However, the impression that Dàhuì and other famous Chán masters outright rejected seated meditation is misleading, and there are in fact several instances where Dàhuì does talk about seated meditation in an approving manner. One example is in a sermon that is directed to his monastic students, in which Dàhuì says, “Although we do not approve of silent illumination, it is necessary that each of you face the wall [to meditate in seated position].”16 This passage says nothing about kànhuà practice, and it seems possible that Dàhuì also instructed his monks to sit in traditional Buddhist meditation without focusing on the huàtóu. But it is interesting that Dàhuì here mentions silent illumination, clearly marking his disdain for it and noting his fear that any approval of sitting meditation might be understood as an endorsement of the silent illumination approach. However, Dàhuì almost certainly must have routinely instructed his monastic disciples to sit in meditation, which, after all, was standard practice in Chán monasteries in the Sòng.
In addressing his audience of educated lay people, Dàhuì never seems to directly advocate sitting meditation, but may at times be understood to be implying that meditation should be practiced if possible (if it could be done the right way). Below is a passage from a letter Dàhuì wrote to an official who had asked if would not be a good idea for beginners to do some meditation, or quiet sitting:
In my teaching, no matter whether you are a beginner or an experienced student, without regard to whether you have studied for a long time or are just entering [the Way], if you want true quietness, you must break your mind of birth and death. Without holding on to an effort to practice [quietness], if you break your mind of birth and death, then you will be naturally quiet. The skillful means of stillness and quiet that the former sages talked about is exactly this. It is simply that the heretical teachers of this late age do not understand the former sages’ talk about skillful means…. When you want to meditate, just light a stick of incense and sit quietly. When you sit, you must not let yourself become dull, and you must also not become agitated. Dullness and agitation are what the former sages criticized. When you meditate and begin to feel these two kinds of diseases appear, then just hold up the words about a dog not having the Buddha nature.17 Then you do not have to spend energy on dispelling those two diseases, and you will be peaceful right there. As the days and months pass, you begin to feel [that the practice] becomes effortless, and that is when you are obtaining power. There really is no need to work on attaining quietude, just this should be your work.18
So, although Dàhuì does not directly state that one must meditate, it seems clear that it is not seated meditation as such that he is against, but the silent illumination approach of just sitting and trying to attain quietness. The way not to fall into that trap is to do kànhuà practice, which makes sitting meditation a powerful practice.
In another, very interesting, passage, Dàhuì seems even more positive about practicing sitting meditation. This is in a sermon Dàhuì gave at the request of the mother of the famous statesman and Dàhuì supporter Zhāng Jùn (1096–1154).19 As Dàhuì explains in the passage, Zhāng’s mother, here called Madame Qínguó (Qínguó Tàifūrén, d. 1156) had long been studying Buddhism, but Zhāng Jùn and his brother were concerned that she had had no awakening. They therefore asked Dàhuì’s disciple Dàoqiān (d.u.) to tutor her. Dàoqiān taught her to focus on the dog gōng’àn—which she did, but she also often read sūtras and worshipped the Buddha (this may refer to Buddha invocation [niànfó]; see below). Dàoqiān then told her that Dàhuì advised against such practices, which would be distractions when working on a gōng’àn. Dàhuì continues, “Having heard Dàoqiān’s words, she all at once let go and single-mindedly only did seated meditation [zuòchán], contemplating [kàn] the saying about the dog not having Buddha nature. I heard that last winter one night when she was sleeping, she all of a sudden woke up. She got up and sat in meditation raising the saying [in her mind]. Suddenly, there was a joyous event.”20 Dàhuì here seems somewhat short of sanctioning Madame Qínguó’s experience as a full-fledged enlightenment, although in his annualized biography she is listed among his literati disciples who had attained enlightenment.21 In any case, this is the only place I am aware of in Dàhuì’s extant works where he directly links seated meditation with kànhuà practice in an event that leads to an enlightenment experience. From his description, it is clear that the main practice of Madame Qínguó was sitting in meditation and contemplating the dog gōng’àn, presumably focusing on the no/wú, and it seems to be exactly what Dàhuì would expect her to do.
