Introduction: Buddhist Meditation in China
The earliest surviving Chinese translations of Indian Buddhist texts are those traditionally attributed to An Shigao 安世高(fl. 149–168),1 active in the Chinese capital of Luoyang 洛陽during the waning years of the Han dynasty. An Shigao coined dozens of Chinese translations for the technical vocabulary of Indian Buddhism, most of which continued to be used for
centuries,and many of which remain part of the standard Chinese Buddhist lexicon to this day. His basic approach was remarkably consistent—titles of people or offices (such as bhikṣu, śramaṇa, orbuddha) were transcribed, but other technical terms were translated. Though some of these translations were of dubious philological accuracy, An Shigao evidently felt comfortable at least
trying to find Chinese equivalents for a host of difficult terms, such as nirvāṇa, saṃsāra, andkarma,words that, by way of comparison, often remain untranslated in modern writings on Buddhism. There was, however, one important term that An Shigao might have tried to translate but did not, dhyāna, which in its Chinese transcription chan 禅 became and has remained the
most basic Chinese word for “Buddhist meditation.”That An Shigao did not attempt to translate this word suggests that the practice of Buddhist meditation had no satisfactory parallels in the pre-Buddhist Chinese imaginaire.
ndeed unlike in English, where we must preface “meditation” with “Buddhist,” in China there never was anything other than “Buddhist” chan. More so even than fo 佛, buddha, which on the popular level ultimately becomes a more or less generic designation for a god, the term chan remained exclusively Buddhist.3 As scholars have pointed out, despite the ubiquity
of “Buddhist meditation” in the modern West, and the claims made concerning the centrality of this discipline in traditional Buddhism, it is surprisingly difficult to specify precisely what we mean by thisword or to find an exact
equivalent for it in Indian Buddhist languages.4 In China, however, the1All dates are CE unless otherwise specified. For the sake of convenience I will refer to An Shigao as if he were a single person solely responsible for the translations carried out under his name.
In reality it is almost certain that these texts were translated through a complex process involving numerous actors, and as with many later Indianor Central Asian “translators” in China An Shi gao’s own role may have been rather limited.2It has often been argued, in contrast, that perceived similarities between Buddhist and “Daoist” meditation fostered initial
Chinese interest in these practices. I have elsewhere argued that this conclusion is largely without foundation. See Eric M. Greene (n.d.), “Healing Breaths and Rotting Bones: On the relationship between Buddhist and Chinese meditation practices during the Han-Three Kingdoms period,” unpublished paper.
There does eventually develop in China a pan-sectarian notion of “meditation,” captured in modern Mandarin using expressions such as da zuo 打坐 (“sit [in meditation]”). Note that the practices often seen as pre-Buddhist Chinese parallels to Buddhist meditation do not specify a seated posture, and indeed often explicitly recommend
that they take place while lying down (Maspero 1987, 501–515). Eventually, however, some forms of Daoist cultivation do come to take place in the Buddhist posture for seated meditation, and by the Song dynasty (960–1279) even the
Confucians were proposing that “silent sitting” (jing zuo 靜坐) be done in the Buddhist cross-legged (jia fu 跏趺) posture (Gernet 1981, 292). It is interesting to note that what links these activities is a physical posture, not a mode of
thought, and in this respect the perceived connection is rather different than in the diverse disciplines united by the English word “meditation.”ponberg 1986. As Sponberg points out, the terms in Indian Buddhist languages denoting what we would like
situation is clearer, perhaps because unlike their Indian counterparts Chinese Buddhists were not obliged to explain how their program of cross-legged exertion differed from outwardly similar practices of other sects.5 So too prior to the seventh century, when new debates within Chinese Buddhism occasionally gave the word chan a polemical status, there was little
disagreement about the importance or value of chan, at least theoretically. Accordingly whatever the difficulties of circumscribing the topic of “Buddhist meditation” within Buddhism as a whole, inthe case of Chinese Buddhism the practice and theory of chan provides a clear object of study.
This dissertation is an attempt to explicate certain aspects of the Chinese understanding of chan as it developed between roughly 400 and 600 CE, with an emphasis on sources dating from the first half of the fifth century. My reasons for focusing on this time period in particular are twofold. First, though texts discussing chan had been known in China since the time of
An Shigao, as I will argue in chapter one only beginning in the early fifth century did appreciable numbers of Chinese Buddhists actually take up this practice in an organized or regular form.Second, this is when Chinese compositions (as opposed to translations of Indian texts)specifically devoted to chan first appear, something almost certainly connected to the increasing importance of chan as an actual practice.
Though these texts quickly entered the Chinese Buddhist canon and are normative and prescriptive in character, they were composed in an environment in which chan practice was fast becoming a regular part of Chinese Buddhist monastic life, at least for some. Thus while we do not know to what extent the specific meditation techniques they proposed were ever put into practice,
these texts are not merely theoretical reflections. Even if the authors of these texts did not themselves engage in any of the stipulated practices, contemporaneous readers would have taken them as attempts to explain practices that were just then beginning to have a real presence within Chinese Buddhism.
