Original insights never fully present: Chan/Zen/deconstruction

Stuart Sargent

The Journal of the American Oriental Society
Vol.116 No.1 (Jan-March 1996)
pp.77-84

COPYRIGHT 1996 American Oriental Society


            Like many readers who will be curious about Bernard Faure's new 
            book, I approach it as a person with a basic knowledge of Chan/Zen 
            Buddhism but not as a scholar of religion; I come to the book also 
            with a specific quest for insights on those who, in literary 
            circles, embraced the aim of Chan, in Faure's words, "to mark the 
            phenomenal world with the seal of the absolute" believing that "in 
            awakening, immanence turns out to be transcendence" (p. 76). That 
            "this equation often came at the expense of transcendental values, 
            and ... led to legitimating the profane enjoyment of the world of 
            passions" (p. 76) I already knew. One way of understanding this 
            phenomenon is to associate it with changes in the social background 
            of those who participated in Chan through the centuries, notably the 
            Ming merchant classes, who supposedly lost the inner scruples 
            inculcated by the aristocratic mores of Tang and the 
            scholar-official ideals of the Northern Song.(1) But to supplement 
            this kind of historical analysis, Faure's book promises a review of 
            the problem from the inside, using recent strategies for reading 
            texts to analyze the duplicity in the discourse of Chan itself. 
            The Rhetoric of Immediacy heroically attempts to encompass the many 
            centuries of Chan practice and doctrine in three cultures (a Korean 
            voice is heard now and then as we shuttle back and forth between 
            China and Japan). Because of the enormity of the task, a frequently 
            disjointed style of presentation, and a tendency to eliminate the 
            logical or evidential underpinnings to some of the most interesting 
            assertions, the non-specialist is likely to be frustrated on his 
            first pass-through. Nevertheless, there is much here to be learned. 
            The several types of discourse promised in the prologue - "the 
            hermeneutical and the rhetorical, the structuralist and the 
            historical, the 'theological' and the ideological/cultural" - come 
            into play in the first chapter, "The Differential Tradition." Faure 
            agrees with those who see the division of early Chan into distinct 
            Northern and Southern schools as having been as tactical as it was 
            ideological. He further questions the whole notion of a coherent 
            tradition that can be termed "early Chan." For one thing, the 
            patriarchal tradition envisioned in that notion is logically 
            incompatible with an original Buddhist "path" a stage of the 
            religion in which individuals may become enlightened and thus 
            empower themselves to teach others. At the same time, we need to 
            deconstruct the very notion of that earlier stage as embodying a 
            "pure" Chan principle that is later "corrupted." Not only are there 
            ambiguities and contradictions at every turn: "the 'original' 
            insight ... may exist only as a [Derridean] 'trace,' something that 
            was never 'present' to a fully awakened consciousness, since there 
            is no self that can actually live the experience" (p. 27). This last 
            clause combines deconstruction and Chan itself to question not only 
            the historical notion of an "originating" teaching, but even the 
            ideological construct of an "originating" experience. 
       Nowhere is the ambiguity of Chan more apparent than in the 
            dichotomy of sudden and gradual enlightenment, the topic of the 
            second chapter. Faure cautions that this dichotomy is not 
            coterminous with the North-South schism; both Northern and Southern 
            schools were "sudden" in seeing enlightenment as imminent and 
            immanent and "gradual" in being unable to do away with mediation, 
            using "skillful means" or mediate stages of preparation to bring the 
            practitioner close to awakening (p. 36). Once again, the 
            intersection of theoretical Chan and deconstruction on the question 
            of language is brought into play to question the reality of the 
            theoretical opposition: "Speaking of the 'sudden' is always gradual; 
            even dismissing subitism and gradualism in the name of a higher, 
            truer 'subitism' is already derivative and therefore gradual."(2) 
            Saying, as Faure does, that any thought in language about 
            enlightenment "can only point to an always-receding horizon or 
            absolute origin" making it "a vanishing point, an ideal origin - but 
            also an ideological construct" (p. 42) brackets (phenomenologically) 
            or denies (deconstructively) that enlightenment has taken place. 
            A related problem is that "[s]udden awakening cannot be the result 
            of an empirical progress. Even when it is preceded by gradual 
            practice, it is not as an effect [that] is preceded by its causes, 
            for it is one of those states that, in Elster's words, are 
            'essentially by-products'" (p. 45). 
