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barry allen

THE VIRTUAL AND THE VACANTEMPTINESS AND KNOWLEDGE IN

CHAN AND DAOISM

I.

Buddhism seems premised on knowledge in a way other religions arenot. Its salvation is a kind of cognitive breakthrough, an accomplish-ment of knowledge. Ordinary life is cloaked in illusion, no more thana dream. People do not clearly understand that, so they form attach-ments and consequently suffer. If knowledge were perfect, therewould be no attachment and thus no suffering. I do not mean to saythere is no place for faith in Buddhism. Practitioners must have faiththat their effort will bear fruit, faith in those who oversee their prac-tice, and faith in the Buddhas merit. A peculiarity of Buddhism,however, is its thought that the origin of suffering is ignorance,entrenched but not unreachable. With appropriate effort a followercan internalize a set of Buddhist categories sufficient to overcome theignorance that dooms us to suffering and rebirth. Once we are enlight-ened, and able through these categories to perceive things as theyreally are, the root of suffering is removed and salvation attained.1

Enlightenment, liberation, nirvanathese are the salvific accomplish-ment of Buddhist knowledge.To find your way to such knowledge youneed a method, a teacher, and some provisional doctrine. That seemsto be how Buddhism was taught in India at the time of the Mahayanarift around the first century BCE, about a century before the firstBuddhists in China. Indian teachers had reduced Buddhism to aproblem of knowledge. The Mahayana movement is an internaldissent among Buddhist teachers who resist, from within knowledge,the liberating value of knowledge. Their Buddhism is renown knownfor the idea of emptiness, which perhaps makes the definitive breakwith their tradition because by design it resists the tendency to treatthe Buddhas teaching as unconditional truth. This idea of emptinesswill be an important Mahayana legacy to Chinese Buddhism andespecially Chan .

BARRY ALLEN, Professor, Department of Philosophy, McMaster University. Special-ties: philosophy of knowledge, art, and technology. E-mail: bgallen@mcmaster.ca

Journal of Chinese Philosophy 37:3 (September 2010) 457471 2010 Journal of Chinese Philosophy

We see the swerve that defines Mahayana in a sequence of passagesfrom the Lankavatara Sutra, a classic Mahayana statement. First, thedisciple must get into the habit of looking at things truthfully. He mustrecognize the fact that the world has no self-nature, that it is unborn,that it is like a passing cloud, like an imaginary wheel made by arevolving firebrand. Then, as these discriminations come to be seenas mutually conditioning, as empty of self-substance, as unborn, andthus come to be seen as they truly are, that is, as manifestations of themind itself, this is right knowledge. The paramita, the perfections ofthe Bodhisattva, are grounded in right knowledge. That knowledgeis Buddhist insight, Buddhist wisdom, but it is not yet completeenlightenment. There is one more step. The disciple should thenabandon the understanding of mind which he has gained by rightknowledge.2 Abandon your knowledge, take the step out of thesystem, and embrace the vacant sky. In the words of ninth-centuryChan master Zhaizhou, The Way does not belong to knowing or notknowing. To know is to have a concept; to not know is to be ignorant.If you truly realize the Way of no doubt, it is just like the sky: wideopen vast emptiness. How can you say yes or no to it?3

Chinese tradition from long before the introduction of Buddhismis practically without exception enthusiastic about the value ofknowledge. Chan, having important roots in the Mahayana tradition,reverses this value. Knowledge is part of the problem Buddhismaddressesthe problem of suffering. Yet if that is true, or if it works,what is it if not wise knowledge? How could anything except knowl-edge point beyond knowledge? Of course, Buddhist liberation isnot a propositional, theoretical knowledge of truth. The difficulty ofenlightenment is not that of a difficult theorem. It is the difficulty ofrealization, of meditation, of internalizing a paradoxical orientation.It is knowledge not of an object but of the mind; and not knowledgeof its nature but penetrating knowledge that mind is not an object, hasno nature, indeed, that it is empty, nothing at all. That is what theenlightened know, that knowledge is empty. Of course, no one canknow that there is nothing to know; for if one knows it, there issomething to know after all. Still, there is nothing to know andthe wise know it. Knowledge brings one that far. The next step is tounderstand that it brought no one nowhere, that knowledge is asempty as the mind that knows no knowing.

