The early genealogies found at the caves of Dunhuang claiming to have inherited their tradition from Bodhidharma, call into question the very act of seeking legitimacy in an external, contrived manner. Also, part and parcel of such genealogies is the important question of what was actually transmitted, for it is by Zen’s own admission, it’s crown jewel. In addition to this, why is a genealogy required insofar as the Buddha’s profound Dharma is universal which means that it cannot be limited by a Zen genealogy? Why can’t other Buddhist traditions also awaken to the Buddha’s Dharma?
Truth be told, the Zen genealogy can be characterized as something more like a Nietzschean will-to-power. A genealogy is not a way or means of seeing what the Bodhisattva saw whereby he became awakened, i.e., became Buddha. Rather, a genealogy is a clever way of convincing the credulous and the imperial government of China that you are legitimate so that the streams of money and power will flow to your sect.
The real issue as I see it boils down to a will-to-power vs. direct gnosis of the Buddha’s profound Dharma that he discovered under the Bodhi-tree. On one side is Zen trying to gain respect and funding from the government and, on the other, is the practice of dhyana which is outside of the institution whereby the adept gains gnosis of the Buddha’s profound Dharma. The orthodoxy that the institution of Zen believes that it has, is only through the creation and maintenance of a genealogy. Ironically, nothing spiritual is transmitted this way. There is only an institutional transmission consisting of robes, documents and other such paraphernalia. There is no actual Mind to Mind transmission insofar as Mind is outside of the sphere of things; even thought.
The real limit of the Zen institution with its genealogy and seeming orthodoxy is when we come to a person recognized as a Zen master (C., Chanshi; J., Zenji). Here “Zen” is no longer the institution, or Zenshu, but the means for attaining enlightenment and also one’s ability to distinguish between the conditioned and unconditioned this being prajña. Faith then becomes a problem. Do we have faith in our master of Zen who supposedly has the same enlightenment as the Buddha? But how do we know that our teacher, personally, realized the same Dharma as the Buddha? Our faith may, in fact, be quite superficial—perhaps too superficial inasmuch as we have too little faith in our own self; in our own ability to see what the Bodhisattva saw under the Bodhi-tree who became the Buddha. Such a lack of faith in our own capacity is then wrongly transferred to the ‘Zen institution’. But this is where we don’t want to go. It cannot awaken us. We must awaken our self.
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