Original insights never fully present

·期刊原文
Original insights never fully present: Chan/Zen/deconstruction
Stuart Sargent
The Journal of the American Oriental Society
Vol.116 No.1 (Jan-March 1996)
pp.77-84
COPYRIGHT 1996 American Oriental Society

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Like many readers who will be curious about Bernard Faure's new
book, I approach it as a person with a basic knowledge of Chan/Zen
Buddhism but not as a scholar of religion; I come to the book also
with a specific quest for insights on those who, in literary
circles, embraced the aim of Chan, in Faure's words, "to mark the
phenomenal world with the seal of the absolute" believing that "in
awakening, immanence turns out to be transcendence" (p. 76). That
"this equation often came at the expense of transcendental values,
and ... led to legitimating the profane enjoyment of the world of
passions" (p. 76) I already knew. One way of understanding this
phenomenon is to associate it with changes in the social background
of those who participated in Chan through the centuries, notably the
Ming merchant classes, who supposedly lost the inner scruples
inculcated by the aristocratic mores of Tang and the
scholar-official ideals of the Northern Song.(1) But to supplement
this kind of historical analysis, Faure's book promises a review of
the problem from the inside, using recent strategies for reading
texts to analyze the duplicity in the discourse of Chan itself.
The Rhetoric of Immediacy heroically attempts to encompass the many
centuries of Chan practice and doctrine in three cultures (a Korean
voice is heard now and then as we shuttle back and forth between
China and Japan). Because of the enormity of the task, a frequently
disjointed style of presentation, and a tendency to eliminate the
logical or evidential underpinnings to some of the most interesting
assertions, the non-specialist is likely to be frustrated on his
first pass-through. Nevertheless, there is much here to be learned.
The several types of discourse promised in the prologue - "the
hermeneutical and the rhetorical, the structuralist and the
historical, the 'theological' and the ideological/cultural" - come
into play in the first chapter, "The Differential Tradition." Faure
agrees with those who see the division of early Chan into distinct
Northern and Southern schools as having been as tactical as it was
ideological. He further questions the whole notion of a coherent
tradition that can be termed "early Chan." For one thing, the
patriarchal tradition envisioned in that notion is logically
incompatible with an original Buddhist "path" a stage of the
religion in which individuals may become enlightened and thus
empower themselves to teach others. At the same time, we need to
deconstruct the very notion of that earlier stage as embodying a
"pure" Chan principle that is later "corrupted." Not only are there
ambiguities and contradictions at every turn: "the 'original'
insight ... may exist only as a [Derridean] 'trace,' something that
was never 'present' to a fully awakened consciousness, since there
is no self that can actually live the experience" (p. 27). This last
clause combines deconstruction and Chan itself to question not only
the historical notion of an "originating" teaching, but even the
ideological construct of an "originating" experience.
Nowhere is the ambiguity of Chan more apparent than in the
dichotomy of sudden and gradual enlightenment, the topic of the
second chapter. Faure cautions that this dichotomy is not
coterminous with the North-South schism; both Northern and Southern
schools were "sudden" in seeing enlightenment as imminent and
immanent and "gradual" in being unable to do away with mediation,
using "skillful means" or mediate stages of preparation to bring the
practitioner close to awakening (p. 36). Once again, the
intersection of theoretical Chan and deconstruction on the question
of language is brought into play to question the reality of the
theoretical opposition: "Speaking of the 'sudden' is always gradual;
even dismissing subitism and gradualism in the name of a higher,
truer 'subitism' is already derivative and therefore gradual."(2)
Saying, as Faure does, that any thought in language about
enlightenment "can only point to an always-receding horizon or
absolute origin" making it "a vanishing point, an ideal origin - but
also an ideological construct" (p. 42) brackets (phenomenologically)
or denies (deconstructively) that enlightenment has taken place.
A related problem is that "[s]udden awakening cannot be the result
of an empirical progress. Even when it is preceded by gradual
practice, it is not as an effect [that] is preceded by its causes,
for it is one of those states that, in Elster's words, are
'essentially by-products'" (p. 45).
