Image of book cover

Guro Shoshin Huby – Reading about Zen: Reflections on China Root, Taoism,Cha’n and Original Zen by David Hinton. Shambala 2020.

Why and how do we read about Zen, Buddhism and Buddhist practice? Indeed, is reading a good thing, or will this detract from the focus on an experience-based practice? Francis Dojun Cook in How to Raise an Ox makes the point that reading and talking about texts is not necessarily a different activity from washing the dishes or putting on your coat. It depends how you do it and to what purpose.

I don’t read about Zen practice very much, but what I have read I have found helpful because it reminds me why I practise. And sometimes I do need reminding. But some books stand out. They just won’t let me put them back on the shelf and move on. They call me back time and time again to ponder and struggle to understand. It is not just about the text and its apparent message, but the way some books, for some reason, burrow their way to a part of my practice that could do with some attention. They become a koan that arises in daily life.

To me, China Root by David Hinton is such a book. It presents a well-written and intriguing story about how Chinese Taoist philosophers honed the Indian Buddhist heritage into a Ch’an tradition that later inspired and informed Zen. This is in itself interesting enough. But then, Hinton goes on to argue that the Ch’an heritage ended up discarding much of the Indian Buddhist idea of enlightenment as a state beyond the everyday. Rather, they ended up with a distinctly Taoist flavoured tradition grounded in an earthy universe where enlightenment is found in the messy here and now. He also endeavours to show how much of the Ch’an influence has been “lost in translation” to English texts that emphasise enlightenment as a special state of mind and in ways that rather muddies the essence of practice for us Westerners. Thanks to Shinro Sensei and a Norwegian philosopher who used to sit with us, I have learned that this argument does not stand up to scrutiny. Nevertheless, reflecting on their comments has enhanced rather than diminished my fascination with the book because it has brought up aspects of my own practice that needed a new angle.

All this for a book of 158 pages including appendix and footnotes! It is a dense text that reads more like a poem than the coherently argued line of thought it claims to be. And herein lies the hook that draws me in.

First of all, the history
Hinton describes how, when Buddhist philosophy and practice was introduced to China in the 1st century CE, it transformed and was transformed by Taoism, a spiritual and philosophical heritage dating from the second millennium BCE. Taoism, in turn, consolidated in the political and spiritual vacuum created by the fall of the Chow dynasty in 223 BCE, whose theocratic rule derived its authority from the concept of an otherworldly ‘Celestial Heaven’. A class of artist-intellectuals stepped in, replacing the metaphysical concept of ’Heaven’ with ‘Tao’ as an empirical, natural phenomenon accessible through direct experience and scientific methods of the era. Access to “Tao” was in principle open to all and did not require the intervention of priestly rulers.

‘Tao’ denotes an impersonal cosmos, described by Lao Tse (6th century BCE) as “a single living tissue that is inexplicably generative in its very nature” (Hinton p.5). We are ourselves part of this cosmos and therefore have direct access to its nature and ways of working. The Taoist universe revolves around the ideas of “absence” and “presence”. It generates “presence”: forms, phenomena, things and ideas, which then fall back into “absence”:  the folds of the generative process, from which new phenomena arise in ever-shifting and dynamic constellations of becoming and falling back. I find this idea easily recognisable in the Zen concepts of Emptiness and Form. However, and if I understand Hinton correctly, the Taoist terms “Absence” and “Presence” need to be understood against the Chinese cosmology to bring out a meaning that is subtly but significantly different. Absence and presence refer to an empirical, dynamic and rather messy phenomenon open to everybody by becoming part of it, rather than abstract entities to be realised by disciplining the mind to grasp it.

According to Hinton, Buddhism’s arrival from India to China from the first century CE coincided with a regeneration of Taoism through the movement known as Dark Enigma. Dark Enigma scholars refined and deepened Taoist philosophy through commentaries on seminal Taoist texts (I Ching, Tao Te Ching and Chuang Tsu), centring their work around the movements of “Absence” and “Presence” as two aspects of the same generative empirical cosmos. They devoted particular attention to the deeper and more inaccessible levels of “Absence” or “Dark Enigma”. When Bodhidharma brought Buddhism to China in the 4th or 5th century CE, Chinese intellectuals had already been at work for at least a century, developing concepts and practices on which Bodhidharma based his teaching.

A drastic claim
According to Hinton, Chinese Taoist thinkers’ work to adapt Indian Buddhism to Chinese was not a 50-50 construction of a shared Indian/Cha’n Buddhist tradition. Rather, Chinese intellectuals not so much absorbed Indian Buddhism as picked out elements that were useful to the refining of Taoism, incorporated them in an evolving Ch’an cosmology and practice, and then cast them aside. He even suggests (p.7) that aside from a few institutional trappings (monasteries provided an important institutional framework for the development of Ch’an, in particular, meditation practice), the practice and philosophy that evolved were scarcely recognisable as Buddhism at all.

