The Hongzhou School Of Chan Buddhism In Eighth- Through Tenth-century China

摘要

Typical! You wait decades for a book on the particularly crucial phase in Chan/Zen history represented by the Hongzhou school, and then two come along at once. Jia Jinhua's book of 2006 is closely followed by Mario Poceski's Ordinary Mind as the Way; The Hongzhou School and the Growth of Chan Buddhism (Oxford, 2007). But I shall not compare these works in this review; there is certainly plenty of room for very different approaches to the source material and the specialist will no doubt want to read both the books in any case. We have long known that this developmental period of Chan contains within it a significant turn in the history of East Asian Buddhism, but how and why that turn occurred has been difficult to determine due to the fact that the records available to us passed through the hands of later Song dynasty editors. We have come to suspect that these people doctored the sources in order to construct a kind of Chan mythos that was of immediate polemical use in Song times, but that concealed or distorted the earlier shape of the tradition.