            Faure at this point suggests in a footnote two extremely seminal 
            ideas that should have been explored more fully in his text. Jon 
            Elster (reference is to his Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion 
            of Rationality [Cambridge, 1983]) shows that the very effort 
            required to sustain the practice intended to produce the desired 
            "by-product" state can block that state from occurring; but Chan, 
            according to Faure, "solves the problem by positing that something, 
            at the critical point, is taking over and continues to perform" the 
            practice. Faure neglects to tell us where in Chan texts this 
            solution is proposed and what it is that "takes over." Equally 
            tantalizing is the suggestion that the "technology" of Chan must 
            include a "sub-technology" that obliterates all memory of the traces 
            left by the process. The reader may wonder: if this refers to the 
            fact that any by-product is also "preceded by its causes" why in 
            this case is it necessary that those causes remain unknown? Is it 
            because liberation from the cycle of cause-and-effect must by 
            definition not be an effect of a cause? Is it because the sensation 
            of awakening is a matter of brain chemistry being altered by 
            meditation or other practices, and this is beyond the reach of Chan 
            ideology? (Chan discomfiture with hallucinations experienced during 
            meditation is mentioned on pp. 105-7; it would have been useful to 
            distinguish this more clearly from the Chan rejection of purposeful 
            "occultic use of meditation.") Faure's sentence raises a number of 
            possible interpretations, but we are given no guidance on which to 
            consider. 
       A point made several times in this chapter is that "the 
            sudden/gradual dichotomy is constantly blurred in the actual 
            practice or discourse of Chan monks" (p. 48). More intriguing is the 
            assertion that Chan never discusses gradualism "although it remains 
            unchallenged in actual practice. The entire Chan tradition seems to 
            hinge on this scapegoat mechanism" (p. 49). Perhaps this silence is 
            the "sub-technology" of erasure mentioned in the footnote four pages 
            earlier? 
            Before we can ponder that, we are presented with another interesting 
            suggestion: awakening is like death insofar as there is a process 
            that must be undergone before it is "absorbed, ratified by the 
            collectivity" (p. 49). The comparison implies that the function of 
            Chan practice is to affirm publicly an enlightenment that has 
            already taken place. This is to put Zongmi's "sudden awakening 
            followed by gradual practice" (p. 42; perhaps familiar enough not to 
            require citation of a source, for none is given) into a potentially 
            useful anthropological frame: a person is "awakened" at some point 
            in life but does not experience it as such until the community 
            recognizes it. Or perhaps Faure means to allude to the Chan teaching 
            that we are originally enlightened. Either way, if we reflect that 
            death is like "the 'original' insight ... [that] may exist only as a 
            'trace' something that was never 'present' to a fully awakened 
            consciousness, since there is no self that can actually live the 
            experience" as discussed above, the parallel would be truly 
            fascinating. That is, neither death nor total awakening can be 
            "lived" yet there are times when their traces must be acknowledged 
            in life. Is this the parallel between funerals and gradual 
            cultivation in Chan that Faure wants to draw? 
            Chapter three, "The Twofold Truth of Immediacy" treats the 
            problematic doctrine that "passions are awakening;" to which I 
            alluded at the beginning as relevant to a great deal of Chinese 
            literature, both lyrical and anecdotal. 
            Unfortunately, this chapter is rather intimidating in the early 
            pages: on pp. 56-57, in two paragraphs, I count at least fourteen 
            ways of approaching the issues raised by the "Two Truths" paradigm. 
            The idea that having a distinction between expedient and absolute 
            truths preserves the latter as a constant to prevent changes and 
            contradictions in conventional truths from bringing down the whole 
            enterprise is easy enough to grasp; the idea that any doctrine that 
            negates duality is simultaneously acknowledging duality, and the 
            psychologically realistic observation that we constantly travel 
            between logically incompatible systems in everyday life are also 
            readily understood. But Faure also addresses in rapid fire a series 
            of comparisons between East and West and between Buddhism and 
            Hinduism proposed by scholars and often contradicting each other. He 
            should have reassured his readers that this bewildering mix would be 
            revisited at greater length in subsequent pages. Brief asides to the 
            initiates provide further intimidation or annoyance, depending on 
            your state of mind: remember, if you will, that "Derrida has pointed 
            out the ideological effects of the attempts to pass immediately 
            beyond oppositions (Derrida 1972b: 56)." Period. If you don't 
            already know what "the ideological effects" are, you'd better look 
            it up. 
