INSTITUT FUR TIBETOLOGIt UND BUDDHISMUSKUNDE UNIVERSITATSCAMPUS AAKH, HOF 2 SPITALGASSE 2-4, A-1090 WIEN AUSTRIA, EUROPE __ Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies Volume 21 • Number 1 • 1998 JOHANNES BRONKHORST Did the Buddha Believe in Karma and Rebirth? 1 JINHUACHEN The Construction of Early Tendai Esoteric Buddhism: The Japanese Provenance of Saicho's Transmission Documents and Three Esoteric Buddhist Apocrypha Attributed to Subhakarasirhha 21 MIRIAM LEVERING Dogen's Raihaitokuzui and Women Teaching in Sung Ch'an 77 TOM TILLEMANS A Note on Pramanavarttika, Pramdnasamuccaya and Nyayamukha. What is the svadharmin in Buddhist Logic? 111 CHIKAFUMIWATANABE A Translation of the Madhyamakahrdayakdrika with the Tarkajvala III. 137-146 125 YANG JIDONG Replacing hu with fan: A Change in the Chinese Perception of Buddhism during the Medieval Period 157 MIRIAM LEVERING Dogen's Raihaitokuzui (1LW&M) and Women Teaching in Sung Ch'an As is well known, Dogen Kigen Zenji MjC^h^W^ (1200-1253), the founder of Japan's Soto Wffl Zen movement, spent five years visiting and studying at a number of Ch'an monasteries in China. After he returned from Sung 5f5 China in 1227 as an heir to Ju-ching bU&'s Dharma, he stayed for a few years at Kenninji ^HHTF, the Tendai Jz-fe temple where he had originally become a disciple of the Zen teacher Myozen %P&. Around 1230 he moved to a small hermitage in Fukakusa $M£, and there his circle of students began to form. At his hermitage in Fukakusa in 1235 and 1236 Dogen raised money to build a Monks' Hall (sodo ft^), a characteristically Sung Ch'an style training hall, and subsequently changed the name of his temple there to Koshoji PIUTF. In 1243, for reasons he never revealed in extant sources, Dogen left Koshoji and led his disciples into the mountains of Echizen i^tfi, where with the help and protection of warrior-class patrons he built a new monastery. Although we do not know a lot about Dogen's early efforts to collect a group of students during the thirteen years that he taught at what became Koshoji, there is evidence that his community of disciples and donors included nuns. In 1231 he wrote a Dharma instruction to a nun, Ryonen T#&, whom he addressed and praised as a serious practitioner. In 1234 a nun named Egi '$H joined his community as one of a group of Daruma-shu J^IHT* disciples. Both Ryonen and Egi reappear in records we have from his Echizen $&m period, which suggests that they remained in Dogen's circle for a good long time. The Daruma-shu group to which the nun Egi belonged also included the monk Ejo 1&!$£, who between 1235 and 1237 wrote down excerpts of Dogen's talks and responses to questions, forming a text called the "Record of Things Heard" (J. Zuimonki Wffi IS). One exchange in this text features an unnamed nun asking Dogen a question, which suggests that at Dogen's teaching sessions nuns attended.' 1. Scholars have suggested caution in using the Zuimonki RfiBflf 2 as a source for Dogen's biography. Whether that doubt should extend to this particular piece of evidence that Dogen had nuns in his sangha I am not able to judge. JIABS 21.1 78 Dogen had women financial supporters as well: in 1237 the aristocratic nun Shogaku IE Jl/E donated a lecture hall for Koshoji.2 In 1240, during this Koshoji period, Dogen also delivered a sermon later included in his Shobogenzo jE&B&i& entitled Raihaitokuzui tLf¥# ft (Bowing [to the Teacher] and Obtaining the [Teacher's] Marrow). The sermon begins with the theme of how to choose a teacher and how to obtain the teacher's marrow, his or her most profound teaching, namely, awakening. But it becomes in large part a sermon on how awakened nuns and lay women, though lower in status in the sangha than awakened monks, are worthy of being honored by monks and lay men and are worthy of being their teachers. Some scholars have suggested that for Dogen, as for the founders of others of the new Kamakura Kfc# Buddhist groups such as Shinran ffiffl and Nichiren 0 M, an interest in welcoming women as practitioners and establishing a doctrinal position that assured them of eventual salvation could have been a way of differentiating himself from the world of Shingon RH, the Vinaya school and Tendai, with their policies of asserting male superiority and excluding women from their practice realms (Mt. Koya itiJ8?Lll, Kukai 3?fl3's Shingon practice center, is a well-known exam ple).3 There is no question but that in this sermon Dogen was critical of the attitudes and practices relating to women that he found current in Japan in a way that radically took on established practices. Whatever his motivation, the sermon must indeed have had a differentiating effect.4 2. On the subject of women in DSgen's sangha, see TAJIMA Hakudo, Ddgen Keizan ryo Zenji no nisokan (Nagoya: Soto-shu Koto Nigakurin Shuppanbu 1953); TAJIMA Hakudo, Soto-shu nisoshi (Tokyo: Sotoshu Nisodan Honbu [Sanyo Sha] 1955); ISHIKAWA Rikizan, "Chusei BukkyS ni okeru ni no iso ni tsuite: toku ni shoki Soto-shu kyodan no jirei o chushin to shite", Komazawa Daigaku Zenkenkyujo nenpo 3:141-53 (March, 1992). In English see Paula Kane ROBINSON ARAI, Zen Nuns: Living Treasures of Japanese Buddhism, unpublished Ph.D dissertation Harvard University, 1993. 