Faure at this point suggests in a footnote two extremely seminal
ideas that should have been explored more fully in his text. Jon
Elster (reference is to his Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion
of Rationality [Cambridge, 1983]) shows that the very effort
required to sustain the practice intended to produce the desired
"by-product" state can block that state from occurring; but Chan,
according to Faure, "solves the problem by positing that something,
at the critical point, is taking over and continues to perform" the
practice. Faure neglects to tell us where in Chan texts this
solution is proposed and what it is that "takes over." Equally
tantalizing is the suggestion that the "technology" of Chan must
include a "sub-technology" that obliterates all memory of the traces
left by the process. The reader may wonder: if this refers to the
fact that any by-product is also "preceded by its causes" why in
this case is it necessary that those causes remain unknown? Is it
because liberation from the cycle of cause-and-effect must by
definition not be an effect of a cause? Is it because the sensation
of awakening is a matter of brain chemistry being altered by
meditation or other practices, and this is beyond the reach of Chan
ideology? (Chan discomfiture with hallucinations experienced during
meditation is mentioned on pp. 105-7; it would have been useful to
distinguish this more clearly from the Chan rejection of purposeful
"occultic use of meditation.") Faure's sentence raises a number of
possible interpretations, but we are given no guidance on which to
consider.
A point made several times in this chapter is that "the
sudden/gradual dichotomy is constantly blurred in the actual
practice or discourse of Chan monks" (p. 48). More intriguing is the
assertion that Chan never discusses gradualism "although it remains
unchallenged in actual practice. The entire Chan tradition seems to
hinge on this scapegoat mechanism" (p. 49). Perhaps this silence is
the "sub-technology" of erasure mentioned in the footnote four pages
earlier?
Before we can ponder that, we are presented with another interesting
suggestion: awakening is like death insofar as there is a process
that must be undergone before it is "absorbed, ratified by the
collectivity" (p. 49). The comparison implies that the function of
Chan practice is to affirm publicly an enlightenment that has
already taken place. This is to put Zongmi's "sudden awakening
followed by gradual practice" (p. 42; perhaps familiar enough not to
require citation of a source, for none is given) into a potentially
useful anthropological frame: a person is "awakened" at some point
in life but does not experience it as such until the community
recognizes it. Or perhaps Faure means to allude to the Chan teaching
that we are originally enlightened. Either way, if we reflect that
death is like "the 'original' insight ... [that] may exist only as a
'trace' something that was never 'present' to a fully awakened
consciousness, since there is no self that can actually live the
experience" as discussed above, the parallel would be truly
fascinating. That is, neither death nor total awakening can be
"lived" yet there are times when their traces must be acknowledged
in life. Is this the parallel between funerals and gradual
cultivation in Chan that Faure wants to draw?
Chapter three, "The Twofold Truth of Immediacy" treats the
problematic doctrine that "passions are awakening;" to which I
alluded at the beginning as relevant to a great deal of Chinese
literature, both lyrical and anecdotal.
Unfortunately, this chapter is rather intimidating in the early
pages: on pp. 56-57, in two paragraphs, I count at least fourteen
ways of approaching the issues raised by the "Two Truths" paradigm.
The idea that having a distinction between expedient and absolute
truths preserves the latter as a constant to prevent changes and
contradictions in conventional truths from bringing down the whole
enterprise is easy enough to grasp; the idea that any doctrine that
negates duality is simultaneously acknowledging duality, and the
psychologically realistic observation that we constantly travel
between logically incompatible systems in everyday life are also
readily understood. But Faure also addresses in rapid fire a series
of comparisons between East and West and between Buddhism and
Hinduism proposed by scholars and often contradicting each other. He
should have reassured his readers that this bewildering mix would be
revisited at greater length in subsequent pages. Brief asides to the
initiates provide further intimidation or annoyance, depending on
your state of mind: remember, if you will, that "Derrida has pointed
out the ideological effects of the attempts to pass immediately
beyond oppositions (Derrida 1972b: 56)." Period. If you don't
already know what "the ideological effects" are, you'd better look
it up.