            There are some things you can look up only with great effort. One 
            locus classicus of the idea that "the passions are awakening" could 
            be, we are told on p. 60, "Linji's advocacy of the 'true man without 
            affairs.' " This caught my eye because "without affairs" looks like 
            (we are not given the Chinese) a translation of wushi, a phrase used 
            in 1079 by Su Shi as an epithet for his drinking - the drinking one 
            does when there is rio business to take care of. I think Su's phrase 
            constitutes an allusion to a story in the Shiji that has nothing to 
            do with Chan, but it would have been nice to see where Linji 
            (presumably Linji Yixuan, although the index entry for him does not 
            cite this page) uses the phrase translated; then one could verify 
            the wording of the original, figure out if it illuminates Su Shi's 
            poems - and then try to puzzle out how it relates to Faure's 
            discussion of "innate enlightenment" since the connection is far 
            from self-evident. 
            It is in this chapter that a problem recently much discussed comes 
            up: the presence or absence of a dualistic world-view in China. This 
            has implications for literary metaphor as well as the functioning of 
            Buddhist symbols imported from India (a culture that presumably lies 
            in the dualistic Western sphere). Faure questions the non-duality of 
            Chinese thought. He points to the presence of mediative symbols in 
            popular religion and to the hostility expressed toward the body in 
            Chan/Zen, which seems to indicate a mind-body split (even though 
            such a split would contradict professed doctrine). I am willing to 
            agree that the East-West dichotomy is fuzzier than some have argued, 
            especially since neither sphere is so monolithic as to exclude 
            incompatible cosmologies; yet I do not think Faure has seriously 
            considered whether mediative devices necessarily imply different 
            levels of reality. If we say that a dream (or recollecting a dream) 
            mediates between sleep and wakefulness, can we say that sleep and 
            wakefulness are therefore universally experienced as two distinct 
            states? Is it not possible that to some people the phenomenon of 
            dreaming demonstrates the self-evident "fact" that sleep and 
            wakefulness are simply two phases of a single experience, and that 
            neither is more "real" that the other? Further: does dualism have 
            any meaning when you declare both mind and matter unreal? The 
            statement that "the return to unity as it is extolled implies a 
            previous departure, or even irremediably produces it" (p. 77) is 
            problematic. It seems logical, but do the unity and the alleged 
            departure from it have the same meaning as they have in the West? 
            Nondualism is not to be written off so easily. 
            It also worries me that Faure slips increasingly across the sea to 
            Japan and Zen aesthetics for examples of "secondary nature" (p. 78) 
            to bolster his argument. He clearly thinks that the Japanese and 
            Chinese world-views were enough alike to allow him to assert that 
            symbols in Chan and Zen have the same significance, so much so that 
            Japanese variations on and additions to continental cultural imports 
            can be said to speak for Chinese Chan. To be sure, at some level we 
            must recognize that Chan/Zen is a powerful international ideology; 
            but when something so subtle as the presence or absence of a 
            dualistic world-view is at issue, I would welcome evidence that the 
            vast linguistic and cultural differences between China and Japan 
            have been controlled in Faure's argument. 
            "Chan/Zen and Popular Religions," the fourth chapter, first devotes 
            several pages to assessing various models of the relationship 
            between popular and hegemonic or dominant cultures (the distinction 
            between the latter two is deemed significant but never explained; it 
            apparently has something to do with the obvious fact that levels of 
            culture, because they overlap imperfectly with social classes or 
            interest groups, are internally divided; see p. 86). Faure's 
            (mercifully) unelaborated reference to "new relationships of power 
            within academia" associated with the increased attention being paid 
            to popular religion (p. 81), may explain his need to record brief 
            positions on so many schema in so few pages. 
            Even when we focus on East Asia, methodological considerations 
            continue to dominate, and the absence of historical data easily 
            leads to obscurity. When Faure proposes, on the one hand, that there 
            is both "a popular and an elitist 'anarchism'" and, on the other, 
            that "what may strike us at first as subversive, both in Chan and in 
            popular religion, may actually turn out to be reinforcing the 
            institutional structure" (p. 91), it sounds insightful. But in the 
            absence of examples, the point is blurred. "Institutional structure" 
            is not even defined; as used here, it probably refers to social and 
            governmental institutions, but the subsequent sentences suggest 
            instead reference to the structure of the religious institution: 
            "popular religion might provide the necessary freedom and alterity 
            that allow institutional power to assert itself. ... Chan and other 
            institutional religions may need the resistance and subversion of 
            popular religion in order to survive" (p. 91). Perhaps Eaure means 
            that Chan is an "institutional religion" in the sense of being 
            endorsed by the state; indeed, seventy pages earlier he has 
            mentioned that Chan's "relationship" with the state is "well 
            documented ... from the eighth century onward." But the nature of 
            that "relationship" is not detailed in this book. Therefore, when 
            Faure, in the last sentence in this chapter, explicitly places Chan 
            and "official" religion in opposition, we conclude that it would be 
            a mistake to equate "institutional" and "official." It is entirely 
            possible to define an "institutional" religion as one possessing 
            hierarchies of authority, enjoying temporal continuity, and 
            expecting a reliable stream of income from supporters; but then Chan 
            and most "popular" religions, which Faure also places in opposition, 
            are equally "institutional." Without actual historical examples of 
            the various relationships between Chan and the state and Chan and 
            other religions, we cannot sort out Faure's distinctions because we 
            don't know what his words mean. 