3. ISHIKAWA Rikizan, "Chusei no Bukkyo ni okeru ni no iso ni tsuite (jo)." p. 141-42. ISHIKAWA cites HOSOKAWA Ryoichi, "Seirinji soji to ni" in Tsukui to oshie, series Josei to Bukkyo 2, April 1989 on this point, an essay I have not had an opportunity to examine. On Ddgen's own failure to transcend the traditional "three followings and five hindrances" framework for viewing women, see ISHIKAWA Rikizan, "Dogen no 'Nyoshin fujobutsu ron' ni tsuite - juni kanbon Shdbdgenzd no seikaku o meguru oboegaki", Komazawa Daigaku Zenkenkyujo nenpo 1: 88-123 (March 1990). 4. It is interesting, though, that the section of the sermon that includes Dogen's LEVERING 79 Other scholars have suggested that Ddgen's real purpose in giving this sermon was to make the point that true students of the Way would be willing to take him as a teacher: indeed, as the true teacher of Buddhism in Japan.5 After all, even though Dogen claimed aristocratic birth, he himself at the time was also of low status in some ways. His social origins, marred perhaps by illegitimacy, had been insufficient to enable him to rise high in the Tendai school hierarchy. In moving from Kenninji to the small retreat in Fukakusa he had abandoned the support and protection of the Tendai establishment. Further, in 1240 he apparendy had no powerful patron among the Kyoto aristocrats. The monks who joined Dogen at Koshoji similarly cut themselves off from the traditional route to monastic fame and leadership. They may indeed have been low-status monks: As William BODIFORD points out in his study of early Soto Zen, "many of Dogen's early sayings seem addressed especially to the lower economic class of monks who lacked the luxury of devoting all their time to scholastic study."6 This line of interpretation may have some plausibility. Certainly Dogen's own lack of unambiguously high status is one context we should not forget as we listen to this sermon. Yet to suggest that Dogen was talking about awakened women solely in order to talk indirectly about himself would in my view be to take this line of interpretation too far. For one thing, an important fact that we should also not forget is the presence of women in his early sangha: it is possible, even likely, that the audience listening to this sermon was not exclusively male. As mentioned above, there is evidence that Dogen's community of disciples included women. Even though in the Raihaitokuzui Dogen seems to be addressing male students, as he talked he may have had in mind some woman or women whom he could recommend as teachers, or some members of his audience attack on the practice of forbidding women from entering certain temples seems not to have been included in the version of the Shobogenzo lE&WkM that circulated before the eighteenth century; it was found at Eiheiji MW-^f in the Secret Shdbdgenzo. Perhaps Dogen's followers had reasons for not wanting to distance their struggling movement so radically from the established sects. 5. This suggestion was made by Morten SCHLOTTER at a conference on Sung Buddhism held at the University of Illinois in April 1996. 6. William M. BODIFORD, Sotd Zen in Medieval Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, Kuroda Institute Studies in East Asian Buddhism no. 8, 1993), p. 25. Much of my summary of Dogen's career in Japan after his return from China, and my suggestion that Dogen was not a high-status monk, are indebted to BODIFORD's account on p. 22-26. JIABS21.1 80 whom he knew to be personally interested in the question of whether women could become awakened and teach.7 Yet another line of interpretation, one that puts religious insight and the doctrines related to it at the center of the discussion of a sermon by this man who has in modern times been widely thought to be a religious genius, rests on the observation that both the logic of Ch'an and Zen thought and the insight approved of in the school radically challenge any kind of essentialist dualism.8 This point is expressed well by Paula ARAL ARAI writes: Just three years before he left for Echizen, [Dogen] wrote this impassioned text in the spring of 1240 in order to extinguish the errors of those who harbor incorrect thoughts about women and the Dharma. He writes with conviction, yet there is a hint of incredulity that serious students of the Dharma have not yet realized the meaning of the fundamental teaching that 'all existents are Buddha-nature'.9 ARAI points out that a radical non-dualism was Dogen's fundamental understanding and teaching during this time. This radical non-dualism led Dogen to reinterpret in 1241 in an essay entitled Bussho {$14 the famous statement of the Nirvana Sutra that "all sentient beings have the