There are some things you can look up only with great effort. One
locus classicus of the idea that "the passions are awakening" could
be, we are told on p. 60, "Linji's advocacy of the 'true man without
affairs.' " This caught my eye because "without affairs" looks like
(we are not given the Chinese) a translation of wushi, a phrase used
in 1079 by Su Shi as an epithet for his drinking - the drinking one
does when there is rio business to take care of. I think Su's phrase
constitutes an allusion to a story in the Shiji that has nothing to
do with Chan, but it would have been nice to see where Linji
(presumably Linji Yixuan, although the index entry for him does not
cite this page) uses the phrase translated; then one could verify
the wording of the original, figure out if it illuminates Su Shi's
poems - and then try to puzzle out how it relates to Faure's
discussion of "innate enlightenment" since the connection is far
from self-evident.
It is in this chapter that a problem recently much discussed comes
up: the presence or absence of a dualistic world-view in China. This
has implications for literary metaphor as well as the functioning of
Buddhist symbols imported from India (a culture that presumably lies
in the dualistic Western sphere). Faure questions the non-duality of
Chinese thought. He points to the presence of mediative symbols in
popular religion and to the hostility expressed toward the body in
Chan/Zen, which seems to indicate a mind-body split (even though
such a split would contradict professed doctrine). I am willing to
agree that the East-West dichotomy is fuzzier than some have argued,
especially since neither sphere is so monolithic as to exclude
incompatible cosmologies; yet I do not think Faure has seriously
considered whether mediative devices necessarily imply different
levels of reality. If we say that a dream (or recollecting a dream)
mediates between sleep and wakefulness, can we say that sleep and
wakefulness are therefore universally experienced as two distinct
states? Is it not possible that to some people the phenomenon of
dreaming demonstrates the self-evident "fact" that sleep and
wakefulness are simply two phases of a single experience, and that
neither is more "real" that the other? Further: does dualism have
any meaning when you declare both mind and matter unreal? The
statement that "the return to unity as it is extolled implies a
previous departure, or even irremediably produces it" (p. 77) is
problematic. It seems logical, but do the unity and the alleged
departure from it have the same meaning as they have in the West?
Nondualism is not to be written off so easily.
It also worries me that Faure slips increasingly across the sea to
Japan and Zen aesthetics for examples of "secondary nature" (p. 78)
to bolster his argument. He clearly thinks that the Japanese and
Chinese world-views were enough alike to allow him to assert that
symbols in Chan and Zen have the same significance, so much so that
Japanese variations on and additions to continental cultural imports
can be said to speak for Chinese Chan. To be sure, at some level we
must recognize that Chan/Zen is a powerful international ideology;
but when something so subtle as the presence or absence of a
dualistic world-view is at issue, I would welcome evidence that the
vast linguistic and cultural differences between China and Japan
have been controlled in Faure's argument.
"Chan/Zen and Popular Religions," the fourth chapter, first devotes
several pages to assessing various models of the relationship
between popular and hegemonic or dominant cultures (the distinction
between the latter two is deemed significant but never explained; it
apparently has something to do with the obvious fact that levels of
culture, because they overlap imperfectly with social classes or
interest groups, are internally divided; see p. 86). Faure's
(mercifully) unelaborated reference to "new relationships of power
within academia" associated with the increased attention being paid
to popular religion (p. 81), may explain his need to record brief
positions on so many schema in so few pages.
Even when we focus on East Asia, methodological considerations
continue to dominate, and the absence of historical data easily
leads to obscurity. When Faure proposes, on the one hand, that there
is both "a popular and an elitist 'anarchism'" and, on the other,
that "what may strike us at first as subversive, both in Chan and in
popular religion, may actually turn out to be reinforcing the
institutional structure" (p. 91), it sounds insightful. But in the
absence of examples, the point is blurred. "Institutional structure"
is not even defined; as used here, it probably refers to social and
governmental institutions, but the subsequent sentences suggest
instead reference to the structure of the religious institution:
"popular religion might provide the necessary freedom and alterity
that allow institutional power to assert itself. ... Chan and other
institutional religions may need the resistance and subversion of
popular religion in order to survive" (p. 91). Perhaps Eaure means
that Chan is an "institutional religion" in the sense of being
endorsed by the state; indeed, seventy pages earlier he has
mentioned that Chan's "relationship" with the state is "well
documented ... from the eighth century onward." But the nature of
that "relationship" is not detailed in this book. Therefore, when
Faure, in the last sentence in this chapter, explicitly places Chan
and "official" religion in opposition, we conclude that it would be
a mistake to equate "institutional" and "official." It is entirely
possible to define an "institutional" religion as one possessing
hierarchies of authority, enjoying temporal continuity, and
expecting a reliable stream of income from supporters; but then Chan
and most "popular" religions, which Faure also places in opposition,
are equally "institutional." Without actual historical examples of
the various relationships between Chan and the state and Chan and
other religions, we cannot sort out Faure's distinctions because we
don't know what his words mean.