            Similarly, it is extremely interesting when he says that Chan/Zen 
            incorporates thaumaturgy and the manipulation of relics to gamer 
            popular support; but he also states that its survival and power 
            depend on struggling against the "subversion" and "alterity" of 
            popular religion. Both statements may be true, but in order to make 
            sense of the argument we must be told just when Chan's very survival 
            or assertion of power (which? and against what forces?) depended on 
            adopting and/or overcoming (simultaneously or in different phases of 
            the process?) the "subversion" and "alterity" of popular religion. 
            Unless one knows to what historical data such sentences apply, they 
            lack referential meaning (signs in search of signification, if you 
            will). Such is the case with the assertion that "archaic religion 
            claimed a perfect adherence to a preexisting superhuman order" (p. 
            92). Most of us know a little about Shang divination directed to 
            royal ancestors, but Faure's words could be applied to that only 
            with considerable elaboration. Without knowing what he identifies as 
            "archaic religion" we have no way of judging the truth value of his 
            utterance. 
            I cannot leave this chapter without quoting its wonderful final 
            sentence - wonderful for the way in which alternatives, separated by 
            dashes and no less than five little "or" are tossed one by one like 
            so many juggler's pins at the hapless reader, until they all come 
            crashing to the floor: "Suffice it to say that for the time being, 
            rather than an opposition - even if dialectical - or a fusion 
            between Chan and local or popular religion, or between Chan and 
            official religion, we can observe an intertwining of - or a 
            transferential relationship among - antagonistic or analogous 
            segments of each of these religious traditions" (p. 95). It is 
            fortunate that this sentence's position at the end of the chapter 
            allows one to ruminate on it and then take a breather. It begins to 
            have the look and feel of a masterful summation. But to really 
            understand the elegant distinction between "fusion" on the one hand 
            and both "intertwining" and its alternative, a "transferential 
            relationship" on the other, does one not need a concrete historical 
            detail or two? As metaphorical vehicles (borrowed perhaps from 
            botany), these terms possess a certain power, a definite structural 
            relationship, but without tenors they finally contribute nothing to 
            Faure's story. 
       With chapters five and six, "The Thaumaturge and Its Avatars," 
            parts I and II, we begin to encounter fascinating historical 
            material. There are minor annoyances, to be sure. A rapid survey of 
            the trickster in ancient China on pp. 115-16, including mention of 
            "Jieyu, the madman of Zhu" (sic!) takes us up to three poorly linked 
            but very suggestive lines of inquiry from Norman Girardot's Myth and 
            Meaning in Early Taoism,(3) but just when one is sitting up and 
            expecting someone to put it all together, Faure drops the subject 
            and shifts abruptly back to Chan. Another frustration: on page 120, 
            the "story of Puhua's death" is mentioned as "clearly patterned on 
            the Daoist Immortal's 'deliverance from the corpse,' " and again on 
            page 185 in connection with predicting one's own death; but since we 
            are never told the relevant version of the story of Puhua's death, 
            its usefulness in bolstering Faure's points is lost. 
            At the bottom of page 123, Faure asks a crucial question: "If folly 
            has become a literary pose or a commodity, to what extent is it 
            still really subversive? Or to what extent were the Chan trickster 
            figures domesticated or emasculated?" Then, "[i]nsofar as nature or 
            naturalness has been co-opted by the ruling class, true nature can 
            no longer express itself through the paradigm of spontaneity." The 
            term "ruling classes" has appeared out of nowhere and is meaningless 
            without context. Maddeningly, we don't know what century we are in, 
            or even which country: since the following sentence tells us that 
            Puhua, the outsider in Tang China, was the inspiration for the Fuke 
            school in thirteenth-century Japan, one guesses in desperation that 
            the founding of the school represents the institutionalization of 
            spontaneity and that the "co-opters" must be Japanese. (But a 
            footnote here mentions that Puhua himself was believed to have been 
            an army officer. Does that make him a member of the Tang "ruling 
            class?" Surely not. Does Faure mean to imply this was a fabrication 
            for the benefit of the military rulers of Japan? In a hurry to get 
            out of his footnote and into a discussion of "negativity" and 
            "reversal of symbols," he deserts us.) 