I think we can conclude that Dàhuì indeed did see kànhuà Chán as a technique that ought to be practiced in sitting meditation, if at all possible, although it should also be extended to be practiced during the regular activities of daily life.
It appears that Dàhuì aimed for kànhuà practice to bring the practitioner to a point at which no thinking or conceptualizing of any kind is possible, as should be clear from the quotations above. But to Dàhuì, a parallel function of concentrating on the huàtóu is that it focuses a person’s doubts.22 Doubts are detrimental to enlightenment, but the unenlightened mind will always have doubts. However, when one is immersed in kànhuà practice, all doubts about other things will be forgotten for the one immense doubt generated by the huàtóu. According to Dàhuì, once doubt is centered on the huàtóu, it will become like a huge growing ball. Eventually this ball of doubt will shatter and all other doubts will disappear with it. This would be the moment of enlightenment. Thus, Dàhuì says, “Great doubt will necessarily be followed by great enlightenment.”23 In this letter to a follower, Dàhuì explains in some detail his views on doubt and kànhuà practice:
All the myriad one thousand or ten thousand doubts are just one doubt. If you can shatter the doubt you have on the huàtóu, then all the myriad doubts will at once be shattered [too]. If you cannot shatter the huàtóu, then you must still face it as if you were opposite a cliff. If you discard the huàtóu and then go and let doubts arise about other writings, or about the teachings in the sūtras, or about gōng’àn by the old masters, or about your day-to-day worldly worries, then you will be in the company of the devil.24
Here Dàhuì makes it very clear that doubt is both powerful and dangerous. If doubt can be harnessed and focused on the huàtóu, it will lead to enlightenment; if not, it is a destructive force that binds a person to delusion. Thus, it is apparent that Dàhuì was concerned with doubt and with how to use the huàtóu to harness it and to further enlightenment. However, in most of the places where Dàhuì discusses kànhuà Chán there is no mention of doubt. It seems possible that, to Dàhuì, doubt was just one facet of kànhuà practice and might not apply to all practitioners.
Dàhuì would maintain that he did not allow for a gradual approach to enlightenment; either one has it or one does not have it. However, it may take many years of effort to get there; in this way, attaining enlightenment is like archery: after practicing for a long time the archer naturally hits the target.25 So although enlightenment is instantaneous, the process of getting there would seem to be a gradual one, although Dàhuì never really addresses this issue.
Furthermore, Dàhuì insisted that kànhuà practice was, in fact, the only way to enlightenment for Chán practitioners of his day, to the virtual exclusion of other Buddhist meditation practices. In this, Dàhuì is unusual among the Sòng Chán masters, who generally tended to take a rather inclusive view of Buddhist practice. It is, therefore, fair to say that Dàhuì invented an entirely new kind of Chán that in its focus on a single new contemplative technique was a radical departure from anything that had come before.
Dàhuì was very successful in forging close ties with literati (often very prominent ones) and convincing them that his kànhuà Chán was the orthodox one. This, I believe, greatly helped the fortunes of the Línjì tradition in the generations after Dàhuì, and it is not surprising if later Chán masters very carefully tried to emulate Dàhuì’s ex
ample and often invoked his authority. Dàhuì also succeeded in making the term “silent illumination” associated with such negative connotations that it was never used again in a positive sense in Chinese Buddhism.26 Most importantly, the kànhuà Chán that Dàhuì invented became a standard meditation technique in Chinese Chán, even in the Cáodòng tradition that had been the target for his criticism of silent illumination.
During the Yuán and Míng dynasties that followed the Sòng, Chán underwent many institutional, social, and ideological changes while its influence in elite Chinese society waxed and waned; however, kànhuà Chán continued as its signature meditation style. But although Dàhuì was still seen as the great sage of kànhuà practice, and Chán masters continued to appeal to his authority in their discussions of it, kànhuà Chán did undergo a number of developments and changes over the centuries. The following outlines some of these changes, which have been grouped under four headings: the use of the kànhuà technique as a way of calming the mind; an even greater emphasis on doubt; the integration of Pure Land practice into kànhuà Chán; and the notion that the huàtóu could be called out aloud.
