Baishui Zen

Before continuing on further, I want to have a shorter post as an interlude to discuss the general structure of Buddhist faith as an organization, to give some context as to what sorts of documents we’ll be pulling from, and why they are important. Since in these posts, we are being broad and agnostic about the different schools of Buddhist thought, it can become confusing to understand who actually believes what, so that’s what we are going to try to start addressing here.

The historical Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, lived and died around 400 BCE. The exact dates are unknown, but what is known is that sometime after his enlightenment, he came up with some structure for how to live and what kinds of teachings would comprise the core path for practitioners to follow if they wanted to follow in his footsteps. After his death, a council of his disciples convened to figure out what among this should be preserved for posterity, and what could be removed. The result of this council’s work became called the Vinaya, also known as Tripitaka, and comprises the main canon.

As expected, no standard can last forever, and by the next century, another council had formed, met and been disbanded over some lesser rules, ending in schism. From this point forward, there would not be anything which could call itself a unified authority on Buddhist belief and practice, including which texts are regarded as carrying correct teachings. There are different ways that Buddhist thought can be subdivided, which are somewhat analogous to different sects of Christianity. The analogy only goes so far, though, due to the tremendous breadth of writings that can be taken as scriptural basis for any given group’s views.

One collection of divisions are the “vehicles” of Buddhism. The oldest tradition according to this classification is Theravada Buddhism. Theravada is the most conservative of the schools of Buddhist thought, limiting themselves almost exclusively to the Pali canon and the Tripitaka, rejecting the sutras of the other schools. Theravada Buddhism is largely associated with southeast Asia, where it is the official religion of countries like Thailand and Myanmar today, and extremely popular throughout the region.

The next group to emerge was Mahayana Buddhism. Mahayana means “great vehicle.” This group is only loosely connected to one another, and is really more of an umbrella term itself. It has a vastly expanded cosmology, and regards many additional beings as buddhas in addition to the Buddha of history. Mahayana Buddhism is popular in India, Tibet, China, Vietnam, Korea and Japan, among other countries, even though the teachings you may find in any given community are often seemingly contradictory. This isn’t a criticism – it’s more of a feature than a bug. Mahayana seeks to elaborate on and penetrate deeper into the teachings of the Buddha. This means there are more teachings developed by different people at different times, and lacking a central authority, those teachings cannot all be simultaneously correct. Many Mahayana Buddhists believe that the method of teaching or practice is not particularly canonical – the best teachings are the expedient ones for the student. Chinese Chan Buddhism, and Japanese Zen, both belong to this category.

The last of the three major groups, by this distinction, is Vajrayana. Vajra means ritual, so it is the vehicle by ritual practice. This group of Buddhism is associated with esoteric practices which they believe are handed down from the Buddha, or from Buddhas from other worlds. Practices often subsume Mahayana practices, while adding in mantras, yoga rituals, visualizations through art forms, and so on. The goal of these rituals is to identify the practitioner with a Buddha or other cosmic deity, and expedite the process of enlightenment. This group is the youngest of the three traditions, and thus has the most other material to pull from. Esoteric Buddhism traces its roots all the way back to medieval India, so even though it is the youngest school, it is by no means a recent innovation. Places with a significant Mahayana Buddhist presence will have varying degrees of Vajrayana practice as well.

In more recent years, different traditions across Asia have shared more of their beliefs with each other, and there is generally more cross-talk between groups. For this reason, it is also popular to divide Buddhist belief into groups by geographic area. By this division, we could split Buddhism into the categories of Indian/Tibetan Buddhism, Chinese and Eastern Buddhism, which includes Korea and Japan, and Southeast Asian Buddhism, which mostly matches up with Theravada above, due to their more conservative attitude about adoption of new practices.

All of the different schools of thought have different degrees of claims of authenticity of their teachings. One of the most common ways of tracking authenticity is through lineages. These are basically family trees of student and teacher. Some of these lineages go all the way back to the Buddha himself, allegedly. Others begin with autodidacts who learned the Buddhist path on their own, and began taking new students. Sometimes these new lineages are sources of innovation and cross-talk between groups.