Indeed it was during this time period, I will suggest, that certain key ideas about the nature, meaning,and practice of Buddhist meditation became established, ideas that would continue to inform the Chinese approach to this discipline in the ensuing centuries.The importance of this period in the development of the Chinese understanding of Buddhist meditation has,
moreover, generally been overlooked. This is owing at least in part to the historically strong influence of Japanese sectarian considerations on the study of medieval Chinese Buddhism. Since the later lineages of Chinese Buddhism most associated
with“Buddhist meditation” to denote tend to be either too narrow, referring to specific states of absorption (dhyāna,samādhi, samāpatti), or too broad, referring to nearly all aspects of religious practice (bhāvanā).
The word yoga may also be an appropriate equivalent to “Buddhist meditation,” but this term is not used in early Buddhist writings, and was adopted only later when Buddhism entered into a period of more direct dialog and confrontation with Brahmanism (Bronkhorst 2011, 165–167). Thus Sponberg (see previous note) ultimate concludes that what we usually call “Buddhist meditation” is“dhyāna undertaken for the sake of bhāvanā,” and this caveat is necessary because the tradition considers thatdhyāna is something also practiced by non-Buddhists.
In China, however, chan 禪 was usually assumed to be something undertaken to achieve Buddhist goals. Throughout this dissertation, unless otherwise specified, the words “meditation,” “Buddhist meditation,” or“meditation practice” can be assumed to be English translations of chan, though in chapter three I will propose that when chan refers to a specific state of consciousness, that is to say the hoped-for fruit of the practice of meditation, it should be translated as “trance
meditation practice were Chan (禪)7 and Tiantai (天台), both of which eventually became distinct institutions in Japan, Japanese scholars have tended to approach the early development of Chinese Buddhist meditation through the traditional historiography of these schools. This has led to a great deal of interest in the distinctive approach to meditative cultivation associated with early Chan (beginning primarily from the late seventh century), as well as a large scholarly output concerning the meditation teachings associated with Zhiyi 智顗 (538–597), founder of the Tiantai tradition. ne problem with the sectarian approach is that it tends to ignore everything that came before.
The early Tiantai writings in particular have generally been seen as the wellspring from which most later Chinese approaches to meditation derive, even though from a historical point of view they loom as large as they do in the minds of scholars only because almost all other sixth-century Chinese writings on chan, of which we know there were many,have been lost.9 But perhaps more perniciously, each side tends to see its founders as the progenitors of a unique and unprecedented form of meditation, viewing all other approaches as representative of“traditional” Indian understanding.
Those studying Chan have thus tended to see Zhiyi as promoting a traditionally Indian “gradual” conception of meditation, one that Chan went beyond through its teachings of “sudden” awakening.10 In contrast Tiantai scholars have seen in Zhiyi’slater writings (which in Tiantai historiography are the full expression of Zhiyi’s thought) a criticism of the exclusive emphasis on concentration meditation (dhyāna, i.e. chan) characteristic of both early Chan and generic “Indian” or “Hīnayāna” meditation practice. Regardless of which side one chooses to exalt as its final flowering, the Chinese understanding of Buddhist meditation is thus assumed to have had little or no independent development prior to the late sixth century.
Indian approaches, on the level of both theory and practice, are accordingly assumed to have arrived in China at an unspecified date and simply continued unaltered until being revolutionized by either Zhiyi or Bodhidharma depending on one’s chosen perspective. Common sense suggests that this model, more often implied than actually argued for, cannot be entirely correct. Nevertheless Chinese approaches to Buddhist meditation prior to the late sixth century have remained more or less unexplored.
These are what I will attempt to uncover in this dissertation. And though the sources that give us access to these earlier Chinese traditions do not necessarily reveal the nuances of their historical development Following scholars such as T. Griffith Foulk I restrict the word Chan (capital “c”) to those groups who beginning in the late seventh century traced their spiritual lineage to Bodhidharma (Foulk 2007). While those claiming such lineage did often attempt to appropriate the word chan, i.e. “Buddhist meditation,” this appropriation was multifaceted, and they did not simply endorse meditation practice as it was understood by other Chinese Buddhists.
Moreover other groups continued to use the word chan in a non-sectarian way, though this became more difficult as the influence of the Chan lineage grew and the word chan became more and more associated with it. Zhiyi would not have thought of himself in these terms, and the notion of a Tiantai lineage developed only slowly in the years after his death (Penkower 1992 and 2000; Chen 1999).9The Tiantai texts were preserved only because they were taken to Japan and Korea during the Tang dynasty,from where they were reintroduced to China in the tenth century (Brose 2008).
See for example Bielefeldt 1988, 78–106 who, though providing a nuanced account of how early Chan meditation teachings departed from the standards set by Zhiyi, tends to equate Zhiyi’s approach with“traditional” Indian methods of meditation. A similar approach is taken by McRae
during the fifth and sixth centuries, they do allow us to reconstruct some of the most important and shared features of how chan was thought about during this time, and what mastering and practicing itwas thought to entail.Most of the sources I will draw from have been known to scholars of Chinese Buddhism and are contained within the so-called Chinese Buddhist canon (da zang jing 大藏經).
