Chan history from 700 to 850
The discovery of the Dunhuang manuscripts revealed another important source for information about the chan movement during the lifetimes of Shitou, Yaoshan and Yunyan, in the form of a chan history written by the Fifth Huayan Patriarch Zongmi (780-841), which provides an overview of the different schools existing in his lifetime. Written from his own sectarian viewpoint—Zongmi was a recognized master in both the Huayan and Hoze chan traditions—it shows that there was no single teaching or meditation practice common to all the chan sects, but that each sect had its own traditional doctrinal orientation and teaching methods, and also that each was located in a different region of China. Zongmi mentions seven different chan schools: Niutou, the Northern, the school of Lao An, two schools in Sichuan, Hongzhou (school of Nanyue Huaizhang), and Hoze, Shenhui's school of southern chan, to which Zongmi himself belonged.
The Niutou or Ox-head school, which evidently remained quite unaffected by the controversy between the Northern and Southern schools, was located south of Nanjing (in modern Jiangsu Province). It claimed a separate lineage to Daoxin, the Fourth Patriarch, and was much influenced by Tiantai teachings. It did not survive beyond the 9th century. The Northern school emerged as a separate tradition only after being vigorously opposed by Shenhui (670-762), the polemicist of the Southern school, and his followers. It was centered around the ancient Tang capital cities of Changan and Loyang, and claimed direct descent from the Fifth Patriarch Hongren by way of his disciple Faju (638-689), who lived for sixteen years in Hongren's East Mountain community. Faju received Dharma transmission from Hongren, and eventually he came to be regarded by many as the founder of the Northern school.
However, the most celebrated master of this school was Shenxiu, who died in 706. Like Faju, he also received Dharma transmission from the Fifth Patriarch at East Mountain, and sought to establish chan meditation practice based on the Mahayana sutras, which he studied deeply throughout his long career. But the Northern school, which initially was considered to be the most important chan lineage in the early Tang, and which enjoyed thereby the patronage of two Tang emperors, was also doomed to extinction by the beginning of the 9th century, due probably to divisions in leadership in the years after Shenxiu's death.
The Southern School came into existence through the efforts of Shenhui, a disciple of Huineng, but who had also practiced meditation with Shenxiu briefly in 699-701. At a "Great Dharma Assembly" held on January 15th, 732, at a temple in a place called Huatai in Hunan Province, Shenhui announced that the unbroken succession of Dharma transmission from Bodhidharma had been passed from Hongren to the Sixth Patriarch, Huineng. In addition to accusing the Northern School of having quite literally usurped the chan patriarchate, Shenhui accused it further of having produced a false teaching, namely that enlightenment occurs through gradual practice, whereas Huineng had taught that enlightenment occurs "at a single stroke," as a sudden breakthrough. The often acrimonious debate between Southern and Northern schools was known to everyone active in the chan movement of the 8th century and went on for several decades, with teachers in Jiangxi and Hunan wasting no time in allying themselves with zu shi chan, the chan of the patriarchs, as the followers of Huineng later termed it. Central to this movement was the rising popularity of Liu zu tan jing (The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch), which was held to be an accurate record of Huineng's teachings, but whose derivation is in fact questionable, and which may have been written, at least partially, much later by Shenhui's disciples. Shitou Xiqian's poem The Agreement of Difference and Unity provides several direct references to the Platform Sutra, possibly as a convenient means of demonstrating Shitou's allegiance to the still-nascent Southern School.
For Zongmi, writing at the beginning of the ninth century, the Southern school was best represented by the Hoze school, of which he himself was the recognized leader. The Hoze school was founded by Shenhui, but did not survive beyond Zongmi's own life time. More significantly for the future course of events, Zongmi speaks in some detail of a second Southern school, which he calls the Hongzhou school, established by the disciples of Mazu in Jiangxi. Since Zongmi does not note the existence of a second Southern school in the succession from Shitou Xiqian, it is to the Song period chan histories we must look for information about the gradual emergence of the Cao-Dong teaching lineage, and its counterpart in the establishment of Linji [Rinzai] school, both of which replaced all other chan schools by the end of the Song dynasty.