The Dalai Lama is of course a Tibetan Buddhist, which is one of the arms of the family tree of Mahayana, and incorporates a number of Vajrayana practices. Zen is also part of Mahayana, so throughout this blog’s posts, we are largely studying Mahayana teachings. Mahayana Buddhists often track these lineages with whatever historical accuracy is possible. While scholars debate the degree to which these lineages are correct, the cultural significance is undoubtedly real. All the texts that are considered here are “authentic,” not in the sense that they are authored by the Buddha, but in the sense that they belong to a living tradition that has guarded, promoted and expounded upon the Buddha’s teachings. The branching nature of these lineages means that not everything fits together perfectly into a unified whole, and it’s up to us to find the path through the teachings that is right for us.

Within these lineages are individuals who stand above other students in their tree. These individuals are prolific in their writings and have many students of their own, and are called patriarchs. Many other practitioners are highly eminent without being elevated to patriarch, and the title of patriarch is not like priest or bishop, it’s not an official status one attains. Rather, it’s something which is recognized through their contributions to Buddhism. Nevertheless, these prominent individuals might be thought of as the greatest sages, teachers and expositors of their time, and might be something resembling a leading authority of the time, even if they do not official power of any type.

Let’s end this summary with a brief look at important people in some of these lineages, in a few broad schools of Buddhism:

In the Indian tradition, the first two patriarchs are the immediate successors of the Buddha: Mahakasyapa, who features prominently in the Nirvana Sutra we are currently reading on this blog, and Ananda, a family member and prominent disciple. Further down the list is partiarch #14, Nagarjuna, who was a famous logician and expositor of the dharma. He is credited with “discovering” many of the Mahayana sutras, guarded by legendary beings called nagas. Nagarjuna’s successor, Aryadeva, was a monk, poet, and philosopher of the Middle Way. These two are extremely prominent throughout the Indian tradition.

In Zen lineages, 13 more patriarchs separate the sage Nagarjuna from Zen’s first patriarch, Bodhidharma, who is credited with bringing Buddhism to China, and innovating it into what became Chan Buddhism. This isn’t completely true, as there are other Chinese Buddhist schools, but it’s clear that the Buddhism that descended from Bodhidharma would be different from that which came before, with an increased focus on prajna meaning wisdom, and referring to emptiness and meditation. Zen lineages track six patriarchs, ending with Hongren, after which the family tree explodes in breadth and becomes very difficult to reliably track further. Many of these lineages survive today in China, Japan and Taiwan.

In Tibet, there are several different notions of lineage. One that is quite different is the lineage of the Dalai Lama, who has his own students, but is believed to be reincarnated across the generations. Because of conflict in Tibet, tracking lineages has been extraordinarily difficult, and preserving them has been a high priority for decades. In particular, the efforts of Dilgo Khyentse Rinpoche have single-handedly preserved a tremendous amount of modern Tibetan lineages, as he sought to receive teachings from anyone whose lineage was threatened. He died in 1991 after serving as head of the Nyingma school. Maintaining this school and it’s monastic program is yet another kind of lineage.

Finally, outside of Chan, China has other Buddhist communities with their own notion of lineage. The Pure Land school of Buddhism is a kind of Mahayana Buddhism that regards different realms as having degrees of purity brought by the teachings of Buddhas in them. This school does not track chains of students and teachers, but does note highly prolific Buddhist philosophers. There is a belief here and elsewhere in an Adi-Buddha, a first or primordial Buddha from which all other enlightened beings learn the dharma from. Patriarch Lushan Huiyuan is respected not just as the first proponent of Pure Land Buddhism in China around 350 AD, but also for asserting the independence of Chinese Buddhists from royal establishments, and promoting their autonomy. This is quite different from the 17th century 9th patriarch of Pure Land Buddhism, Ouyi Zhixu, who is famous for his syncretic writings. He is regarded as a patriarch of Pure Land Buddhism, but also of Tian’tai Buddhism, and a Chan master. With an average gap between them of 200 years per patriarch, this notion of lineage is very spread out. This is consistent with the Pure Land belief that not all realms will have a Buddha or patriarch within them at all times, and there are teachings put aside specifically for the preservation of the dharma. The last Pure Land patriarch, Shi Yinguang, died in 1940.