The Synthesis: Gathering the Two Rivers Back into One

6.5 The Synthesis: Gathering the Two Rivers Back into One

Zhiyi of Tiantai built the bridge — he showed that Chan and Pure Land could, in principle, be one thing. But a bridge is only a bridge; the two rivers themselves still ran their separate ways.

The work of actually gathering these two long-parted rivers back into one stream was a relay six hundred years long — from Yongming Yanshou in the Five Dynasties, to Yunqi Zhuhong, Hanshan Deqing, and Ouyi Zhixu in the Ming. These masters set out to make Chan and Pure Land, truly and thoroughly, one.

Yongming: Refusing to Admit There Are "Two Rivers" at All

The first to lay down the program of the synthesis was Yongming Yanshou of the Five Dynasties.

He stated the master principle in a single line: "The myriad practices arise together; principle and phenomena are unobstructed." Every form of practice rises side by side, and none need abolish another; the principle (lǐ) and the phenomenal work (shì) were never in each other's way. And he said: "One never settles for any single gate exclusively." Buddha-recollection, seated meditation, sūtra-recitation, walking practice — every one of these roads leads to the attainment of the Way, and I will never lock myself to any one gate.

Look at what Yongming is doing. He is not "stitching Chan and Pure Land together." He refuses, at the root, to admit that there are "two opposed rivers" at all. In his eyes, the myriad dharmas have always been one mind only; Chan and Pure Land both open out of this same mind — where could the opposition come from?

(Yongming was no mere smoother-over, though. He also said: in this degenerate age, "only the single gate of the Pure Land remains a road one can enter by" — self-power is hard to bring to completion; other-power succeeds more easily. So he leaned neither toward Chan nor toward Pure Land. What he leaned against was this: letting anyone take this mind, one from the beginning, and split it by force into two halves.)

Yunqi: One Buddha-Name, Shallow or Deep

The one who turned this program into a teaching anyone could learn was Master Yunqi of the Ming. He set up a pair of terms of the greatest consequence: "phenomenal holding" and "principle holding."

What do they mean? The same one phrase, "Namo Amitābha Buddha," can be recited in two ways.

One way is called phenomenal holding: honestly and plainly, you keep this buddha-name going, one utterance after the next, recollection unbroken, carried along by your faith in the Buddha and in the power of the vow. This is the Pure Land river — facing outward, leaning on other-power.

The other is called principle holding: even as you recite, you turn back and take up "bodily-investigation" of this very buddha-name — investigating: this one recollecting the Buddha — who, in the end, is it? Yunqi put it wonderfully: reciting this way, he said, "in intent closely resembles the way the venerable elders of former generations taught people to take up a huàtóu and raise the doubt" — and is that not the Chan school's huàtóu inquiry? So he said: one who practices Chan inquiry need not hunt for another huàtóu; "one need only land on this single phrase, Amitābha Buddha." This is the Chan river — facing inward, seeing one's own mind.

Do you see it now? The same buddha-name: recited shallow, it is Pure Land; investigated deep, it is Chan. Phenomenal holding and principle holding are not two dharma gates; they are two depths of one buddha-name. And Yunqi quoted a line from the Yuan-dynasty Chan master Zhongfeng that says it once and for all: "the Chan that is Pure Land's, the Pure Land that is Chan's." Chan is the Pure Land's Chan; the Pure Land is Chan's Pure Land. The two have always been inside each other.

He even said something very heavy: those who cling to Chan yet slander the Pure Land "are slandering their own Chan" — in slandering the Pure Land, you are slandering your own Chan. Because the two were one from the start.

Hanshan: The Chan Side, Too, Gave Its Nod

Yunqi received Chan from the Pure Land side. But it is not enough for the Pure Land side alone to say "we are one" — the Chan side had to own the kinship with its own mouth before the synthesis could count.

The nod came from Master Hanshan of the Ming — himself a great elder of the Chan school.

Hanshan gave an utterly concrete way of taking hold, called "buddha-recollection inquiry-into-truth": put down every stray thought and wandering idea in the mind, put them down until there is nothing left to put down, and raise up a single utterance — "Amitābha Buddha"; then turn back and look at where this one thought arises, and inquire into its truth: this one recollecting the Buddha — who, finally, is it?

This is the huàtóu the whole world would later know in the Chan halls — "Who is recollecting the Buddha?" Hanshan set its root, plainly and openly, in buddha-recollection itself.

