2020 2nd International Conference on Education, Economics and Information Management (EEIM 2020) ISBN: 978-1-60595-684-8 Research on the Life of Shao Yong Qing MING1,a 1Yunnan Normal University, Kunming, Yunnan, China [email protected] Keywords: Shao Yong, A History of the Song Dynasty, Life, Chan Buddhism. Abstract. Shao Yong (1012-1077), a renowned philosopher of the northern Song dynasty (960-1126), was known for his scholarship on the philosophy of Changes (yixue zhexue) and Neo-Confucianism. There is often a relationship between one’s way of life and one’s philosophy. In order to deepen understanding Shao Yong’s philosophy, this paper will take the life of Shao Yong as its subject of study, and this subject will be approached by focusing on the life of Shao Yong and his study of Buddhism along with and his practice of Chan Buddhism. 1. Introduction When it comes to discussing the life of Shao Yong, there is something of a mystery. In the existing scholarship, most researchers did not identify the Buddhist influence on the life of Shao Yong. Even those scholars who accepted that Buddhism did influence Shao Yong’s philosophy, they however did not mention how Buddhism influenced him in detail. Therefore, in this paper his Buddhist background will be interpreted in its widest sense. This will lay the groundwork for how Shao Yong’s Chan Buddhism background directed his redefinition of the Supreme Ultimate. 2. The Life of Shao Yong According to A History of the Song Dynasty, an Outer Record of Master Shao Kangjie, A Critical Biography of Shao Yong and “A Neo-Confucianist of the Northern Song: Shao Yong and His Works,” We can draw an overview of the life of Shao Yong as follows: Shao’s style name was Yao Fu, his honorific name was Kangjie, and he was also called Master Peace-and-Happiness (anle xiansheng). Shao was born in 1011 and lived until 1077. He lived during the first century of the Song dynasty (960-1279). It was a peaceful era. After nearly a hundred years of the civil war and invasions from the north that characterized the late Tang dynasty and “Five Dynasties (907-960) and Ten Kingdoms (902-979),” China was once again unified and its society was in order. Intellectual and cultural life flourished and philosophy, always a major preoccupation of Chinese life, attained a spectacular level of development. The “Philosophy of Changes” is known as yixue zhexue in Chinese, which refers to the philosophical theories of The Book of Changes. Shao Yong’s biography in the A History of the Song Dynasty mentions, “His forebears had been natives of Fanyang, but his father, named Gu, moved to Hengzhang, and then again to Gongcheng. Thus Shao, when in his thirteen year, traveled to Henan, where he buried his parents on the Yi river, subsequently becoming a native of Henan…” [1] 56 According to this record, his forebears had been natives of Fanyang, which is the present Zhuozhou of Hebei province, a city just south of the present Beijing. When he was thirteen years old, his family moved to Hengzhang, which was another name for the small Zhang River in the extreme northern tip of Henan province. Afterward, with his father, he moved to Gongcheng, a town equivalent to the present Hui county in northern Henan, and hence he became a native of Henan. Gongcheng had a famous Mount Sumen, with the beautiful Baiyuan Lake in its valley, near by which Shao Yong’s home was located. It was the peaceful and secluded shore of the lake where he learned from his parents planting, ploughing, cutting wood, The Book of Changes, Buddhism, Confucianism and Daoism. Additionally, he met his future teacher Li Zhicai and learned from him the “Innate Diagram” (xiantian tu), “the Fu Xi Eight Trigrams and Sixty-four Hexagrams,” the “River Diagram,” “Luo Writing,” etc. His philosophy originated in the Baiyuan Lake of Mount Sumen, therefore, a chapter presenting his philosophy in the Huang Zongxi’s A Record of Song and Yuan Scholars (Songyuan xue an) was called the Case Studies of Baiyuan (Baiyuan xue an). Regarding this, in his “Epitaph to Shao Yong” Cheng Mingdao (1032-1085) commented, “The Case Studies on Kangjie was also called the Case Studies of Baiyuan because Yao Fu resided at Baiyuan.”[2] In 1049 Shao migrated to Luoyang and made Luoyang his home for the rest of his life. He called his residence, Nest of Repose and Happiness (anle wo), where as a famous literati, he pursued philosophy, practiced meditation and wrote poetry. Both his major philosophical work Supreme Principles that Rule the World (Huangji jingshi shu) and Yi River Teacher’s Beating the Earth (Yichuan jirang ji) were written there. The Images and Numerals School of The Book of Changes that was established by him at Luoyang became one of the major schools of Chinese philosophy of Changes, and exerted a tremendous, profound as well as far-reaching influence on the history of Chinese, Japanese and Korean philosophy of Changes and the idealist school of Neo-Confucianism. 