This is a pretty drastic claim! It certainly makes you sit up and take notice.

It also brings me to the central point Hinton makes and his reason for writing the book: he claims that much of the subtlety and complexity of the Taoist heritage as it developed into Ch’an has been lost in the translation to Western traditions via Japanese Zen. Much was lost when Ch’an was picked up by Japanese philosophy centering on an aesthetics of paring down and simplifying, creating calm and orderly spaces where the more messy and earthy aspects of Ch’an are lost. The idea of calm and simplicity is of course attractive to stressed and overstimulated Westerners and more again was lost when Zen was translated to Western thought. Hinton argues that the translations embrace an (early) Buddhist way of thinking about practice as striving for a place of tranquillity in a reality outside of our own messy everyday. He documents his argument in an appendix presenting translations of key Ch’an and Zen texts.

An example is the Buddhist practice of meditation. On this point Hinton suggests that Ch’an shows most clearly the contrast with the imported Indian tradition, where the practice of meditation or dhyana was a way to annihilate the self by entering a tranquil place of Nirvana, in important respects separated from everyday life. As far as I understand Hinton, Cha’n meditation is a means of accessing the process of Tao, and the dynamics of Absence and Presence. Ch’an transforms meditation into a practice to enter more deeply into precisely this everyday in order to experience its fleeting place in the constantly shifting process of a generative Tao. The “annihilation of the self” is achieved by realising that we are part of this flow, not separated from it. In moments of clarity we are the process – we can come to reflect  ‘the cosmos alone with itself’.

‘Mind’ is another concept Ch’an picked up from Indian heritage. It became integral to the practice of meditation in its overlap with the idea of “the cosmos alone with itself”. ‘Mind’ is not only the vessel of thoughts, ideas, reactions and assumptions that keep “me” a separate entity outside of the cosmic generative process. “Mind” is the reflection of the universe itself and through meditation we discard all that constitutes a separate “me” until we are a mirror looking out on the cosmos as itself. This state of “empty mind” is however not a tranquil and static place where the job is to polish the mirror free of dust to perfectly reflect reality. It is a place where we fully experience the generative process itself. In the words of Hui Neng, how can dust alight? This place is certainly vast, but not necessarily tranquil in our everyday use of the word.

Together with most people I have spoken to who have read the book I have a problem here.  I do not recognise the “Western” Zen to which Hinton refers. My own experience is that the practice and philosophy he describes as Ch’an is close to Zen traditions I know from Europe. I certainly recognise it in StoneWater. Henry Shukman Roshi makes the same point in a foreword praising China Root: “…I can’t help feeling I have just read a staggeringly good account of the modern Zen training a contemporary Japanese-based lineage led me through…”

Hinton seems to create a stereotype of “Western Zen” and “early Indian Buddhism” in order to construct his argument that Taoism’s heritage should be acknowledged and brought back to centre stage in Zen practice. But is this necessary? As Shinro Sensei pointed out to me, Buddhism’s arrival in China set in motion a complex and productive blend of ideas, teachings and practices that defies simple divisions between “Indian Buddhism”, “Taoist heritage”, “Cha’n” and “Zen”. Kogen Sensei suggested that Hinton’s description of Indian dhyana Buddhist practice seems close to criticism levelled against silent illumination meditation as passive and “deadwood sitting”.

Taoism seems alive and well in “Western Zen”, although of course expressed in other idioms than medieval Chinese. And the process of transformation is still ongoing and given a new momentum by Zen’s move to the West. (Even Reddit is part of the process! see Reddit Zen pages for an interesting example
https ://www.reddit.com/r/zen/comments/wk3kl0/china_root_by_david_hinton_lying_and_fraud_part_1/

It seems to me that Hinton is shooting blanks, or at any rate aiming for the wrong target. This is a pity, because it detracts some attention from the many other insights the book offers.

A mirror of my own practice and two useful concepts
Anyway, I am not sure Hinton’s argument or its flaws is what most readers seem to take from the book. For me certainly the text from the beginning goes off beyond an intellectual line of reasoning and really speaks to my own practice: I have come to realise that my practice mirrors the tension Hinton sets up between an Indian metaphysical understanding of Buddhist practice and a Taoist/Cha’n empirical experience, simplistic though it may be. I recognise in myself a tendency to strive for a place outside of my everyday life. I get frustrated when I can’t get there and tend to discard moments when I am knocked off a laboriously-achieved and precarious poise of Zen as a hindrance, an irrelevance. This happens at a subconscious level however, almost as a knee-jerk reaction outside of my sometimes more polished descriptions of Zen as being in the moment.