Despite their ready availability, their importance for our understanding of the history and development of Chinese approaches to Buddhist meditation during the fifth and sixth centuries has not been sufficiently appreciated.12 Here again at least some blame can be laid at the feet of the Japanese sectarian approach to Chinese Buddhist history, as the two key texts I will draw from, the Scripture on the Secret Essential Methods of Chan (Chan mi yao fa jing 禪祕要法經, ChanEssentials hereafter) and the Essential Methods for Curing Chan Sickness (Zhi chan bing mi yaofa 治禪病秘要法; Methods for Curing hereafter), have usually been examined not in connection with later Chinese writings on chan, which given their titles and content one might expect to be the logical point of comparison, but as the background material for understanding the Immeasurable Life Contemplation (Guan wu liang shou fo jing 觀無量壽佛經), a so-called apocryphal Chinese scripture compiled sometime during the fifth century that serves as a keytext in the Japanese Pure-land (Jōdo 浄土) schools.
As I will discuss in chapter two there is indeed a close historical connection between these texts, and also a larger corpus of fifth-century Chinese scriptures known as the Contemplation Scriptures (guan jing 觀經). If the goal is to contextualize the Immeasurable Life Contemplation,the Chan Essentials and Methods for Curing are thus indeed quite helpful. The problem, however, is the tendency to approach these sources only as precursors to the Immeasurable Life Contemplation. On the one hand this results in examining primarily those features of the texts that directly pertain to their supposed successor(s).13 On the other hand it means that scholars have tended to overlook the importance of these texts for understanding later Chinese approaches to chan.
This is because in the traditional Japanese reading the key import of the Immeasurable Life Contemplation is the promotion of a non-meditative practice of intoning the name of Amitābha, something that supposedly replaced the various complex meditative practices previously considered necessary for salvation.15 The Chan Essentials and Methods for Curing have thus been seen as part of a tradition of meditation practice that, while perhaps popular in Central Asia, was superseded in China by the “Pure-land” practices of the Immeasurable Life Contemplation, practices that were, supposedly, sharply distinguished from chan per se.
In English, the most detailed study of many of the major sources I will use in this dissertation is Yamabe 1999b,and Yamabe’s studies have been instrumental in my work on this material. Thus most Japanese studies of the Chan Essentials have focused on how this text treats “contemplating the Buddha” (guan fo 觀佛) or “bringing to mind the Buddha” (nian fo 念佛), the main practice promoted in the Immeasurable Life Contemplation.14In the traditional terminology, san 散 as opposed to ding 定 (this later word, it must be noted, is usually considered equivalent to chan 禪).
For a consideration of the difficulty in separating “Pure-land” and “Chan” approaches to liberation in somewhat later times, see Sharf 2002b, though his study concerns Chan more so than chan.16A further point is that both the Chan Essentials and Methods for Curing are, with only a few exceptions, patentlynon-Mahāyāna in both narrative style and assumed soteriology, while the Immeasurable Life Contemplation
In this dissertation I thus aim to break free of the sectarian typologies that have informed scholarly approaches to early Chinese Buddhist meditation and in the process uncover certain features of a basic Chinese understanding of chan that, I will argue, crystallized during the first half of the fifth century. The traditions of meditation that developed during this time, both the concrete regimes of practice (whose existence can be known only indirectly) and the texts that those who followed or promoted such practices produced, seem to have come into being in south China during the Song dynasty (420–479 CE), a time and place during which were active a large number of Indian missionaries claiming to be, or at least remembered as,
“meditation masters”(chan shi 禪師), a title not used in Chinese Buddhism prior to this time. The Chan Essentials and Methods for Curing can be read, I will suggest, as stemming from this milieu, and as reflecting the understanding that developed among the followers of these foreign meditation masters, who seem to have established the first enduring traditions of Buddhist meditation practice in China.
Such is the basic historical context within which I will situate my study of fifth- and sixth-century Chinese Buddhist meditation texts. As for the questions I will attempt to answer,stated in broadest terms they are twofold. The first concerns the nature and meaning of the experiences Buddhist meditation was thought to produce; the second concerns the way these experiences were understood to relate to other forms of Buddhist ritual and practice. Put slightly differently, what was meditation thought to do, and what were people thought to do with meditation? Although these questions are quite general, they are, I believe, foundational.
To a great extent the concept of “meditation” has been naturalized in scholarly discussions on Buddhism, such that “meditation texts” and “meditation practices” are often mentioned without feeling the need to specify just what kind of thing “meditation” really is or was thought to be in these cases. Part of my aim in this dissertation has thus been to question some of these assumptions, or at least to look at them afresh in the context of a careful analysis of a cohesive body of primary sources usually described using this word.I thus begin with the question of experience, and in particular the “meditative experiences” thought to result from meditation practice.
Because my own approach to this question will differ somewhat from them, I must first discuss, if only schematically, the principal ways that scholars of religion, and so-called mysticism and Buddhist meditation more particularly, have approached this at times controversial topic. For heuristic purposes three basic methodologies may be distinguished, which I will refer to as the “perennialist,” “constructivist,”and “performative.”17(and indeed the remainder of the Contemplation Scriptures) are in contrast written in the style of Mahāyānascriptures and present distinctly Mahāyāna ideas.