That sounds sort of Daoist. It can be made to sound even moreDaoist, and Chan authors sometimes labored to make their religionappeal to Daoists. Some scholars think Chan is Daoism, or that thedistinction is overcome. This is, for instance, the view of KristoferSchipper, who calls Chan typically Chinese, practical, concrete, andabove all Taoist. Chan thought, at odds with the scholasticism of the

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Buddhism of the Great Vehicle, borrowed from Taoist mysticism itsshattering of concepts, its teaching without words, and its spon-taneity.4 Borrowed, that is, from Laozi, Zhuangzi, and later Daoistthought, and not from, say, Nagarjuna and the Mahayana thought onemptiness, or from sources in Yogacara and Tathatagarbha Buddhism.There is something to this theory. Daoist monasteries provided themodel for Buddhists in China, where monks are temple-based, aDaoist practice is not usual in India.5 The first Buddhist booksselected for translation into Chinese respond to Daoist preoccupa-tions concerning medicine, breathing technique, and meditation.

Buddhists and Daoists were also sharing sacred mountains. Song-shan had been a holy place for Daoists since the first century CE.Buddhist monasteries appear there in the third century. Daoism is inits splendor during the Six Dynasties period, fourth to sixth centuriesCE. The old interest in breathing exercises, calisthenics, and alchemytakes center stage. Life and death are not fates to endure but technicalchallenges to superior, esoteric knowledge. The immortality of thebody can be obtained by careful management, nourishing the vitality,transforming it with diet, gymnastics, respiratory and sexual exercises,all carefully calibrated to counteract decrepitude. Among DaoistsBuddhism seemed like a new method for the immortality thatobsessed them. Buddhism had the reputation of an especially pure,moral, balanced, reasonable practice, one that avoided alchemy andemphasized meditation, and they eagerly studied it.6

Nevertheless, I think the similarities between Daoism and Chan areoften merely verbal, a skillful appropriation by Chan authors of avocabulary and way of thought that seems Daoist only up to a point,and then departs in an often predictable way. What makes thedeparture predictable is the completely different understanding ofemptiness in Chan and Daoism, supporting a no less different under-standing of the value of knowledge.

II.

Chan is many things. It has roots in Mahayana Buddhism and theinfluence of Nagarjuna. It absorbs and appropriates from the Daoistclassics, as well as earlier developments in Chinese Buddhism. It isalso a critique of Indocentrism in Chinese Buddhism, impatient witha Buddhism of translated sutras, imported relics, and foreign tradi-tions.7 Complicating the genealogy is an internal history of Chan thatproves to be a fond fable. For instance, according to the internalaccount Chan goes back to Bodhidharma, and has been in China sincehis arrival from India in the fifth century. But scholars cannot see any

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Chan at all until the eighth century, when it first becomes an estab-lished identity with a corp of monks and temples, and it begins in acommunity unaware of descent from Bodhidharma. They did not calltheir school Chan either. They are known as the Dongshan or EastMountain school, a community of monks in south China near Lushan,founded ca. 650.8

I want to take a closer look at Chans specifically Nagarjunianinheritance.9 I single out this one thread of genealogy because Chansapproach to enlightenment seems to me a kind of practical inferencefrom the Nagarjunian thought on emptiness. Of course, it must remainan open question exactly how much or little his thought is a paradigmin all Chan treatments of knowledge throughout the tradition. But Ido think his ideas help us to appreciate what is philosophically atstake in Chan thought on emptiness and especially the emptiness ofknowledge.

The emptiness Nagarjuna alludes to means absence.What is absentor lacking is svabhava, meaning self-nature,inherent existence, orown being.10 A thing has svabhava when a specific characterizingproperty individuates it and renders it nameable and knowable.Candrakirti, in a classical commentary on Nagarjuna, says,This is thedefinition of it: Svabhava is not artificially created and not dependenton anything else.11 To use a Greek expression, the svabhava is autokath auto, itself from itself, self-identical, enjoying substantial, non-relational identity and existence. Nagarjunas teaching on emptinessis a correction of a mistaken belief in svabhava. The emptiness itreveals is the utter absence of anything with svabhava being.