What was the day-to-day life of a chan monk like around the year 800? The Song histories and imperial records provide us with some clues. In Jiangxi and Hunan, where the Southern school or "chan of the patriarchs" was fully established, there must have been a few thousand serious chan monks studying at a variety of temples and monasteries located in the remote rural regions and led by a few dozen celebrated masters. The monks would live and work at different temples and then move on after a period of time to receive teachings from another master. They worked in the fields and forests surrounding the monastery, performed kitchen and housekeeping or administrative duties inside the monastery, and devoted themselves otherwise to the daily routine of meditation, ceremonies and lectures. Monastic activity was codified and regulated by Baizhang Huaihai (720-814), a famous teacher in the lineage of Mazu, whose reforms had the effect of supplanting a strict observation of the Vinaya rules, a new trend clearly noted at the very beginning of the recorded teachings of Yaoshan.
The chan monastery itself was divided into separate buildings—a Dharma hall for lectures and possibly for housing sutra texts, a Buddha hall for ceremonies, and a monks' hall for meditation, where the monks also ate and slept and sometimes heard lectures. The buildings were often located in a row, one after another, leading up the side of a hill or mountain, the whole area surrounded by a high wall. It is unfortunate that no contemporary records exist to tell us more about the actual meditation practice of the Tang monks. About all we know is that the numerous meditation methods described in the Hinayana scriptures were a subject of considerable experimentation in many monasteries in the early Tang, and that the term sitting meditation (zuo chan), although nowhere described in detail, did at least exist in the vocabulary of chan by the 8th century, and is specifically mentioned in Huineng's Platform Sutra. The monks heard lectures of Buddhist doctrine and philosophy, as indicated for example by Yaoshan's comment that the monks have teachers "to teach them sutras and Abidhamma."
We should not conclude that the growing chan monasteries, becoming increasingly organized and regulated in the mid- and late-Tang, were populated exclusively by serious students and dedicated practitioners. Many, maybe most of the monks were certainly illiterate, many were escaping from the labors and hardships of a peasant's existence, or from forced conscription into the army, from anticipated prosecution for criminal activities, or simply from homelessness. In any event, the monasteries would have harbored quite a wide variety of individual interests and abilities. Perhaps Shitou refers to a more dubious aspect of Chinese monastic life when he asks Dadian Baotong, 'Are you the kind of monk who studies Buddhism seriously, or are you the kind of monk who just hangs around all day?"
This period would have known a constant growth of monastic life and rapid expansion of interest in chan theory and practice, increasingly stabilized in and through the lineage of Huineng. The "golden age of chan" came to an abrupt end with the persecution of Buddhism instigated by the Emperor Wuzong in the years 841-846. Animosity towards Buddhism as a foreign religion imported from India had always existed in China, not only on the part of Taoists, but especially by Confucian scholars and officials who ran the imperial and provincial governments, and who undoubtedly saw their influence and the Confucianist cult of the state threatened by the sudden upsurge of interest in Buddhism, as well as by the unprecedented prosperity of the monasteries. Wuzong himself was an ardent Taoist, determined to drive Buddhism from China.
But ideology was not the only determining factor for the "great persecution:" economic reasons were also of primary importance. The Buddhist monasteries had accumulated wealth in the form of extensive land-holdings in the countryside, and the income which these produced was tax-exempt. The growing population of monks signified for the imperial government a corresponding reduction in agricultural productivity: one more monk meant one less farmer, or one less soldier in the imperial armies, an important consideration in an agrarian county with an organized national government whose borders were under constant attack by hostile forces emerging from nomadic societies. It is no wonder that Tang government administrators were anxious to control the steadily growing numbers of professional monks, fearing perhaps the kind of development which was to occur later in Tibet, where eventually more than 30% of the adult male population lived within monastic walls.
The year 846 marked a watershed in the development of Buddhism in China. One obvious result was the emergence of the chan movement and Jingtu (Pure Land) as the dominant schools of Buddhism, while virtually all other sects went into rapid decline. The persecution under Wuzong must have dampened whatever contemporary hopes may have existed for the establishment of Buddhism as the official state religion of the empire, and it enforced the realization that Buddhism could flourish only by the will of the state. As so often happens in cultural history during periods of political upheaval, new forms of social organization and religious practice quickly developed. For the chan movement, these resulted in the gradual establishment of the Five Houses and the creation of new forms of chan literature during the following Song period, of which the translations included in the present work may also be seen as representative.