1986: 245). Moreover, the issue of sudden enlightenment was a long-standing
one; when it was raised by Tao Sheng 300 years before, it had brought
controversy but no new movement within Buddhism. The principal weakness
of the “Northern school” was its location at court, where it was exposed to
political vicissitudes, and diluted its meditation practice with intellectual con-
cessions to the court literati. Neither the “Northern” nor the “Southern”
faction continued long after this controversy; in Figure 6.3 we see that their
connections were confined to the intellectual circles of the capital. The contro-
versy of “Northern” and “Southern” schools was elevated retrospectively into
a symbol for the larger social movement. The real “Zen revolution” was taking
place among those lineages which cut themselves off from the basis of court
patronage as sharply as possible.
For these radicals, the doctrine of sudden enlightenment was pushed to an
extreme and given a deep organizational significance. The conventional Ma-
hayana path to enlightenment was through a series of (usually 10) ranks of
spiritual achievement, which implied considerable social stratification within
the monastic community. “Enlightenment” was the test by which a monk was
promoted to be head of the lineage, or to the rank of an abbot capable of
heading his own monastery. To attack the doctrine of the gradual stages of
enlightenment was to increase drastically the possibilities for mobility of relig-
ious status within the meditation school. This took place within a context in
which the openness or restrictedness of religious status was a matter of open
conflict.^8
The radical Ch’an masters opened up elite religious mobility not with
philosophical argument but in practice. They eliminated liturgy and intellectual
studies, and even attacked the practice of prolonged meditation, substituting
tests of dramatic and paradoxical insight. The “Zen revolution” made possible
a rapid organizational growth, and at the same time legitimated decentraliza-
tion of self-supporting new monasteries and lineages. Some of the famous
Ch’an masters had as many as 100 enlightened disciples. The creativity asso-
ciated with this process was an outburst of emotional energy flowing into an
explosion of organization-building.
From the mid- and late 700s on appear the flamboyant characteristics
associated with Zen. Ma-tsu (709–788) began to teach by means of paradoxi-
cal sayings, out of which came the famous contests of repartee for which the
Zen quest for enlightenment came to be known. One of Ma-tsu’s pupils,
Huai-hai (720–814), began the practice of requiring monks to engage in
manual labor. This was a sharp break with the old Buddhist custom of begging
for alms, and with the prevalent Chinese Buddhist practice of living, often
rather opulently, off gifts of land, serfs, and slaves from emperor or nobility.
In place of the wealthy urban monasteries and lavish court circles in which
Revolutions: Buddhist and Neo-Confucian China • 293