Emptiness is presented as a deduction from dependent origination,or the reciprocal causal dependence of all things upon each other.Nagarjuna says, The cessation of ignorance occurs though rightunderstanding. Through the cessation of this and that, this and thatwill not come about. The entire mass of suffering thereby completelyceases. In his commentary on this passage Candrakirti says,The onewho sees dependent origination correctly does not perceive a sub-stance even in subtle things.12 There is nothing to things, no identityor being. Change is merely, first this, then that. There is nothing moreto causality than concomitance. Things (what we call things) have nolatency, no virtuality, no nature, no principle; there is nothing to themthat was not already actual in their causes, and so on forever. Every-thing borrows its nature from its causes and lacks a nature of its own.Everything depends on everything else, everything completely con-ditioned by everything else. Nothing has a nature, identity, virtue,latency, power, or intensity. Everything is what it is conditioned to be,and that leaves everything empty, empty of reality, empty of actuality,phenomena behind which is nothing.

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Emptiness reigns everywhere we thought being is. That may seemto make emptiness a new name for being, but the subtle Nagarjunaskirts this paradox. Critics were eager to fault his self-refuting irreal-ism. Are Nagarjunas assertions empty? If so, then he has nothing tosay, and says nothing. If he communicates at all, then it cannot be truethat all is empty, because that assertion is not empty, not if it truly is anassertion. Nagarjuna agrees with this argument but says it does notapply to him. If I had a proposition, this defect would attach to me.But I have no proposition.Therefore I am not at fault.13 All concepts,all terms, including sunyata (empty) (Chinese: kong ), are incom-plete symbols composed of provisional names. It is not assumed thatthey stand for entities or even make sense, whatever that means.Emptiness is neither a metaphysical conception nor an ontologicalreality; it is not the ultimate truth of the world, not a name for being.It would be impossible for Nagarjuna to be more clear in repudiatingthe premise of the imputed self-refutation. It is empty is not to besaid, nor that something could be non-empty, nor both, nor either.But how can all those possibilities (all the possibilities) be excluded?Because empty is said only in the sense of conceptual fiction.14 Wethink, Either p or not-p. It has to be one or the other. Unless, of course,p depends on an assumption. If not-p depends on the same assump-tion, then anyone who rejects the assumption can, indeed must, denyboth p and not-p, which is what Nagarjuna does. Either cold or notcold. But to be cold is to be a body; if something were not a body itwould be neither cold nor not. Either empty or not empty implies thatsomething enjoys a self-nature, a self-identity, a being of its own.Nagarjuna rejects that assumption. He suspends thoughts presump-tion of being. He is a mirror image of Parmenides.The Eleatic thinkerinstructs the lover of truth to say and think only this: being is.15 ForNagarjuna this would have to become even more ambiguous.Do notsay or think: nothing is.

Any is presupposes a not. To think x is to think that something is x,which is to think there is something x is not, from which it is differ-entiated. Buddhists seem as touchy about this dualism betweenbeing and not-being as the Eleatics were. Parmenides says we mustsuspend the not, say and think only is. If we adhere to that rule we arepromised access to reality and realitys truth. For Nagarjuna,although, the emptiness of not being does not imply the ultimatereality of being. Instead, the distinction between is and is-not is defec-tive. But isnt that what Parmenides already said? The differenceis that for Parmenides nondifferentiation (saying only Being is) istrue, the ultimate truth, disclosing the monadic essence of being.Nagarjuna never says emptiness is the truth. In fact, he says thatnothing is true in the sense Parmenides assumes. It is because he

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believes in ultimate truth that Parmenides thinks we face a momen-tous decision, that we have to choose between two ways, two paths,that of Being and Not-being, which he links dialectically to Realityand Appearance. To insist on these distinctions, to say we must makethem, make them clear, might to alert Buddhist eyes look like cling-ing, an expression of suffering, suffering from the delusion of sense.

