Enlightenment in Dispute This page intentionally left blank Enlightenment in Dispute The Reinvention of Chan Buddhism in Seventeenth-Century China jiang wu 3 2008 3 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2008 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wu, Jiang, 1969– Enlightenment in dispute : the reinvention of Chan Buddhism in seventeenth-century China / Jiang Wu. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-19-533357-2 1. Zen Buddhism—China—History—17th century. I. Title. BQ9262.9.C5W8 2007 294.3'927095109032—dc22 2007029033 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper This book is dedicated to my father Wu Shaoyao (1939–1985) and my father-in-law Liu Shisong (1940–2002). This page intentionally left blank Preface Many excellent works on the history of Chan (Zen) Buddhism in China and Japan have been written in recent years. Conspicuously absent from these studies is a thorough investigation of Chan Buddhism in the seventeenth century, when China was undergoing a series of religious transformations. This topic has been neglected largely because the golden age of Chan was long past, and most scholars assume that Chan communities were in decline during the Ming and Qing dynasties. In fact, as this book will show, Chan Buddhists were extremely active in this period, and various Chan communities had been rebuilt according to the Chan ideals of antiquity. For example, one of these communities, based in Huangbo monastery in Fujian, was particularly prominent in China and also became so in Japan. The third Huangbo master, Yinyuan Longqi (1592–1673), migrated to Japan in 1654 and laid the foundation for the third largest Zen denomination in Japan, the Obaku school. His story demonstrates the vitality of Chan Buddhism in seventeenth-century China. This book, unearthing this forgotten segment of Buddhist history in China, should be of interest to various readers. Students of Chinese religions will find that it fills a significant gap in the history of Chan Buddhism. Historians will be interested in learning the temporary ascendancy of the Chan monks in the Manchu court and the Yongzheng emperor’s fierce responses to some Chan works. Specialists in early Chan history will be surprised to learn that viii preface in the seventeenth century the identity of a Tang Chan master became the fo- cus of a controversy and that beating and shouting were resurrected as pri- mary methods of training Chan students. Historians of Japanese Buddhism should be interested in the chain of events that led to the founding of the Obaku school in Japan. The primary focus of this book, however, is the trans- formation of the Chan tradition in the seventeenth century. Readers might find this book not easy because so many people’s names, book titles, and place names are mentioned and discussed. Reading this book requires great patience to focus on seemingly trivial but extremely important pieces of evidence, which were often disguised in the intricacy of easily con- fused names and complex relationships. It is my intention to reproduce in this book the complexity of the controversies by focusing on some “small” details. The benefit of doing so is that this book can be used by researchers and students as a handbook of seventeenth-century Chan Buddhism. Such a meticulously documented book is needed because when reading Buddhist sources from this period, scholars will inevitably come across many refer- ences to the major events and figures I study in this book. If readers use my comprehensive index properly, together with the reference books listed in the bibliography, it will be relatively easier to locate more information about the subjects for which they are looking. For a long time, the main obstacles that lay ahead of scholars and students of Buddhism in late imperial China were exactly these names and relationships. To figure out the connections among these monks, I actually have built a relational database, which I hope to re- lease in the future. I wish to thank those who helped and encouraged me to struggle through various stages of research and writing: my mentors Robert Gimello and Tu Weiming and Professors Peter Bol, Michael Puett, Eugene Yuejin Wang, Beata Grant, Helen Baroni, Robert and Elizabeth Sharf, Albert Welter, Miriam Le- vering, Anne Blackburn, Timothy Brook, Jonathan Spence, Lynn Struve, and Joshua Fogel. In particular, I want to thank professors Chün-fang Yü, Chia-lin Pao-Tao, and Lewis Lancaster for their support of my career and research. Two anonymous reviewers read the manuscript carefully and helped to finalize this book. John McRae and Charles Jones read an early version of the manu- script and offered their professional insights to improve my writing and the organization of materials. Charles Jones also generously shared with me sev- eral rare Chan sources written or compiled by the late Ming literary figure Yuan Hongdao. Several recent trips back to China, especially the one to Eastern Zhejiang, where active Chan communities grew in the seventeenth century, allowed me to add new perspectives to this study during the final stage of revision. I thank preface ix Gene Reeves for inviting me to join a conference on the Lotus Sutra and later a tour to Ningbo and Tiantai in June 2006. This trip was generously financed by Rissho Koseikai. I appreciate having had this opportunity to talk with abbots and monastic officials in famous monasteries in the area. I also thank Lewis Lancaster for inviting me to travel with him to Nanjing, Shanghai, and Beijing in August and November 2006 for a database project of contemporary Chi- nese monasteries. These two trips were funded by the Electronic Cultural At- las Initiatives at University of California, Berkeley. During my trips, Profes- sors Li Fuhua and He Mei (Institute of World Religions, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences), Wei Dedong (Institute of Buddhist Studies, Renmin Univer- sity), and An Husheng ( Buddhism Online at www.fjnet.com) provided useful information about contemporary Chinese Buddhism from a different angle. I want to thank all of them. Among my teachers and friends in China, I am grateful to Professor Chen Zhichao, grandson of the famous historian Chen Yuan (1880–1971), who first taught me at Harvard and later provided guidance for my research when I stayed at his home in Beijing. Professors Pang Pu and Chen Lai, during their stay at Harvard, also taught me how to read early Confucian texts and newly discovered texts by Wang Yangming and his follower Yan Jun. Professor Fang Keli of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, formerly from Nankai Univer- sity where I graduated, has been encouraging me and providing his support for many years. Credits also go to my friends Wei Dedong and Huang Jiqian, who coordinated my trip to Huangbo monastery in Fuqing in 2001. The abbot Beisheng of Huangbo monastery and his disciple Mingkong welcomed me warmly during my visit to the rebuilt Huangbo monastery in the summer of 2001. I thank all of them. In addition, I am grateful to the staff at Harvard- Yenching Library for their generous help and to Professor Liu Yuebing, then at the Institute of Japanese Culture at Zhejiang University, who helped me to photocopy rare sources from Komazawa University Library and shared with me his research on Meiji Confucianism. Professor Qin Zhaoxiong of Kobe Foreign Language University provided valuable assistance by helping me to acquire rare sources from the Manpukuji archive, where Tanaka Chisei kindly assisted him. I presented the contents of appendix 3 at the Center for Buddhist Studies at UCLA in February 2003 and at the Conference on the Study of Chinese Buddhism held in Hsi Lai monastery, Los Angeles, in June 2005. I am grate- ful for the feedback from the audiences. Kamada Hitoshi at the University of Arizona Library checked all of the Japanese transliterations. Cynthia Read, Paul Hobson, Merryl Sloane, and other editors at Oxford University Press have taken care of the production of this book. I deeply appreciate their work. x preface I want to extend special thanks to the Chinese Buddhism Electronic Text Association (CBETA), which has made many Chan genealogies compiled in late imperial China available online during my revision of this book. Their ef- forts allowed me to locate references efficiently and to check the validity of various pieces of evidence relating to the controversies examined in this book. Any remaining errors are my own. My colleagues at the University of Arizona provided continuous support by making all of their resources available to me. I also received generous funding from the Office of the Vice Provost for Fac- ulty Affairs at the University of Arizona for indexing this book. Finally, I want to thank my wife, Jing Liu, for her care and support and my daughter, Shalan, for the good luck she brought to me.