seventh world of chan buddhism - Zen Buddhist Order of Hsu Yun

He came to a curious end. He had a dream in which he battled a makara - an
amphibious creature associated with the Svadhisthana Chakra. The dream inspired him to
participate in the killing of a whale or some other large sea animal. For reasons no one
understood, he immediately grew sick and was dead within a few weeks.
A peasant rebellion quickly toppled what was left of Qin Shihuangdi's dynasty, and a
more civilized chain of rulers, the Han, (206 B.C. - A.D. 220) came to power. Chinese life
returned to normal, and in the more relaxed atmosphere, the pressure was taken off the Daoist
ashrams. As persons unsuited to the spirituality and simplicity of Dao existence returned to
ordinary life, monastic Daoism returned to its pristine Way. It was then, during the Han, that
Buddhism made its entry into China. It trekked into the north by way of the trans-asiatic Silk
Road and into south via the sea ports, particularly Guangzhou (Canton). Two entirely
different receptions were accorded it.
In the northern cities of power and learning, the Confucian ruling class, having
reasserted its political dominance after the overthrow of the Qin dynasty, dismissed with
patrician hauteur the various Buddhist scriptures that were slowly being circulated. They
found the new teachings to be little more than a collection of barbarian superstitions, alien
and antithetic to their sophisticated beliefs.
In the south, where people already were barbarians, the scriptures were greeted as an
agreeable variation on existing themes of Daoist philosophy.
Northern Confucianism preached the virtues of collective identity, of the need for an
individual to subordinate his own interests to those of his family and clan. A man served the
past and present members of his family and they, in turn, served him. There was collective
responsibility and collective compensation. In such a team-oriented system, Buddhist notions
of self-reliance were decidedly subversive. Not even the Son of Heaven functioned as an
individual.
From any Confucian point of view, the new religion was objectionable. Intellectuals,
whose leisurely scholarship was familially financed, regarded the Buddha model with
considerable alarm. The thought that an educated nobleman would abandon his birthright in
order to pursue - as a vagrant! - some far-fetched, independent salvation was worse than
contemptible. Further, reincarnation and karma were clearly bizarre blasphemies. A man's
ancestral ghosts were fully accounted for. There were no unclaimed spirits hanging about
waiting to inhabit new bodies; and, thanks to the very thorough ghosts, nobody required
additional hardships or favors for karmic retribution to supply. Magistrates, their pincers at
the ready, blanched at the prospect that a man's punishment could await him in a life beyond
their reach. They scoffed at the suggestion that any suffering they imposed upon a defendant
might stand not only to his credit but to their own discredit in that other-worldly judgment.
Warlords found not the slightest merit in the code of non- violence; and landowners, whose
fortunes depended upon the sweat of serfs, took no comfort in the vision of thousands of
CHAPTER 4 ORIGINS OF THE TWO MAIN SCHOOLS OF CHAN
S EVENTH W ORLD O F C HAN B UDDHISM
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