3. Shao Yong’s Study of Buddhism and his Practice of Chan Records on Shao Yong show that he not only studied Buddhism but also practiced Chan. Tang Mingbang in his work entitled, A Critical Biography of Shao Yong identifies that Shao resided in Tiangong Temple (Tiangong si) after he migrated from Gong Cheng to Luoyang in 1049. The description of Tiangong Temple in Biographies of Buddhist Patriarchs states, “In the sixth year of Tang Zheng Guang [632], [Taizong] ordered his former residence which was called Longquan Gong and located at the eastern capital city [Luoyang] to be rebuilt as Tiangong Temple.” [3] This shows that the temple was a royal monastery, and it originally was emperor Taizong’s (599-649) residence. It was a holy place, land of bliss. Not only did Tang emperors such as Taizong, Gaozong (628-683) and Wu Zetian (624-705) go there on pilgrimage, but also Song literati such as Zhu Xi, Su Shi, Chen Hao, Chen Yi and Zhang Zai etc. went there, for painting, writing poem, studying Buddhism and meditating. The Temple became a famous Tiantai, Chan, Huanyan and Yogacara school’s center for doctrinal studies during the northern Song. Here the study of the following texts flourished—The Demonstration of Consciousness Only, the Treatise in Twenty Verses on Consciousness Only, the Awakening of Faith, the Lankāvatara sutra, Stopping and Seeing : A Comprehensive Course in Buddhist Meditation, The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch, Mahayana Method of Cessation and Contemplation, etc. 57 In Tiangong Temple, Shao Yong studied a number of Buddhist texts, particularly the texts translated by Paramārtha (499-569). Buddhist concepts of Buddha nature, “the perfection of wisdom,” “Consciousness-Only” and “realizing mind and seeing self-nature,” etc. had deeply influenced Shao Yong’s development as a philosopher of Changes. Regarding this, Anne D. Birdwhistell wrote, “Shao’s concepts of perception and consciousness exhibit certain similarities to the ideas not only of the T’ien-t’ai [tiantai] school of Chih Yi [Zhiyi] and Hua Yen [huayan] school of Fa Tsang but also to the ideas of the Consciousness-Only school, which analyzed the processes of perception and postulated eight divisions of consciousness.” [4] Wang Deyi in his chapter entitled, “Shao Yong” of his 1999 publication of The Thinkers of Chinese Past Dynasties (Zhongguo lidai sixiangjia), [5] identified the Buddhist Consciousness-Only school as influencing Shao Yong’s concept of “mind is the Supreme Ultimate.” [5] Tang Junyi (1909-1978) wrote “A Brief Examination of the Meaning Behind Shao Kangjie’s Observation of Things as Nature” [6] and “Shao Kangjie’s Theory of the Book of Changes and Theory of Mind.”[6] In these works, he emphasized Shao Yong’s idealism and examined how closely Shao Yong’s thinking was to traditional Confucianism. Moreover, he acknowledged the influence of the Buddhist Consciousness-Only school. Tiangong Temple is also known as a famous Chan monastery, where both Shenxiu (606-706) and Shenhui (684-760) had propagated Chan for a long time. Records of Shenxiu in both Great Peace Records (Taiping guangji) and Biographies of Eminent Monks of Song Dynasty (Songgao sengzhuan) show that Shenxiu spent the last period of his life traveling back to Tiangong Temple to teach Chan and Avataṃsakasūtra (Great Means Expansive Buddha Flower Adornment Sutra). His disciples always exceeded three hundred.[7] Regarding this, John R. McRae mentioned that Shenxiu died while sitting quietly in meditation posture at Tiangong Temple in Luoyang on the twenty-eight day of the second month of the Shenxiu period, which is 706.[8] Descriptions of routines in the temple show that sitting in meditation and concentrations on huatou were the norm. Meditation was the prime practice in Tiangong monasteries. Shao Yong attended meditation training class in the Tiangong Temple Chan Hall. This was an exercise of giving expression to tranquil inner thoughts and creating simple surroundings to be in harmony with his internal tranquility. Through practice, he began experiencing that samatha and vipassana were the two complementary aspects of Buddhist meditation. The practice of samatha was able to bring about deeper levels of concentration while the practice of vipassana leads to insight into the true nature of things. The realized that the developments of samatha lead to a high degree of mastery over the mind and thereby forms a basis for the development of insight. When insight is developed by a calm and steady mind, such insight will be able to penetrate into the deeper regions of the mind. He further experienced, in a deep state of meditation, that The Book of Changes concept of “Supreme Ultimate,” was similar to the Buddhist enlightened mind.