Tibetan Emperor Tride Tsutsen (Me Agtsom, 704–55 CE) Invited the Zen Teacher Moheyan from Dunhuang to Tibet, the Zen Teaching Was Widely Spread in Tibet
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“After the Tibetan Emperor Tride Tsutsen (Me Agtsom, 704–55 CE) invited the Zen teacher Moheyan from Dunhuang to Tibet, the Zen teaching was widely spread in Tibet. Jingjue, the student of Xuanze, wrote Record of the Masters and Students of the La’ka. Although this text, based on a gradual approach to the Zen teachings, was translated into the Tibetan language, the sudden enlightenment teachings of Zen were already widespread in Tibet, and they were the subject of the Samye debate. The Chinese character Zen (禪) has two parts that mean ‘symbolize the single’ or ‘inseparable meaning,’ while the great Kagyu master Phagmodrupa says nonduality is Mahamudra. Therefore, there is no essential difference between Zen, Mahamudra, and Dzogchen teachings.” —His Holiness the Drikung Kyabgon Chetsang, author of The Practice of Mahamudra “Zen points directly to the heart mind, but it does so from within particular cultures, particular perspectives. This collection of the teachings of a long lost and now found Tibetan school of Zen gives us another of those perspectives. Master Moheyan and the other teachers of the Tibetan school of Zen are clearly our relatives on the Zen way. And I’ve found their unique perspectives enriching my own understanding, both encouraging and challenging. I was particularly taken with the Tantric influences on Tibetan Zen. This selection of some core texts of Tibetan Zen provides us another map through the mysteries of our human hearts and minds and helps us walk our own way to realization. How wonderful!” —James Ishmael Ford, author of If You’re Lucky, Your Heart Will Break and Zen Master Who” “Tibetan Zen is a title both provocative and evocative— provocative because such a tradition is supposed never to have existed, evocative because it invites its readers to imagine a lost world of profound religious exchange, a time before Buddhist sectarianism had set in, when monks along the ancient Silk Road explored innovative new practices across cultures. In this beautifully written book, Sam van Schaik guides his reader into this world, bringing the Dunhuang manuscripts to life through his careful analyses. The result is a comprehensive presentation of an extinct and in many ways unique Buddhist tradition, a study whose brilliant insights into early esoteric ritual, the bodhisattva precepts, and much more raise the field to new levels of sophistication, shedding light on the origins of both Tibetan Buddhism and Chinese Chan/Zen.” —Jacob P. Dalton, author of The Taming of the Demons “Tibetan Zen is an unprecedented work. Van Schaik’s explanations expand our notion of just what Tibetan Buddhism was—and is—while his translations offer contemporary readers the opportunity to expand their own minds by engaging classic Zen writings from a deeply creative period of Buddhism.” —Kurtis R. Schaeffer, University of Virginia ABOUT THE BOOK Until the early twentieth century, hardly any traces of the Tibetan tradition of Chinese Chan Buddhism, or Zen, remained. Then the discovery of a sealed cave in Dunhuang, full of manuscripts in various languages dating from the first millennium CE, transformed our understanding of early Zen. This book translates some of the earliest surviving Tibetan Zen manuscripts preserved in Dunhuang. The translations illuminate different aspects of the Zen tradition, with brief introductions that not only discuss the roles of ritual, debate, lineage, and meditation in the early Zen tradition but also explain how these texts were embedded in actual practices. SAM VAN SCHAIK received his PhD in Tibetan Buddhist literature from the University of Manchester, England. He currently works at the British Library’s international Dunhuang Project in London, researching early Tibetan manuscripts, and is the author of Tibet: A History (Yale, 2011). Sign up to receive news and special offers from Shambhala Publications. Or visit us online to sign up at shambhala.com/eshambhala. Tibetan Zen Discovering a Lost Tradition Sam van Schaik SNOW LION BOSTON & LONDON 2015 SNOW LION An imprint of Shambhala Publications, Inc. Horticultural Hall 300 Massachusetts Avenue Boston, Massachusetts 02115 www.shambhala.com Cover design by Katrina Noble © 2015 by Sam van Schaik All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Van Schaik, Sam, author. Tibetan Zen: discovering a lost tradition / Sam van Schaik. —First edition. pages cm eISBN 978-0-8348-0284-1 ISBN 978-1-55939-446-8 (paperback: alk. paper) 1. Zen Buddhism—Tibet Region—Doctrines—History. 