Another word for emptiness is nonduality. Perhaps that is notobvious. The usual contrary of dualism is monism, as for instance inmaterialist theories of nature from Democritus to Diderot. However,monism is not the same as nonduality; indeed, monism is dualisticthrough and through, as it discriminates and attacks dualism. Themost consistent nondualism is not monism but emptiness. First youovercome all the distinctions, then you overcome your overcoming,overcome thinking of yourself as having overcome something, ofhaving accomplished something others have not. Duality may seeminextricable from thought. What would we think if we made nodistinctions, differentiated no opposition? Nondualistic thoughtwould have to be nonobjective too. It is not thinking emptiness (asa paradoxical object); it is emptying thinking (of objects), emptyingconsciousness of objectivity, forgetting distinctions, even the distinc-tion between is and is not. It is not just that thought has no objects, oneis not interested in them, does not care about objectivity or lack of it,whether things are the same or different, better or worse, right orwrong, and so on. The cessation of ignorance is not to arrive at thetruth of emptiness; it is to realize the emptiness of truth. The wisdomof the enlightened is not knowledge of the empty; it is the emptinessof knowledge.

III.

What Chan seems to make of this paradoxical tradition is precisely itsparadoxes, its gongan , and its insistent thought on emptiness.Chan is not a metaphysical idealism; it does not teach that objectsbelong to consciousness or are constructions of the mind. It is notontology, not the ultimate truth of reality. If we must use Westernterms, Chan seems like a nonintentional phenomenology, which isanother paradox inasmuch as phenomenology is the science of con-sciousness and consciousness is defined by intentionality, the relationto an object. Chan phenomenology is a phenomenology of the absentobject, the void, the unfulfilled, the vacant, the seen-throughtheemptiness on the other side of suffering and sense.

We see this paradoxical phenomenology in the analyses of thePlatform Sutra, attributed to Huineng, sixth in the line of Chan

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Patriarchs going back to Bodhidharma.16 The sutra identifiesno-thought (wu nian ) as its principal teaching. As wu weidoes not mean literally no action but rather a special kind of actionwith a peculiar intentionality, so no-thought does not mean no think-ing but a particular quality of thought. No-thought is not to thinkeven when involved in thought.17 The idea is to eliminate attachment,clinging in thought. The cling of thoughts is what western theory callsreference, or the intentional relation to an object. The relation is notmerely intentional; it is also a kind of clinging, a kind of suffering,and a delusional, empty non-relation to nothing at all. No-thought isthinking without clinging to objects. The Dharma of no-thoughtmeans: even though you see all things, you do not attach to them.18

You see things but these things are not your objects; they are notaccepted as the reidentifiable referents of egocentric attitudes. It isconsciousness uncommitted to objects.

Someone impressed by the Western tradition of philosophicalpsychology might say that is impossible. Consciousness is defined byintentionality, which requires aboutness or reference to an object.Brentano declares that Every mental phenomenon includes some-thing as object in itself.19 For Husserl, In every wakeful cogito, aglancing ray from the pure Ego is directed upon the object of thecorrelate consciousness for the time being.20 It is the unintentionalcontribution of Chan, however, to reveal this so-called intentionalitythesis as a dispensable stipulation. Buddhists say the delusion ofobjects is a karmic effect of clinging and selfishness. How can it be theforegone conclusion of transcendental logic that consciousness is con-demned to this suffering? In the words of the eighth-century Suran-gama Sutra, a definitive work for Chan, because you have lost touchwith your minds true nature by identifying yourself with the objectsyou perceive, you keep on being bound to the cycle of death andrebirth. Those who have mastered correct practice are able to redi-rect the attention of their faculties inward to the faculties source. . . [and] no longer pay attention to objects of perception.21

We have, not to stop thinking, but to stop clinging, stop stoppingover things. If one instant of thought clings, then successive thoughtscling; this is known as being fettered. If in all things successivethoughts do not cling, then you are unfettered.22 In the later words ofChan master Huangbo (ninth century),Your sole concern should be,as thought succeeds thought, to avoid clinging to any of them.23

Intentional thought is fettered, unenlightened thought. Thinkingof some objectan object of knowledge, description, desire, orpurposeis a form of clinging to a moment, the delusion of acontent that might return, a reidentifiable object with a nature of itsown. Successive thoughts that do not cling are unburdened by objects.

