Customer Reviews

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

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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.

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.