To: alt.religion.buddhism.tibetan From: jneatrou@casbah.acns.nwu.edu (John Neatrour) Subject: Adviata and Zen; Hui Neng (9408.huineng.jn) Date: 49940803 Quoting: |QUARK |(Interesting point. It does seem that Mr. Suzuki preferred the |more philosophical bent of the Lankavatara and Yogacara literature. |Maybe this was a personal preference, finding a lot of complex |material that satisfied his intellectual curiosity. After all, it's pretty |hard to come up with layer upon layer of explanation for the short, terse |paradoxes in the Diamond(-Cutter) Sutra, for instance!) One hand destroys the other creates. |(Yeah. The standard party line, at least, says the Lankavatara was |emphasized by the first five Patriarchs, and this only changed because Eno |was supposedly enlightened from a line in the Diamond Sutra concerning the |non-abiding mind. I'm not real sure just how accurate all this is, however- |these things are debated by top scholars. Supposedly the Lankavatara |continued to be emphasized by the so-called Northern school, but recent |research has pretty well documented the wider sophistication of the Northern |school's teaching. (Generally, the gist of recent scholarship is that the |Northern school has been given a bum rap in these matters). The same applies, |I believe, to the later "Golden Age" masters of the early T'ang period: many |diverse doctrinal elements were already synthesized and freely used by early |masters such as Ma Tzu and Shitou. It's probably a mistake to think these |things had a rather late synthesis). The bum rap of the Northern school was the authorship of the infamously dogmatic Shen-hui, Hui-neng's disciple. There is some evidence that others in the Hui-neng lineage were not so critical of the Northern school and maintained friendly relations. There is a very good chance that the often quoted Platform Sutra was composed to further the ambition of Shen-hui at the expense of Shen-hsiu. There is the phrase in the Sandokai "there is no patriarch of South or North". In fact teachers who were trained under Hui-neng taught a synthesis of Southern and Northern Cha'n.