Hinton brings this tension to light for me, and also offers me ways out. He reminds me that we are not sitting to get anywhere different, but to become more rooted to where and who we are. At some level I know this and this idea of meditation draws me in for its promise of adventure and liberation. It is why I sit down on the cushion. However, once there, the idea is easily lost. Getting to where I know why I sit is no small endeavour and requires a degree of discipline and effort that seems daunting. I come to my cushion all ready to penetrate the mysteries of the universe, only to be entangled in an endless stream of mundane thoughts, anxieties and reveries that seem to bring me further and further away from those very mysteries.

Here however Ch’an lends two most useful but subtle concepts of Tzu-jan and Wu-wei. Tsu-jan I think denotes “occurrence appearing of itself” at the mysterious and evasive interactions between Absence and Presence. Wu-wei or “not acting” I understand as being one with (and in that) movement, without an “I” that separates me from an ongoing creative process. We balance precisely on that point, both on and off the cushion. We are integral to the generative process, and so are those thoughts and anxieties I find so frustrating because I feel they separate me from an Absolute. Standard advice on meditation is not to push the thoughts away, or to invite them in, but simply to observe them. This makes sense, but I slip all too easily into the idea that the thoughts are external to me, as an observer. However, the idea of Tzu-jan makes me appreciate those thoughts as significant and important because they are part of the generative ongoing process that ‘I’ am caught up in. With Wu-wei I can sink into them and come and go with them, rather than observe them and try to tame them, from the outside. They are the very stuff of meditation itself, not some random and irrelevant distractions I have to get through to get to some ideal place of clarity.  I can more easily go with the flow, even relish it. This approach makes meditation more dynamic, flexible, and – sometimes! – opens me to whatever adventure life throws at me, both on and off the cushion.

The same goes for “bringing meditation into everyday life”. I really struggle with that. I can wholly give myself to doing the dishes or cleaning the floor, that is not the problem. In fact I find being absorbed in tasks quite relaxing. I can garden all day and love cleaning the windows. It is everything that goes on around and between these tasks where my concentration breaks down, and to me the stuff between tasks is my everyday or certainly a large part of it. How to deal with all that stuff and relate to it? With Wu-wei I can take a step back and remind myself that events actually do this for me. I “only” need to remove myself from centre stage. Easier said than done.  But the thought that “Wu-wei” can be translated as “idleness” is both a useful and welcome reminder to somebody intent on doing the right thing all the b***** time.

“Living the hinge of Tao”?
To me, Hinton’s message in China Root is neatly summarised as “living the hinge of Tao” (p 69). It describes Ch’an practice and philosophy as living the “generative origin moment”(s) where the dark enigma transforms into transient ‘Presence’ only to fall back into an ever-dynamic “Absence”. I find this thought endlessly fascinating and inspiring, if hard to put into practice. But if living the “hinge of Tao” may seem a bit ambitious, a good wobble can also take you interesting places.

Hinton also puts my own struggle to live a Taoist-inspired Zen practice into perspective. It may not just be a personal thing. I wonder if our historical and intellectual heritage and conditioning can prevent me/us from fully realising the potential of Zen practice. We “Westerners” are conditioned into a universe that revolves precisely around “me” as an individual. Moreover, our use of language places us as observers and authors, rather than participants, of the world and its representations. We are trained in ways of thinking where concepts and ideas are placed logically in orderly systems of thought that aim to accurately represent the world, and we then strive to communicate those representations through language. Hinton describes Ch’an as a mental universe where key concepts and ideas change meaning and overlap with each other depending on context. Moreover, the individual as author and observer is an accidental part of this dynamic. To Chinese and Ch’an apparently, words are an integral part of the generative process. Things and phenomena appear when they are named, their place and meaning shifts with use and they come and go. It is a process where we as users of language are decentred and accidental participants in a process much larger than ourselves. We are not authors – we are being written and erased in ways over which we have very little control. All we can do is let go.

Taoist cosmology is based on the idea of an impermanent and constantly shifting universe, and accessing this universe and our part in it requires regular deconstruction and rejection of ideas and concepts underpinning our intellectual schemas at any one time. They are as impermanent as any other form thrown up by the never-ending generative process of Tao. The only way to describe and communicate this reality is poetry. Hinton’s linear argument may be short-lived. Maybe he should have known better. But his poetry stands. I return time and again to China Root to help me appreciate the beauty of a transient world and my place in it. I also have learned that reading about Zen and Buddhism is important, and that there are many ways to do it.