Similarly, it is extremely interesting when he says that Chan/Zen
incorporates thaumaturgy and the manipulation of relics to gamer
popular support; but he also states that its survival and power
depend on struggling against the "subversion" and "alterity" of
popular religion. Both statements may be true, but in order to make
sense of the argument we must be told just when Chan's very survival
or assertion of power (which? and against what forces?) depended on
adopting and/or overcoming (simultaneously or in different phases of
the process?) the "subversion" and "alterity" of popular religion.
Unless one knows to what historical data such sentences apply, they
lack referential meaning (signs in search of signification, if you
will). Such is the case with the assertion that "archaic religion
claimed a perfect adherence to a preexisting superhuman order" (p.
92). Most of us know a little about Shang divination directed to
royal ancestors, but Faure's words could be applied to that only
with considerable elaboration. Without knowing what he identifies as
"archaic religion" we have no way of judging the truth value of his
utterance.
I cannot leave this chapter without quoting its wonderful final
sentence - wonderful for the way in which alternatives, separated by
dashes and no less than five little "or" are tossed one by one like
so many juggler's pins at the hapless reader, until they all come
crashing to the floor: "Suffice it to say that for the time being,
rather than an opposition - even if dialectical - or a fusion
between Chan and local or popular religion, or between Chan and
official religion, we can observe an intertwining of - or a
transferential relationship among - antagonistic or analogous
segments of each of these religious traditions" (p. 95). It is
fortunate that this sentence's position at the end of the chapter
allows one to ruminate on it and then take a breather. It begins to
have the look and feel of a masterful summation. But to really
understand the elegant distinction between "fusion" on the one hand
and both "intertwining" and its alternative, a "transferential
relationship" on the other, does one not need a concrete historical
detail or two? As metaphorical vehicles (borrowed perhaps from
botany), these terms possess a certain power, a definite structural
relationship, but without tenors they finally contribute nothing to
Faure's story.
With chapters five and six, "The Thaumaturge and Its Avatars,"
parts I and II, we begin to encounter fascinating historical
material. There are minor annoyances, to be sure. A rapid survey of
the trickster in ancient China on pp. 115-16, including mention of
"Jieyu, the madman of Zhu" (sic!) takes us up to three poorly linked
but very suggestive lines of inquiry from Norman Girardot's Myth and
Meaning in Early Taoism,(3) but just when one is sitting up and
expecting someone to put it all together, Faure drops the subject
and shifts abruptly back to Chan. Another frustration: on page 120,
the "story of Puhua's death" is mentioned as "clearly patterned on
the Daoist Immortal's 'deliverance from the corpse,' " and again on
page 185 in connection with predicting one's own death; but since we
are never told the relevant version of the story of Puhua's death,
its usefulness in bolstering Faure's points is lost.
At the bottom of page 123, Faure asks a crucial question: "If folly
has become a literary pose or a commodity, to what extent is it
still really subversive? Or to what extent were the Chan trickster
figures domesticated or emasculated?" Then, "[i]nsofar as nature or
naturalness has been co-opted by the ruling class, true nature can
no longer express itself through the paradigm of spontaneity." The
term "ruling classes" has appeared out of nowhere and is meaningless
without context. Maddeningly, we don't know what century we are in,
or even which country: since the following sentence tells us that
Puhua, the outsider in Tang China, was the inspiration for the Fuke
school in thirteenth-century Japan, one guesses in desperation that
the founding of the school represents the institutionalization of
spontaneity and that the "co-opters" must be Japanese. (But a
footnote here mentions that Puhua himself was believed to have been
an army officer. Does that make him a member of the Tang "ruling
class?" Surely not. Does Faure mean to imply this was a fabrication
for the benefit of the military rulers of Japan? In a hurry to get
out of his footnote and into a discussion of "negativity" and
"reversal of symbols," he deserts us.)
