When Buddhism came to China from India, the culture of China was highly refined and sophisticated. And when the mind of China met the mind of India, with all of its great subtlety, Buddhism was transformed. What came of it was Chan (J., Zen) or the same, the Buddha Mind School. This was an extraordinary accomplishment.
Even today, looking back at Chan Buddhism and its development during the Song dynasty (960–1279) it is amazing to think that Chan could be simplified to statements like this:
Not mind, not Buddha, not sentient being—what is it? 不是心不是佛不是物是箇甚麼
Who is dragging this corpse in here for you? 誰與 爾拕這死屍來
At birth where do you come from—at death where do you go? 生從何來死從何去
That one might answer these questions and see what Siddhartha saw as a result, who sat beneath the Bodhi tree in meditation and became the Buddha is, to put it mildly, impressive!
It is also impressive how much literature Chan Buddhism poured out based upon the answer to these questions. It was not a small amount. This literature also had an appeal to the commoner and the literati.
Unlike the labyrinthine religions of Judaism and Christianity which never asked questions like Chan Buddhism did, Chan was able to captivate the human heart in a profound way and produce results. By that I mean, of the people who were drawn to Chan, there was a small number of them who successfully intuited the answer to these abstruse questions. This feat, to put it mildly again, was impressive!
In the West we are not lacking sophistication and subtlety but we have done something the Chinese didn’t do on the scale that we have managed. We have given religion and mysticism a bad reputation. Our culture is not only anti-religious but it is materialistic. We believe the cause of everything is material in the form of particles. This is, I hasted to add, a philosophical position which has so blinded us that the questions at the beginning of this blog make little or no sense to the average Westerner.
Few Buddhists are able to launch a polemic against Western materialism that it might be exposed as being actually unscientific rather than scientific insofar as no one has yet claimed to have found the ultimate particle of the universe from which everything is composed. Not even the materialist Democritus who postulated that atoms and the vacuum were the beginning of the universe could offer proof. No doubt Plato was right in wanting to burn all the writings of Democritus lest it corrupt weak minds.
Today, Chan is like an empty wine skin. Yes, we still possess a great amount of Chan literature and much has been translated into Western languages. We even have teachers. But the mind of the Western student is not the same as the mind of an average Song dynasty Chan student. The Western mind still needs to be weaned off of materialism: the belief that phenomena have a material cause.
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