolish consciousness. According to Buddhism, human reasoning
is ultimately controlled by our deepest consciousness, the alaya consciousness
(besides the senses of sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell, and mind), which is
the seed or, to use our modern day language, the "mastermind" and "memory
chip" of all other senses because it contains the seeds and traces of past
actions. The alaya consciousness, in its original and pure form, was good, but
because it could not work alone, and had to be projected through the six senses,
which were "contaminated," so to speak, its reflection of the true world
became successively degenerated over the generations. In order to restore the
alaya's power to reflect the truth, one needs to completely rid of all existent
reasoning, conceptions, and separation of the world into many things, in other
words, problems associated with the other six senses. True knowledge is achieved
through intuiting that the world is an integral whole, hence, the 28 Indian Patriarchs
and the Six Chinese Patriarchs [who were considered founders of the Chan School]
see each other and see the same truth. (516) Hence although humans err in their
views of the world and suffer, there is the potential to change this and achieve
happiness. The relationship between suffering and happiness is the difference
between what is manifest and what is potential. The world is full of things that
are happening and that are potentially to happen, such as the Koreans going to
the Buddhist temples (who are more to the east, hence morning comes earlier to
them than to the Chinese), and the Chinese just about to do so. But if one does
not use one's intuition and just goes about the motions, one will not get the
truth.