As I will discuss in chapter one, scholarly analysis of the history of Chinese Buddhist meditation has tended to conflate “Hīnayāna” with “Indian.” Apparently“Hīnayāna” texts such as the Chan Essentials and Methods for Curing are often assumed to have been of little interest or influence in China, and to have served only as the precursors or raw materials out of which Chinese approaches to meditation were devised.17The designations “perennialist” and “constructivist” are relatively common in the literature (e.g. Forman
In the perennialist approach “religious experience” explains religion.18 The doctrines,rituals, and literature of religious traditions are explained as the expressions of one or many experiences. The “constructivist” approach, which became dominant in the academy beginning in the 1970s,19 is the precise opposite of this—experiences become what need to be explained.Among scholars favoring this understanding so-called mystical experiences, taken by theperennialists as prior to language and culture,
are discussed as “constructed” from the beliefs,practices, and expectations of those who have them, and exploration of these domains is taken a sa way of explaining those experiences. Scholars studying Buddhist meditation have if not followed then at least mirrored these contrasting approaches. It was thus once common to interpret Buddhist doctrines as elaborations of meditative experiences. The contrasting approach, which emerged later, was in keeping with the constructivists—rather than explaining Buddhist doctrines as interpretations of meditative experiences some scholars began to think of Buddhist meditation as the generation of“deliberately contrived exemplifications of Buddhist doctrine.”
In this understanding Buddhist meditation texts are not records of the experiences of past virtuosos, but practical guidebooks for inculcating experiences that conform to the expectations of the tradition. What I will dub the “performative” approach can be seen as a criticism of both the perennialists and the constructivists.23 Rather than positing experience as an explanation (in the manner of the perennialists) or trying to explain the experiences people claim to have (as would the constructivists), the “performative” approach questions the explanatory value of the category“experience” at all, since “experience” as an inner event to which the subject has privileged access by definition cannot impinge on publicly available discourse.
To this methodological question about how we might use, or not, the category“experience” to interpret or explain our data, Robert Sharf adds a historical conclusion specific nly beginning in the late 18th century was “religious experience” discussed in the now familiar terms. This idea is usually traced to Schleirmacher, who argued that the essence of religion was an inner, personal “intuition” or“feeling” (Proudfoot 1985). However Schleirmacher did not himself use the word “experience” (Erlebnis), and his ideas were linked to debates about “religious experience,” a term originally used in the context of conversion experiences among Anglo-American Protestants, only towards the end of the 19th century (Taves 2004).
he 1978 publication of Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis edited by Steven Katz, though not the beginning of the revolution, marks the moment when it had gotten fully under way. Precursors to the constructivist trend can be found from the very beginning of the modern study of mysticism, and one scholar has noted Rufus M.Jones’Studies in Mystical Religion from 1909 as perhaps the earliest example (Almond 1990, 212). Wayne Proud foot’s Religious Experience stands as the most articulate presentation of this position. Scholars must, he suggests, ultimately provide an explanation, an account of “why the subject was confronted with this particular set of alternative ways of understanding his experience and why he employed the one he did”(Proudfoot 1985, 223).21See for example Conze 1968, 213. For a sophisticated attempt to demonstrate this in the case of one particular doctrine, see Schmithausen 1973.
For a more recent analysis in this vein, see Obeyesekere 2012, 19–30. Gimello 1978, 19323 For the purposes of this introduction the “performative” approach is that articulated by Sharf 1995 and 1998. For criticisms of Sharf’s attempts to apply this approach to Buddhism and Buddhist meditation, see Gyatso 1999 and Dreyfus 2011.24As Sharf puts its, “while experience—constructed as that which is ‘immediately present’—may indeed be both irrefutable and indubitable, we must remember that whatever epistemological certainty experience may offer is gained only at the expense of any possible discursive meaning or signification” (Sharf 1998,
to Buddhism—namely, that taking the telos of religious forms to lie in a special kind of personal experience is a modern rather than traditional way of approaching Buddhism in general and Buddhist meditation in particular. Buddhists, Sharf argues, did not partake of our post-Cartesian sensibilities in which inner experience stands over and against outward performance. Not judging personal experiences privileged sources of authority or knowledge, they did not seek them out through meditation (its commonly understood purpose) but rather aimed to embody the Buddhist teachings, to “enact” rather than generate ideal states of experience through, loosely put, “ritual,” an activity that Sharf insists should not be thought of as mere show.
Sharf does not deny that Buddhist meditators had experiences, but he suggests that such experiences “were not considered the goal of practice,” and moreover considers that Buddhists themselves, at least the sophisticated ones, appreciated the epistemological problems inherent in any attempt to ground public claims to authority in private experiences. My own approach to these questions begins with the recognition that what we have before us are texts, not experiences. The primary subject of my investigation is thus not meditative experiences per se, but the understanding of meditative experience that fifth-century Chinese chan texts presuppose. And indeed these texts speak of little else, such that we cannot help but confront this question.
Their “rhetoric of meditative experience,” however, is indeed very different from what Sharf identifies in the case of modernist Buddhist movements, the“extolling [of] experience as a superior form of knowledge, i.e. superior to ‘second-hand’knowledge gleaned from teachers or texts,” and in contrast to this our texts patently assume that the significance of meditative experiences will not be transparent to the subject.
