The Way of Zen - Alan Watts [43]
Seng-chao had been converted to Buddhism as a result of reading the Vimalakirti Sutra–a text which has exercised considerable influence upon Zen. Although Seng-chao became a monk, this sutra is the story of a layman, Vimalakirti, who excelled all the Buddha’s disciples in the depth of his understanding. He had surpassed all the other disciples and Bodhisattvas by answering a question as to the nature of the nondual reality with a “thunderous silence”–an example frequently followed by Zen masters. Vimalakirti “thunderingly silent” is, too, a favorite theme of Zen artists. But the main importance of this sutra for China and for Zen was the point that perfect awakening was consistent with the affairs of everyday life, and that, indeed, the highest attainment was to “enter into awakening without exterminating the defilements [klesa].”
There was an appeal here to both the Confucian and the Taoist mentality. The Confucian stress on the importance of family life would not easily sympathize with a rigorously monastic type of Buddhism. Though the Chinese Buddhist masters were normally monks, they had large numbers of advanced lay students, and Zen, in particular, has always attached great importance to the expression of Buddhism in formally secular terms–in arts of every type, in manual labor, and in appreciation of the natural universe. Confucian and Taoist alike would be especially agreeable to the idea of an awakening which did not involve the extermination of human passions, as klesa may also be translated. We have already noted the peculiar trust in human nature which both these philosophies professed. However, not exterminating the passions does not mean letting them flourish untamed. It means letting go of them rather than fighting them, neither repressing passion nor indulging it. For the Taoist is never violent, since he achieves his ends by noninterference (wu-wei), which is a kind of psychological judo.
Seng-chao’s writings, as well as his commentary on the Vimalakirti Sutra, are full of Taoist quotations and phrases, for he seemed to be following the example of less important, though earlier, monks such as Hui-yüan (334–416) and Tao-an (312–385) in using “extension of the idea” (ko-i c) for explaining Buddhism through Taoist parallels. So much did this suggest an equivalence between the two traditions that by the end of the fifth century Liu Ch’iu could say:
From the K’un-lun mountains eastward the (Taoist) term “Great Oneness” is used. From Kashmir westward the (Buddhist) term sambodhi is used. Whether one looks longingly toward “non-being” (wu) or cultivates “emptiness” (sunyata), the principle involved is the same.4
Two of Seng-chao’s doctrines would seem to have had some importance for the later development of Zen–his view of time and change, and his idea that “prajna is not knowledge.” The chapter on “The Immutability of Things” in his Book of Chao is so original and so startlingly similar to the section on time in the first volume of Dogen’s Shobogenzo, that the celebrated Japanese Zen philosopher can hardly have been unfamiliar with it.
Past things are in the past and do not go there from the present, and present things are in the present, and do not go there from the past.… Rivers which compete with one another to inundate the land do not flow. The “wandering air” that blows about is not moving. The sun and moon, revolving in their orbits, do not turn around.5
In the same way Dogen pointed out that firewood does not become ashes and life does not become death, just as the winter does not become the spring. Every moment of time is “self-contained and quiescent.”6
Seng-chao also discussed the seeming paradox that prajna is a kind of ignorance. Because the ultimate reality has no qualities and is not a thing, it cannot become an object of knowledge. Therefore prajna, direct insight, knows the truth by not knowing.
Wisdom knows not, yet it illumines the deepest profundity. Spirit calculates not, yet it responds to the necessities