Transition ⑥ · From the Śūraṅgama to Chan

Part Six has walked up to the end of a map, and stopped. The page is about to turn.

This middle page is a breath.

The three things the Śūraṅgama gave the concentration gate are all packed into the satchel: a door (gathering in the mind is the precept—the precept is the first portion of the gathering-in, and sand cannot be steamed into rice); a road (reverting the faculty and entering the stream, turning the hearing back to hear its own nature—the return to the source is not two; the gates of expedient means are many); and a chart (the fifty skandha-māras—the states themselves are without fault; only construing them as sagehood delivers one to the host of māras; the resolution lies in wisdom, not in technique). A great samādhi already complete from the first—its entrance, its path, every fork along its road—could not have been handed over more completely.

And yet it is precisely this completeness that forces a question into view.

The Śūraṅgama itself said it: "In principle, awakening is sudden, and with awakening [the delusion] is dispelled at once." If the principle truly can be finished in one sudden awakening, if that great samādhi truly is complete from the first and not built by cultivation—then what of the map drawn all along this road? The scale, the ladder, the meditation-subjects, the nine abidings, the twenty-five gateways … for one who has already seen "complete from the first," are any of these still needed? The finer the map, the louder this question rings. Maps are drawn for those who have not yet arrived; the one who has arrived looks at the land, not at the chart.

In the history of the Buddha-dharma there was a company of people who carried this question to the very end. Not by discussing it—by living it.

In the years of the Liang dynasty of the Southern courts, an old monk crossed the sea and came ashore at Guangzhou. His one conversation with Emperor Wu of Liang did not meet; he crossed the Yangzi northward, settled on Mount Song, and sat facing a wall—sat for nine years. Later ages honored him as the first patriarch of the eastern land: Bodhidharma. From him there grew up on Chinese soil an entirely new tradition, which called itself "not founded on words and letters, a separate transmission outside the teachings, pointing directly at the human mind: see the nature and become a buddha."

Its name is exactly the word this volume sorted out at its opening and then kept sealed away for six parts—Chan.

Remember the threefold identity Part One established: dhyāna—the chan of "the four dhyānas," a transliteration out of India; chan-concentration—the general name for concentration; and Chan—the chan of the Chinese school of that name. For six parts this word has been used only in its first two senses; now the third sense is formally unsealed. The book's subtitle—"from Pāli jhāna to silent illumination and huatou"—redeemed its first half in Part One; its second half begins to be redeemed from this page.

But first set straight the point most easily bent: Chan is not "doing away with concentration." Bodhidharma faced the wall for nine years—that is not not-sitting; in the family ways of the patriarchs down the generations—the long sittings, the training periods, the seven-day chan retreats—the cushion was never missing. What Chan rearranged is not whether one sits, but the relation of concentration and wisdom—once "in principle, awakening is sudden" is taken seriously to the very end, concentration is no longer the stair that walks ahead of wisdom, and the whole sequence of concentration-then-wisdom must be dealt afresh. How it is dealt afresh is the business of Part Seven's five chapters: Bodhidharma's wall-gazing—what kind of gazing it is; sudden and gradual—what the Southern and Northern schools were really contending over; silent illumination—what it illuminates; watching the huatou—what it watches; and at the last, the Sixth Patriarch's earth-shattering sentence: "Concentration and wisdom are one substance, not two."

The ruler carried all this way must be gripped the tighter in this part: the map is not the terrain—and what Chan would say is exactly this: even that sentence is itself another map.

We turn the page, to watch Bodhidharma face the wall.