2. Zen literature— China—Dunhuang Caves—Translations into English. I. Title. BQ9262.9.T53V36 2015 294.3′92709515—dc23 2014042693 To Ananda CONTENTS Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction 1. Orientations 2. Masters of Meditation 3. Teachers and Students 4. The Practice of Genealogy 5. Encounter and Emptiness 6. Debate 7. Observing the Mind 8. Authority and Patronage 9. Funerals and Miracles 10. Zen and Tantra Notes Works Cited Index E-mail Sign-Up PUBLISHER’S NOTE This book contains diacritics and special characters. If you encounter difficulty displaying these characters, please set your e-reader device to publisher defaults (if available) or to an alternate font. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book has its beginning in work that I did with Jacob Dalton on the Tibetan Dunhuang manuscripts during the years 2002 to 2005. In the years that followed, I was able to spend time with John McRae and other Sinologists, from whom I learned much about Chinese Zen, or Chan. In 2010 I was awarded a three-year grant by the British Academy to study and translate the Tibetan Zen manuscripts. During this project I had the privilege of working with Drikung Kyabgön Chetsang Rinpoche to create online editions of all the Tibetan Zen texts, now available at the website of the International Dunhuang Project. I have been lucky to work with many great colleagues at the British Library and would especially like to thank Burkhard Quessel and Susan Whitfield for their support. My erstwhile colleague Imre Galambos has always been willing to answer my questions about Chinese sources. Finally I’d like to thank Nikko Odiseos of Shambhala Publications for his interest in this book, and Michael Wakoff for his sympathetic copyediting. ABBREVIATIONS BD Dunhuang manuscripts in the National Library of China D The Derge edition of the bka’ ’gyur and bstan ’gyur IOL Tib J Tibetan Dunhuang manuscripts in the British Library Or.8210 Chinese Dunhuang manuscripts in the British Library Or.15000 Tibetan manuscripts from Central Asian sites in the British Library Pelliot Chinese Dunhuang manuscripts in the chinois Bibliothèque nationale de France Pelliot Tibetan Dunhuang manuscripts in the tibétain Bibliothèque nationale de France T Taisho Tripiṭaka: the Chinese Buddhist canon When references are given to manuscripts, r refers to the recto (front) and v refers to the verso (back). The method of numbering depends on the format. Pothi folios are numbered 1r, 1v, 2r, 2v, and so on. Concertina folios are numbered r1, r2, r3, and so on, until one reaches the verso, where the manuscript is flipped over and continues as v1, v2, v3, and so on. Scrolls in vertical format are numbered simply as r or v followed by line numbers, while those in horizontal format are numbered r1 for the first column of text, r2 for the second, and so on (and v1, v2, and so forth, on the verso). INTRODUCTION A LOST TRADITION? Censured in Tibet, forgotten in China, the Tibetan version of Zen was almost completely lost. Zen first came to Tibet in the eighth century, when Chinese teachers were invited there at the height of the Tibetan empire. According to traditional histories, doctrinal disagreements developed between Indian and Chinese Buddhists at the Tibetan court, and the Tibetan emperor called for the situation to be resolved in a formal debate. When the debate resulted in a decisive win by the Indian side, the Zen teachers were sent back to China. Though this story has been questioned, it is clear that the popularity of Zen declined in Tibet, and its original texts were all but forgotten. This changed at the beginning of the twentieth century with the discovery of a sealed cave full of ancient manuscripts in Dunhuang in Chinese Central Asia. The Tibetan manuscripts from the cave have been dated to the ninth and tenth centuries, making them the earliest known source materials for Tibetan Buddhism. Among them are some fifty manuscripts containing the only surviving original Tibetan Zen texts, the primary source material for understanding Tibetan Zen. Since the manuscripts offer a snapshot of the early Zen tradition in the eighth to tenth centuries, they are significant sources for the study of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Zen as well. Furthermore, Tibetan Zen appears to have developed into a distinct tradition, incorporating elements of tantric Buddhism, and this fascinating synthesis remains little understood.1 The sealed cave at Dunhuang was part of a complex of Buddhist cave shrines, cut into a cliff at the edge of the Central Asian desert. We know tantalizingly little about the cave: neither why it was filled with manuscripts nor why it was sealed. But we have the results of this accident of history, in the thousands of books in Chinese, Tibetan, Turkic, Sanskrit, and other languages, along with Buddhist paintings and temple banners. In fact, the term “library cave” is misleading, for if one thing is clear, it is that this cache of manuscripts does not form any kind of coherent library collection. Alongside Buddhist scriptures and treatises are notebooks, shopping lists, writing exercises, letters, contracts, sketches, and scurrilous off-the-cuff verses.