Zen History: A Historiography Focused on Questions

Author: Gong Jun
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-08-01
Features: When Western Buddhist studies entered the era of "embracing the other" and listening to polyphonic voices, 【1】the Buddhist discourses in the Chinese context seemed to still remain confined to research within a relatively narrow historical and interpretive narrative framework. As an examination of Zen thought, although with the discovery of new materials at the beginning of the 20th century, especially the publication of Dunhuang manuscripts, scholars began to re-examine the reliability of traditional lamp histories and their historical context, hoping to reconstruct a new history of Zen thought. In terms of methodology, due to excessive reliance on the revolutionary insights brought by new historical materials, the structural framework of research primarily based on historical documents supplemented by necessary interpretive explanations has become the basic paradigm of modern Chinese Zen studies. The value belief of "clear etymology leads to clear meaning" in Sinology, after being packaged with modern rationality, led scholars to believe that through the collation and interpretation of original documents and archaeological materials, the temporal and spatial distance of history could be filled, and the original appearance of traditional Zen could be reconstructed. This ambitious heroicism-inspired paradigm of documentary epistemology, on the one hand, has led to a considerable expansion of historical document studies on Chinese Zen, especially textual studies on Tang Dynasty Zen, and has, together with Japanese scholars, re-established the historical genealogy of early Zen development.