Records of the Transmission of the Lamp: Volume 2
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The Hokun Trust is pleased to support the second volume of a complete translation of this classic of Chan (Zen) Buddhism by Randolph S. Whitfield. The Records of the Transmission of the Lamp is a religious classic of the first importance for the practice and study of Zen which it is hoped will appeal both to students of Buddhism and to a wider public interested in religion as a whole. Contents Preface Acknowledgements Introduction Abbreviations Book Four Book Five Book Six Book Seven Book Eight Book Nine Finding List Bibliography Index Reden ist übersetzen – aus einer Engelsprache in eine Menschensprache, das heist, Gedanken in Worte, – Sachen in Namen, – Bilder in Zeichen. Johann Georg Hamann, Aesthetica in nuce. Eine Rhapsodie in kabbalistischer Prosa. 1762. Preface The doyen of Buddhism in England, Christmas Humphreys (1901- 1983), once wrote in his book, Zen Buddhism, published in 1947, that ‘The “transmission” of Zen is a matter of prime difficulty…Zen… is ex hypothesi beyond the intellect…’1 Ten years later the Japanese Zen priest Sohaku Ogata (1901-1973) from Chotoko-in, in the Shokufuji Temple compound in Kyoto came to visit the London Buddhist Society that Humphreys had founded in the 1920s. The two men had met in Kyoto just after the Second World War. Sohaku Ogata’s ambition was to translate the whole of the Song dynasty Chan (Zen) text Records of the Transmission of the Lamp (hereafter CDL), which has never been fully translated into any language (except modern Chinese), into English. Before his death Sohaku Ogata managed to translate the first ten books of this mammoth work.2 The importance of this compendium had not gone unnoticed. It was Paul Schmidt (1901-1972) at the University of Albuquerque, New Mexico, a one-time student of Zen at Chotoko-in, who was responsible for getting Sohaku’s work into print. Humphreys, who had already mentioned the work in Zen Buddhism, had a copy of this translation in his library. Carmen Blacker (1924-2009) at the University of Cambridge had high praise for the original Song work. In an open letter ‘to whom it may concern’ addressed to her long- time friend Irmgard Schlögl3 (later Ven. Myokyo-ni 1921-2007), she says of this work, ‘A full translation of the …Transmission of the Lamp would be an invaluable asset to Buddhist studies in this country.…The work ranks as a religious classic of sufficient importance to merit a place in the Sacred Books of the East and any publisher who made it accessible to English readers would be doing a considerable service to Buddhist studies in the West.’ There is much research to do on this lengthy work, the bible of Chinese Chan, but the translator’s present task is to render arcane Song dynasty classical Chinese into modern readable English. There are bound to be mistakes in a project of this scope but hopefully this will facilitate a fruitful voyage of discovery for the generations to come. Annotations too have been kept to a minimum though here again, the allusions in the work are a rich mine of history of one of the major civilisations on our home-world. Happily the literature on both Chan and its wider cultural influence is growing all the time, with many excellent scholars devoting study to this subject. The introduction has been kept short and is directed to a wider readership interested in religion as a whole rather than scholarly exposition. As we progress in our translation different aspects of Chan will no doubt come to light and in Volume 3 it is hoped to go into the historical background in more depth, itself a daunting task! This is the second volume of a full translation of the Records of the Transmission of the Lamp comprising books 4-9 of 30. Being the primary source text of the Chinese Chan School (in Japanese called Zen) up to about 1008 CE, we meet all the important figures in Chan ‘history’ there. May it inspire and delight, as the shades of the ones who have gone before still inspire us in our efforts to plumb the depths of the Great Way. Randolph S. Whitfield 1 Zen Buddhism by Christmas Humphreys. London, William Heinemann, 1947, p. 3. 2 The Transmission of the Lamp. Early Masters. Translated by Sohaku Ogata. Edited by Prof. Paul F. Schmidt. Wakefield, New Hampshire. Longwood Academic, 1990. 