History and Religion

·期刊原文

History and Religion

By Arthur Waley

Philosophy East & West

V. 5 (1955) pp. 75-78

Copyright 1955 by University of Hawaii Press

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THIS IS A BELATED note on the exchange of views published by D. T. Suzuki and Hu Shih in the April, 1953, number of Philosophy East and West. I write it because I believe it is possible to go even further than Van Meter Ames (in his article of April, 1954) toward making these two ardent workers understand one another. I take it that the aim of Suzuki's many works in English has been to draw the West toward Zen and the non-rational approach which, like all forms of religious experience, Zen demands. No one could deny that in this task he has been eminently successful. The current interest in and comfort derived from Zen in America and Europe are due almost solely to his long series of writings. None of the defects in them which scholars have noted in any way detract from their efficacy as propaganda (and I am not using the word in any derogatory sense) for the Zen attitude to life. Hu, on the other hand, writes primarily as a historian, as one who is passionately interested not only in finding out what really happened but also in discovering the sequence in which things-happened. Religious writers are sometimes apt to forget how much they owe to secular scholars. In the present case it was Hu, after all, who first discovered the T'ang Dynasty Zen writings in the Pelliot collection and who set going the whole train of research which has made clear to us what the early history of the Zen sect in China, long falsified by Zen writers themselves, really was. The influence of these discoveries is apparent in many of Suzuki's later writings, despite the fact that to him "Zen is above space-time relations and naturally above historical facts." If this were really so, the proper course for Suzuki to take would seem to be to avoid history altogether. Even to say "once upon a time," as in the fairy stories, would from his point of view be too historical, for it would imply a past and a present. Instead, he has always given the reader a great deal of history. But a writer who is hostile to history (at any rate, in connection with the subject about which he writes) is not likely to be a very good historian. An instance occurs to me in which Suzuki breaks an obvious and elementary rule of historical research, namely,

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that evidence is valuable in proportion as it dates from a time near the event in question and valueless if it is separated from this event by hundreds of years. In The Zen Doctrine of No-Mind[1] he gives as his authority for the dates of Bodhidharma (sixth century A.D.) an author called Ch'i-sung, who lived in the eleventh century.

But is the attitude that Zen is "above historical facts" really a Zen attitude at all and not, rather, a personal prejudice? It seems to me that this separation of the mundane and the transcendental, of the finite from the infinite, comes of an attitude that almost every one of the old Zen writers has warned us against. Surely the whole burden of their teaching is that Buddha does not exist apart from the World, nor the World apart from Buddha. Again and again, when a disciple asks for a definition of "Buddha" the Master replies by diverting his attention to some commonplace object or some banal activity of daily life. "What is Buddha?" "Let's have a cup of tea!"

"To set up what you like against what you dislike-this is the disease of the mind," says Seng-ts'an, whom I quote in Suzuki's own translation. Suzuki dislikes history (at any rate, when it is applied to Zen) and likes legends. He even seems to feel it to be a kind of blasphemy to disentangle fact from fiction. Hu has (it appears) pointed out that most of what we are told about the culture-hero Fu Ta-shih (497-369 A.D., according to tradition, and inventor of the prayer-wheel) belongs to popular legend, and the poems attributed to him are in reality of much later date. Suzuki is moved to say: Fu Ta-shih "does not vanish even when thickly enveloped in the heavy fogs over New York these winter mornings. . . . Hu Shih kills Fu Ta-shih with his gaathaa, which however remains quite eloquent even to this day." If Zen is "above history," why should it matter so much to Suzuki whether the songs in question are by a Mr. Fu in the sixth century or by an anonymous poet in the eighth century? Why should it move him to this display of what, on the analogy of pyrotechnics, I can only call praj~naa-technics? As for the verses themselves, the one about "the bridge flows, but the water stands still," referred to by Suzuki, seems to me one of those lapses into mechanical paradox to which in China Taoists and Buddhists alike were rather too prone. For strangeness I much prefer his landscape where

The fiercest wind does not stir the trees,
A drum is beaten, but no sound is heard,
The sun rises, but the trees cast no shadow.

Incidentally if we accept the legend of Fu Ta-shih as history we are placed in a dilemma. On the one hand, we can then accept as fact the story about Fu

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1. D. T. Suzuki, The Zen Doctrine of No-Mind, The Significance of the Sutra of Hui-neng (Wei Lang) (London: Rider and Company, 1949), p. 9.

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and the nun. One day he caught a nun stealing vegetables from his garden. In her greed she took more than she could carry in her arms and began to drop them in her flight. Fu went to the house, fetched a basket and caught her up, saying, "Wouldn't this be a help to you?" But, on the other hand, we have to admit that in order to raise funds for repairing a monastery he sold his wife and two children by auction. I do not think Suzuki has ever discussed the subject, but I have a feeling he would (to use his own term) "kill" the second story and keep the first,, which, one cannot deny, "remains quite eloquent even to this day," though it is in a tradition of Chinese super-goodness that originated in Confucianism rather than in Buddhism.

Where I feel that Hu, in his inveterate love of the reasonable, goes too far is in his contention that Zen sayings in general have a rational meaning. He produces a handful of cases where this is so, but, if one reads through several hundred kung-an (Japanese, koan), questions for meditation, of the tenth century onward, it seems to me it is very seldom true that there is any rational meaning at all. They are in most cases simply verbal devices for breaking down the common-sense everyday view of things, in order to make room for what Suzuki calls "praj~naa-intuition."

Obviously the antinomy revealed in the April, 1933, discussion is not one that is confined to the two distinguished people there concerned. Some of us remember the difficulties in which the Ligue des Pois, originally founded, I think, as the League of Faiths by Younghusband in England, became involved when it was discovered that some of its members regarded it as an organization for carrying on historical research, while others were only concerned with introducing into Europe the religious ideas-of the East or with using a supposed basic identity of all religions as a lever to international goodwill. Well known, too, is the disquiet caused in some circles at Oxford when Radhakrishnan, whose role had been essentially that of an interpreter of the East to the West, was succeeded in the Spalding Chair by a scholar who announced his intention of functioning simply as a scholar. But, to parody Han-shan:

Water and ice do one another no harm;
History and religion-both alike are good.

After all, every Zen Master who has ever existed lived in time and space, was a man of Tang or Sung or Ashikaga times, a man of Honan or Kuang-tung or Kyoto, and it was not in some transcendental existence, but in working and sleeping, eating his rice and sipping his tea, that his satori, enlightenment, could be incorporated. And surely the case of the artist is much the same. One cannot communicate Beethoven's musical satori by tracing his

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movements in time and space. Yet, no one thinks it "sinful" or even irrelevant to inquire into the history of his life and relate it to what was going on in the world around. Some modern Zenists would think this analogy between Zen and music frivolous. But it certainly would not have been thought so in ancient China, for example, at Hangchow in the thirteenth century, when art was so often discussed in terms of Zen. Suzuki need not feel that he is a "sinner" (he actually uses this word) if he has sometimes dabbled in history, for apart from the mundane there is no transcendental. Still less need he ask Hu to join him in his peccavi, for if there were no Hus there would be no Suzukis.