Then, from inside the Chan school, he spoke the word of equality to its very end: "Buddha-recollection is itself Chan inquiry; Chan inquiry leads to Pure Land birth." To recollect the Buddha is to inquire in Chan; to inquire in Chan is to be born in the Pure Land. Whether Chan and Pure Land are one thing, he said, "is the unsettled doubt of past and present" — a case left hanging for a thousand years; and now, "this saying breaks it open, and the view that divides Chan from Pure Land is with this wholly dissolved."

Please notice who is speaking: a patriarch of the Chan school. This is not the Pure Land side, all on its own ardor, trying to pull Chan over; it is the Chan side, from inside its own house, acknowledging the kinship. Both sides nodded — and only then did the synthesis truly close.

Ouyi: Locking It Fast

Last came Master Ouyi of the late Ming, who locked the synthesis fast and sealed it. He did three things.

First, he established the three of "faith, vow, and practice" as the framework of buddha-recollection — and not one can be missing: without faith, no vow can be raised; without vow, no practice is guided forth; and without the wondrous practice of holding the name, the vow cannot be brought to fullness nor the faith confirmed. Three strands, each locking into the next.

Second — and this is the deepest move — he taught "believing in oneself." The first thing faith must believe, he said, is "this present single thought of one's mind": "The empty space of the ten directions, the lands numerous as dust-motes, are from the first things manifest within this single thought of my mind… one's own mind originally contains the Land of Bliss." This one thought of mind, moving before you right now, already holds the whole Land of Bliss within it; the Western Pure Land you seek birth in was, all along, inside this single thought of yours.

Listen — this one line, "one's own mind originally contains the Land of Bliss," takes what the Laṅkā taught in Part Five, "to recollect the Buddha is to recollect the mind," and what the Pure Land teaches, "seek birth in the West," and fuses them completely into one: the land you seek outwardly and the mind you see inwardly are the same one. Outward and inward, from here on, can no longer be pulled apart.

Third, he set down a keystone: "The single practice of confident-vow name-holding perfectly subsumes and perfectly transcends every dharma gate." This one gate of holding the name "perfectly subsumes" all dharma gates — gathers every gate inside itself — and at the same time "perfectly transcends" all dharma gates — stands beyond every one of them. One buddha-name, reaching downward, gathers in the dullest ordinary being; reaching upward, it overtops the loftiest gate. And he added one more phrase: "through phenomenal holding reach principle holding" — in the very moment of your honest holding of the name (the phenomenal), you go straight through to that deepest bodily-investigation (the principle); no need to drop the phenomenal to go seeking the principle, for the phenomenal is itself the road to the principle.

With this, the two great rivers, parted in their courses for a thousand years, gathered back into the same riverbed.

One Buddha-Name, One from the Beginning

Look back over this whole part, "Two Streams," and one thing comes into view.

Those two rivers — the Pure Land that seeks birth outward, the Chan that sees the nature inward — were spoken through in one line, at the very headwaters, by Daoxin, the Fourth Patriarch of Chan: "To recollect the Buddha is to recollect the mind." They were never anything but two faces of a single act.

It was inside history that people each took hold of one face and drove it to its utmost, and so it parted into two rivers: Tanluan, Daochuo, and Shandao dredged deep and set firm the face of "outward, holding the name, seeking birth"; Huineng and kànhuà Chan honed sharp and drew tight the face of "inward, seeing the mind, asking who." The farther apart they ran, the more they looked like two houses.

But Yongming, Yunqi, Hanshan, and Ouyi, generation after generation, gathered them back — to tell you: one phrase, "Namo Amitābha Buddha" — recite it shallow and honest, and it is Pure Land; go deep, turn back, and ask "who is the one recollecting?" — and it is Chan. You go outward, seeking that land; you go inward, seeing this mind; and that land and this mind were one from the beginning.

One buddha-name, one from the beginning. It parted from home, and it has come home.

One Last Expanse Remains

Buddha-recollection has come a long way by now: from early Buddhist recollection, to the calling of the name on Chinese soil, to the settling of a home in the Three Pure Land Sūtras, to the deep senses of the great Mahāyāna sūtras, to the parting and re-joining of the two rivers of Chan and Pure Land.

But the title of this book made a promise: from early Buddhist recollection to the Flower Ornament vision. One last station remains, the widest expanse of all, not yet visited — the Flower Ornament.

In the world of the Flower Ornament, buddha-recollection is no longer only recollecting one Buddha, seeking one land, seeing one mind; it opens out into the whole dharmadhātu — layer upon layer without end, the one containing the all. And the one who leads us into this expanse is a great bodhisattva, with his "Ten Great Vows": to pay reverence to all Buddhas, to praise the Tathāgatas, to cultivate offerings vastly…

That is Part Seven. We turn this page and walk into the Flower Ornament — into Samantabhadra's Ten Great Vows.