Accordingly though I will follow Sharf and refrain from applying what he calls the “hermeneutic of experience” (invoking “experience” as either an explanation or what is explained),28 I will not ignore what these texts have to say about the importance of the personal experiences obtained through meditation. Rather I will take as the object of my study the strategies the texts themselves use for interpreting or explaining the significance of the experiences they assume people will have.The most important meditative experiences discussed by texts such as the ChanEssentials and Methods for Curing are what I will call “verificatory visions,” a concept that I will introduce in chapter one.
I use the term “visions” because they are presented as the suddenarising of new objects of consciousness described in primarily visual terms, as something themeditator suddenly “sees.” By “verificatory” I mean that these visions are not significant merely as acts of perception or as the acquisition of knowledge relative to the object seen. Rather the occurrence of the vision—having this particular experience—is deemed to signify something about the person to whom it appears.
Indeed given the assumption that meditation is part of a path to liberation, all meditative experiences in Buddhism must have been understood to have this quality, at least in part. Even when the results of meditation are said to be insight into some25Sharf 1995, 269; Sharf 200526Sharf 1998, Sharf 1995, Sharf ascribes a “hermeneutic of experience” to modernist Buddhists or modern scholars who interpret the ultimate referent of Buddhist rituals, doctrines, or texts as specific, identifiable experiences in the minds of practitioners (Sharf 1995)
particular doctrinal truth, the point is not that by having such an experience the meditator finally becomes convinced of these truths or finally understands what they really mean; or at least this is not the only point. Having such an insight has soteriological value, and this means that having
this experience “verifies” that the meditator has reached a certain level of attainment. While all accounts of Buddhist meditation are thus predicated on the idea that meditative attainment is “verificatory” in this manner, the Chan Essentials and Methods for Curing illustrate this point particularly clearly because they describe “verificatory visions” that are symbolic.
I use symbol here in the tradition of Peirce’s tripartite division of signs into icons,indexes, and symbols 30—a symbol has only a conventional relationship to its object, contrasted with an icon, which designates by way of similarity or likeness (such as a map) or by partaking in the very substance of what is designated (a lover’s hair), and an index, which has a dynamic or temporal connection to its object (such as a stop sign, whose location indexes the place where one should stop, or crying, which indexes the presence of sadness). To understand what I mean when I say that in the Chan Essentials and Methods for Curing meditative experiences (in particular “verificatory visions”) are symbolic we may contrast them with the way that the stages of Buddhist meditation are more typically depicted and, more to the point, the way such accounts are typically read.
Consider the canonical stock passage describing the first dhyāna, the most basic attainment of Buddhist meditation:Here, oh monks, having separated from desires, having separated from unwholesome dharmas, a monk reaches to and then abides in the first dhyāna, which is accompanied by applied and sustained thought, and endowed with bliss and joy.
This makes Buddhist accounts of meditative experience rather different from the classical descriptions of mystical experience given by William James or others, where mystical experiences are sources of direct or unmediated knowledge, and are deemed important largely because they prove, at least to the subject, the existence of God or attest to other potentially disputed religious truths. As those who have studied the notion of religious experience have noted, the elaboration of this concept since the late 18th century has occurred largely in a polemical context where the validity of religious truths were being questioned (Proudfoot 1985; Taves 1999).
One reason for appealing to supposedly direct, unmediated “experience” was thus to forestall criticism about such truths—these things are known to be true because they have been observed using a faculty carrying the objective validity of sense perception, the basis upon which scientific truths are established. (The similarity between mystical experiences and sensory perception is a major theme in The Varieties of Religious Experience.)And while Buddhist doctrinal texts do, in the context of polemical debate, sometimes aver to “yogic perception”(yogi-pratyakṣa) as proof (pramāṇa) for certain truths, Buddhist meditation texts almost always preach to the choir, presuming that the truths of Buddhism are accepted by the reader or practitioner.
Directly perceiving these truths through insight is thus held to be significant not because this is what finally allows the practitioner to be convinced that they are true, but because this is what attests to the practitioner’s attainment of specific stages along the path to awakening. In East Asia this understanding indeed seems to have often been explicit, and one of the most basic words for soteriologically significant meditative attainment is zheng 證, “verification.” Peirce 1955.
See also Burks 1949. In Peirce’s writings these terms refer not to different signs but different relationships between what he calls the “sign form” and the “object,” what Saussure would call the signifier and the signified (Hanks 1996, 39). My attempts here to apply Peircian terminology to something like experience,which is not overtly framed as an act of communication, is deeply indebted to Rappaport’s use of this frame workin his analysis of ritual and religion more generally (Rappaport 1979, 173–246; 1999). 31A stop sign also communicates symbolically in that only by convention does an octagonal red placard at a street intersection mean “stop.” The indexical component is the “here” of the placard’s full meaning, “stop here.”32Idha bhikkhave bhikku vivecc' eva kāmehi vivicca askulalehi dhammehi savitakaṃ savicāraṃ vivekajam
Introduction: Buddhist Meditation in China The typical approach is to assume that this provides both an ontological account of what the firstdhyāna is and a phenomenological account of what it is like to reach it or abide in it. Because the discussion here concerns, at least in part, the mind and consciousness (though “bliss” is interpreted as a bodily sensation), our Cartesian habits make this reading natural. But when we consider the “verificatory” character of meditative attainment the arguably more important question is a semiotic one—what is it that verifies or communicates to the meditator (or anyone else) that the first dhyāna has indeed been obtained?