Faure cautions us that he intends to outline the role of the
thaumaturgic elements in the acculturation of Chan "only in a
heuristic fashion, in order to reveal the structural logic of those
developments rather than their historical occurrence" (p. 100). Yet
a temporal framework is apparently essential to these two chapters,
and properly so, since "acculturation" takes place over time and
only in historical context. Broad historical generalizations such as
the following are offered and do help us understand the "structural
logic": "Thus for several centuries, Chan chose the trickster over
the thaumaturge" as a "strategy . . . for domesticating the occult"
by making it this-worldly (p. 115).(4)
The big picture aside, Faure often teases us with hints of a more
detailed accounting of Chan's relationship with external factors
waiting to be written, especially regarding developments in the
eighth and ninth centuries. Context suggests that he thinks it was
in the eighth century that the denunciation of thaumaturgic "powers
by Chan masters appears to have been essentially a discursive
strategy, a political move at a time when Tantrism and Daoism were
in favor at the court" (p. 109). It is less clear when it was that
"carnivalization," as realized in Hanshan and Shide, was "certainly
not what the Chan tradition, trying at the time to establish its
authority, needed" (p. 117). Because Hanshan's "[t]raditional dates
range from the end of the sixth to the middle of the ninth century,
the most common view being that he lived during the early T'ang
period," and it is only "recent scholarship" that "has tended to put
him in the late eighth or early ninth century"; and because some
poems attributed to Shide could be as late as the Song,(5) Faure's
phrase "at that time" could refer to any period between the late
sixth and the eleventh centuries. Nowhere in the book does he tell
us when the two figures were created (one hopes he does not consider
them historical) as "carnivalizers" both to support and embarrass
Chan.
Faure implicitly associates Puhua's domestication of the
thaumaturgic tradition(6) with "the time when Han Yu criticized the
emperor for worshipping the Buddha's relic" (p. 121) and states that
it is significant that in the same period Layman Pang and others
worked to make Chan "the religion of 'everyday life'" (p. 124). The
relationship Faure implies between Han Yu and these trends in Chan
would be a most interesting topic to explore at greater length. A
later historical topic, one within Chan itself, is the Song advocacy
of "the superiority of the formless" and the crazy monk ideal as an
inversion of the contemporary "formalization and ritualization of
Chan practice" (p. 124). And most tantalizing is this suggestive
comment dropped in at the very end of chapter six with no
elaboration: "the trickster . . . ideal can be seen as . . . an
attempt to accommodate Chan ideology to the social changes that
marked the Tang/Song transition." Only much later, on page 314, does
Faure hint that the social changes he has in mind for that hundred
or so years have to do with "imperial centralization under the Tang
and the monetarization of the economy during the Sung," which he
associates with the increasing role of "mediation." More work is
needed to develop and support this notion (especially since
"centralization under the Tang" is cruelly oxymoronic for mid- and
late-Tang).
Chapters seven and eight, "Metamorphoses of the Double, I:
Relics" and "II: 'Sublime Corpses' and Icons," challenge us to look
even further beyond the familiar ideology of "wordless transmission"
to the enshrined detritus of the transmitters. "Relics" include both
crystalline fragments left after the cremation of a master's body
and all other remains or articles associated with his person - even
his writings. It is startling to learn that Qisong, the Song figure
who labored to establish the translatability of Buddhism into
Confucianism, ultimately found Buddhism superior because of relics
(p. 139; mere thaumaturgy was not unique to Buddhism and should be
discounted; see n. 27).
Chapter eight's material on mummified monks was interesting to me as
someone who encounters these "icons" from time to time in poetry,
whether as background (e.g., Su Shi's poem at the pagoda of Sengqie
in Sizhou(7)) or as occasion (e.g., Yu Ji's poem for the temple that
enshrined the lacquered corpse of the Tang Chan Master Purun(8)).
One of the most crucial points in this chapter is the status of
highly realistic sculptures (especially in Japan) as "substitute
bodies . . . pointing to no reality beyond themselves" (p. 170).
