Zongmi on Chan

This work is a very important contribution to Chan studies, and indeed to the study of Chinese Buddhism. Broughton's introduction and annotation are extremely erudite and, at the same time, eminently readable. His book contains information that has only been available heretofore in a very limited and patchwork fashion. -- John McRae, Komazawa University This is an excellent, impeccably researched, and well-translated piece of work. Modern Japanese scholarship, which has dominated the field of Zen studies for the past century, has downplayed Zongmi and tried to marginalize him. Yet Jeffrey Broughton is absolutely right in claiming Zongmi's central, even foundational influence on the tradition. This book helps to redress the balance and is a major contribution to the field. -- T. Griffith Foulk, Sarah Lawrence College While Zongmi is one of the most important figures in Chinese and East Asian Buddhism, under a Japanese Zen interpretive hegemony, he has been reduced to the status of textual exegete and, by definition, isolated from the ranks of the 'true' Chan masters. Jeffrey Broughton's masterful work restores Zongmi's reputation and, in the process, recovers an authentic tradition of East Asian Chan to its rightful stature. The translations Broughton provides in this book will serve as standard sources for generations to come. -- Albert Welter, author of Monks, Rulers, and Literati: the Political Ascendancy of Chan Buddhism and The Linji Lu and the Creation of Chan Orthodoxy

Japanese Zen often implies that textual learning ( gakumon) in Buddhism and personal experience ( taiken) in Zen are separate, but the career and writings of the Chinese Tang dynasty Chan master Guifeng Zongmi (780-841) undermine this division. For the first time in English, Jeffrey Broughton presents an annotated translation of Zongmi's magnum opus, the Chan Prolegomenon, along with translations of his Chan Letter and Chan Notes. The Chan Prolegomenon persuasively argues that Chan "axiom realizations" are identical to the teachings embedded in canonical word and that one who transmits Chan must use the sutras and treatises as a standard. Japanese Rinzai Zen has, since the Edo period, marginalized the sutra-based Chan of the Chan Prolegomenon and its successor text, the Mind Mirror ( Zongjinglu) of Yongming Yanshou (904-976). This book contains the first in-depth treatment in English of the neglected Mind Mirror, positioning it as a restatement of Zongmi's work for a Song dynasty audience. The ideas and models of the Chan Prolegomenon, often disseminated in East Asia through the conduit of the Mind Mirror, were highly influential in the Chan traditions of Song and Ming China, Korea from the late Koryo onward, and Kamakura-Muromachi Japan. In addition, Tangut-language translations of Zongmi's Chan Prolegomenon and Chan Letter constitute the very basis of the Chan tradition of the state of Xixia. As Broughton shows, the sutra-based Chan of Zongmi and Yanshou was much more normative in the East Asian world than previously believed, and readers who seek a deeper, more complete understanding of the Chan tradition will experience a surprising reorientation in this book.