Silent Illumination

7.3 Silent Illumination

Speak of the Caodong house style, and what most people today think of first is the phrase "just-sitting." Let the lineage be set straight at the outset: "just-sitting" (shikantaza) is the later word of Dōgen, of the Japanese Sōtō school; its source lies in the Southern Song, with Chan master Hongzhi Zhengjue (1091–1157)—and Hongzhi's own name for his house style was two words only: silent illumination. This chapter reads Hongzhi's own writing; the two short inscriptions he left, the "Lancet of Seated Meditation" and the "Inscription on Silent Illumination," push the Chan gate's concentration forward a third step.

Knowing Without Touching Objects, Illuminating Without Facing Conditions

The opening lines of the "Lancet of Seated Meditation":

The essential function of all the buddhas, the functioning essence of all the patriarchs: knowing without touching objects, illuminating without facing conditions. … The water so clear to the bottom—the fish moves slowly; the sky so vast without bound—the bird flies far and faint.

"Illuminating without facing conditions"—these five characters must be set back on the road this book has walked before their astonishment shows. The concentration of the first six parts, whatever its depth, was built upon an object: the practitioner binds the mind to a single object, and by way of the object faced bores deeper layer by layer. The forty doors of the meditation-subjects—door by door, each an object; the nine scale-marks of the nine stages of mental abiding—what they measure is the mind's settledness upon its object. Concentration, all along, was a being-concentrated upon something.

The seated meditation Hongzhi speaks is exactly "not facing conditions": it sets up no object as the thing faced; the knowing awaits no thing known and is subtle of itself; the illumining awaits no condition illumined and is wondrous of itself. This is an objectless mirroring. "The water so clear to the bottom—the fish moves slowly": the clarity of the water is not set there to mirror the fish, yet the fish moves slowly through it. "The sky so vast without bound—the bird flies far and faint": the vastness of the sky is not raised up to bear the bird, yet the bird flies far and faint across it. The illumining is like this water, this sky: it sets up no illumining "I" to take hold of an object illumined, and the myriad appearances appear and subside of themselves within it.

The former enters concentration by grasping—taking up one object and abiding in it; silent illumination illumines by not grasping—setting up no object, and the illumining clear of itself. The difference of a single word is the turning of the whole road.

When Illumination Loses Its Silence; When Silence Loses Its Illumination

What makes silent illumination silent illumination—its exact structure—is in the "Inscription on Silent Illumination":

Silent, words forgotten; bright, all manifest before you. In the moment of mirroring, all is vast; in the place of abiding, all is numinous … when illumination loses its silence, intrusion appears … when silence loses its illumination, it all becomes leftover dharma. The principle of silent illumination is complete—the lotus opens, the dream wakes.

"Silent, words forgotten; bright, all manifest before you"—silence carried to the place where words are forgotten, and the clear illumining standing complete and present. Silence is quietness, stillness; illumination is mirroring, contemplative seeing. The crux lies in the two mutually rejecting lines at the center: when illumination loses its silence, intrusion appears—if the illumining has no silence beneath it, it sinks into clinging and becomes the intrusion of objects; when silence loses its illumination, it all becomes leftover dharma—if the silence has no illumining running through it, it sinks into dead sitting and becomes a useless remainder. Lacking either one, it is no longer silent illumination.

To say it in this book's old words: silence answers roughly to calming, illumination to contemplation. But the calming-and-contemplation of silent illumination is not the two stages of first-calming-then-contemplation. Remember the pair of tracks Part One laid down, and Part Four's Yogācāra fastening the tandem running after the ninth abiding—calm and insight bearing one yoke together, yet the yoke waiting for the calm track to reach the summit. Hongzhi sets that yoke down directly in the present thought: within the calming there is already the numinous brightness of illumination; within the illumining, already the stillness of silence—the two constituting each other in one thought, with no before or after to divide. "The principle of silent illumination is complete"—complete already in the present thought, awaiting no accumulation of stages.

Polishing, Not Wiping

The sneer silent illumination most easily draws is to be read as dead sitting in a pool of standing water. Hongzhi, in his own writing, had long since closed that floodgate: "vast and solitary, yet never dull"—vast and standing alone, not sunk in torpor; "numinous, free of all opposition, yet self-attained"—numinous beyond all duality, not wooden; "illumination without the work of illumining, light and shadow alike cut off"—illumining while retaining no agency of an illuminer, keeping no image of an illumining and an illumined. The silence of silent illumination was never a blank where awareness stops; it is a stillness that holds mirroring within it.

One sentence of his asks for finer discrimination still: "The field is empty and vast—what has been one's own from the very first—and is to be kept by cleansing and polishing." On its face, "cleansing and polishing" looks very like Shenxiu's "wipe it clean time and again"—but the import is exactly opposite. The wiping of Shenxiu's verse has the structure "not pure at root; wiped now, and only then pure": purity is wiped into being. Hongzhi's polishing rests instead on the premise that "the field is empty and vast—what has been one's own from the very first"—that empty vastness is complete already; polishing does not produce a purity, it removes the films that obscure, and lets what is originally there appear once more. One is wiped and thereby gained; the other polished and thereby recovered. The reader will recognize the premise—it is exactly Bodhidharma's line in the entrance by principle: "all the living share one same true nature, which only the adventitious dust of deluded thought has covered." The concentration of silent illumination is the re-appearing of the native ground, not a building-up by stages.

The Dispute Lay in the Courtyards, Not Between the Two Masters

To speak of Song-dynasty Chan, one cannot get around a famous dispute. Dahui Zonggao, Hongzhi's contemporary, denounced one strain of the Chan of his day as "heretical silent-illumination Chan," jeering that it taught people to become "cold ashes and withered wood." The words could hardly be heavier.

But this dispute must be read in its right place. First, what Dahui attacked was a class of corruptions that grasp stillness as the ultimate—an unnamed deviation, not Hongzhi himself. Second, Dahui himself also taught people to sit quietly; "even when at leisure one must sit quietly" came from his own mouth: what he broke was the grasping of the place of stillness as the ultimate, not sitting quietly itself. Third, and most decisive: "when silence loses its illumination, it all becomes leftover dharma"—dead sitting become leftover dharma is exactly the first wrong turn the "Inscription on Silent Illumination" itself shuts out. The cold ashes and withered wood Dahui drove out so forcefully is precisely the thing silent illumination's own text rejects in so many words; when a gate is rebuked by way of a corruption it has itself plainly rejected, the rebuke does not land on the gate.

And what most surely sets the key for this dispute is a first-hand record. At the moment of his passing, Hongzhi looked to his attendant and asked for a brush, and wrote a letter with his own hand—leaving it for Chan master Dahui, entrusting to him his final affairs. Dahui, receiving the letter that night, hurried through the night to the mountain, reverently bore Hongzhi's whole body, and buried it in the East Valley stūpa.

A master who, dying, entrusted his after-affairs to his "opponent"; an "opponent" who, hearing the news, hastened through the night to the mourning and laid him to rest with his own hands—if there were truly a settled verdict ranking silent illumination above or below the huatou, if the two masters truly held each other's gate heretical, this would be unintelligible. The dispute lay in the courtyards—in the Southern-Song Chan forest's contest of patronage and standing; not in the mutual knowing of the two masters. On this ground the book sets the two gates side by side, not ranked.

Silent illumination is reflection settled into a posture of simultaneous co-presence. In the same age, another door pressed reflection into a ball of fire.

The next chapter, Watching the Head of Speech.