When we assume that for meditative states there is a one to one correspondence between ontology and phenomenology then the semiotic question has a trivial answer—a description of what the first dhyāna is is also a statement about the experience that verifies that one has reached it.In Peircian terms we may say that a phenomenological reading of Buddhist meditation texts assumes, among other things, that the semiosis of meditative experience is exclusively iconic—that, for example, what communicates the attainment of dhyāna can only be an experience describable in terms reminiscent of or equal to the ontology of the first dhyāna itself as a particular mental (and also perhaps bodily) state.
This seems to be at least part of what we might mean by saying that the experience of verification is direct.33 However traditional Buddhist meditation texts rarely give clear reasons for assuming this reading. Thus the canonical account of the first dhyāna cited above does not say, after listing the mental and bodily factors present in the first dhyāna, that verification of the attainment of the first dhyāna takes place only by direct observation of those self-same factors. In fact early Buddhist sources are generally silent as to how meditative attainments are to be verified.The later “meditation manuals” that I will examine in this dissertation address such questions directly.
Thus in the Meditation Scripture (Zuo chan san mei jing 坐禪三昧經), a fifth-century Chinese translation of an Indian meditation manual that I will discuss in more detail in chapter one, the method for obtaining dhyāna through the so-called “contemplation of impurity” (in which the meditator focuses his mind on a skeleton) concludes as follows:If the mind remains fixed for a long time [on the bones] then it will begin to accord with the factors of dhyāna. When one obtains dhyāna there are three signs. [First,] the body will feel blissful, relaxed, and at ease. [Second,] from the white bones [that the meditator has been contemplating] light will stream forth, as if they were made of white jade.
Third, the mind becomes calm and still. This passage, parallels to which occur in many contemporaneous sources, reveals a concern not merely with methods for reaching dhyāna or with the mental factors that characterize it, but with providing experiential criteria for determining when dhyāna has in fact been obtained.pītisukhaṃ pathamam jhānam upasampajja viharati (SN, 5.307).
Part of what those who have emphasized the immediate or direct nature of “religious experience” seem to be trying to describe is what I here call an “iconic” experience. Indeed those who discuss such experiences often explicitly contrast them to “symbolic” forms of knowledge or communication. See for example Wayne Proudfoot’s discussion of Schleirmacher and those following after him (Proudfoot 1985, 1–40; note in particular the examples from the writings of Ernst Cassirer on p.26–27).
Three signs are given here whereby a meditator can know that dhyāna has been obtained.Two of them—the relaxed body and the calm mind—can indeed be though of as iconic because they are similar to the factors that actually characterize the state of dhyāna. But the third sign cannot. Here verification occurs not through an internal observation of the mind or body but through a change in the object of the mind.
In other words the meditator has a vision. Because the content of the experience (what it is “about” in a phenomenological sense) is not directly connected with dhyāna itself as a state of body and mind (what it is “about” in a semiotic sense),this experience can be called symbolic.35 A principal conclusion of this dissertation is that Buddhist meditation texts, such as the Meditation Scripture here, often explicitly allow for anon-iconic semiotics of meditative experience in this sense.
What I will call “verificatory visions” are thus symbolic experiences that verify the attainment of particular meditative states. These were the experiences that fifth-century Chinese chan texts thought that meditators would have. That they were symbolic in this way allowed them to become both varied and elaborate, for as symbols they were no longer constrained by similarity to what they designated. Indeed we will see in chapters three and four that in the ChanEssentials and Methods for Curing they occasionally reach epic proportions.
But in all cases the meaning of these visions was assumed to be at least potentially opaque to the uninitiated(another inherent feature—or bug—of symbolic communication).36 Indeed an entirely different kind of symbolic vision was also thought to be possible, indicating not success but the presence of obstacles (we will see many examples of these in chapter four). Providing a means to distinguish between evil visions and auspicious visions seems to have been one of the principal functions of these texts. Neither records of the experiences of past virtuosos nor guidebooks for self-consciously generating normative experiences, these texts present themselves as handbooks for the interpretation of visions.
Using the distinction between iconic and symbolic experiences we can see how fifth-century Chinese Buddhists may have been deeply concerned with securing personal experiences without attributing to them Cartesian assumptions. Here “personal” can, perhaps, be seen as corresponding to the final Peircian sign, the index. “Verificatory visions” verify something about the person to whom they appear, and this creates what Perice called a “dynamic” connection between the sign-form (the appearance of the vision) and its meaning (“attainment for you”).
I would thus suggest that fifth-century Chinese Buddhists did think that chan would lead to Though the tradition would not necessarily distinguish these as iconic versus symbolic (direct versus conventional), a similar distinction does seem to be made by Zhiyi, who in the context of these same verificatory visions distinguishes the arising of mental states that bear a resemblance to the previous mental states of which they are result (and hence “iconic” by my definitions) from the appearance of new objects of consciousness,which as the ripening of karma (vipāka) are of a different character than their causes (see chapter four).