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You are thinking, there are thoughts; but you are not clinging, theyare not your objects, you do not know or care whether they are thesame again or different. There is no object posited, yet still there isthought, consciousness, mind alone. That does not make the enlight-ened person catatonic. One remains as aware as ever of the environ-ment, perhaps even more so. One continues to see and hear butnothing clings. It is consciousness without intentionality, or intention-ality without reference, or enlightened intelligence without ontology.

Chan enlightenment is not an accomplishment of sage knowledge.It is the extinction of knowledge, liberation from knowledge. Donttry to see the true (zhen ) in any way. If you try to see the true,your seeing will be in no way true.24 For a monk to think he knowssomething others do not, or that there is any knowing at all is balefulattachment. In the Record of Baizhang, from the Mazu school ofChan, we read:

If one uses ones mind to engage broadly in intellectual study, seekingmerit and wisdom, then all of that is just birth and death, and it doesnot serve any purpose as far as reality is concerned. Blown by thewind of knowledge, such a person is drowned in the ocean of birthand death. . . . They [monks] should be taught to leave all things,whether existent or nonexistent, to forsake cultivation and attain-ment, and let go of the very notion of forsaking.25

According to a sermon attributed to Bodhidharma, Eruditionand knowledge are not only useless but also cloud your awareness.26

A passage worthy of Zhuangzi reads:

If you use your mind to study reality, you wont understand eitheryour mind or reality. If you study reality without using your mind,youll understand both. Those who dont understand, dont under-stand understanding. And those who understand, understandnot understanding. . . . True understanding isnt just understandingunderstanding. Its also understanding not understanding. If youunderstand anything, you dont understand. Only when you under-stand nothing is it true understanding.27

I take True understanding is understanding not understandingas the cognitive complement of the thought that detachment requiresdetachment from detachment. You have to throw away detachment,with its implicit dualism of the detached and the clinging, to realize acareless consciousness. That comes from understanding, but what isunderstood is what is not understood; what is understood is our con-dition of not understanding. How could anyone understand empti-ness? There is nothing to understand, understand? And it is indeed anaccomplishment of understanding, of wise knowledge. The appear-ance of appearance as no appearance cant be seen visually but canonly be known by means of wisdom.28 To look at appearance and see

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no appearance is to look at appearance without positing an objectreplete with objectivity, self-identity, being. Everything still looks as itdid before, except now you are radically unattached.You do not thinkthere is any permanence in appearances or back of them, or that thereis any real difference of value, that some appearances are better thanothers, that some ought to be and others not. Knowledge, wisdom,insight takes you that far, to the brink of sense, where knowledge itselfis finally seen through and ceases to function.

IV.

Centuries before Nagarjuna, Daoists innovate the concept ofemptying the mind, although their word (xu ) is not that chosento translate Nagarjunas sunyata (emptiness), which becomes kong

in Chinese. There is indeed an important difference in what getsdescribed as empty. The emptiness spoken of in the Daodejing andZhuangzi is the vacancy that allows fullness to fulfill its effect. Theempty is the tenuous, the formless, the indeterminate, and unqualified,which is opposed to fullness but operates correlative with it. The fullis effective through the emptiness of the empty.As I understand it, fullmeans actual, empty means virtual. Transformation requires virtualemptiness as atoms require void. This is among Chinese thoughtsmost rigorous intuitions. If becoming is original and irreducible, thenthings have to stay fluid and breathe. The generation of the cosmosfrom emptiness assures that. There is a bottomless well of the virtual,a potent potentiality at the source of things. Because these authors donot think in terms of being as presence or identity, they do not or thinkof the empty as the absent or vacant. The virtual is, is in being, reallyexists. It is the opposite of the actual, not of the existing or real.29