Buddha-nature" to read "all existents are Buddha-nature". Should we be surprised that one whose mind dwelt on (or in) non-duality would discuss the implications of this non-dualism for eradicating a highly dualistic and unproductive way of constructing one's world that he could see everywhere around him in the prevailing gender construction? In this essay I would like to bring to the reader's attention an additional historical point to consider in understanding why Dogen preached the Raihaitokuzui, namely, the way in which women's ability to master and teach the fundamental insights of Ch'an Buddhism had been represented 7. In the texts of Sung China one can usually find a close correlation between a master's mention of the possibility of a woman becoming awakened through Ch'an study and the recorded presence of a woman either as intended audience for a letter or poem in which the point is made or as sponsor of the sermon in which the point is made. 8. See my "The Dragon Girl and the Abbess of Mo-shan: Gender and Status in Ch'an Buddhist Tradition", JIABS 5.1 (1982): 19-35, and LEVERING, "Lin-chi Ch'an and Gender: the Rhetoric of Equality and the Rhetoric of Heroism", in Jose" Ignacio Cabez6n ed., Buddhism, Sexuality and Gender (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press 1992), pp. 137-56. 9. ARAI, Zen Nuns, p. 83. LEVERING 81 to him during his five years as a Ch'an student in Sung China. This aspect of his experience and its implications have not received adequate attention from scholars of women in Japanese Buddhism or from scholars of Dogen. This is no doubt because the degree to which Sung Ch'an practice, and Sung Ch'an representations of Ch'an practice, were in fact welcoming to women students and teachers, and were in fact different from Japanese Buddhist practice with respect to women, have heretofore not been adequately explored in detail by historians of Chinese Ch'an and Japanese Zen.10 It is obvious to any reader of his written records that Dogen's sense of his own authority rested in part on his experience abroad. In his sermons and essays he often presented himself to his audience as one who knew how Ch'an/ Zen in particular and Buddhism in general was authentically practiced because he had seen what was done in Sung China." What Dogen represented in the Raihaitokuzui as Ch'an rhetoric and practice with respect to women are similarly represented in the texts of Sung Ch'an. A close reading of Ch'an texts from the Five Dynasties and the Sung periods suggests that by the time of Dogen's visit to China, what Dogen advocated with respect to women accorded in large part with what was in fact being represented in China as Ch'an practice.12 This suggests that we need to give some weight to the fact that for five years Dogen 10. Although my approach here is historical, and my argument here will be an historical argument, I see it as compatible with a view that there is awakening, that what one is awakened to is a radically non-dualist way of seeing the world, and that this would influence one's views on the significance of social constructions of gender. 11. See BODIFORD, pp. 12-14. Scholars have sometimes doubted the accuracy of Dogen*s representations of matters in China, particularly when they are made in a highly polemical context. I would like to suggest that in this sermon to the extent that we can check them Dogen's depictions were faithful to Southern Sung representations of Ch'an practices. 12. An influential school of thought in Japanese scholarship, particularly within the Soto sect, has portrayed Dogen as faithfully transmitting some "pure Ch'an" from China to Japan. This school has interpreted DSgen's thought as developing ideas found in China and in Chinese texts, and has directed attention away from Dogen's Japanese background. I do not wish to ally myself uncritically with that kind of interpretation. It would be a mistake to overlook in our interpretations Dogen's formative background in Japanese culture as well as in Tendai and Japanese Zen, and to pay insufficient attention to the Japanese world that formed the context for his teaching. JIABS21.1 82 practiced Sung Ch'an, and learned much about how the Chinese Ch'an tradition represented itself to itself, whom Ch'an communities included, and how Ch'an practices were carried out. It is perfectly possible, given what was being said and sometimes done in China, that when Dogen returned home, Japanese attitudes and practices in relation to women students of Buddhism struck him as unlike those of the Ch'an he had seen abroad. He had formed his own identity around the notion that Sung Buddhism was different from Japanese Buddhism, and that he was a Buddhist as men in the Sung were Buddhists. His own growing sangha was to include some women, as he probably knew that the sangha of some Sung masters had done, and he wanted all his students to understand that in the Sung Ch'an Buddhism that he had practiced, awakening was what