Buddhism spread widely in нndia, Southeast Asia, and Central Asia in the centuries after Gautama^ death. It reached China in the first century C.E., and spread from there to Korea and Japan. Over the centuries Buddhism branched into many different schools and sects, and accumulated many scriptures (.sutras, ali at least nominally the teachings of the Buddha him- self). The main branch of Buddhism that became popular in China was Mahayana, or "Greater Vehicle,,> Buddhism, which promised believers that saints, called Bodhisattvas, would reward their faith by helping them to break free of the wheel of karma and be reborn in paradise (a far cry from the austere nirvana of Gautama^ original conception). Mahayana sects became extremely popular and encouraged many acts of devo- tion, from building temples and making holy religious images to copying and recopying the sutras.
A radical challenge to this form of Buddhism was mounted in the late fifth or early sixth century c.E. with the founding of a new school called Cfran [Chan], the "meditation" school of Buddhism; most of us know the word better in its Japanese pronunciation, Zen. Founded by an obscure and semile- gendary monk named Bodhidharma, the Ch'an school taught that salvation should be sought not in acts of religious merit, nor in the intervention of Bodhisattvas, but through an intense regime of meditation that would empty the mind of doctrine, scriptures, desires, distractions, and ali attachment to the world, thus preparing the way for a wordless leap into enlight- enment.
Bodhidharma^ new sect suffered its own schisms and com- peting claims to leadership; it was finally united again by a most unlikely man. Hui-neng was an illiterate woodcutter from southern China who became a Cfran monk, and soon showed a genius both for expounding the doctrine of the school and for imposing discipline on its monastic practices; he came to be accepted by ali of the Cfran subschools as the Sixth Patriarch in a line from Bodhidharma himself. The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch is a record of Hui-neng's life and work.
The book's title is odd; it is the only Buddhist text called a sutra that is openly and obviously not a record of the teachings of Gautama Buddha. The Platform Sutra consists of three main parts: an autobiography of Hui-neng, a long sermon, and a set of miscellaneous sayings, anecdotes, and teachings. Even more curious is the autobiography itself; Hui-neng is described as having been illiterate, and the autobiography is supposedly "as told to" a monk named Shen-hui. But it is really a fabrica- tion, written long after Hui-neng's lifetime, possibly based on factual traditions handed down about him but including a great deal of hopeful confabulation as well. Hui-neng's sermon also was certainly transmitted orally for a long time before it was written down.
The most famous teaching recorded in the Platform Sutra, though, is probably the work of Hui-neng himself. A rival had written a poem:
The body is a tree of perfect wisdom,
The mind is the stand of a bright mirror.
At ali times diligently wipe it clean;
Do not allow it to become dusty.
Hui-neng wrote in reply:
Truly perfect wisdom has no tree,
Nor has the bright mirror a stand.
Buddha-nature is forever clear and pure.
Where would there be any dust?
Hui-neng argues for a wordless discipline, transmitted by "silent precepts" from master to novice, to replace the sutras; tear them up, he shouts, get rid of them, they are only impedi- ments to enlightenment. Of course this raises a problem that has haunted Cfran (Zen) ever since—the Platform Sutra is only the first book in a huge library of Zen scriptures, this in a sect that says "destroy the scriptures" and teaches that enlightenment can come only from wordless discipline. The Chinese Taoist classic, the Tao Te Ching, says "The Tao that can be called Tao is not the universal Tao; words that can be spoken are not universal words." Zen encapsulates this nicely: "Those who know do not say, those who say do not know." Yet of the writing of books about Zen there is no end.
The Platform Sutra is fairly short, and it is not difficult to read. Unlike the sutras of mainstream Buddhism, it contains few unfamiliar terms and concepts (but if you want to see what these mainstream scriptures are like, try the Diamond Sutra and the Lotus Sutra). Even making allowances for pious leg- end-mongering, it paints a portrait of a remarkable individual, the woodcutter monk Hui-neng; it also allows one to gain an understanding of a religious faith and discipline that has been enormously influential in East Asian religion, literature and art for well over a thousand years, and which has in recent years made its mark in the Western world as well.
J.S.M.
FIRDAUSI
ca. 940-1020 Shah Nameh
Firdausi, the pen name of a man of obscure origins named Abul Kasim Mansur, is generally regarded as the greatest poet in the history of the Persian language. He is said to have been born into a modest land-owning family in the city of Khurasan, where he managed somehow to acquire a good education that included not only the usual Islamic arts and sciences but also, less usually, ancient Persian history and literature. He made his way to the court of Shah Mahmud of Gazni and accepted a commission to complete a long poem on Persian history (the previous holder of the commission had died shortly after beginning the poem).
The finished poem, the Shah Nameh or "Book of Kings," is composed of nearly 60,000 rhyming couplets and tells the story of the Persian throne from the earliest days to the com- ing of Islam. Much of the poem is simply a recapitulation of history, from the rise of the prophet Zoroaster (founder of the pre-Islamic religion of Pйrsia) and the glorious reigns of the empire-builders Cyrus and Darius, to the wars with Greece and the rise and fali of Persian royal dynasties; it ends with the collapse of the Sasanid Kingdom in the mid-seventh century.
But if we think of Firdausi as an historian, we find that he fits no mold that weve encountered thus far in this Plan. His history resembles neither the majestic sobriety of Thucydides [9], nor the cheerful credulousness of Herodotus [8], nor the systematic organization of Ssu-ma Ch'ien [18]. More than any of these, Firdausi resembles Homer [2,3]; he is historian as bard. His strength is in pure narrative; he has an eye for the telling detail and the illuminating anecdote, and the elegance of his poetry (apparent to some degree even through the
screen of translation) carnes the work through occasional dry spells in the action. One thing that makes Firdausi's poetic history so interesting is his willingness to go beyond what most modern critics would call history proper and into the realm of legend to deal at length with the exploits of Persia's great cul- ture-hero, Rustam. Rustam is a perfect prince, eloquent and elegant, but also a warrior of imposing strength and bravery; he is a sort of latter-day Persian reincarnation of Gilgamesh [1] with some of the attributes of Hercules, polished by the man- ners of a highly cultivated and refined court. He is the true hero of the Shah Nameh, an ideal to be emulated by future Persian kings.