Book Reviews / T’oung Pao 97 (2011) 202-262 225 Fathering your Father: e Zen of Fabrication in Tang Buddhism. By Alan Cole. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. xix + 340 pp. It is rare to review a book that successfully overturns many of the assumptions held in an area of study. is book achieves this revolution for Chan studies and deserves to be read closely by all researchers in the fi eld. is study of Chan genealogical “histories” of the sixth and seventh centuries, while excluding some texts, inscriptions, and other evidence (p. xv), concludes that early “Chan” was no more than a forgery of lineages of transmission from Bodhidharma and ulti- mately the Buddha in order to gain Tang court approval as the only true Bud- dhism in China, and for the latest patriarch of each text to be recognized as the owner of “the totality of tradition.” Cole suggests that these “histories” were fab- ricated during political crises or “hot-spots” for dynasties which needed symbolic religious legitimization, and that each successive fabrication was made in the light of previous histories to overcome their antecedents. is was a skilful organization of the “triangle of Buddhism, the State, and the populace” (p. 310) to claim that the latest master in the lineage had state sanction to be the sole owner of true Buddhism and that he was available to make universal buddhahood, admittedly of a second order, accessible to his followers. ese texts were thus not products of religious experience, but falsifi cations of history to gain infl uence at court and in religious circles. In other words, these histories were a series of swindles, each one upping the ante. Precedents for these confi dence tricks were provided by Xinxing (540-594), leader of the sect of the ree Stages, and by the Tiantai monk Guanding (561- 632). Xinxing asserted that he alone knew and embodied Buddhist truth, and even though every individual possesses the potential to be Buddha (Buddha- nature), they need to confess, meditate, and accept Xinxing’s “sudden teaching” to be saved. Guanding presented his master, Zhiyi, as a “king of Buddhism” who could legitimize the Sui dynasty. Guanding created a Buddhist lineage for Zhiyi, even inventing the fi gure of Huiwen to do so. In the early Tang, Guanding’s heirs falsely tried to make Guanding the only heir of Zhiyi. e fi rst stage in the fabrication of a lineage from Bodhidharma is allegedly refl ected in Daoxuan’s additions in the 660s to his Xu gaoseng zhuan, where the claims of Fachong (587-665?) to a lineage of transmission of the Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra from Huike, Bodhidharma’s pupil, appear. is is supposedly achieved in part by an insertion into Daoxuan’s hagiography of Huike that upgrades Huike as an ancestor. No political hot-spot is revealed here. e second stage identifi ed was the creation of a genealogy for Faru (d. 689) by the monks of Shaolin Monastery in 690 in a funerary inscription that claims that Faru was the fi fth-generation heir of Bodhidharma. Bodhidharma brought from India the “secret meaning of the Buddha” that transcends the sutras. e implication was that in China there was only one master per generation in the transmission. is transmission occurred “suddenly,” without any preparation by © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/156853211X600291 226 Book Reviews / T’oung Pao 97 (2011) 202-262 the heir-apparent. e Shaolin monks used this incarnate buddha, Faru, to bolster their land claims during the hot-spot of the 690 proclamation of the Zhou dynasty by Empress Wu Zetian, who sought Buddhist approval. e Shaolin author apparently learned the technique of lineage manipulation from the Fachong intervention in the Xu gaoseng zhuan. e third stage was the writing of the Chuan fabao ji by Du Fei, who went beyond the funerary inscription genre to create a lineage history of all the sup- posed Chinese patriarchs, from Bodhidharma through to Faru and then Shenxiu (606?-706), with the added statement that Shenxiu had an heir, the next patri- arch, whom Du Fei does not name. It seems that Du Fei banked on the monu- mental standing of Shenxiu, who had been invited to the court by Empress Wu, learned from the fabrication techniques of the Shaolin monks, and manipulated the Huike biography from the Xu gaoseng zhuan. However, no specifi c hot-spot is identifi ed, except the vague suggestion that Empress Wu and emperors Zhong- zong and Ruizong submitted to Shenxiu and made him “something like a pater- nal Buddhist pope” (p. 167). e fourth stage was the clumsy Lengqie shizi ji by Jingjue, who claimed that his own teacher, Xuanze, otherwise unknown, was the imperial teacher and legit- imate heir of Hongren, the fi fth patriarch, although Shenxiu and Lao An were also heirs. Jingjue’s aim was to make himself the next incarnate Buddha in the transmission. He “quotes” a text supposedly by Xuanze to assist in this subterfuge, but the text and its author were in all likelihood fi ctions formed by him. Cole argues that Jingjue made Shenxiu a dead-end in the lineage “pipeline,” although this argument depends on discounting the fi nal “mini-chapter” on four disciples of Shenxiu in this text. “Jingjue needed the image of Shenxiu to repro- duce Xuanze as his double but then couldn’t fi gure out how to get him out of the way, and thus Shenxiu remains as a vestige limb” (p. 197). But the long entry on Shenxiu in Lengqie shizi ji seems too big to be a “vestige limb,” and combined with the entry on Shenxiu’s four disciples supposedly added by Jingjue’s rivals, this seems an unsatisfactory or insuffi cient explanation. Moreover, Xuanze appears less prominently in terms of length of entries, and has no recorded sayings, unlike other patriarchs. Also, Shenxiu, Xuanze, and Lao An—in that order—are labelled the seventh generation of the transmission, and allegedly each of them was suc- cessively national teacher for Empress Wu, Emperor Zhongzong, and Emperor Ruizong. Moreover, if the concluding “mini-chapter” is an addition by rivals, it is most artful, for it incorporates Jingjue’s use of Gunabhadra as the fi rst patriarch and counts all the twenty-four individuals of the Lengqie shizi ji, including, it seems, Jingjue himself.1 Again, if this “mini-chapter” were removed, the Lengqie shizi ji would peter out aimlessly in a series of “jivey” sayings of Shenxiu. If Jingjue’s real purpose was to write himself into the single-patriarch-per-generation 1) See comment by Yanagida Seizan, Shoki no zenshi, vol. 1 (Tokyo: Chikuma shobō, 1971), 326..