mattered most to a student, not gender.13 A Summary of the Raihaitokuzui The title of the sermon probably refers to the story of Bodhidharma's interviewing his four disciples as to their insight, and then saying to each, on the basis of his or her answer, "you have attained my skin," or flesh, or bones, or marrow. When asked to express his insight, his disciple Hui-k'o & &! merely bowed wordlessly, to which Bodhidharma replied, "You have attained my marrow." So perhaps the title of Dogen's sermon should be translated, "[He] bowed and attained [Bodhidharma's] marrow." But the sermon also clearly refers to bowing not simply as an answer, but also as the formal act in which a disciple takes a master as his/her teacher. A large part of the sermon is about to whom it is appropriate to bow as one's teacher. Perhaps as he reflected on the story of Bodhidharma and his four disciples Dogen was struck by the fact that one of them was a woman, the nun Tsung-ch'ih $8$#. Perhaps this unusual element of the story was in part responsible for the striking turn that this sermon takes from simply emphasizing that one who seeks the Dharma will seek it from any awakened being, even one of low status, to emphasizing that one who understands the Dharma will understand that women can awaken to it, and will seek the teaching from an awakened woman. 13. As we shall see below, perhaps due to the enthusiasm of the convert, perhaps because as a Japanese he did not really understand how Chinese Ch'an teachers placed certain limits on their rhetoric, Dogen was willing to go, in rhetoric if not in practice, even farther on this matter than his Chinese co-religionists had done in advocating that male students take awakened women as teachers. LEVERING 83 Dogen begins his sermon with the topic of the difficulty of finding a true teacher,14 and the importance of dropping everything to study with such a teacher when found. The point he wishes to make is that true teachers may take any form: even a youth, a lay person, or a woman may be a true teacher. Thus in the second sentence of the sermon he says, "a true teacher has nothing at all to do with such characteristics as male and female and so on, but the teacher must be one who is a great man (^:i ^ Ch. ta-chang-fu, J. daijobu), must be 'such a person' (i.e., one who is intimately acquainted with satori f?f)..."'5 A little further on he says, "Long ago [the great god] Indra honored a wild fox as his own master and sought the Dharma from him, calling him "Great Bodhisattva." It had nothing to do with whether the teacher was in a high or low [noble or base] form because of past karma." Deluded people of high social status, age, seniority, monastic rank or accomplishment on the bodhisattva path, though, think that they cannot bow to those of lower status or rank and take them as their teachers, even if such lower ranking persons have acquired the Dharma. Dogen offers a long list of telling examples. For instance, some think to themselves, "I am the chief of the monk officials who govern monastic affairs, so I 14. The term Dogen uses might better be translated as a mentor or a guide: it is the same term that is used in China of teachers who direct one's doctoral research. Not only does this teacher instruct you in some subject, she also guides you in your efforts to reach the goal. Hee-Jin KIM uses the term "guide" in his translation in his Flowers of Emptiness: Selections from Dogen's Shdbogenzd, Lewiston NY: Edwin Mellen Press 1985. 15. The first part of this sentence is taken from the statement of Mo-shan Liao-jan to Chih-hsien that Dogen quotes below. Chih-hsien's question is, "What is the person in the mountain [i.e., Mt. Mo] like?" Her answer: "It is not [a matter of] male or female form and the like." The second part of the sentence says that the teacher must be a daijdbu %.££. (Ch. ta-chang-fu). The notes in the Nihon Koten Bungaku Taikei edition of the Shdbogenzd (vol. 81) cite the Nirvana Sutra, chllan 9, the Ju-lai-hsing chapter, which says, "If one is able to know that he has the Buddha nature , I say that he has the characteristics of a man {chang-fu). If there is a woman [who knows], then she is a man (nan-tzu H •?)." KlM's translation of ta-chang-fu is interesting: "What counts is that the guide be a being of virtue." This translation has an advantage in that it reflects the way in which Mencius reinterpreted the meaning of the term ta-chang-fu to mean not a hero of great physical strength or political power but rather a moral hero, a man of virtue. The third part of the sentence refers to the story discussed by Dogen in his Immo ffijfr fascicle, the statement that if you want to know "such a thing", you must be "such a person". JIABS21.1 84 cannot bow to ordinary men and women, even if they have acquired the Dharma." Others think, "I have reached a very high stage of the bodhisattva path, and I cannot honor nuns and the like, even if they have acquired the Dharma." Dogen points out that this is entirely the wrong attitude in one who truly seeks the Dharma. "When a nun (who as a nun ranks lower than any monk) who has acquired the Way, who has acquired the Dharma appears in the world (as an abbess), for the monk who seeks the Dharma and studies Zen to enter her assembly, bow to her in homage (as his teacher) and ask [her] about the Dharma is the mark of his excellence as a student. It [finding an awakened teacher] should be like finding drinking water when you are thirsty." Dogen then tells the story of the monk Kuan-ch'i Chih-hsien MUifeBB 's studying under the nun teacher Mo-shan Liao-jan T^lJLlTM as told in the Ching-te ch'uan-teng lu MW.