            Faure cautions us that he intends to outline the role of the 
            thaumaturgic elements in the acculturation of Chan "only in a 
            heuristic fashion, in order to reveal the structural logic of those 
            developments rather than their historical occurrence" (p. 100). Yet 
            a temporal framework is apparently essential to these two chapters, 
            and properly so, since "acculturation" takes place over time and 
            only in historical context. Broad historical generalizations such as 
            the following are offered and do help us understand the "structural 
            logic": "Thus for several centuries, Chan chose the trickster over 
            the thaumaturge" as a "strategy . . . for domesticating the occult" 
            by making it this-worldly (p. 115).(4) 
            The big picture aside, Faure often teases us with hints of a more 
            detailed accounting of Chan's relationship with external factors 
            waiting to be written, especially regarding developments in the 
            eighth and ninth centuries. Context suggests that he thinks it was 
            in the eighth century that the denunciation of thaumaturgic "powers 
            by Chan masters appears to have been essentially a discursive 
            strategy, a political move at a time when Tantrism and Daoism were 
            in favor at the court" (p. 109). It is less clear when it was that 
            "carnivalization," as realized in Hanshan and Shide, was "certainly 
            not what the Chan tradition, trying at the time to establish its 
            authority, needed" (p. 117). Because Hanshan's "[t]raditional dates 
            range from the end of the sixth to the middle of the ninth century, 
            the most common view being that he lived during the early T'ang 
            period," and it is only "recent scholarship" that "has tended to put 
            him in the late eighth or early ninth century"; and because some 
            poems attributed to Shide could be as late as the Song,(5) Faure's 
            phrase "at that time" could refer to any period between the late 
            sixth and the eleventh centuries. Nowhere in the book does he tell 
            us when the two figures were created (one hopes he does not consider 
            them historical) as "carnivalizers" both to support and embarrass 
            Chan. 
            Faure implicitly associates Puhua's domestication of the 
            thaumaturgic tradition(6) with "the time when Han Yu criticized the 
            emperor for worshipping the Buddha's relic" (p. 121) and states that 
            it is significant that in the same period Layman Pang and others 
            worked to make Chan "the religion of 'everyday life'" (p. 124). The 
            relationship Faure implies between Han Yu and these trends in Chan 
            would be a most interesting topic to explore at greater length. A 
            later historical topic, one within Chan itself, is the Song advocacy 
            of "the superiority of the formless" and the crazy monk ideal as an 
            inversion of the contemporary "formalization and ritualization of 
            Chan practice" (p. 124). And most tantalizing is this suggestive 
            comment dropped in at the very end of chapter six with no 
            elaboration: "the trickster . . . ideal can be seen as . . . an 
            attempt to accommodate Chan ideology to the social changes that 
            marked the Tang/Song transition." Only much later, on page 314, does 
            Faure hint that the social changes he has in mind for that hundred 
            or so years have to do with "imperial centralization under the Tang 
            and the monetarization of the economy during the Sung," which he 
            associates with the increasing role of "mediation." More work is 
            needed to develop and support this notion (especially since 
            "centralization under the Tang" is cruelly oxymoronic for mid- and 
            late-Tang). 
          Chapters seven and eight, "Metamorphoses of the Double, I: 
            Relics" and "II: 'Sublime Corpses' and Icons," challenge us to look 
            even further beyond the familiar ideology of "wordless transmission" 
            to the enshrined detritus of the transmitters. "Relics" include both 
            crystalline fragments left after the cremation of a master's body 
            and all other remains or articles associated with his person - even 
            his writings. It is startling to learn that Qisong, the Song figure 
            who labored to establish the translatability of Buddhism into 
            Confucianism, ultimately found Buddhism superior because of relics 
            (p. 139; mere thaumaturgy was not unique to Buddhism and should be 
            discounted; see n. 27). 
            Chapter eight's material on mummified monks was interesting to me as 
            someone who encounters these "icons" from time to time in poetry, 
            whether as background (e.g., Su Shi's poem at the pagoda of Sengqie 
            in Sizhou(7)) or as occasion (e.g., Yu Ji's poem for the temple that 
            enshrined the lacquered corpse of the Tang Chan Master Purun(8)). 
            One of the most crucial points in this chapter is the status of 
            highly realistic sculptures (especially in Japan) as "substitute 
            bodies . . . pointing to no reality beyond themselves" (p. 170). 