Kànhuà Chán as a Device to Calm the Mind
As we have seen, Dàhuì was battling silent illumination, which he felt was imposing a deadening stillness and quietude on the mind of the practitioner. Instead, practitioners were encouraged to put all of their efforts into kànhuà Chán and attain a breakthrough enlightenment; once that had been achieved, their minds would be naturally quiet. So to Dàhuì, the kànhuà technique was not about calming or quieting the mind.
However, there are indications that kànhuà Chán in some forms may have been understood as a device to calm the mind, at least within the Cáodòng tradition. This would no doubt have irked Dàhuì, who had made it very clear that he associated his contemporary Cáodòng masters with the dead-end silent illumination that he attacked.
Although the vast majority of Cáodòng masters of the Yuán and Míng dynasties in general taught a quite orthodox kànhuà Chán meditation, in the late Sòng some Cáodòng masters may have invested kànhuà Chán with a silent illumination approach. Thus, in an autobiographical narrative (rather unusual for its time), the monk Xuěyán Zŭqīn (1216–1287) talks about his early Chán training with a Cáodòng master in this way:
I then joined the assembly of venerable Tiějué Yuǎn of Shuānglín27 to whole-heartedly practice [dǎ shífāng]. From morning to night I stayed only in the monk’s hall without leaving the building. Even when I was entering the common quarters or going to the washroom, I held my hands in my sleeves, moving about very slowly, and never glancing left or right but only looking no more than three feet in front of me. The worthies of the Cáodòng tradition were wont to teach people to contemplate [kàn] the saying about the dog not having Buddha nature. Just when random conceptions and thoughts arose, one was supposed to ever so lightly balance the word wú/no on the tip of the nose. When the thought disappeared, you should right away put down [the wú/no]. This way you would sit silently waiting for purity to become ripe. After a long time, understanding would naturally occur. Practice in the Cáodòng tradition was very dense and obscure; and therefore people after doing this for ten or twenty years still did not succeed. Thus it was difficult for them to find heirs [to their tradition].28
Of course, Zŭqīn went on to get a transmission in the Línjì tradition, and he was no doubt very aware of Dàhuì’s attacks on the silent illumination of the Cáodòng tradition. But although he is not a disinterested reporter, his description may well still reflect a use of the huàtóu that was designed to calm the mind, rather than to facilitate investigating it and generate doubt. This would be quite in keeping with what we know about Cáodòng practice of a century earlier and its emphasis on the original Buddha nature with which all sentient beings are endowed.
This kind of use of the dog gōng’àn can perhaps be traced back to the Cáodòng master Tiāntóng Rújìng (1163–1228), who became famous as the teacher of the founder of the Japanese Sōtō Zen school, Dōgen (1200–1253). Rújìng told his students to use the huàtóu “wú/no” to sweep out their minds: “Rújìng ascended the hall [and said]: ‘When your mind is flying off in different directions, how do you control it? Take the story about Zhàozhōu’s dog not having the Buddha nature and just use the word “wú/no” to vigorously sweep it out…. Suddenly you will sweep through to the Great Void, and lucidly penetrate all the myriad distinctions in the universe.’”29 Rújìng here seems to suggest an emptying out of the mind, using the huàtóu to stop random thoughts.
