204 CHAPTER EIGHTsolve the riddle of the k'ung-an. The solution lay in actually being able to
attain that ability in one's meditation.
The encounter with the k'ung-an, however, did not end there. One
was expected to convey one's realization to one's teacher in live words or
actions, liberated from context, that were supposed to embody one's new
perspective. This use of the "rhetoric of embodiment" was a new solution
to the dilemma that many Chinese Buddhist schools had found them-
selves in when they adopted tenets of the proponents of 'nonbeing' (see
Section 8.4.1). Buddhist texts taught that there was such a thing as wrong
release; thus there was the need to validate any spontaneous realizations
attained in meditation. The proponents of 'nonbeing', however, taught
that ultimate principles lay beyond words; thus there should be no verbal
content to any ultimate realizations by which they could be validated.
The k'ung-an masters thus looked to the rhetoric of embodiment-in
which the style of one's words and actions was supposed to express the
nonverbal level of mind from which they sprang-as the new way of
gauging the authenticity of one's realizations. In other words, one's level
of attainment was judged not by what one said, but by how one said it.
The assumption behind this faith in the rhetoric of embodiment was that
if the immediacy of Awakening in the present moment was the same as
that experienced by the great masters of the past, it should find its expres-
sion in a similarly live style of communication. Thus, although k'ung-an
practice placed a high value on the present moment, it did so by establish-
ing present moments of the past, together with their rhetorical
expressions, as its paradigms.
C. Ch 'an in .the Early Sung. The founding of the Sung dynasty brought
renewed official support for Buddhist monasticism. The Sung rulers took
an interest in regulating monastic life, and Ch'an advocates campaigned to
have Ch' an masters appointed as abbots of the large monasteries under
imperial sponsorship. New lamp records-far more extensive in content
than those of the interregnum, and written in a far more literary style-
were composed to promote the school's good reputation in the eyes of the
court. The first of the new lamp records was The Transmission if the Lamp
(1004), compiled by Yung-an Tao-yuan for the edification of the Ching-
te emperor. This codified the Ch' an lineage in a form that was to become
standard throughout the remaining history of the school, tracing the
transmission back not only to Bodhidharma, but through Mahakasyapa all
the way to the Buddha.
The campaign was successful, but success had its price. The communi-
ties over which Ch' an masters were placed were highly regulated, with
elaborate ritual cycles and rigid daily schedules for study, work, and medi-
tation. There is no way of knowing the extent to which the descendants
of the uncouth Ch' an meditators of the ninth century had already
become domesticated by the end of the T' ang, but within the first few
generations of the Sung the process of domestication was complete.
To deal with this situation, Ch'an writers took the records made dur-