Guo Gu - The Essence of Chan: A Guide to Life and Practice according to the Teachings of Bodhidharma

Everything has a cause, and every cause arises because different conditions have come together. Nothing is haphazard or random; one thing leads to another in a chain of events, such as the sequence of events that caused you to select this book. In other words, the reason you are reading these words is due to the ripening of many conditions.

Sometimes the conditions that arise are favorable, sometimes not. These conditions are not inherently good or bad, and their meanings can change. When conditions change, your experience also changes. The working of causes and conditions, and cause and effect, is the core principle of the Chan (Zen) Buddhist teaching. It is also the heart of the dynamic teachings of Bodhidharma, the first lineage master in the Chan tradition, who came from India to China in the fifth century C . E .

Buddhism offers many different teachings. A wide variety of schools have evolved from these teachings; Chan Buddhism is only one of them. Some of you may be more familiar with the word Zen, which is the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese word Chan. Chan is usually understood to be a tradition of practice within Chinese Buddhism that emerged in the seventh and eighth centuries C . E ., mainly as a reaction against Buddhist scholasticism.

The Indian sage Bodhidharma came to China at a time when Buddhism was beginning to flourish widely, and many Chinese clerics were writing extensive treatises about Buddhist theories of doctrine and practice. Bodhidharmas teachings cut through the theories. They aimed directly at the awakening that Buddha Shakyamuni (the historical Buddha) experienced under the Bodhi tree: namely, that we are intrinsically free from the fetters of vexations and afflictions, and that our true nature is already perfect and undefiled. Similarly, when a cloud covers the sun, the skys spaciousness is not affected by the cloud, nor by whether the sun is visible or not. Chan methods and teachings point to the realization that who we truly are can never be covered by the clouds of vexations and afflictions. The point is that we should not get bogged down by the clouds, but instead we should see the big picturethe sky. This is essentially the message of Bodhidharma.

After the Buddhas passing in India in the fifth century B . C . E ., Indian Buddhist monks traveled southward to many other South Asian countries and spread his religion during the following centuries. Buddhism also went west as far as Pakistan and farther northwest as well. But causes and conditions prevented Buddhism from taking root there, largely because of politics and competition with indigenous religious traditions. The Chinese were introduced to the Buddhism of central Asia and India sometime between the first century B . C . E . and the first century C . E .five hundred years after the Buddhas time. Because China was such an influential nation, Buddhism spread from there to Korea, Japan, and the rest of East Asia. Later in the seventh and eighth centuries, Buddhism arrived in Tibet.

However, it took a good five hundred years, from the first to the sixth century C . E ., for the Chinese to begin to understand Buddhism on its own terms. The main issue concerned the Buddhist texts that the Chinese had at their disposal. Buddhism is unique because it has thousands of scriptures, not just a single text. Buddhist missionaries who went to China belonged to different traditions of Buddhism in India and central Asia, and so they brought a great variety of scriptures and treatises with them, and these texts were then translated into Chinese. In modern terms, this would be as if someone went to a new country and brought a random selection of textbooks from different languages, plus chose books that were designed for different levels of readers, from elementary school texts to college textbooks and graduate-level PhD theses. So not only did the Chinese have texts from different traditions of Buddhism, often with contradictory teachings, but these texts addressed Buddhism from a range of viewpoints, from extremely basic teachings to complex esoteric rituals. As a result, the Chinese were not offered a coherent system of Buddhism, and their confusion about this new religion remained for several centuries.

In addition, for many centuries Buddhism in China was really just an extension of the indigenous religions that already existed there. When Buddhism arrived in China in the first century, it had to compete with centuries-old Confucian and Daoist traditions, and therefore it had to reconcile with these teachings. Some elements of these indigenous traditions were absorbed into Buddhism, and some were modified. In the beginning, the Chinese translated key Buddhist terms by using their indigenous knowledge and existing practice traditions. For example, China already had various religious communities that practiced contemplative techniques such as macrobiotic and alchemical diet training. The elite, namely those educated in the classic Confucian tradition, also had their own eremitic traditions of self-cultivation, in which some practitioners lived in retirement in the mountains as hermits and practiced different kinds of meditation and contemplation. In the first phase of the Buddhist transmission in China, the Chinese basically appropriated Buddhist teachings to further their own understanding of themselves and the universe. Certain essential Buddhist teachings, such as the nature of emptiness and interdependence, were rendered imprecisely as the Dao, or the Way, and the concept of the Buddha was understood as the great immortal. This blending of Buddhism and indigenous Chinese religions further muddied the Chineses understanding of this new religion for several hundred years.