Records from the AncestralMirror

About the Zongjing Lu

Today, as yesterday, Chinese religiosity is rich in its variety of received influences: from Buddhist India, from Sinitic Daoism, Confucianism and from an original, home-grown Buddhism, including Chan. In China this eclectic approach has ever been the norm:8 rigidity in religious affiliations seems alien to Asian sensibilities.

The Zongjing Lu is not a typical [Song dynasty] 'Chan' text - it does not seek to delight the reader with an original brilliance expressing wisdom and insight. The work is studious, traditional Buddhist logic, conforming to a timehonoured Indo-Sinitic analysis of the human condition and its transcendence.

Yongming Yanshou (904-976 CE) refers to himself as a Chan Master. For more than a thousand years he has been a figure difficult to squeeze into a tiny box of preconceptions regarding what a 'Chan master' really is.9 Most inconveniently, he was also the sixth patriarch of Pure Land practices,10 so how could he be a pure Chan master?11 This originally Indian Pure Land movement12 was / is all-pervasive in Asian Mahayana traditions without being / possessing a definite 'doctrine'. Our Western Land (Paradise Lost) is rather squeamish about chanting or visualisation practices, as if the [Christian] devil himself were being invoked: not very respectable. Yet given an all-embracing Mahayana Buddhism in south-east China of the 10th century, mirrored in the ZJL, a strong theophanic element in common practices of worship surrounding Yanshou and acolytes would seem to have been a likely part of daily life. Furthermore, the history of manifesting an apparition of a Buddhist ipseity through the contemplation / incantation of a name,13 in this case Amitabha, so that the worshipper might see Him 'as clearly as seeing the stars in the night sky,'14 has a long and venerable history in Chinese religion (and is also a common element in other world religions).15 For, says Yanshou, quoting a famous sutra, Buddha Amitabha, the Western Paradise, is right here and now.16 Nevertheless, Yanshou declares that calling upon Buddha Amitabha in the hope of gaining a good rebirth in his Western Paradise (nianfo) 17 is for persons who have no faith in their own consciousness being Buddha,18 where nianfo is the entrance into the sanctuary of enlightenment.'19

If the Pure Land is a double projection from the believer's own alayavijñana,20 is this one of the functions of 'Only Consciousness' (??), the constant refrain of the ZJL?21 If you believe in Amitabha, he stands before you. Human feelings going out towards the Buddhas and their response to a consciousness of faith (ganying ??) are heard, for 'Humans and the Buddhist pantheon and cosmos are bound tightly together via the mechanism of stimulus-response .the Buddhist unseen world is exquisitely responsive: it is not aloof and indifferent .nor is it capricious in its responses .'22 Yanshou too, in the second fascicle, says that 'Human feelings and the response [of the Buddhas] is not unreal.' (??) (426c16)

Pure Land and Chan: in the Jingde Chuandeng Lu (CDL), Emperor Xuanzong (r. 847-859 CE) questions Chan master Hongbian of Da Jiangfu Temple in Jingzhou (Shanxi, Xi'an),

'What of the people of today who call upon Buddha?' Hongbian replied, '. for those of middling capacities, because they couldn't awaken suddenly, the Buddha therefore opened the temporarily expedient gate of the sixteen entrances to meditation and of invoking Buddha to be born in the Pure Land .'23

And Zongmi, in his Chan Prolegomenon, quoted in the CDL, says,

Coming to recollection of the Buddha by seeking birth in the Pure Land, they must also cultivate the sixteen moments of seeing, as well as the samadhi of recollecting Buddha and [enter] the samadhi of seeing all the Buddhas of the ten directions [as clearly as the stars at night].24

What Chan practice and Pure Land chanting and visualisations obviously have in common is faith: these meditation practices take long years to cultivate, impossible without intense effort and whole-hearted devotion.25 The isolated ego cannot sustain such intensity; disappointments and failure come quickly: faith is needed in some form. The strangeness of such meditation states centred around visualisations - and the attempt to study them second-hand - brings home how old masters of meditation such as Zhiyi and Yanshou (not to mention Daoists and Tibetans) were able to describe these states authoritatively, veritable tours de force of consciousness and memory, the direct personal experience, verified by the commensurate insight into our human potential.

Consciousness's power to visualise has been lauded in other civilised cultures; 26 it certainly exists, be it as a more or less protean / slippery non-entity, ungraspable physically or non-physically. According to Yanshou,

The true consciousness (xin) - a ring of iron would not be able to conceal its radiance, for it pervades the three thousand great chiliocosms and the all-pervasive void. (T48.0432a19)

This is not mere hyperbole. Again, this off-world consciousness; experienced Buddhist meditation masters such as Zhiyi, Yanshou and many others, might have achieved something quite notable: through years of both practical experience in meditation and of harvesting the insights of this experience (one half is not possible without the other), they managed to synchronise their two brainhalves to reveal a higher-consciousness above the deluded one,27 responsible for producing incomprehensibly vast, profound and erudite literatures. Why otherwise would Yanshou say that 'One should stimulate consciousness as if it were a bridge in order to liberate oneself from forgetfulness and weariness,'28 a direct quote from the Huayan Jing. 29 The key here is the bridge, the liminal nature of consciousness (???), not without its danger.30 Pure Land practice originally concerned the art of dying, the importance of the last thought moment at death to ensure a propitious rebirth in the Western Paradise. One of Yanshou's myriad good deeds31 might have been to stimulate this process to see / feel Amitabha in this very life, before physical death. Chan [meditation] and Pure Land practices seem to partner well in this undertaking, for 'the contemplation of emptiness is not hindered by the constant practice of recitation.'32 It should also be born in mind that talk of students' middling or lesser capacities was not pejorative or discriminative: skilful means were acts of compassion. This all-embracing consciousness then is clearly a chip from the 'uncarved block', its true affinity. 33 Earthbound, with feet of clay, left and right brains work ever so slightly out of sync, a disconnect discernible even in the written word. Therefore, not to take the multiple contexts of consciousness into account - a Chan / Pure Land streaming out of and back into our consciousnesses, only consigns us to a learning place we never fully inhabit. Some 'ancients', released from their root afflictions, no longer sang in their chains like the sea - they became the sea.34

Yanshou's magnum opus is the Zongjing Lu ???, translated here as Records from the Ancestral Mirror. The character zong ?,35 like consciousness (xin), takes on multiple nuances.36 The jury might be out forever on what Yanshou's understanding of zong is in relation to Chan. Further, the combination of two key but unrelated Chinese Buddhist characters, zong (?) and mirror (?) is peculiar to Yanshou, who uses the combination (??) more than five hundred times in the total ZJL, defining his meaning as the facilitator of a two-way traffic, 'attracting Buddha-wisdom teachings into the ancestral-mirror (from the realm of birthlessness) to reveal it outwardly as the path of Buddhist practice,'37 a skilful means provided for sentient beings' return to the birthless. Might it be then, that Yanshou's use of zong in the title of his work also embraces 'ancestors' as guardians reflecting the source of [Buddhist] truth, for he calls upon them, as he says himself (fasc.94), three hundred times in the ZJL; and quotes from them, sometimes extensively, some seven thousand times.

Yet a mirror cannot reveal things 'as they really are'. The English saying 'as above, so below' hints at the problem of mirrors: their images are a reversal of the original, of 'reality', or, they reveal the shadow side of the real. The image in the mirror then could...