            Despite similar claims Faure makes regarding the patriarch's robe as 
            the embodiment of the dharma (p. 166), the mortuary portrait as a 
            double (p. 175), and even the patriarch as an icon, a double, of the 
            Buddha (p. 178), I feel these assertions are never adequately 
            substantiated. The manner in which the arhat Pindola is 
            "consecrated" as the image of the Buddha by King Asoka may be 
            important evidence for the presence of the sacred in the immediate 
            object of devotion, but this story is relegated to a footnote (p. 
            177, n. 59) and comes from a different culture. Faure himself lets 
            slip that "Chan discourse . . . fluctuated between metaphor and 
            metonymy, transcendence and immanence" (p. 170), and I suspect that 
            the status of mummies and sculptures is similarly difficult to pin 
            down. 
            Chapter nine, "The Ritualization of Death," centers on the 
            contradiction between the funerary ritualism that became 
            increasingly important in Zen from the fourteenth century on and 
            Chan/Zen subitism and traditional attitudes toward death (p. 179). 
            Several interesting phenomena are introduced, most notably the 
            obligations of a Chan master to foretell the time of his death, to 
            compose death verses, and to die in the meditation posture. Faure 
            makes the valuable observation that death verses soon became 
            formulaic, at least by the thirteenth century in Japan. But he ends 
            his discussion of the topic by asserting that the "departing verse 
            was not simply intended to testify to the master's enlightenment; it 
            was producing it and contained, in the litteral [sic] sense, its 
            'essence.'" Let us note first that a verbal artifact "contains" 
            something only metaphorically, since it has no spatial dimension; to 
            refer to the verb's literal sense is to remind us perversely that it 
            is not being used literally. But the substantive question here is 
            this: on what basis does Faure make these statements? He has just 
            cited evidence that in 1295 the death verse was "severely criticized 
            for having become a mere show." One could understand how it might 
            nevertheless "testify" politically and ideologically to the master's 
            enlightenment, but to go beyond that and say that it "produces" and 
            contains the essence of his enlightenment is to make extravagant if 
            ill-defined claims for the verse that I suspect no one in 1295, 
            including the masters who had to write the verses, would have 
            accepted. 
            The remainder of the chapter considers the various and contradictory 
            functions of funerals: to accelerate the transition to death and to 
            purify, on the one hand, and, on the other, to prolong the memory 
            and significance of the deceased and to establish continuities. Most 
            of what is said could apply to the majority of cultures in which 
            burial or cremation is practiced; perhaps a separate monograph is 
            needed to show how Zen funerals compare with other funerary customs. 
            A number of figures - "Schema of the cremation ground" (p. 196); 
            "The Four Gates and funerary circumambulation" (p. 199); "Symbolism 
            of the Svastika in Soto Zen" (p. 200); and "Symbolism of postmortem 
            ordination" (p. 203) - appear in this chapter but are referred to 
            only obliquely or not at all in the text. Unsupported by 
            explication, most of them are meaningless. This suggests that the 
            chapter was put together in haste and edited in the same manner. 
       Careless editing may also be the culprit in the apparently random 
            placement of note 30 (and note 32 in chapter ten) and also in the 
            use of Japanese pronunciations for terms from a Chinese text (p. 
            193; cf. the mixed use of Sanskrit and Japanese terms - no Chinese 
            terms - in association with Chinese practices and texts, p. 293, n. 
            14). 
            Chapter ten, "Dream Within a Dream," begins in a refreshingly 
            straightforward manner: "Relics and icons reintroduced presence and 
            mediation in a world emptied by the Buddhist philosophy of emptiness 
            and selflessness. Another aspect of the Buddhist 'metaphysics of 
            presence,' and a crucial mode of mediation, is provided by the 
            intermediary world of dreams" (p. 209). But dreams are a complex 
            topic. Rather late in the chapter, Faure introduces a distinction 
            between the hermeneutical and performative models of dreams: the 
            former deals with dream interpretation; the latter recognizes that a 
            dream may be "transformative" and also modify "social structures." 
            This distinction could have been used profitably as a framework to 
            give the chapter more shape, since Faure covers both Buddhist 
            theories on the question of the reality of dreams (which of course 
            entails the unreality of "reality") and the ways in which dreams are 
            agents of deepening understanding or legitimization. 
            Twice in this chapter Faure makes a puzzling choice not to see in 
            cited texts what I would guess to be the doctrine that there is no 
            self and therefore no dreamer. On p. 216, where the Damolun states 
            that when one awakens according to the Dharma there is nothing 
            "[worth calling] awakening," I would suggest that Faure has 
            distorted the meaning by adding the words in brackets. On p. 219, 
            where Dahui asks, "Who is dreaming?" I think the implied answer is, 
            "No one." "Yogacara idealism, which maintains that everything is a 
            dream, and only the dreamer is real" (p. 220) is surely irrelevant, 
            if not incompatible. Since Faure has stated that there is no self to 
            experience enlightenment (p. 27) and later states that there is "no 
            'subject' to suffer from" the passions (p. 234), I would ask why 
            dreams are not an analogous case. 
