Record II [of the Bodhidharma Anthology] truly constitutes
the beginnings of the recorded sayings genre of Ch' an literature… Sections
50-56 center on Master Yuan…
Who is this Yuan? We do not know, and we will never know,
but below I will list him as one of Bodhidharma's disciples. We might call him
a forgotten Bodhidharma disciple, or at the very least a forgotten member of
the Bodhidharma circle…
His name is a Buddhist technical term. The Sanskrit would be
pratyaya (condition). Related expressions include idampratyayata
(thisconditionality) and pratitya-samutpada (dependent origination). Perhaps
we could call him "Master Conditioned," his name suggesting the
profound teaching of conditionality, which must be seen and understood or one
remains in samsara…
The Master Yuan sections of Record II are true Ch'an
question-andanswer encounters (wen-ta) between practitioners. Later Ch'an
literature is filled with such encounters, but it is startling to see them in
such an early text and in such a developed form…
Yuan (section 50) speaks of escaping karma-the force of the
effects of intentional actions in this and past lives that binds one to the
wheel of the rebirth process-through a Singularity, an act of will: "When
you are on the verge of seizing a lofty sense of willpower [jo yu-ch'u yuan-i
shih], bondage and habit energy will surely melt away." He is
iconoclastic, consistently criticizing reliance on the Dharma, reliance on teachers,
reliance on meditative practice, reliance on canonical texts. Faith in Buddhist
teachings and teachers, praxis according to the traditional rules, and learning
in scripture lead to nothing but self-deception and confusion. From this stance
Master Yuan never budges. His relentless boldness prefigures much in the stance
of the full-blown Ch' an tradition.
He does speak positively of one thing. He calls it
"bodily energy" (t'i-ch'i) or "spirit" (ching-shen). The
first is a general term for physical strength, and the latter is found in
classical Taoist texts, the Chuang Tzu and the Lieh Tzu, where it means the
spirit or mind associated with Heaven, and in medical works, where it means
vim, vigor, or stamina. This is not the only classical Taoist terminology he
employs, for he says that if one evinces even the slightest desire to advance
in religious training, "ingenious artifice" (ch'iao-wei) gains the
upper hand. This term also comes from the Chuang Tzu. Energy and spirit are all
a practitioner needs (sections 51 and 55-56):
If you have bodily energy, you will
avoid the deceptive delusions of people and Dharma, and your spirit will be all
right. Why? Because when you esteem knowledge, you are deceived by men and
Dharma. If you value one person as correct, then you will not avoid the
deceptive confusions of this person .... If you desire to cut off crafty
artifice, don't produce the thought of enlightenment and don't use knowledge of
the sutras and treatises. If you can accomplish this, then for the first time
you will have bodily energy. If you have spirit, do not esteem understanding,
do not seek Dharma, and do not love knowledge, then you will find a little
quietude .... If you can understand that intrinsically there is neither
quiescence nor disturbance, then you will be able to exist of yourself. The one
who is not drawn into quiescence and disturbance is the man of spirit.
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