3 Carmen Blacker’s open letter on the subject of the Jingde Chuandeng Lu (in Japanese, Keitoku Dentoroku) is dated 15th June, 1972. Acknowledgements In gratitude to the Venerable Myokyo-ni of London who pointed out the way of Master Linji (Rinzai) for many years. Thanks to the Hokun Trust of London for granting funds for this translation and its publication. Thanks to the Venerable Sohaku Ogata, whose work continues. Thanks to Carman Blacker for her far-sightedness. Thanks to the Ven. Myokun of The Hermitage of the True Dharma (Shobo-an) London, for real enthusiasm and practical help. Thanks to Michelle Bromley for much practical help and encouragement, without which this book would never have come into being. Last but not least, thanks go to my wife Mariana, who has supported me all along the Way. Introduction ‘If the flesh came into being because of spirit, it is a wonder. But if spirit came into being because of the body, it is a wonder of wonders.’4 So there is a descent followed by an ascent: spirit descends into the body and from the body it ascends into spirit. In the middle is the causal matrix of the living body. In Chan too the original nature is immanent. It takes the wonderful potential of the physical, living body, swept clean through śīla practice (scraping off the adventitious passions) to make a fitting abode for the original nature to manifestly function unobstructedly (大用). Encounters in Chan What is the Chan message? Not to rely on words? The message, the word, is a call to attention, the signal that an exchange is about to begin between teacher and pupil, a precursor to gathering together an attention usually scattered all over the place. Around this crystallising point, encompassed by rituals just sufficient to help gather up scattered awareness, living currents can pass between two human beings. Students can feel the master’s quality of being precisely because it by-passes their consciousness and thought processes. What happens at such an encounter then takes place through the living bodies of both, even though thought gave the initial impulse. Indeed, without initial thought it would be impossible to approach the living body in this way. The CDL redactors have crystallised essentially physical living encounters into words, though the words by themselves are insufficient to know what is going on. For thought to impregnate the living flesh it has to be concentrated. The ordinary dispersed thinking of everyday life is not potent enough to make much impact on the living flesh. But when thought is concentrated enough and pressed into the living body it can stamp it with its content. The body then reabsorbs the thought, so to say, so that it becomes instinctual bodily awareness and in the Chan encounter it is these two living bodies with this kind of awareness that are said to respond to each other.5 Thinking then becomes redundant. Such encounters are legion in Chan and are called ‘entering the tiger’s den’ or ‘entering the room’ – pupils have to confront the tiger (the master) by becoming tigers themselves, then it is tiger to tiger. This initial impregnation of the living flesh by concentrated thought (the gong’an, Jap. kōan) only takes such a long time, because again conventional thought by itself is hopelessly weak, confused and helpless when it comes to knowing how to approach the living body, admittedly the most inaccessible part of the human being from consciousness’ point of view, though right under our nose twenty-four hours a day. In fact, by the time the gong’an has reached the cold upper world of the verbal formula, it has already completed half of its journey. The return journey is to take its host back down into the depths whence it came, like a globule of nuclear plasma spurting forth from the central sun, reaching its zenith and then falling down again into the living fire, a slow, willing immolation which is a systematic stripping away of everything petty, cosy and sentimental, re-emerging as the fully humanised warmth of the heart: the wonder of wonders.6 Neither can cold thought acknowledge the fact that it is unable to appreciate what it means to impregnate the living flesh with thought leading to bodily awareness in this way. Yet curiously enough there is a verb in the English language that refers more or less to this activity – ‘to ponder’. Thought by itself can only think, is incapable of pondering and even less capable of appreciation. Chan also means concentrated in the sense of being awake: if I am driving my car round a busy roundabout in the middle of the capital at rush hour, my eyes, hands, feet, in fact my whole body and the body of my car are in a profound union in which there is absolutely no time to think. If I had to think when to change gear (we are still in manual transmission), or think which car I should give right of way to when they are coming at me from all sides four lanes deep, if I had to think about all this before taking action, an accident would certainly ensue.