BUDDHISM IN CENTRAL ASIA AND CHINA 203their own in the following centuries as new stories accreted around them
in response to issues that developed within the various Ch' an lineages.
B. Ch'an during the Five Dynasties. The T'ang-Sung interregnum, called the
Five Dynasties period (907-60), marked an important watershed in the
history of Ch' an. To escape the turmoil that was engulfing most of the
empire, thousands of monks from the southern Ch' an lineages took
refuge in present-day Fukien, a relatively peaceful enclave in southern
China. Forced into close proximity, they began to view themselves as a
unified school. Threatened with the potential for total political chaos,
they began writing down their oral ' traditions as a way of preserving them
for future generations. Their writings focused on tales exemplifying un-
orthodox teaching methods: unusual discourses and tales of encounters
between masters and their students, showing how Awakening could be
sparked in a variety of ways and later expressed in a variety of forms. Al-
though their initial impetus may have been simply to preserve these teach-
ings, they soon put the encounter dialogues to other uses as well. One
was to flesh out the Ch' an lineage accounts, called lamp records, to
demonstrate in detail the various ways in which the light of Awakening
had been passed from generation to generation. In doing so, these writers
succeeded in turning the entire lineage-from the time of the Buddha
through the T'ang dynasty-into a "sudden" lineage. The earliest extant
example of this style oflamp record was The Collection if the Patriarchal
Hall, compiled in 952 by Ching-hsiu Wen-teng.
Another use of encounter dialogues, pioneered by Yiin-men Wen-yen
(d. 949), was to assign the dialogues as k'ung-an ("public cases"; inJapan-
ese, koan ) to meditators as central topics of meditation. Dialogues for this
purpose were chosell·for their ability to baffle the ordinary rational and
verbal processes of the mind, using language for its ability not to inform,
but to perform: to shake up the mind and point to the principle, the Bud-
dha-nature, that could shine through only when the mind was in a spon-
taneous, nonverbal state (see Section 8.4.1; compare Section 6.3.3). This
practice was to help counteract the tendency of adhering to the words of
the texts or to the methods of formal sitting meditation as ends in them-
selves. To continue a metaphor we have used frequently in this text-that
Buddhist teachings are to be regarded primarily as a form of therapy-
k'ung-an meditation takes as its means of therapy case records of success-
ful cures.
A typical example of a k'ung-an is this: A monk asked Tung-shan,
"Where can we go to escape hot and cold?" Tung-shan answered, "Why
not go where there is neither hot nor cold?" "What sort of place is nei-
ther hot nor cold?" "When cold, let it freeze you to death. When hot, let
it burn you to death." The apparent message here is that the suffering
caused by hot and cold come from the mental labels of "hot" and "cold"
applied to sensations. If one were simply to allow the sensation to take
place without the label, one would touch a principle freed from any suf-
fering related to the sensation. To know this message, however, was not to