populace when he returned to Ch’ang-an. Earlier, the translator Kumarajiva was
reputed to be a great magician, and was even forced to mate with court concubines
to propagate his magic powers.- Gregory (1991); Weinstein (1987: 63, 149); Dumoulin (1988: 45–49, 225–235,
284–285). The influence of Hua-yen within the Ch’an lineages is noted in Figures
6.3 and 6.4 from the time of the great innovators Shih-t’ou and Ma-tzu, ca. 750,
down to Ta-hui, ca. 1150. - In Figure 6.3 we see the Ch’an lineages already starting to split at the time of
Hung-jen’s contemporary Fa-jung (238), the alleged founder of the Oxhead school,
who syncretized Ch’an meditation with the old Three Treatise school. Obviously
there was no strong anti-intellectualism here, but the splitting was a structural
harbinger of things to come. The most prominent Oxhead master was Hung-jen’s
pupil Fa-chih (240), who combined meditation with the Amidaist practice of
invoking the name of the Buddha. The Oxhead school lasted through seven
generations of masters, although it never had any of the famous “Zen”-style
paradoxers (McRae, 1985; 1986: 241–242). Hung-jen’s pupils included three more
who originated their own lineages: the “Northern school” patriarch Shen-hsiu; his
rival Hui-Neng; and Hsuan-Chih (240a), who founded a Szechuan school which
practiced meditation on the Buddha’s name, another syncretism of Ch’an with the
Pure Land school. Hui-Neng in turn was not only master of the contentious
Shen-Hui but propagator of several other lineages as well, including those of the
“Zen” radicals Ma-tzu and Shih-t’ou. It is apparent that Hui-Neng did not make
an isolated doctrinal breakthrough, but was in the midst of an organizational
transformation as Ch’an lineages split off all around him. - Consciousness-Only, with its great intellectual difficulty, was highly elitist; the route
to enlightenment culminated in mastery of the philosophy, with the highest relig-
ious status reserved for advanced scholars. T’ien-t’ai had already made a similar
claim, with its hierarchy of doctrines to be mastered before enlightenment. At the
opposite end of the field, the Pure Land sects made salvation as easy as possible,
with the Amidaists taking it to the extreme of demanding only chanting a holy
name. In the mid- and late 700s this conflict became explicit, as T’ien-t’ai and Pure
Land monks polemicized between intellectual and anti-intellectual, hard and easy
routes to peak religious status. Hui-neng himself was subject of polemical attack
by Tzu-min (268 in Figure 6.3) of the Pure Land school; and Tzu-min is a lineage
predecessor of Fa-chao (271), who preached the prospect of damnation in hell and
condemned the easy paths to enlightenment, including universal salvation. The
Ch’an route, however, was at neither of the two Pure Land poles, which applied
essentially to laypeople, and differed over the rigorousness of faith required. The
Ch’an innovation concerned the restrictedness or availability of high religious
status among the elite of meditation specialists. - We see this clearly by comparing Figures 6.3 and 6.4: in the former the Ch’an
lineages fan out across the page, taking the place of all other Buddhist factions; in
the latter, from 900 through 1200, we see the Ch’an lineages winnowing down,
the surviving branches amalgamating with one another and finally disappearing,
while the neo-Confucians fan out across their side of intellectual space.
972 •^ Notes to Pages 290–296