Despite similar claims Faure makes regarding the patriarch's robe as
the embodiment of the dharma (p. 166), the mortuary portrait as a
double (p. 175), and even the patriarch as an icon, a double, of the
Buddha (p. 178), I feel these assertions are never adequately
substantiated. The manner in which the arhat Pindola is
"consecrated" as the image of the Buddha by King Asoka may be
important evidence for the presence of the sacred in the immediate
object of devotion, but this story is relegated to a footnote (p.
177, n. 59) and comes from a different culture. Faure himself lets
slip that "Chan discourse . . . fluctuated between metaphor and
metonymy, transcendence and immanence" (p. 170), and I suspect that
the status of mummies and sculptures is similarly difficult to pin
down.
Chapter nine, "The Ritualization of Death," centers on the
contradiction between the funerary ritualism that became
increasingly important in Zen from the fourteenth century on and
Chan/Zen subitism and traditional attitudes toward death (p. 179).
Several interesting phenomena are introduced, most notably the
obligations of a Chan master to foretell the time of his death, to
compose death verses, and to die in the meditation posture. Faure
makes the valuable observation that death verses soon became
formulaic, at least by the thirteenth century in Japan. But he ends
his discussion of the topic by asserting that the "departing verse
was not simply intended to testify to the master's enlightenment; it
was producing it and contained, in the litteral [sic] sense, its
'essence.'" Let us note first that a verbal artifact "contains"
something only metaphorically, since it has no spatial dimension; to
refer to the verb's literal sense is to remind us perversely that it
is not being used literally. But the substantive question here is
this: on what basis does Faure make these statements? He has just
cited evidence that in 1295 the death verse was "severely criticized
for having become a mere show." One could understand how it might
nevertheless "testify" politically and ideologically to the master's
enlightenment, but to go beyond that and say that it "produces" and
contains the essence of his enlightenment is to make extravagant if
ill-defined claims for the verse that I suspect no one in 1295,
including the masters who had to write the verses, would have
accepted.
The remainder of the chapter considers the various and contradictory
functions of funerals: to accelerate the transition to death and to
purify, on the one hand, and, on the other, to prolong the memory
and significance of the deceased and to establish continuities. Most
of what is said could apply to the majority of cultures in which
burial or cremation is practiced; perhaps a separate monograph is
needed to show how Zen funerals compare with other funerary customs.
A number of figures - "Schema of the cremation ground" (p. 196);
"The Four Gates and funerary circumambulation" (p. 199); "Symbolism
of the Svastika in Soto Zen" (p. 200); and "Symbolism of postmortem
ordination" (p. 203) - appear in this chapter but are referred to
only obliquely or not at all in the text. Unsupported by
explication, most of them are meaningless. This suggests that the
chapter was put together in haste and edited in the same manner.
Careless editing may also be the culprit in the apparently random
placement of note 30 (and note 32 in chapter ten) and also in the
use of Japanese pronunciations for terms from a Chinese text (p.
193; cf. the mixed use of Sanskrit and Japanese terms - no Chinese
terms - in association with Chinese practices and texts, p. 293, n.
14).
Chapter ten, "Dream Within a Dream," begins in a refreshingly
straightforward manner: "Relics and icons reintroduced presence and
mediation in a world emptied by the Buddhist philosophy of emptiness
and selflessness. Another aspect of the Buddhist 'metaphysics of
presence,' and a crucial mode of mediation, is provided by the
intermediary world of dreams" (p. 209). But dreams are a complex
topic. Rather late in the chapter, Faure introduces a distinction
between the hermeneutical and performative models of dreams: the
former deals with dream interpretation; the latter recognizes that a
dream may be "transformative" and also modify "social structures."
This distinction could have been used profitably as a framework to
give the chapter more shape, since Faure covers both Buddhist
theories on the question of the reality of dreams (which of course
entails the unreality of "reality") and the ways in which dreams are
agents of deepening understanding or legitimization.
Twice in this chapter Faure makes a puzzling choice not to see in
cited texts what I would guess to be the doctrine that there is no
self and therefore no dreamer. On p. 216, where the Damolun states
that when one awakens according to the Dharma there is nothing
"[worth calling] awakening," I would suggest that Faure has
distorted the meaning by adding the words in brackets. On p. 219,
where Dahui asks, "Who is dreaming?" I think the implied answer is,
"No one." "Yogacara idealism, which maintains that everything is a
dream, and only the dreamer is real" (p. 220) is surely irrelevant,
if not incompatible. Since Faure has stated that there is no self to
experience enlightenment (p. 27) and later states that there is "no
'subject' to suffer from" the passions (p. 234), I would ask why
dreams are not an analogous case.
