Thirty_Years_of_Buddhist_studies,Conze

30 Thirty Years of Buddhist Studies
our knowledge of other sects, thereby hoping to gain a fuller
view and a more correct perspective:
1. H. Dumoulin ^ a Jesuit of the Catholic Sophia University
at Tokyo, has placed Ch'an into the context of Chinese history
and thought. So intent had Suzuki been on explaining the
spiritual message of the Ch'an masters, that it is very hard
from his books alone to form an idea of their localization in
time and space, or of their doctrinal affiliations. In an admirable
article, later on admirably edited by Ruth Fuller Sasaki, 1
Dumoulin describes the development of Ch'an during the Tang
and Sung periods, i.e. during the time when Ch'an was at the
acme of its creativity, produced a great number of strong
personalities, and achieved a startling originality of expression.
In 1959 Dumoulin published in German a general survey of
Zen history 2 which was in 1963 translated into English. This
handbook is a most conscientious and relatively unbiassed
piece of work which gives all the relevant facts as known at
present. One may complain that it is confined to the external
historical facts, but they are surely worth knowing, as long
as they are not taken too seriously. Nothing prevents his readers
from suffusing the facts with their own religious experience, if
they have any.
2. Rinzai Zen has become so closely bound up with the
" Japanese national character", or rather the mentality of the
Samurpi, that it is unlikely to be the same as Ch'an, a creation
of the essentially pacific Chinese genius. Zen, in fact, is not
Ch'an, but a response of the Japanese mind to Ch'an, just as
Ch'an itself had been the response of the Chinese mind to Indian
Buddhism. The study of Ch'an thought has in recent years been
advanced by Fung Yu-lan 3 to whom we owe a masterly exposition
of the philosophical views of the Ch'an masters, and partly
by a pimber of translations, which range from the T'ang
masters 4 to the later Ch'an literature of the seventeenth to
1 The development of Chinese Zen, 1953 (First in German in 1941).
2 Zen Geschichte und Gestalt. 1959.
3 A history of Chinese philosophy, vol. II, 1953.
4 SheH-hui (668—760) into English in Asia Major, III, 1952, 132-55,
and into French by J. Gernet in various places. Hui Hai (ca. 800) by
J. Blofeld, 1948,1959. The Mumonkan into German by G. H. Dumoulin,
Monumenta Serica, VIII, 1943, pp. 41-102.