            Chapter eleven is a "Digression: The Limits of Transgression." It 
            covers the problem of the affirmation of desire raised at the 
            beginning of this review, and the problem of women as a threat to 
            the enlightenment of men. Tales of both heterosexual and homosexual 
            transgressions in monastic communities are recounted, but in the end 
            the reader does not feel that he shall ever know much about how the 
            issue of sexuality was resolved at any particular moment. Criticism 
            of moral laxity almost always comes from outside the community, 
            especially from those who have a stake in exaggerating the 
            transgressions - not only Jesuits but also writers of fiction in 
            Ming China and Tokugawa Japan. Valid surveys on sexual practices are 
            difficult enough to carry out in our own time; they will never be 
            done retrospectively for previous centuries. Moreover, "[u]nlike in 
            Christianity, sexuality never really became in Chan/Zen the object 
            of an elaborate discourse, despite a relatively similar process of 
            individuation, studied in the Western case by Foucault" (p. 257). 
            Even if Faure were to expand on his concept of "individuation" (I 
            take his reference to the Chart master as the "paradigmatic 
            individual" on p. 191 to be a tongue-in-cheek oxymoron) then, we 
            shall never understand a discourse on sexuality that did not take 
            place. 
            "The Return of the Gods," chapter twelve, concerns mainly the place 
            of the arhat in Chan/Zen and kami in Zen. A number of explanations 
            are offered for different cases: local gods are replaced by the holy 
            man, who borrows some of their iconography (p. 265); outlawed 
            desires are covertly expressed in the attachment of Hindu themes to 
            Buddhist figures (p. 265); arhats were somewhat more controllable 
            than Daoist immortals and at the same time "offered a kind of 
            transcendence and personal relationship that popular gods" did not 
            (p. 266); gods in Zen "demythologize" themselves by accepting 
            abstract, philosophical definitions (p. 280); and ritualization 
            accomplishes a similar weakening of the gods' individuality (p. 283; 
            note that Chan/Zen monks themselves become god-like powers that must 
            be tamed through ritual, pp. 281-82). 
            The final chapter, "Ritual Antiritualism," puts aside Chan's 
            antiritualism to explore the "surplus of meaning" in the rituals 
            that became so much a part of Chan. There are many seminal ideas 
            here. On p. 296, four suggestive ways of looking at meditation as 
            ritual are juxtaposed in one rich paragraph: Chan meditation may be 
            a kind of "depossession" that prepares one for possession by an 
            "other"; despite that, it is also comparable to possession or to the 
            trance; sitting in meditation ritually reenacts the awakening of the 
            Buddha (on p. 299, Faure will state that awakening itself is a 
            ritual reenactment of it); therefore, it iconizes the "death" that 
            transcends time and death. These points deserve greater elaboration; 
            one could also argue that "possession" is undesirable in the absence 
            of a trustworthy God with whom one hopes to be united. 
            Another valuable observation is that "the failure of . . . ritual is 
            actually its success, the creation of a discrepancy between the 
            ideal and the real (without which both would cease to exist) and the 
            making guilty of individuals who fall short of the ideal" (p. 299). 
            Total sacralization of life would be the end of life. 
            In his "Epilogue," a dense and powerful essay that brings together 
            all the themes of the book, Faure stresses that the dichotomies he 
            has explored are not found only between Chan and other traditions 
            (Buddhist and "popular") but within Chan itself. He argues that the 
            two levels of truth or discourse laid out in the preceding pages in 
            all their aspects supplement each other, each maintaining itself 
            precisely "because of their tensions" (p. 318). Thus, for example, 
            Chan attempted to limit and purify to "save the ontological reality" 
            but the very "privatization/secularization" that accompanied this 
            attempt made ritual, icons, and elaborations necessary in order to 
            sustain the tradition. 
            It remains to mention errors that may be confusing for some readers. 
            There is a tendency for Faure to substitute "z" for "s" in pinyin 
            romanizations: "sansheng" becomes "zansheng" (pp. 122 and 329); "Huo 
            jushi" ("incinerating laymen") is written huojuzhi on p. 203. Also 
            "diyi" and "dier" ("first order" and "second order") are written 
            with "da" instead of "di" (p. 18). 
