The Hongzhou School of Chan Buddhism in Eighth-through Tenth-century China [Hardcover]

Jinhua Jia (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 10, 2006

A comprehensive study of the Hongzhou school of Chan Buddhism, long regarded as the Golden Age of this tradition, using many previously ignored texts, including stele inscriptions.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

This book provides a wide-ranging examination of the Hongzhou school of Chan Buddhism—the precursor to Zen Buddhism—under Mazu Daoyi (709–788) and his successors in eighth- through tenth-century China, which was credited with creating a Golden Age or classical tradition. Jinhua Jia uses stele inscriptions and other previously ignored texts to explore the school’s teachings and history. Defending the school as a full-fledged, significant lineage, Jia reconstructs Mazu’s biography and resolves controversies about his disciples. In contrast to the many scholars who either accept or reject the traditional Chan histories and discourse records, she thoroughly examines the Hongzhou literature to differentiate the original, authentic portions from later layers of modification and recreation.

The book describes the emergence and maturity of encounter dialogue and analyzes the new doctrines and practices of the school to revise the traditional notion of Mazu and his followers as iconoclasts. It also depicts the strivings of Mazu’s disciples for orthodoxy and how the criticisms of and reflections on Hongzhou doctrine led to the schism of this line and the rise of the Shitou line and various houses during the late Tang and Five Dynasties periods. Jia refutes the traditional Chan genealogy of two lines and five houses and calls for new frameworks in the study of Chan history. An annotated translation of datable discourses of Mazu is also included.

"Jia critically surveys the available scholarship in Japanese, English, and Chinese, and puts forth her own conclusions supported by extensive citations of traditional Chinese sources that have generally been overlooked." — Steven Heine, author of Dogen and the Koan Tradition: A Tale of Two Shobogenzo Texts

About the Author

Jinhua Jia is Assistant Professor of Chinese Literature at the City University of Hong Kong.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 220 pages
• Publisher: State Univ of New York Pr (August 10, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0791468232
• ISBN-13: 978-0791468234
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,752,921 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "But you shall shine more bright in these contents than unswept stone...", April 22, 2008

By 

Crazy Fox (Chicago, IL USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Hongzhou School of Chan Buddhism in Eighth- Through Tenth-Century China (Paperback)

What are the chances that two excellent books on the Hongzhou School would be published within months of each other? So it is, though. Jinhua Jia's "The Hongzhou School of Chan Buddhism" and Mario Poceski's "Ordinary Mind as the Way" (Ordinary Mind as the Way: The Hongzhou School and the Growth of Chan Buddhism) both add much to our knowledge of this otherwise relatively understudied but immensely influential aspect of Chan/Zen Buddhism in Tang China, and both came out just recently in 2007. Independently and spontaneously, no less, according to the inscrutable operations of some scholarly zeitgeist. Both too are indispensable in their own ways.

By rights I should be focusing more on Jia's book here. As happenstance would have it, though, I just finished reading Poceski's book about a week ago or so, and my impressions are still too fresh to make this anything but a rather comparative evaluation. Like Poceski, Jia convincingly undercuts the eccentric and iconoclastic images of Mazu, Baizhang, and the Hongzhou school, showing through careful and judicious use of reliably datable texts that they were very much conservatively monastic monks with a thorough grounding in the Buddhist scriptural canon. Jia's method is much more rigorously and thoroughly philological, and she leads the reader along in an intricate process of uncovering different layers in the encounter dialogues (sources ruled out by Poceski), bits of which seem to be authentic historically according to her. Sometimes this seems tedious at first, but then when Jia marshals all the details and makes her points, it all falls into place and the reader's patience is rewarded.

Also like Poceski, Jia first establishes what can be known historically about Mazu and his school, and then goes on to examine their characteristic religious doctrines and practices. In Jia's case, though, she gives more focus to the Hongzhou School's later attempts to achieve orthodoxy and explores within that process its supposed schism with the Shi-tou School [please pardon the hyphen], arguing in conclusion that this split was a retrospective narrative cooked up considerably later for clear polemical reasons. She also succeeds in shedding fascinating new light on an old tangle, the authorship of the monastic regulations attributed to Baizhang which supposedly initiated Chan's institutional independence. Jia compellingly examines the existing sources (including a few previously overlooked ones) and demonstrates clearly that these rules are neither the creation of Baizhang Huaihai himself as per the standard normative narratives nor a Song Dynasty invention from scratch as per the academic debunkers--and, a surprise for both sides, far from freeing Chan from reliance on the Vinaya rules, they originally reinforced that reliance.

If there is one thing that's annoying about this fine study, it's that Jia sometimes speaks in terms perhaps a bit too categorically certain--that something MUST be a forgery or MUST be authentic. Surely, despite Jia's considerable acumen here, we are dealing with high probabilities rather than absolutes. That said, I imagine few have done the requisite textual homework to call her bluff. In the end, too, it is highly instructive to read this book soon after Poceski's: both take off from very similar starting points and reach similar overall conclusions, and yet the details in their discussions diverge and their investigations branch off in differing directions. If nothing else, lots more interesting work awaits in this area, but a good start has been made with these two pivotal studies. Jia's is not nearly as smooth a read, but it makes up for that in methodological brass tacks. Highly recommended.

1 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A good reference, not much more., April 27, 2009

By 

Gregory O. Schnurr "Reads too much" (Fayetteville, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Hongzhou School of Chan Buddhism in Eighth- Through Tenth-Century China (Paperback)

If you want a history lesson, written in the style of an academic, with endless foot notes and references, this is the book for you. If you however are a layman seeking Chan information, I would pass. It was interesting, with a lot of history, but my search is far more personal so I walked away from it rather disappointed. The author has done his homework, but it is rather a boring read, It's more of a text book, and not a very interesting one at that.