&&& (hereafter CTCTL), which is given in full below. He ends by saying, "Chih-hsien* s bowing and seeking the Dharma from Mo-shan TKUJ showed the superiority of his determination [to attain the Way]." He then tells how a nun named Miao-hsin $>{§ became the provisions manager of the ninth century master Yang-shan Hui-chi fflJlij]&:£ (807-883)'s monastery, because the monks at the monastery agreed that she was the most qualified. Her duty was to attend to donors, donations and provisions, particularly of grain and food. Her cloister was apparently lower on the mountainside than the main compound that contained the Dharma Hall and Abbot's Quarters. She became the teacher of seventeen traveling monks from Szechwan who stopped for the night at her cloister on their way up the mountain to study with Hui-chi. This came about because in the evening as they were resting they had a discussion about the Sixth Patriarch's comment as recorded in the Platform Sutra that "it is not the wind that moves, or the flag that moves, it is your mind that moves," which she overheard. When her disparaging remarks about their discussion were reported to them, they did not brush them aside. Instead, "they were ashamed that they had not been able to speak [Dharma, as those who understood Ch'an would do]," and at once they put on their outer robes and performed the ceremonial etiquette appropriate to seeking an interview with a teacher. In the formal interview she said to them, 'It is not the wind which moves, it is not the flag which moves, and it is not the mind which moves.' When they heard this comment of hers, they had a realization, and made bows of thanks and became her disciples. Then they returned to Szechwan, since they LEVERING 85 had found enlightenment and a teacher, and did not need to climb the mountain the next day to see Hui-chi.16 The moral Dogen draws from these stories of Chinese monks who have taken women as their teachers is that the Japanese monks in his audience should do the same. DOgen says, "When the abbot of the monastery and the senior monk with whom he shares his teaching seat are not around, you should ask a nun who has acquired the Way to teach you." Don't prefer a monk, even a senior monk, if he has not acquired the Way. In support of his point that in China men Ch'an students take enlightened women as their teachers, he makes a more general observation: "At present nuns enroll in the monasteries of the Sung. When one becomes famous for her attainment of the Dharma, and receives the imperial edict from the government officials appointing her abbess of a monastery for nuns, then at that monastery she "ascends the Hall." (That is, she goes to the Dharma Hall in response to an invitation issued with great ceremony and ascends the high seat to teach by giving a sermon and answering questions, as the Ch'an teacher who is an abbot or who represents the abbot does on the most formal of teaching occasions.) All of the monastic community from the abbot down attend to hear her teaching, listening to the Dharma while standing formally in their positions. Among those who ask questions [of the woman master] about [old] sayings (wato, Ch. hua-t'ou fSaS) there are also monks. This is a long-established practice." Dogen may have meant that the monastery at which the new abbess "ascended the Hall" was the one in which she had been enrolled when she heard the news, which most likely was a largely male monastery with a largely male assembly of students; or he may have meant that she "ascended the Hall" at the monastery to which she was now appointed abbess, which in the Sung as far as we know was always a convent of nuns. Or, as happened with male abbots on the occasion of their inaugural sermons, it may have been a third monastery, a large monastery in the neighborhood of the monastery to which she had been appointed. Holding the inaugural ceremony in a nearby larger monastery would be especially necessary if one's new monastery were small, but in the case of males it seems to have happened even when the monastery to which one was appointed was quite large. But regardless of which of these Dogen meant, he clearly means to tell his listeners that on this occasion of her first 16. I do not know of any occurrence of this story in an extant Chinese text.