            Names and dates sometimes suffer strange fates. Yelu Chucai's name 
            is miswritten Yelu Chuzai (p. 27); because his name does not appear 
            in the character glossary and Faure misidentifies him as a monk, the 
            reader may think "Yelu Chuzai" is someone else, not the famous Yuan 
            official and lay Buddhist. Dadian Bastong (p. 146), is an error for 
            Dadian Baotong. The character glossary includes only "Dadian," 
            forcing the curious reader to find a good dictionary for the second 
            name. Pozao Duo is clearly not "Po the Stove-breaker" (p. 260) but 
            "Duo the Stove-breaker." Dates for people are sometimes given more 
            than once, which I found helpful. But sometimes dates are withheld 
            until late in the book or appear on pages not cited in the index. 
            Dahui Zonggao first appears on p. 41, but his dates are given on pp. 
            188 and 219. Sengqie's death date can be inferred on p. 153 and is 
            stated on p. 158; but his full dates are given only on p. 265. The 
            index entry for Sengqie does not cite that page (nor are mentions of 
            him on pp. 118 and 150 cited). Wanhui (whose name becomes "Maihui" 
            in the character glossary through a transposition of radicals) is 
            said on p. 265 (not indexed) to have died in 711 - but we were told 
            on p. 150 that he was buried in 709. Another macabre confusion is 
            found in n. 14, p. 156: the last example of a mummy being produced 
            in China is "recorded in Taiwan in 1976. See Welch 1967." Holmes 
            Welch's The Practice of Chinese Buddhism reports only the 1959 
            exhumation of a mummy in Taiwan (p. 344); no predictions about 
            future mummies are made. I suspect that Faure is keeping his 
            reference for the 1976 mummy to himself; "See Welch 1967" means "See 
            Welch 1967 for other information on mummies." 
            If "On the Leaves" seems an impossible translation for Joyo (p. 
            277), your instincts are correct: the correct name is Yojo. The name 
            is also backwards in the character glossary. 
            The date 625 on p. 166 should be 1625. One of two page citations on 
            p. 243 is clearly wrong: p. 433b cannot follow p. 455a in the source 
            text. 
            It is unfortunate that poor editing, not only for these minor 
            details but also for style and organization, detracts from this 
            study, for Faure brings enormous erudition and creativity to play 
            here. Yet in the end, despite all the frustrations I have expressed 
            above, I come away with the sense that the complexity and richness 
            of this book reflect more than the bafflements of deconstruction: 
            they reflect the reality of Chan/Zen itself, in all its oppositions 
            (dialectical or otherwise), fusions, intertwinings, and 
            transferential relationships within itself and between it and 
            antagonistic or analogous religious traditions. Faure's is an 
            essential study. 
            1 See part one of Ge Zhaoguang, Chanzong yu Zhongguo wenhua 
            (Shanghai: Shanghai Renmin chubanshe, 1991). 
            2 Musicians who know the word "subito" may be able to deduce the 
            meaning of "subitism." Psychologists who know the new verb 
            "subitize" designating a subject's instant apprehension of quantity 
            without counting constituent units, are perhaps better prepared to 
            comprehend "subitism." Most other Anglo-phone readers will 
            extrapolate from context; if they recall the mention on p. 33 of 
            "Demieville's translation of the term dun as 'subit' (sudden)" and 
            search the OED for English words derived form this Latin root, they 
            will find only obsolete or rare words often connoting careless 
            haste. 
            3 Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1983. 
            4 The subsequent rise of the thaumaturge implied here is 
            contradicted on p., 117: "the Chan tradition eventually chose the 
            trickster against the thaumaturge." I suppose Chan could choose the 
            trickster for several centuries, allow the thaumaturges to have 
            their way for a while, and then eventually return to the trickster; 
            but both the sequence of chapters five and six and much of Faure's 
            discussion point to a unidirectional movement away from the relative 
            prominence given earlier to the magical powers of Chan masters and 
            toward the relative dominance of the trickster image. 
            5 E. G. Pulleyblank, "Linguistic Evidence of the Date of Hanshan," 
            in Studies in Chinese Poetry and Poetics, vol. 1, ed. Miao (San 
            Francisco: Chinese Materials Center, Inc., 1978), 163 and 175. 
            6 If Puhua was an officer in 755 - see p. 124, n. 13 - he must have 
            died before the affair of the Buddha bone in 819 and should not be 
            directly associated with "mid-Tang Chan." But his acts presumably 
            helped shape ninth-century developments. 
            7 Translated by Ronald Egan, Word, Image, and Deed in the Life of Su 
            Shi (Cambridge: Harvard-Yenching Institute, 1994), 179-80. 
            8 Translated by Jonathan Chaves, Columbia Book of Later Chinese 
            Poetry (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1986), 41-42.