It was a great pleasure to be present and participate when Keizan Rōshi gave Denkai and Denbō to Dan Kōjin Bushin Gallagher on 30 October 2024. When thinking about the preparations for Dharma Transmission, I began to reflect on our lineage and the ceremony’s general significance for a talk during the sesshin. What follows is my attempt to reconstruct some of the things I said. I hope that it’s helpful and interesting to readers of the newsletter.
There’s a four-line verse attributed to Bodhidharma, combining four separate slogans that can also stand alone. This verse tends to be referred to when people want to be definitive about Zen or to distinguish it from other branches of Buddhism. For that reason, it’s become quite well-known. The Dumoulin translation I have in front of me reads:
A special transmission outside the teachings,
Do not depend on written words,
Directly point to the human mind,
See one’s nature and become Buddha.
Apparently, the attribution to Bodhidharma does not withstand academic scrutiny. Scholarship suggests that the four independent lines of the verse originated in the 8th or 9th century. Moreover, as Professor Albert Welter has explained, they aren’t found together as a single verse until the Tsu-t’ing shih-yüan (Collection from the Garden of the Patriarchs), written in 1108, when they were first attributed to Bodhidharma.
Whatever the scholarship, you’ll probably agree that doubts about age and attribution don’t undermine the verse’s value and significance for practice. On the contrary, to paraphrase Dr John McRae’s first rule for Buddhist studies: when something’s not true, it’s more important rather than less so! This is so because, as McRae says, historical facts tend to be limited in impact to a very few people in a specific time and place, whereas “The mythopoeic creation of Zen literature implies the religious imagination of the Chinese people, a phenomenon of vast scale and significance.” Put another way, the value of this particular verse comes from the authority with which generations of Zen practitioners have imbued it as a teaching device. It’s influential not because Bodhidharma really did write it but rather because generations of Zen students and masters have imaginatively revered, studied and made use of it.
One question which we could ask ourselves about the verse is: which line is most definitive of Zen? Or, which line most clearly brings out whatever it is that differentiates Zen from other branches of Buddhism?
In answer, I expect most Zen students would plumb for the fourth line (“see one’s nature and become Buddha”) because it points to the aim of Zen practice, exemplified in the numerous stories of the awakening of Zen masters down the ages, beginning of course with Śākyamuni Buddha himself, who gazing at Venus, saw into his own nature and became Buddha. According to the Denkōroku, he exclaimed at that time:
“I, and the great earth and beings, simultaneously achieve the Way.”
On the other hand, and without denying the importance of the fourth line, perhaps there’s a good case to be made for the first line because the special transmission outside the teachings makes possible seeing into one’s nature and becoming Buddha. If we agree about that, then to understand what’s definitive about Zen, we need to ask ourselves, what are the teachings, and what is the special transmission outside of the teachings?
The teachings are the Buddhist canon or the word of the Buddha. Originally, they were unwritten. Tradition has it that Ananda memorised the sūtras (discourses and sermons), and Upāli memorised the Vinaya (the moral code). In the year after the Buddha’s death, a ‘First Council’ (saṇgīti) of 500 Arhats was held at Rājagṛha to establish the canon. As the most senior monk, Mahā Kaśyapa chaired the convocation. He asked Ānanda to recite everything he recalled of the Buddha’s discourses and Upāli to recite the rules of the Vinaya. That’s the story. However, the canon, which was eventually written down and formulated into the Tripiṭaka or “three baskets” (of the sūtras, the Vinaya and the Abhidharma, a scholastic analysis and commentary), did not receive its final form until long after the first council.
Moreover, from the beginning, there were disagreements about how accurately and comprehensively the teachings were remembered and formulated. The disagreements caused schisms in the sangha, the emergence of different sects and, after the first century BCE, Mahayana ideas began to develop. Eventually, of course, a number of very influential Mahayana sūtras and commentaries were added to the Buddhist canon.