Although in later times Cáodòng masters seemed eager to demonstrate their orthodox understanding of kànhuà Chán, there are some indications that a notion of kànhuà Chán as a device for calming the mind may have persisted. Thus, the late-Míng and early Qīng Cáodòng master Wéilín Dàopèi (1615–1702) says in a sermon,
It is like Chán master Dàhuì always instructing people to contemplate the saying about the dog not having the Buddha nature, stating that the one character “no/wú” encompasses the entire universe. Just when delusions and vexations manifest before you, you must maintain your composure and raise the “no/wú.” It is like pouring a ladle of cold water into a huge boiling cauldron: it will immediately become clear and cool. Bringing up the huàtóu [in your mind] is very much like this. Afterwards, the worthy [Dàhuì] also made people give rise to intense feelings of doubt, using these feelings of doubt to generate conditions for enlightenment. Therefore it is said: “Not to doubt the word [the huàtóu] is a great calamity: great doubt, great enlightenment; small doubt, small enlightenment; no doubt, no enlightenment.” The number of those who have practiced according to this and have obtained the Way is beyond count.”30
Here we see a typical appeal to Dàhuì as the orthodox arbiter of kànhuà Chán, but also an emphasis on the power of the huàtóu to calm the turbulent mind that here seems presented as a fundamental function of kànhuà Chán.
Doubt in Later Kànhuà Chán
In the quotation above, Wéilín Dàopèi emphasizes, as did Dàhuì, that kànhuà Chán is a crucial and necessary tool in obtaining enlightenment. But Dàopèi also puts great emphasis on the engendering of doubt. This is, in fact, typical of kànhuà Chán in the Yuán and Míng, which tends to emphasize doubt to a much greater degree than Dàhuì does in his surviving writings. Beginning by the late Sòng, the saying “great doubt, great enlightenment; small doubt, small enlightenment; no doubt, no enlightenment” came to be used frequently in discussions of kànhuà Chán, although it was not an expression used by Dàhuì.
It seems the earliest instance of the expression is found in Xuěyán Zŭqīn’s autobiographical account referred to above. Here Zŭqīn tells of how he was set on the correct path after his time practicing in the Cáodòng tradition by an old monk who told him, “When practicing Chán, one must give rise to a feeling of doubt. Great doubt, great enlightenment; small doubt, small enlightenment; no doubt, no enlightenment. One must doubt the gōng’àn to get anywhere.”31 The context clearly suggests that this was an expression circulating at the time and not the original invention of the unnamed monk. The passage underscores the great emphasis on doubt in kànhuà practice, and it is in fact virtually impossible to find a discussion of kànhuà Chán from the Yuán or the Míng that does not mention doubt.
Although the dog gōng’àn continued to be used, a number of other gōng’àn also became popular in the centuries after Dàhuì, and were thought to generate the same kind of doubt. For example, the Yuán dynasty (1279–1368) Chán master Zhìchè Duànyún (b. 1309) writes, “Whether you investigate the word “wú/no” [of the dog gōng’àn], or you investigate your original face, or you investigate invoking the name of the Buddha, although the gōng’àn are different, in the end the doubt [they generate] is the same.”32 Duànyún also has an interesting discussion in which he describes doubt in kànhuà Chán exemplified by yet another gōng’àn:
To begin with, you shou
ld raise [the gōng’àn] “The ten-thousand things return to one, where does the one return to?” perhaps three or four times, gathering it up [mentally] as seems right. Then you begin to put less emphasis on the “ten-thousand things return to one,” and only let doubt arise on the word “one”; the doubter should doubt this “where does the one return to?” The three words “return to where” should lead you to thoroughly investigate “the one”; where else can you find peace and establish yourself? The three words are not where the doubt should be placed, the doubt is on “the one.” If, unfortunately, feelings of doubt on “the one” do not arise, then again raise the “where, after all, does the one return to?” When you raise the huàtóu, saying it out loud or not saying it out loud are both fine, just don’t be too fast and also don’t be too slow.33
This is one of the rare places in Chán literature where we are given a few pointers about how kànhuà meditation is to be carried out. In this scheme, the practitioner starts with the whole gōng’àn and moves toward the most important part of it; then shifts to the huàtóu or keyword, the crucial element of the gōng’àn, which is where doubt should be concentrated. If not successful in focusing doubt on the huàtóu, the practitioner must go back to the second step.
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