[f89] In this connection I wish to make some remarks against certain scholars who consider the philosophy of Śūnyatā to be really the foundation of Zen. Such scholars fail utterly to grasp the true purport of Zen which is first of all an experience and not at all a philosophy or dogma. Zen can never be built upon any set of metaphysical or psychological views; the latter may be advanced after the Zen experience has taken place, but never before. The philosophy of the Prajñāpāramitā can never precede Zen, but must always follow it. Buddhist scholars like those at the time of Dharma are too apt to identify teaching and life, theory and experience, description and fact. When this confusion is allowed to grow, Zen Buddhism will cease to yield an intelligent and satisfactory interpretation. Without the fact of Enlightenment under the Bodhi-tree near the Nairañjanā, no Nāgārjunas could ever hope to write a single book on the Prajñā philosophy.
[f90] As I stated before, there is a confusion between Dharma’s mien-pi habit of sitting and his doctrine of the pi-kuan meditation. The confusion dates quite early, and even at the time of the author of the Records the original meaning of pi-kuan, wall-contemplation, must have been lost.
[f91] Sometimes this man is said to be a civilian and sometimes a soldier embracing Confucianism.
[f92] As one can readily see, this story is more or less fictitious. I mean Kuang’s standing in the snow and cutting-off of his arm in order to demonstrate his earnestness and sincerity. Some think that the snow story and that of self-mutilation do not belong to that of Kuang, but borrowed from some other sources, as Tao-hsüan makes no reference to them in his book. The loss of the arm was due to a party of robbers who attacked Kuang after his interview with Dharma. We have no way to verify these stories either way. The whole setting however is highly dramatic, and there must have been once in the history of Zen some necessity to interweave imagination largely with facts, whatever they may be.
[f93] According to Hsieh-sung, the author of the Right Transmission of the Law, Bodhi-Dharma has here followed Nāgārjuna in the anatomy of Zen-understanding. For Nāgārjuna says in his famous commentary on the Prajñāpāramitā-sūtra, “Moral conduct is the skin, meditation is the flesh, the higher understanding is the bone, and the mind subtle and good is the marrow.” “This subtle mind,” says Hsieh-sung, is what is secretly transmitted from the Buddha to his successors in the faith. He then refers to Chih-I of the Sui dynasty who regards this mind as the abode of all the Buddhas and as the middle way in which there is neither unity nor multiplicity and which can never be adequately expressed in words.
[f94] According to this, there must have been a special volume of sermons and letters by Hui-k‘ê, which were compiled evidently by his disciples and admirers before they were put down in writing and thoroughly revised by the author himself. In the case of Bodhi-Dharma too, according to Tao-hsüan, his sayings were apparently in circulation in the day of Tao-hsüan, that is, early in the T‘ang dynasty.
[f95] Understood by some to be leprosy.
[f96] In the Vimalakīrti, Chapter III., “The Disciples,” we have the following: “Do not worry about the sins you have committed, O monks,” said Vimalakīrti, “Why? Because sins are in their essence neither within nor without nor in the middle. As the Buddha taught us, all things are defiled when Mind is defiled; all things are pure when Mind is pure: and Mind is neither within nor without nor in the middle. As is Mind, so are sins and defilements, so are all things—they never transcend the suchness of truth.”
[f97] Hsin, is one of those Chinese words which defy translation. When the Indian scholars were trying to translate the Buddhist Sanskrit works into Chinese, they discovered that there were five classes of Sanskrit terms which could not be satisfactorily rendered into Chinese. We thus find in the Chinese Tripitaka such words as prajñā, bodhi, buddha, nirvāṇa, dhyāna, bodhisattva, etc., almost always untranslated; and they now appear in their original form among the technical Buddhist terminology. If we could leave hsin with all its nuance of meaning in this translation, it would save us from the many difficulties that face us in its English rendering. For hsin means mind, heart, soul, spirit—each singly as well as all inclusively. In the present composition by the third patriarch of Zen, it has sometimes an intellectual connotation but at other times it can properly be done by “heart.” But as the predominant note of Zen Buddhism is more intellectual than anything else, though not in the sense of being logical or philosophical, I decided here to translate hsin by “mind” rather than by “heart.”
[f98] This means: When the absolute oneness of things is not properly understood, negation as well as affirmation will tend to be one-sided view of reality. When Buddhists deny the reality of an objective world, they do not mean that they believe in the unconditioned emptiness of things; they know that there is something real which cannot be done away with. When they uphold the doctrine of void this does not mean that all is nothing but an empty hollow, which leads to a self-contradiction. The philosophy of Zen avoids the error of one-sidedness involved in realism as well as in idealism.