Indeedvipāka, “karmic fruition,” may be the perfect emic category for what I am here calling the “symbolic.” The most important point is thus perhaps not that “symbolic” communication is conventional (something that, in anyevent, is always at least a second-order observation, signifiers and signifieds having, for those who use them, an apparently necessary relationship—see Benveniste 1969), but that unlike “iconic” communication it is obscure,such that the relationship between cause and effect, between signifier and signified, is assumed to be difficult to determine.36As Rappaport notes symbolic communication, by separating signifier and signified, allows for the possibility of lying in a way that is impossible, or at least more difficult, when one is restricted to icons (Rappaport 1979, 223–227).10
Introduction: Buddhist Meditation in China personal experiences in this sense. But this does not mean that they held the symbolic meaning of such experiences to be immediate or indubitable.The full meaning of a meditative attainment as understood by fifth-century Chinese chan texts is thus “attainment for you.” While “for you”is understood directly, “attainment” (or conversely, “hindrance”) is the symbolic component,whose meaning can be, and indeed must be, determined through eminently public means.This then brings us to the second question: the connections thought to exist between meditative experiences and other Buddhist rituals and practices. As I phrased it above, what did people do with meditation?
In many ways this is the heart of my project, and it connects to the broader question of just what Buddhist meditation was ultimately thought to be. As I will showin chapters four and five, one of the most distinctive features of fifth-century Chinese meditation texts is the way that meditative experiences are taken to signify not just inner mental attainments, but the fruits of, or conversely the need for, rituals, specifically practices of repentance (chan hui 懺悔). Indeed in fifth- and sixth-century China chan seems to have been valued in large measure as a means of divining the efficacy of such rites, which during this time were beginning to form the core of Chinese Buddhist liturgical life.
In order to make clear what is distinctive about this way of understanding the connections between meditation, its fruits, and the broader ritual or liturgical context within which it was practiced, we need to first review the“canonical” understanding of this question. The most basic Buddhist presentation of the relationship between meditation and other forms of religious practice is the so-called path to liberation or mārga, which according to classical interpretations comprises three components: śīla (“good conduct”), samādhi(“concentration”; sometimes given as dhyāna), and prajñā (“wisdom”). A slightly more inclusive version adds to the head of the list dāna, “giving” (in a traditional context making donations to the Sangha), and combines samādhi and prajñā into a single item, bhāvanā,“cultivation.”
A full exploration of the various meanings of these terms is beyond the scope of this introduction and even the dissertation as a whole, and I present them here schematically only soas to make clear that traditional Buddhist soteriology does posit an undeniable hierarchy between the “external” practices of “conduct” and “giving,” technically classified as actions of body or speech, and the “internal” practice of meditation, action of the mind.38 In other words the dependence among the elements of the path is unidirectional, such that while it is possible tofully cultivate dāna and śīla without significant attainment in dhyāna or prajñā, not so thereverse. One result of this is that in classical or even post-classical formulations of the Buddhist path external and internal practices are segregated.
Once having begun to cultivate samādhi ordhyāna further progress is presented as something that takes place within and by the mind alone. hough bhāvanā is sometimes translated as “meditation,” etymologically “cultivation” is preferable since as the verbal noun of the causative form of √bhū, “to exist,” its literal meaning is something like “bringing into being.”Following our discussion above, I would suggest that, in contrast to “meditate,” “cultivate” also better captures the “verificatory” nature of Buddhist meditation by referencing the way that the fruits of meditation are the creation or generation of attainments pertaining to the meditator.38Thus in the traditional division of the elements of the so-called noble eight-fold path into śīla, samādhi, andprajñā it is explained that śīla pertains to actions of body and speech (“right speech,” “right action,” and “right livelihood”), while the remaining members pertain to mind.11 Introduction: Buddhist Meditation in China Moreover with this schema in place the telos of each practice only ever points “upward,” and just as in the “hermeneutic of experience” noted by Sharf among modern interpreters the purpose of external behavior (such as śīla) lies in its ability to help engender specific inner, or at least mental experiences.This teleological understanding is the one generally deployed by modern scholars to explain why it is that meditation depends on “pure” śīla, a requirement mentioned in all traditional Buddhist meditation texts. Though often passed over quickly or in silence,39 those who do address this question usually interpret the teleology of the mārga in psychological terms,such that śīla, refraining from unethical actions, becomes a preliminary meditation practice, there straint of the gross evil mental tendencies that lead to external actions of body and speech.
Although it is surely correct to insist that śīla was traditionally valued in terms of the overall path of practice, defining it solely as “ethics” or “morality”41 risks overlooking the connection between śīla and formal ritual. Indeed pure śīla was neither simply the absence of wrongdoing nor a personal commitment to a set of abstract moral guidelines, but a positive condition generated by taking on a specific set of vows, an event whose validity depended not on the mind, but on actions of body and speech (in a word, ritual).
In other words one needed to become and remain a formal member of the Buddhist community through the proper performance of publicly verified rites, and strictly speaking even the most “ethical” person cannot successfully practice meditation until they have undergone ordination (formally, a public undertaking of a set of vows), while a serial murderer who ordains as a monk or nun can,without in any way expiating his past sins, succeed in meditation practice, as illustrated in the famous story of the killer turned arhat Aṅgulimālya.43 The organization of the mārga thus implies that success in meditation depends on performing the rituals that create pure śīla, both Thus Edward Conze, in his dated but in its time influential introduction to Buddhist meditation devotes only a single sentence to this question, noting that before beginning meditation practice “the observance of the moral rules must in any case have become nearly automatic” (Conze 1975, 20). More recent compendiums have even less to say about the matter (Bucknell and Kang 1997; Shaw 2006).