Chapter eleven is a "Digression: The Limits of Transgression." It
covers the problem of the affirmation of desire raised at the
beginning of this review, and the problem of women as a threat to
the enlightenment of men. Tales of both heterosexual and homosexual
transgressions in monastic communities are recounted, but in the end
the reader does not feel that he shall ever know much about how the
issue of sexuality was resolved at any particular moment. Criticism
of moral laxity almost always comes from outside the community,
especially from those who have a stake in exaggerating the
transgressions - not only Jesuits but also writers of fiction in
Ming China and Tokugawa Japan. Valid surveys on sexual practices are
difficult enough to carry out in our own time; they will never be
done retrospectively for previous centuries. Moreover, "[u]nlike in
Christianity, sexuality never really became in Chan/Zen the object
of an elaborate discourse, despite a relatively similar process of
individuation, studied in the Western case by Foucault" (p. 257).
Even if Faure were to expand on his concept of "individuation" (I
take his reference to the Chart master as the "paradigmatic
individual" on p. 191 to be a tongue-in-cheek oxymoron) then, we
shall never understand a discourse on sexuality that did not take
place.
"The Return of the Gods," chapter twelve, concerns mainly the place
of the arhat in Chan/Zen and kami in Zen. A number of explanations
are offered for different cases: local gods are replaced by the holy
man, who borrows some of their iconography (p. 265); outlawed
desires are covertly expressed in the attachment of Hindu themes to
Buddhist figures (p. 265); arhats were somewhat more controllable
than Daoist immortals and at the same time "offered a kind of
transcendence and personal relationship that popular gods" did not
(p. 266); gods in Zen "demythologize" themselves by accepting
abstract, philosophical definitions (p. 280); and ritualization
accomplishes a similar weakening of the gods' individuality (p. 283;
note that Chan/Zen monks themselves become god-like powers that must
be tamed through ritual, pp. 281-82).
The final chapter, "Ritual Antiritualism," puts aside Chan's
antiritualism to explore the "surplus of meaning" in the rituals
that became so much a part of Chan. There are many seminal ideas
here. On p. 296, four suggestive ways of looking at meditation as
ritual are juxtaposed in one rich paragraph: Chan meditation may be
a kind of "depossession" that prepares one for possession by an
"other"; despite that, it is also comparable to possession or to the
trance; sitting in meditation ritually reenacts the awakening of the
Buddha (on p. 299, Faure will state that awakening itself is a
ritual reenactment of it); therefore, it iconizes the "death" that
transcends time and death. These points deserve greater elaboration;
one could also argue that "possession" is undesirable in the absence
of a trustworthy God with whom one hopes to be united.
Another valuable observation is that "the failure of . . . ritual is
actually its success, the creation of a discrepancy between the
ideal and the real (without which both would cease to exist) and the
making guilty of individuals who fall short of the ideal" (p. 299).
Total sacralization of life would be the end of life.
In his "Epilogue," a dense and powerful essay that brings together
all the themes of the book, Faure stresses that the dichotomies he
has explored are not found only between Chan and other traditions
(Buddhist and "popular") but within Chan itself. He argues that the
two levels of truth or discourse laid out in the preceding pages in
all their aspects supplement each other, each maintaining itself
precisely "because of their tensions" (p. 318). Thus, for example,
Chan attempted to limit and purify to "save the ontological reality"
but the very "privatization/secularization" that accompanied this
attempt made ritual, icons, and elaborations necessary in order to
sustain the tradition.
It remains to mention errors that may be confusing for some readers.
There is a tendency for Faure to substitute "z" for "s" in pinyin
romanizations: "sansheng" becomes "zansheng" (pp. 122 and 329); "Huo
jushi" ("incinerating laymen") is written huojuzhi on p. 203. Also
"diyi" and "dier" ("first order" and "second order") are written
with "da" instead of "di" (p. 18).
