The Chan Counter-Thesis: Pressing the Buddha-Name Into the Mind

6.2 The Chan Counter-Thesis: Pressing the Buddha-Name Into the Mind

Tanluan and Daochuo, in the last chapter, took that buddha-name and turned it outward — toward the Buddha on the other side, toward the land in the West, leaning on the vow-power of that far shore.

This chapter is the other river. It takes up the very same buddha-name — and presses it, hard, inward.

But the urgent thing comes first: a towering misunderstanding has to be knocked down.

A Towering Misunderstanding: Chan Never Abolished Buddha-Recollection

People often hear it said: Chan and Pure Land are set against each other. Chan is self-power, sudden awakening, no setting up of words; Pure Land is other-power, calling the name, seeking birth in the West. Chan looks down on buddha-recollection, and those who recollect the Buddha will never amount to Chan.

This opposition sounds weighty enough, but most of it was talked into shape later — especially within the last century or two. Set it back on the ground of the Tang and Song, and things were never so.

Chan never abolished buddha-recollection.

The evidence is ready to hand. The Chan monastic code — Baizhang's Pure Rules — formally installs a post called the niànfó office. When a monk died, the funeral rested on buddha-recollection; at meals in the hall, palms were joined and the Buddha recollected. Hongren, patriarch of Chan, said: "Guarding the original true mind surpasses recollecting the other-buddha" — and mark that word "surpasses": it means surpass, not abolish. He set outward recollection a notch lower, but he never said "do not recollect." Even Daoxin, the Fourth Patriarch of Chan, said plainly: "The Buddha directs dull-faculty beings toward the West" — an open acknowledgment that for those of dull faculties, the Western Pure Land is a real and useful road.

So what Chan did to buddha-recollection was not abolition but redirection — taking that buddha-name and turning it around: from outward to inward. The buddha-name is still the same buddha-name; only the "Buddha" being recollected has turned — from that one at the sky's edge into this mind of yours, the very one now doing the recollecting.

Daoxin: To Recollect the Buddha Is to Recollect the Mind

This turn was made long ago, by Daoxin, the Fourth Patriarch of Chan.

We heard his line when we read the Laṅkā; hear it once more now, and listen for the turn in it:

To recollect the Buddha is to recollect the mind; to seek the mind is to seek the Buddha. Apart from the mind there is no other Buddha; apart from the Buddha there is no other mind.

To recollect the Buddha is to recollect the mind; to seek the Buddha is to seek the mind. Apart from this mind there is no separate Buddha; apart from the Buddha, no separate mind.

The method Daoxin used was still the Mañjuśrī Prajñā's — "tether the mind to one buddha, devotedly call the name" — not one word changed. But he read that "one buddha" as "one mind"; he read that "seeking the Buddha" as "seeking the mind." The outer shell of the buddha-name stands untouched; what it points to within has quietly turned around.

And he added one more line, telling you where such recollection arrives: "Constantly calling the Buddha to mind, while clinging does not arise, will dissolve into formlessness." Keep the Buddha constantly in mind; do not let the stray thoughts that clutch at this and grasp at that come up; and as the recollection goes on and on, even the "mark" melts away, settling into one expanse of formless stillness.

See it now: on the Pure Land side, the more one recollects, the clearer that Buddha grows, the more vividly present before the eyes. On the Chan side, the more one recollects, the more that Buddha melts open — melting, at the last, into one expanse of the formless. The same buddha-name, walking in two opposite directions.

Huineng: The Names Stay, the Direction Turns Around

The one who spoke this turn inward most thoroughly — and most famously — was Huineng, the Sixth Patriarch.

In the Platform Sūtra, a prefect asks Huineng: your disciple often sees monks and laity recollecting Amitābha Buddha, seeking birth in the West — can they truly be born there?

Huineng did not say "they cannot." He first asked a question back, swift and clean: "If Easterners commit evil and recollect the Buddha to be reborn in the West, where do Westerners who commit evil recollect the Buddha to be reborn?" What this question pricks is not buddha-recollection — it is the fixing of one's whole seeking on a single direction. If the Pure Land is taken as nothing more than a place on a map, then "rebirth" becomes a house-moving without end: when a Westerner sins, where does he move to next?

