Customer Reviews

Zen Dawn: Early Zen Texts from Tun Huang (Shambhala Dragon Editions)

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This is one of the best of Shambhala's "Dragon" series and perhaps the most intriguing book on Zen I've ever read. It left tooth-marks on my fingers as I unconsciously bit my hand in my excitement.

Every Zen-fan knows the story about Hui-neng, the illiterate lay-brother enlightened on hearing one phrase from the "Diamond Sutra." When it came time for the Fifth Ancestral Teacher of Zen to appoint a successor, he invited all his monks to submit a poem expressing their grasp of Zen. A scholarly monk named Shen-hsiu wrote a clever one, but Hui-neng capped it with a poem he got somebody to write out for him, proving that He was the rightful successor, the True Sixth Ancestral Teacher...

Or... Was He? This book translates three texts found in caves at Tun-huang, the Chinese Dead Sea Scrolls. All we have known about Zen has come from the Southern School, tracing succession back to Hui-neng. But here we have relics of the Northern School, destroyed by anti-Buddhist purges in the 9th century, and in their view, the Real Sixth Ancestral Teacher was - shivery, expectation-arousing music - Shen-hsiu!!

Now that you've recovered... The "Treatise on Sudden Enlightenment" is a fascinating foundational early Zen practice text. But "Bodhidharma's Treatise on Contemplating Mind" (surely to Heaven inauthentic) is disappointing, an allegorical interpretation of Buddhist worship practices. The real treasure here is "Records of the Lanka", which chronicles the work of the successive teachers of the Northern lineage.

As literature it is lowly, anecdotes and quotations lumped together; but the contents are as clear and sharp as diamonds. One bombshell is to discover that the method of "contemplating sayings" (later called koan study) was well-known. "The Lanka" mentions an Indian teacher, Gunabhadra, teaching in China Before Bodhidharma (!!), who used this method over two centuries before Hui-neng: "He also said: "In a room there is a jar. Is the jar also outside the room or not? Is there water in the jar? Is the jar in water? Are there jars in all the waters of the world? What Is this water?""

This is far more than a curiosity: it has the roughness, freshness and force of primitive art. I recommend it to anyone even slightly interested in Zen.

A marvelous book. If you're interested in Dharma at all, you should definitely have it.

T.Cleary is a great Bodhisattva and a boon to all who would look to the past to truly know the present moment. That said I have wondered why a man from India and a native speaker and scholar would possibly mistranslate a word into Chinese and then forget it's original meaning? It has never been OK to kill anyone! Imposable to teach.. perhaps, but If there was an Indian monk who came from the west he would have to know better than that! So the Bodhidharma that wrote those ridiculous OK to kill them words must have been a lately joined fellow.