Names and dates sometimes suffer strange fates. Yelu Chucai's name
is miswritten Yelu Chuzai (p. 27); because his name does not appear
in the character glossary and Faure misidentifies him as a monk, the
reader may think "Yelu Chuzai" is someone else, not the famous Yuan
official and lay Buddhist. Dadian Bastong (p. 146), is an error for
Dadian Baotong. The character glossary includes only "Dadian,"
forcing the curious reader to find a good dictionary for the second
name. Pozao Duo is clearly not "Po the Stove-breaker" (p. 260) but
"Duo the Stove-breaker." Dates for people are sometimes given more
than once, which I found helpful. But sometimes dates are withheld
until late in the book or appear on pages not cited in the index.
Dahui Zonggao first appears on p. 41, but his dates are given on pp.
188 and 219. Sengqie's death date can be inferred on p. 153 and is
stated on p. 158; but his full dates are given only on p. 265. The
index entry for Sengqie does not cite that page (nor are mentions of
him on pp. 118 and 150 cited). Wanhui (whose name becomes "Maihui"
in the character glossary through a transposition of radicals) is
said on p. 265 (not indexed) to have died in 711 - but we were told
on p. 150 that he was buried in 709. Another macabre confusion is
found in n. 14, p. 156: the last example of a mummy being produced
in China is "recorded in Taiwan in 1976. See Welch 1967." Holmes
Welch's The Practice of Chinese Buddhism reports only the 1959
exhumation of a mummy in Taiwan (p. 344); no predictions about
future mummies are made. I suspect that Faure is keeping his
reference for the 1976 mummy to himself; "See Welch 1967" means "See
Welch 1967 for other information on mummies."
If "On the Leaves" seems an impossible translation for Joyo (p.
277), your instincts are correct: the correct name is Yojo. The name
is also backwards in the character glossary.
The date 625 on p. 166 should be 1625. One of two page citations on
p. 243 is clearly wrong: p. 433b cannot follow p. 455a in the source
text.
It is unfortunate that poor editing, not only for these minor
details but also for style and organization, detracts from this
study, for Faure brings enormous erudition and creativity to play
here. Yet in the end, despite all the frustrations I have expressed
above, I come away with the sense that the complexity and richness
of this book reflect more than the bafflements of deconstruction:
they reflect the reality of Chan/Zen itself, in all its oppositions
(dialectical or otherwise), fusions, intertwinings, and
transferential relationships within itself and between it and
antagonistic or analogous religious traditions. Faure's is an
essential study.
1 See part one of Ge Zhaoguang, Chanzong yu Zhongguo wenhua
(Shanghai: Shanghai Renmin chubanshe, 1991).
2 Musicians who know the word "subito" may be able to deduce the
meaning of "subitism." Psychologists who know the new verb
"subitize" designating a subject's instant apprehension of quantity
without counting constituent units, are perhaps better prepared to
comprehend "subitism." Most other Anglo-phone readers will
extrapolate from context; if they recall the mention on p. 33 of
"Demieville's translation of the term dun as 'subit' (sudden)" and
search the OED for English words derived form this Latin root, they
will find only obsolete or rare words often connoting careless
haste.
3 Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1983.
4 The subsequent rise of the thaumaturge implied here is
contradicted on p., 117: "the Chan tradition eventually chose the
trickster against the thaumaturge." I suppose Chan could choose the
trickster for several centuries, allow the thaumaturges to have
their way for a while, and then eventually return to the trickster;
but both the sequence of chapters five and six and much of Faure's
discussion point to a unidirectional movement away from the relative
prominence given earlier to the magical powers of Chan masters and
toward the relative dominance of the trickster image.
5 E. G. Pulleyblank, "Linguistic Evidence of the Date of Hanshan,"
in Studies in Chinese Poetry and Poetics, vol. 1, ed. Miao (San
Francisco: Chinese Materials Center, Inc., 1978), 163 and 175.
6 If Puhua was an officer in 755 - see p. 124, n. 13 - he must have
died before the affair of the Buddha bone in 819 and should not be
directly associated with "mid-Tang Chan." But his acts presumably
helped shape ninth-century developments.
7 Translated by Ronald Egan, Word, Image, and Deed in the Life of Su
Shi (Cambridge: Harvard-Yenching Institute, 1994), 179-80.
8 Translated by Jonathan Chaves, Columbia Book of Later Chinese
Poetry (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1986), 41-42.