Throughout the history of Buddhism and its spread to different countries, the written teachings have played a central role. Sūtras spread along the caravan routes of the Silk Road, and their early translators and exegetes were in great demand and highly revered. Sometimes, they were even held hostage by local monarchs desperate to own the teachings! Particular sūtras were hugely influential in the development of Buddhist sects in particular times and at particular places. This was as true of Zen as of other sects (in its beginnings, in China, Zen was associated with the Lankāvatāra Sūtra, the importance of which subsequently declined, to be replaced by the Diamond Sūtra by the time of the fifth ancestor, Daiman Kōnin). However (and according to its traditions at any rate), Zen also developed an infamy for paying scant regard to the sūtras and for promoting instead a special transmission outside the teachings. One very learned scholar of the Diamond Sūtra, Tokusan Senkan, was so scandalised by the stories he heard about Zen monks that he decided to travel to the Zen temples of southern China to put them straight. At that time, Tokusan was known for his learning as “Diamond Jō,” but he met his comeuppance in a teahouse along the way when he stopped for refreshment. The proprietor was an accomplished lay Zen student. Seeing Jō’s huge backpack of Buddhist texts, she asked him what it was. Self-importantly, Jō explained that he was a leading exegete of the Diamond Sūtra; these were his commentaries, and he was on his way to teach Zen monks about real Buddhism. The proprietor of the teahouse replied that she would serve Jō with refreshment if he would first answer a question for her. Jō agreed, and so she said, “I have heard that, according to the Diamond Sūtra, past mind is ungraspable, present mind is ungraspable, and future mind is ungraspable. So where is the mind that you wish to refresh? If you can answer this, you may buy refreshments from me. If not, you’ll have to go elsewhere.” When Jõ was unable to reply, the teahouse proprietor directed him to the nearby Zen temple, where he burned all the commentaries and took up Zen study!
The story of Diamond Jō is, of course, meant to illustrate the limitations of the intellectual study of the written teachings in the Tripiṭaka and hint at the special transmission with which Zen is concerned. The special transmission outside the teachings is, of course, a profoundly personal insight into the teachings that does not depend for its verity on the written word of a sūtra (as the second line of the verse makes clear). It would be easy to presume from this that the special transmission doesn’t depend on the spoken word either, or indeed, on any other person. We might want to argue that it’s entirely self-generated, just as Śākyamuni Buddha’s realisation was apparently self-generated upon seeing the morning star. According to this understanding, we are each alone, the master of our own life, and each of us can only follow our own genius. However, I think we need to be careful about this. Such a conclusion is only half right. It’s right in the sense that only we can wake up to our own lives, but it’s missing something of great importance—the lineage.
According to the Zen tradition, the special transmission outside the teaching is Dharma Transmission (Denbō or Shihō), through which, in dependence on our teacher, our understanding is confirmed. We join the lineage of ancestors, from Śākyamuni Buddha down, in our case, through Taizan Maezumi Rōshi, Tenshin Fletcher Rōshi and Keizan Scott Rōshi to his successors, in the 83rd generation. It consists of a sacred trust so that, as a transmitted teacher in the lineage of the ancestral Zen masters, Kōjin Sensei, for example, is now entrusted to guard the transmission well and pass it on to the next generation. This is a grave responsibility, which comes together with great gratitude to Rōshi and the previous generations of teachers. It’s the special transmission, understood in this way (sometimes called the tributary stream flowing through the darkness), that is at the heart of our Zen practice.
Of course, like the verse attributed to Bodhidharma, the ancient history of the stream of our lineage was almost certainly made up, probably during the first millennium of the Common Era. There are differing academic opinions about when and why transmission lineages developed and whether they originate from India or China. The importance of our lineage, however, really doesn’t depend on whether it’s true that, as a matter of historical fact, it goes all the way back to Śākyamuni Buddha. Applying McRae’s rule, it’s more important and helpful for us to imaginatively appreciate and invest ourselves in the lineage as a wonderfully rich study tool, offering continually renewed life to our daily practice.
Literal truth, by contrast, is a collection of dry facts which, in the case of early Buddhism, evince more than a few moments of prevarication, disagreement and near failure. According to the early canon, for instance, the Buddha didn’t actually appoint anyone to succeed him after he entered paranirvāna. From the little we know, the Buddha might even have believed his teaching career had failed as he died. His two senior-most followers, Śāriputra and Maudgalyāyana, had predeceased him; a third accomplished sangha leader, Mahākāśyapa, was not with him when he died, and although Ananda had memorised the teachings, he had not attained to any understanding of them. Therefore, the future of the Dharma was somewhat precarious and probably remained so until the reign of the Buddhist patron, Emperor Asoka Piyadasi (ruled circa 268–232 BCE), who ensured its survival and eventual spread beyond the borders of India for his own reasons.
The story of our lineage has its origins in the Mahayana. A way to understand how and why it emerged might be to ask ourselves what a straightforward exegesis of the early Tripiṭaka teachings might have been like in the years after the Buddha’s death. Although we can’t know, I do doubt whether early Buddhism was an easy sell when taken literally, especially perhaps to sophisticated Indian Vedanta audiences. The basic proposition was that the Buddha was a man; he had lived a few centuries earlier; he had taught his followers to live simply, wisely and kindly, but he had died and was gone. Unless a living teacher was particularly charismatic and gifted, that message probably didn’t sound terribly attractive when set against the promise of the Vedanta. At the dawn of the Mahayana, many Buddhist teachers began to up their game. They re-presented the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha in a new paradigm which, in its developed form, would be called the Trikāya.