What Huineng wanted to say is this: "When the mind is pure, the buddha-land is pure." When your mind is pure, the ground under your feet is, that very moment, the Pure Land; when the mind is not pure, then even born in the West, you still carry your offense with you.

Then, one by one, he invited the Buddhas and bodhisattvas of the Pure Land back into your own mind:

Compassion itself is Guanyin; giving-and-renunciation is called Mahāsthāmaprāpta; purifying-capacity is Śākyamuni; the upright-and-direct is Amitābha.

Look at it — Guanyin, Mahāsthāmaprāpta, Śākyamuni, Amitābha: of these four names, Huineng dropped not one. He only turned what they point to, from the Buddhas and bodhisattvas at the sky's edge back to the virtues within your own mind: that measure of compassion in you is Guanyin; that willingness to give and to let go is Mahāsthāmaprāpta; that power in you that can wash itself clean is Śākyamuni; and that mind of yours, plain and direct, with no bend and no winding, is Amitābha.

"The buddha is made from within the nature; do not seek outside the body." The Buddha is accomplished within your own self-nature — do not go searching outside your body.

This is the finest single move of Chan's turn inward: the names, every one of them, kept; the direction they point, turned wholly around — from outer back to inner. It does not ask you to throw away "Namo Amitābha Buddha." It asks you to understand: the "Amitābha" you recollect is, in the end, that measure of the upright-and-direct within your own mind.

Who, After All, Is Recollecting the Buddha?

This inward river flows on downstream, growing keener the farther it runs, until at last it grinds out the sharpest blade in the house of Chan.

From the Song dynasty onward, Chan masters taught people to "contemplate the huàtóu" — to seize one phrase and investigate it, dead-set, until that "I" which has always taken itself for granted is driven to the end of its road. Zhaozhou had a line for this long before. Someone asked him: this recollecting of the Buddha, the Dharma, the Saṅgha — is it "I" who does the recollecting? Zhaozhou asked back: "Who is the one recollecting?" The one doing the recollecting — who is that?

In the Yuan dynasty, the Chan master Zhongfeng set this one word "who" up as the very pivot of Chan investigation: "Before parents were born, who am I? When a breath does not come, who am I?" And he said one line more, joining Chan and Pure Land into one: "Recollecting the Buddha and investigating Chan share one body-and-pattern" — buddha-recollection and Chan investigation are, at bottom, one and the same frame of bones.

By Master Lianchi in the Ming, this inward river had at last ground out the huàtóu that everyone has known ever since — "Who is recollecting the Buddha?"

The way it is used is utterly simple, and utterly fierce: you recollect the Buddha honestly and plainly, a few utterances of the name; then you take that gaze which has always looked outward and — all at once — turn it back, shine it on yourself, and ask:

Who, after all, is the one recollecting the Buddha?

Look — this is still buddha-recollection: not one utterance of the name is missing. Yet this single question seizes the buddha-name from the edge of the lips and hauls it back down to the floor of the mind — back onto that self which has been recollecting all along, yet has never once been seen clearly. On the Pure Land side, one follows the buddha-name forward, seeking birth in the West; on the Chan side, one follows the buddha-name, turns around, and presses the question into one's own mind.

Outward, inward — one buddha-name, parted into two roads. Yet these two roads are what Daoxin said straight out long ago — "To recollect the Buddha is to recollect the mind" — they are one thing, in two directions.

Setting the Name Firm Again

Chan gathers the buddha-name into the mind — gathers it all the way into formlessness, all the way into "Who is recollecting the Buddha?"

But the Pure Land river is straining in exactly the opposite direction. It does not gather the name into the mind; it wants to set the name outward, in the solid and the real, planted firm and steady — steady enough that an ordinary person who cannot read a single character, cannot settle the mind, whose very life is nearly spent, can still grab hold of it with one hand.

The one who set this name so firmly in place is the great consolidator of the Pure Land school — Shandao.

In the next chapter we return to the Pure Land river and watch Shandao settle one phrase — "Namo Amitābha Buddha" — into the one rope that even the most hopeless can still hold.