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Zen Skin, Zen Marrow: Will the Real Zen Buddhism Please Stand Up?

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Steven Heine

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“It is now clear that the kōan about Mahakasyapa's receiving the flower after Sakyamuni's wordless sermon, as well as slogans like "special transmission outside the teaching" and "no reliance on words and letters"—originally separate items that came to be linked in a famous Zen motto attributed to Bodhidharma—were created in the Sung dynasty. First making their appearance in eleventh-century transmissions of the lamp texts, including the Chingte chuan-teng lu (1004) and the T'ien-sheng kuang-teng lu (1036), these rhetorical devices were designed to support the autonomous identity of Zen in an era of competition with neo-Confucianism and are not to be regarded as accurate expressions of the period they are said to represent. A close examination of sources reveals that Tang masters with a reputation for irreverence and blasphemy were often quite conservative in their approach to doctrine by citing (rather than rejecting) Mahayana sutras in support of teachings that were not so distinct from, and were actually very much in accord with, contemporary Buddhist schools.”

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“For TZN, nonsense in Zen is understood in the most positive of terms on a metaphysical level rising above and standing beyond the contrast and conflict between sense and senselessness. Nonsense is a tool skillfully used to help put an end to seeking a path of reason and to point to an enlightened state unbound by the polarity of logic or illogic. For the dissolution thesis, on the other hand, the endless wordplay in Zen literature represents an infantile stammering and the willful abandonment of meaning, and is a kind of verbal cunning and trickery that harbors risky ethical (i.e., antinomian) consequences. Here we find clearly the roots of the critique of Zen's failure to negotiate human rights issues, which seems to rest on a tendency toward deceptive, duplicitous rhetoric that avoids being pinned down or committed to any particular view or decision.”

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“Zen discourse ranges from rejection to veneration with exorcistic trends never disappearing, and the haughty disdain for supernaturalism in some records coexists with full-scale syncretism that includes purification rites. This range in the levels of discourse of Japanese amalgamations offers many striking contrasts with the nonassimilative, intolerant interactions between Christianity and medieval European paganism.”

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“When acknowledged, problems regarding Zen rights are seen by TZN as skin, flesh, and bones relative to a record of outstanding accomplishment in addressing the greater needs of humankind and the potential that Zen has at its core, or marrow, to achieve much more in the social realm than other less philosophically consistent spiritual outlooks or less disciplined forms of religious training. To put it crudely, according to TZN, Zen and only Zen, which functions seamlessly in both the ideal and real realms, is capable of embarking on a worldwide mission to save modern civilization from its own undoing. But according to HCC, the Zen approach, in which there festers an irresolvable gap between realms, has already shown its failure to address some basic matters of inequity within the narrow context of Japanese society and should not be let off the hook.”

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“TZN acknowledges that during its peak institutional period, Zen had close affiliations and received significant support from the elite classes in both China (among scholar/officials and literati during the Sung dynasty) and Japan (among samurai and those affiliated with the newly dominant Hōjō and Ashikaga warrior clans during the Kamakura and Muromachi eras, respectively). Even Dogen, known for his integrity and commitment to reclusion, could not have established Eiheiji temple without the benefaction of his chief patron, the one-eyed samurai retainer Hatano Yoshishige. The positive side of maintaining these connections is that Zen learned a mastery of organizational structure and techniques for community relations and outreach. Furthermore, the historical development of Zen in medieval Japanese society was somewhat different than in China, as Zen monks also formed strong affinities with outcasts and the downtrodden.”

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“While Eisai's Rinzai sect became known as "shogun Zen" because it gained support from the militaristic Hojo government that established power in the thirteenth century, Dōgen's Sōtō Zen sect, sometimes referred to as "farmer's Zen," used a broad range of evangelical and public works projects to spread into the countryside, especially in the northern provinces. These included mass precept ceremonies and summer retreats for laypersons, as well as large-scale bridge building and irrigation installations. Through these methods, Sōtō Zen was especially successful in trying "to reach the social classes that had been unable to participate in the formal Buddhist funerals and memorial services of the older sects—Shingon, Tendai, and the Gozan Zen schools." Therefore, in many ways, Zen in medieval Japan exercised a commitment to social reform through the overcoming of discrimination and injustice and by increasing the base of those who benefited from the spread of the dharma.”

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