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Qisong on Lineage: the Critical Essay Revised and Defended

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Qisong on Lineage: the Critical Essay Revised and Defended CHAPTER SIX QISONG ON LINEAGE: THE CRITICAL ESSAY REVISED AND DEFENDED Introduction: A Different Format, a Different Scope, a Different Attitude The second fascicle of the Critical Essay takes the form of a series of questions and answers.1 The questions derive, in all likelihood, from reactions to the two sections of the first fascicle, which were circulated in the years after the composition of the first in the early 1050s and then the second in the late 1050s or very early 1060s. Qisong presents the questions in the voice of an unidentified ‘visitor’ or ‘guest’ who expresses skepticism on many points, including several made earlier in the Critical Essay, and then he responds at length in his own voice. The third section differs from the earlier sections of theCritical Essay in three ways. First, the topics discussed are more theoretical and acknowledge a wider Buddhist context for the issues surround- ing Chan lineage. Qisong’s answers draw very little on the historical sources used previously, turning instead to a number of sūtras and commentaries, particularly the Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra and the Da zhidu lun.2 Second, Qisong here confronts directly the questions and 1 The question-and-answer format had long been used in Indian Buddhism and traditional Chinese literature as well as Chinese Buddhist material. One of its permu- tations is the master-disciple conversation of Chan yulu, or discourse records. In the Chan Preface [Chanyuan zhuquanji duxu] of Zongmi, these conversations are criti- cized—by a questioner—as disorganized (T.48.2015.399c28–9), and the same certainly applies here. Although this section of the text shows fewer signs of rapid composition than those that precede it and is somewhat less self-contradictory, Qisong does return to topics repeatedly. As a result, in my analysis, I have grouped together passages that are related while also taking their immediate context into account. 2 Qisong calls the first text simply the Nirvāṇa Sūtra and seems to be using a text identical or very close to Huiyan’s translation (T.12.375). Chün-fang Yü recently summed up scholarship on the Da zhidu lun: “Because no Sanskrit or Tibetan version of this text is extant, some Western Buddhologists have cast doubt on the received tra- dition in Chinese Buddhism, which says that this text was authored by Nāgārjuna and translated by Kumārajīva. While E. Lamotte, A.K. Warder, and more recently Chris- tian Lindtner question the traditional attribution of Nāgārjuna as its author, David Seyfort Ruegg suggests that it might be a Central Asian (or Serindian) work which 196 chapter six reactions of those not already convinced—and not necessarily respect- ful—of Chan lineage. He does not soften the tone of doubt driving most of the questions, even when he is aware that his answers are not always persuasive. Third, one finds less anxious revisiting of the weak points of Qisong’s defense of Chan lineage. By this time, he is confident that theMeditation Sūtra and its prefaces have put to rest any doubts about the legitimacy of Chan lineage, and this conviction seemingly frees him to write expansively about the nature and signifi- cance of the lineage in ways that Chan monks rarely have. Many of the questions and answers revolve around the ‘problem’ of the Meditation Sūtra. This work, the linchpin in his defense of Chan lineage, itself requires defense. It appears to be a straightfor- ward meditation text of the Sarvāstivādin school and yet was authored, Qisong believes, by Bodhidharma. In the process of making sense of this apparent incongruity, Qisong addresses many issues of interest: the history and nature of the text and its prefaces, the relation of the mind-to-mind transmission to the outward teachings of the Buddha, the secrecy often surrounding dharma transmission, the history of the ‘separate’ dharma transmission as the inner or secret history of Buddhism, and the branching of the lineage into more than one line after Huineng. In the earlier sections, Qisong strives to lay out how, in his view, the dangerously misleading Transmission of the Dharma Treasury came about and gained credence despite the accurate information about the transmission already circulating in China. Here, albeit in a less than organized fashion, he attempts a grander reconstruction of the story of true lineage—from its origin to periods of concealment, triumph, and external decline—within the known history of Buddhism. Along the way, he paints a picture of the figures, the patriarch-bodhisattvas, who make up the lineage and, in his view, are the leaders of Buddhism as a whole. This attempt to construct a narrative that goes beyond a series of often formulaic biographies of patriarchs demonstrates, among other things, Qisong’s understanding of the power of the lineage myth and of its importance as an object of reverence. Kumārajīva and his Chinese collaborators translated. There is so far no scholarly con- sensus on this issue” (“Review of Alan Cole’s Mothers and Sons in Chinese Buddhism,” 343, typographical errors corrected)..
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