According to the Trikāya, Siddhartha Gautama, the man who lived and died in the 5th century BCE, was a Nirmāṇakāya—a psycho-physical appearance or manifestation in time and space. However, his realisation of Buddhahood as the transcendent Dharmakāya, the body of truth or reality, was undying, unifying, holistic and eternal. Understood as Dharmakāya, Mahayana teachers asserted that the Buddha was of such universal significance that he could say this upon his enlightenment:
“I, and the great earth and beings, simultaneously achieve the Way.”
This reimagined understanding of the Buddha would enable Mahayanists to say that the Buddha did not attain enlightenment beneath the Bodhi Tree in Magadha but countless aeons previously, that he eternally teaches on the Vulture Peak, and that in the whole of his teaching career, he never uttered one word of teaching!
In the same way, the Buddha’s teaching of the Dharma was re-imagined; it was no longer merely a collection of dried parchment leaves. It was now the Buddha’s Sambhogakāya: his subtle or unlimited body of enjoyment, to be experienced in the affirmative contact that arises between one realised self and another, as a creative gestalt (if you will). From the Sambhogakāya perspective, the true teaching (or the special transmission outside the teachings) is not just the Tripiṭaka. It is, potentially at least, each and every lived experience pointing directly to the human mind. Inherently, it followed that there was now the opportunity to see into one’s nature and realise Buddhahood in each and every instant. The Sambhogakāya is, of course, epitomised in the story of Mahākāśyapa’s smile, which came to be seen as the birth of Zen at the moment that the Buddha transmitted the Dharma to the next generation of teachers.
Once the World-Honoured One held up a flower and blinked. Kāśyapa smiled. The World-Honoured One said, “I have the treasury of the eye of the true Dharma and the wondrous mind of Nirvana, and I transmit it to Mahākāśyapa.”
When two unique instances of Nirmanakaya come together, a Buddha meets another Buddha, eye-to-eye, in Sambhogakāya, there is the special transmission outside the teachings, whose content is Dharmakāya. At that moment, two embodied beings, at a particular time and in a particular place, are taken out of their time and place in history and geography and invested with life and meaning for all people, in any place and at any time. This is how the lineage works, generation by generation, conveying its empowerment down to the present day.
The Trikāya corresponds to the realised Triratna, or Three Treasures of the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha, in which we take refuge during the Jūkai, Shukke Tokudō and Denkai ceremonies. Realising ourselves as the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha during these ceremonies, we are also realising ourselves as the Trikāya (and there are also aspects of the Denbō ceremony which bring this out very clearly).
In these ceremonies, we realise ourselves as the Three Treasures through the power of atonement. By the power of atonement, we give ourselves permission to embrace and make manifest the whole of our humanity without exception or judgment. In atonement, we fearlessly allow ourselves to show up as we are. When we do this, showing up at a given time, in a particular place, we do before others—and more especially one other, whom we empower to confirm us as the realised beings we are. In the Jūkai ceremony, it’s the Kaishi (preceptor) who does this for us. In Denbõ, it’s the lineage teacher. In this way, the role of the teacher is very important to our practice. By imaginatively engaging with the lineage of Dharma successors embodied in the living person of our own teacher and permitting ourselves to allow that person to be the Trikaya and to receive our atonement, we can, in turn, confirm ourselves as the Trikaya. In due course, we can also help others to make the same journey. The story of the transmission of the Dharma from Mahākāśyapa to Ananda illustrates something of this:
The Venerable Ananda asked the Venerable Kasyapa, “Elder Dharma brother, did the World Honoured One transmit anything else to you besides the gold brocade robe?” Kasyapa called, “Ananda!” Ananda replied. Kasyapa said, “Knock down the flagpole in the front gate.” Ananda was greatly awakened.
By openly revealing his doubt about the transmission, Ananda revealed his difference from the elder Mahākāśyapa, as Nirmanakāya. As a consequence, Mahākāśyapa was able to meet him, Buddha to Buddha, in Sambhogakāya. He called out to Ananda, and Ananda responded. Although nothing more than a call and response occurred, the special transmission outside the teachings had been directly confirmed to Ananda as Dharmakāya. As there was no more to be said, Mahākāśyapa told Ananda to knock down the flagpole. At this moment, the significance of Mahākāśyapa’s interactions with the Buddha (and later with Ananda himself) now became clear to Ananda—as, of course, they do to us. The Dharmakāya shines as unmistakably as the morning star. All of this is at the heart of Zen. Bodhidharma’s verse and the whole lineage of ancestors are true if, and only to the extent that we allow them to be confirmed to us as true in our own lives. I would say that all of this is inherent in the nature of Zen, Bodhidharma’s verse and the transmission of the Dharma.