Early Chan Buddhism

A Meditation Movement or New Ways of Writing about Final Authority in Tang China

Bibliographic Data

ID3559705
AuthorsAlan Robert Cole (Independent Scholar, Westport, NY 12993, USA), Alan Cole (Film Independent, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume15
Issue4
Pages403
Publication date2024-03-26
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueReligions (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 2077-1444 • E-ISSN: 2077-1444
PublisherMDPI AG (PUBLISHER • IT)
DOI10.3390/rel15040403
OpenAlexW4393201777
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited32

This essay argues that the long-standing assumption that Chan Buddhism began as a meditation movement is outdated and needs to be replaced by a paradigm that sees the origins of Chan in a set of literary inventions that took form in the mid-Tang era and were designed to prove that the totality of tradition was owned by certain masters of the day. These bold claims to own perfect tradition were bolstered by newly invented genealogies that worked to show that this or that master was, in effect, a descendant of the Indian Buddha, and, thus, a quasi-Buddha himself. Further finessing these efforts to take over final authority in the world of Tang Buddhism was the studied use of Daoist tropes to naturalize and soften these aggressive claims, all in order to make them more appealing to elite readers who could now be impressed by decidedly Chinese-looking portrayals of perfect Buddhism, set on the timeless ground of the Great Dao, where there could be no competition, envy, literary pretensions, or even Buddhist practices-just pure and total truth in the body of a Chinese man. In trying to make sense of this cycle of carefully rewriting the past in order to control the present (and future), it should be clear that we need to switch to a paradigm that accepts that the seductive reinvention of tradition was done consciously and with no small amount of craft and cunning

Aesthetics · Art · Buddhism · China · Literature · Meditation · Political science · Theology · Chinese history and philosophy · History · Indian and Buddhist Studies · Japanese History and Culture · Law · Philosophy

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