202 CHAPTER EIGHT
The Platform Sutra, despite its shaky historical foundations, became
one of the most influential texts in the development of southern Ch' an. It
gave a Chinese flavor to a teaching from the Nirvift;ta Sutra concerning the
identity of concentration and wisdom, defining concentration as the
essence of wisdom, and wisdom as the function of concentration. This
identity is reflected in its definition of tso-ch 'an (sitting meditation). Sitting
(corresponding to concentration) means not a physical posture, but a state
of not activating thought in any and all circumstances; meditation ( corre-
sponding to wisdom) is the state of seeing one's original nature without
confusion. This definition is reminiscent of Chih-i's sudden method of
practice, but the Siitra offers no details as to whether, as in Chih-i's teach-
ings, this approach was to be combined with formal meditation
techniques, or if it implied a rejection of such techniques altogether. Vari-
ous southern schools took up different sides on this question, but the
mainstream position retained formal techniques as the backbone of the
practice, using the sudden perspective as a corrective to the pitfalls that
formalism might entail.
The early sectarian Ch' an battles continued until the persecutions of- Although a number of newly ascendant Ch'an lineages joined in the
fray, other lineages did their best to stay in the mountains and avoid the
controversy. Realizing that elaborate doctrinal explanations could only
deliver a meditator into the hands of his scholarly opponents, they devel-
oped a new teaching style that made heavy use of paradox, cryptic state-
ments, shouts, and beatings to jolt their students out of the verbalizing
mind-set that led to doctrinal controversies in the first place. Although
these IIfethods were borrowed from the methods of old Taoist sages, they
were also bolstered by the teaching in the Vimalaklrti-nirdesa Sutra
concerning the inability oflanguage to express nonduality. Prominent
among this new style of teacher were Ma-tsu (709-88), Huang-po (d.
850), Lin-chi (d. 866), and Tung-shan (807-69). Four of the later Five
Houses of Ch' an in the Sung dynasty traced their lineage back to Ma-tsu;
the most prominent among them descended from Lin-chi, one of Ma-
tsu's Dharma descendants, whose predilection for shouts and beatings be-
came their house style. The remaining house, Ts'ao-tung, traced itself
back to Tung-shan, whose methods-though unorthodox as well-placed
more of an emphasis on quiet sitting. During the Sung dynasty, the Five
Houses eventually became institutionally quite distinct from one another,
but historical records indicate-that during the late T' ang they were fairly
fluid, with students from one lineage often studying under masters from
other lineages and going off into the mountains to meditate alone.
Because these schools avoided the capital, they were best positioned to
survive the persecutions of845. Few contemporary documents survive
from this period, so it is difficult to tell what role the unorthodox methods
of these lineages played in the schools' meditative and communal life as a
whole. The suspicion is that many of the stories attributed to them are
later creations, as these figures became literary types that took on a life of