Similarly the most important collection of scholarly studies of the Buddhist path (mārga) in a pan-Buddhist perspective says almost nothing about śīla, the articles being entirely devoted to various approaches to “meditation” as either dhyāna, prajñā, or both (Buswelland Gimello 1992). Attempts to compare Buddhist meditation to “meditation” in other traditions, or to study the neurological effects of meditation practice, also usually end up defining “meditation” in terms that implicitly sever any connection to external practices (Kohn 2009; Lutz et. al 2007).40Vajirañāṇa 1962, 79; King 1980, 28; Gunaratana 1985, 16; Gethin 1998, 170.
Note, however, that the technical explanation in the Pāli texts from which the above authors draw is different, namely that breaking one’s śīla will produce “remorse,” kaukṛṭya, the presence of which impedes dhyāna (Gunaratana 1985, 15). In other words the traditional explanation is not that refraining from misdeeds trains the mind and allows it to practice meditation,but that committing misdeeds generates something that actively prevents meditation.41As does, for example, Winston King, who explains only that to practice meditation one must be “a morally sincere person” (King 1980, 28). The specific items in the various sets of “rules for training” (śīkṣāpada) are often called “precepts,” but this translation is misleading.
They are not merely “commands or injunctions” (as “precept” is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary;http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/149594, accessed April 6th2012), but things to which one has made a formal commitment. The translation “precept” no doubt stems from this word’s formerly common use in reference to the Ten Commandments, which to early Western scholars of Buddhism no doubt seemed the closest Occidental parallel. Another way to say this is that question of the purity of one’s śīla is very different from the question of one’s karma, though as we will discuss in chapters four and five this distinction gradually becomes more porous.
Introduction: Buddhist Meditation in China ordination itself and also the poṣadha, the fortnightly rite of confession and atonement.That fifth-century Chinese chan texts would posit an essential link between meditation and rituals of repentance (chan hui 懺悔) is thus not unexpected. What does seem unprecedented is that in these texts significance flows not merely “upwards” from external ritual to internal meditation, but “downwards,” from meditative experiences to public ritual practice. This occurs because rather than presenting chan as something only accessible to those with pure śīla, fifth-century Chinese texts present chan as a crucial means of revealing when one is pure or not, and hence when one needs to perform further rituals.
The dependence of dhyāna on śīla is taken to mean not simply that those with impure śīla fail to garner significant experiences while meditating, but that a meditator’s impure śīla will be revealed during meditation through a variety of inauspicious visions.The difference between this understanding and the classical one is striking, and fundamental changes are evident on a number of levels.
Perhaps the most interesting point is that(im)purity of śīla has evidently transformed from something easy to determine through publicly available means into something profoundly obscure. Phrased differently, whether a given ritual or purification had actually “worked” or not seems to have become a major concern. But in terms of the actual practice and meaning of meditation the main point is that successfully atoning for transgressions—verifying the purity of one’s śīla—seems at times to have become not a prerequisite for meditation but the reason for engaging in it, or at the very least some thing the need for which will continue all the way along the path to liberation.
Rather than a linear path leading from external rituals to internal meditation, this is a soteriology in which ritual practice continues to play an integral, and not merely preparatory role at all stages. Meditative experiences are thus here no longer (if ever they really were) simply iconic experiences signifying increasingly rarefied or liberated states of consciousness, but symbolic experiences whose significata include ritual practices and their fruits.***This dissertation is divided into five chapters and three appendices, the third of which contains complete annotated translations and critical Chinese editions of the Chan Essentials and the Methods for Curing. Chapter one provides the background context by examining the rise ofchan practice among Chinese Buddhists during the fifth century and the numerous “chanscriptures” (chan jing 禪經), as they were called, that were translated into Chinese during this time.
I will also here introduce the notion of “verificatory visions,” which can be seen not only in the fifth-century Chinese chan texts but also in contemporaneous Indian sources. Chapter two discusses the composition, structure, and textual history of the Chan Essentials and Methods for Curing. Unlike the texts examined in chapter one these two texts were almost certainly composed in China, and as such they provide us with information directly relevant to Chinese Buddhist understanding. I chapter three I commence the heart of my exploration of the importance and function of “verificatory visions” in the fifth-century Chinese understanding ofchan, and I will begin my analysis by showing that we must indeed think of the elaborate
Introduction: Buddhist Meditation in China imagery in these texts as descriptions of visions, not as prescriptions for “visualization”meditation as has usually been assumed. In chapter four, I look more closely at just what these visions were thought to mean, and it is here that the intrinsic connection between meditative experience and repentance comes to the fore. This understanding, I will show, was foundational not just for the Chan Essentials and Methods for Curing, but also for the more developed systems of meditation and ritual seen in the writings of Zhiyi in the late sixth century. Finally in chapter five I will look at repentance rituals where chan practice comes to play a crucial role. In particular I will examine a style of repentance rite that seems to have developed in fifth-century China as a way of combining vinaya rituals for monastic reintegration with Mahāyāna rites promising the elimination of evil karma
