ZenExperience-obooko-rel0025

one he believed proper. Perhaps it was in this formative period
that the inner strength of Ch'an's first Chinese master was forged.
Hui-k'o's major concern during this period must inevitably
have been the study of the Lankavatara Sutra entrusted him by
Bodhidharma. The Lankavatara was not written by a Zen master,
nor did it come out of the Zen tradition, but it was the primary
scripture of the first two hundred years of Ch'an. As
D. T. Suzuki has noted, there were at least three Chinese
translations of this Sanskrit sutra by the time Bodhidharma came
to China. 6 However, he is usually given credit, at least in Zen
records, for originating the movement later known as the
Lankavatara school. As the sutra was described by a non-Ch'an
Chinese scholar in the year 645, "The entire emphasis of its
teaching is placed on Prajna (highest intuitive knowledge), which
transcends literary expression. Bodhidharma, the Zen master,
propagated this doctrine in the south as well as in the north, the
gist of which teaching consists in attaining the unattainable, which
is to have right insight into the truth itself by forgetting word and
thought. Later it grew and flourished in the middle part of the
country. Hui-k'o was the first who attained to the essential
understanding of it. Those addicted to the literary teaching of
Buddhism in Wei were averse to becoming associated with these
spiritual seers." 7
The Lankavatara purportedly relays the thoughts of the
Buddha while ensconced on a mountain peak in Sri Lanka.
Although the work is notoriously disorganized, vague, and
obscure, it was to be the stone on which Hui-k'o sharpened his
penetrating enlightenment. The major concept it advances is that
of Mind, characterized by D. T. Suzuki as "absolute mind, to be
distinguished from an empirical mind which is the subject of
psychological study. When it begins with a capital letter, it is the
ultimate reality on which the entire world of individual objects
depends for its value." 8 On the question of Mind, the Lankavatara
has the following to say:
. . . the ignorant and the simple minded, not knowing that the
world is what is seen of Mind itself, cling to the multitudinousness
of external objects, cling to the notions of being and non-being,
oneness and otherness, bothness and not-bothness, existence
and non-existence, eternity and non-eternity. . . . 9