For scholars of Chan Buddhism the task of rescuing History from the intricate web of myths and legends spun by its most brilliant minds seems to have always been the most pressing (and most tempting). Perhaps the most notable figures in this regard are the Chinese historian Hu Shih and the Japanese Zen historian Yanagida Seizan who, precisely for this reason, receive a fair amount of attention in Mario Poceski's new book Ordinary Mind as the Way. Poceski does not, however, invoke Hu and Yanagida to bolster his own claims about Chan or to secure his place in this intellectual lineage of sorts but to take them-especially the latter-to task for not applying the same critical tools that they used to demystify early Chan to the study of middle Chan or, more specifically, to the so-called Hongzhou school, the subject of Poceski's well-researched book. What seems to trouble Poceski most about Hu and Yanagida's views on the Hongzhou school and its putative founder Mazu Daoyi (709-788) is their tendency, despite their differing agendas, to see the rise of Mazu and his school as a kind of revolution that gave birth to a new Buddhism (sometimes referred to as 'classical Chan') that was, to borrow Poceski's own words, "distinctively Chinese" (p. 10). One of the major aims of Poceski's book is to thus show that such views are based on the hasty use of misleading sources - most notably the so-called "encounter dialogues" - and not corroborated by other extant sources which, if used judiciously, can offer a more accurate, nuanced, and context-sensitive picture of a school that flourished between the eighth and ninth century. And that is exactly what he delivers in Ordinary Mind as the Way.
展开▼
