Zen Classics: Formative Texts in the History of Zen Buddhism

Zen and the Art of Relying on Words and Letters:
This is a fine collection of articles overall. It is clearly a sequel to Heine and Wright's prior collection "The Zen Canon" and while it maintains the same high level of scholarship as before, the essays in "Zen Classics" are vastly improved in readability. That said, I would not recommend this book to anyone not already generally familiar with Zen Buddhism to some degree at least. But with the requisite background knowledge, these articles and the issues they address are really fascinating. 1. In "Guishan Jince (Guishan's Admonitions) and the Ethical Foundations of Chan Practice" Mario Poceski convincingly demonstrates the role of good old-fashioned monastic rules & regulations and scriptural study for a Chan (Zen) temple community. This is especially pertinent because the text in question is from the Hongzhou tradition (the one usually portrayed as iconoclastic and wild). 2. In "A Korean Contribution to the Zen Canon: The `Oga Hae Seorui' (Commentaries of Five Masters on the `Diamond Sutra')" Charles Muller analyzes a key text in the Son (Zen) tradition by the monk Gihwa. This is a multilayered text consisting of The Diamond Sutra, Five Commentaries on that Sutra (by Zongmi, Huineng, Fu Dashi, Yefu Daochuan, and Yuzhang Zongjing), and then Gihwa's own subcommentary on these latter. In the process, Muller argues that Korean Son is distinct from Japanese Zen in having such a scriptural orientation, an argument that seems overstated (Hakuin's commentary on the Heart Sutra (as translated by Norman Waddell) immediately comes to mind). 3. "Zen Buddhism as the Ideology of the Japanese State: Eisai and the `Kozen Gokokuron'" by Albert Welter is definitely one of the most important articles in this collection. In it, Welter places Eisai's form of Zen firmly within the historical context of its time, both in terms of the actual Sung Buddhism active where he went when in China and in terms of the Buddhist approach to the political order as found in the Sutra of Benevolent Kings, which was widely accepted in the Heian and Kamakura periods in Japan. In trying to understand Eisai's thought without obscuring it by the assumptions of later ages (especially ideologies of a "pure Zen" a la D.T. Suzuki), we learn a lot about Zen in particular and Buddhism in general during this formative time. 4. Steven Heine's "An Analysis of Dogen's `Eihei Goroku': Distillation or Distortion?" gives us page after page of meticulous, hair-splitting textual analysis and criticism and yet can only say in answer to its own question, both and neither. Still interesting, though. 5. In "Rules of Purity in Japanese Zen" T. Griffith Foulk continues to investigate the various written monastic rules and regulations of Chan/Zen, this time tracing their history in Japan from the Kamakura period up to the present day. There is a wealth of detail here that is nicely integrated in a well-written narrative, and the careful treatment of the understudied Tokugawa and Meiji periods is especially welcome. 6. "Zen Koan Capping Phrase Books: Literary Study and the Insight `Not Founded on Words or Letters'" by Victor Sogen Hori is basically bootlegged from the intro to his book on the same subject, but if you haven't read it there already he gives a pretty good characterization of this particular genre of Zen text, a description of key works within that genre, and an explanation of them in terms of the literary games prevalent in China of the time. 7. In "Imagining Indian Zen: Torei's Commentary on the Ta-mo-to-lo ch'an ching and the Rediscovery of Early Meditation Techniques during the Tokugawa Era" Michel Mohr carefully examines this understudied text and the issues it raises. The idea of a Zen monk integrating Watarai Shinto into his interpretations of an old, possibly Sarvastivada (hinayana) sutra alone is bizarre enough to make for fascinating reading. 8. Finally, David Riggs does a great job in "Meditation for Laymen and Laywomen: The `Buddha Samadhi' (`Jijuyu Zanmai') of Menzan Zuiho" of trying to disentangle Menzan's own concerns and priorities from what later sectarian polemics have read back into his writings. Considering the fact that so much of what characterizes Soto Zen today harks back to Tokugawa reformers like Menzan, studies like this one are much needed. No book is perfect, of course. Some bad typographical errors infect Heine's article. A glossary giving the Chinese characters for the terms, names, and titles is again missing (as it was in "The Zen Canon") despite the fact that this would be very useful for the scholar. And one wonders why no study of Hakuin (say, his "Orategama" which without doubt qualifies as a "classic" according to Heine & Wright's stated criteria) was included. But these nitpicks aside, this is a fine book that is likely to become in its own right a classic in the field.