An empty heart is the source of objectivity, on the theory that theless selfish, the less fettered the judgment. Zhuangzi says listeningwith the xin is better than listening with ears, but listening withqi is best. Ears hear words; xin adds connections; but qi, beingtenuous, responds to the environment in its virtual dimension, assynergy and potential. Starve the xin of self-regarding desires andfeed the emptiness of a sage. As wu wei is not literally devoid of wei(save as an ideal limit), so a tenuous mind is not devoid of knowledge,although it is unhindered by conventional moral and linguistic dis-tinctions. It is empty of distorting memories, prejudices, and precon-ceived ideas. But is it empty of knowledge? Both Zhuangzi and theDaodejing conduct polemics against the value of knowledge, butwhen we look closely it is clear that these always mean somebodysso-called knowledge, typically Confucian learning about classics and

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ceremonies. Zhuangzi chapter 1 presents ordinary knowledge, whatthe world calls knowledge, as limited, as something to get over, as littleknowledge. Little knowledge (xiao zhi ) does not measure up tobig knowledge (da zhi ).30 Chapter 2 repeats this interestingdistinction in verse:

Great knowledge is effortless,Petty knowledge picks holes.Great speech is flavorless,Petty speech strings words.31

Words of great knowledge lack flavor. They are not passionate,committed, decisive, or precise. To be any of those takes little knowl-edge. Little knowledge is good with language, knowing how to dothings with words. It is the knowledge that gets you through school.Great knowledge gets you through life, knowing the art of nourishinglife. This is a knowledge of the empty, meaning knowledge of theworld in virtual depth rather than actual configuration, artful knowl-edge capable of collaborating with the virtual potentials of a situationin their subtlest, most incipient form. Getting over little knowledge isa step toward better knowledge. Great knowledge is knowledgeinsight into the incipient, where transformation is birthing, the virtualmatrix of the future.

As in Zhuangzi so in the Daodejing there is apparent hostilitytoward knowledge, together with the hint that this is not the onlything that might be called knowledge, that there might be another,different, more effective knowledge.32 Hostility toward knowledge istypically directed to what the ru-scholars call knowledge, ponderouslearning of ceremonies and ancient texts, combined with a scholarsbelief in the value of linguistic distinctions. There is something else,although, more properly valued as knowledge, and that is what youhave to master for wu wei effectiveness. To know it is to master an artinaction. What makes inaction artful and not mere indolence is thatnothing required is left undone, there being no objection to raiseagainst how a situation is handled.To act without deliberate intentionis an art of the invisible. It takes subtle eyes to see opportunitiesinvisible to others, to discern the germ of future things, and know howto modify their evolution when it is pliable and easy to do so.33 Thepromise of such knowledge is not Truth, God, or Eternitythesebeing the leading incentives of western theorybut more realisticallyto prolong your vitality to the limit of human capacity.

For Daoists there is a knowledge to accomplish, a great knowledgeby which we nourish our body and are effective without (much) effort.It is a knowledge tapped into the virtual, knowing circumstances invirtual depth, and where they can be effortlessly transformed. Thisknowledge is empty in the sense of being empty of actuality, actual

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form, hence not equivalent to a formula or representation. It isan improvisatory knowledge that does not reiterate but is capableof functioning in the fog of incipience, where being is becomingand functioning means ziran productivity that leaves nothingrequired not done. This is not a knowledge that leads one to the brinkof enlightenment, then ceases to function. The point of pursuingenlightenment is to master a knowledge that continues to functionand enhance ones efficacy.

Daoists want to overcome little knowledge to reach the good stuff,knowledge that feeds life and does not exhaust it.They do not say thatConfucians are wrong about knowledge but that they are superficial.They are stuck in a limited view. What they call knowledge is littleknowledge.Confucians say that the best sort of life is a strenuous effortto be good. To Daoists it is a mistake to depend on language, ceremo-nies, and classics. The problem with these artifacts is not their artifi-ciality, however, as is often thought.34 They do not want to rely onartifacts in the way that Confucians rely on the classics and the li .They want instead to innovate artifacts, to create new forms, to partici-pate in the ziran productivity of nature, and vanish into things.35

Buddhists do not want to vanish into things. Things too must vanish.Their emptiness is unconditional, without potential, dynamism, orvirtual difference. The epistemological innovation of the Daoists is topresent the knowledge of Confucians as limited, as something to getover, a gesture Chan repeats to the Daoists. They too are stuck in alimited view, their so-called great knowledge also little, limited, anobstacle.The solution is not a still greater knowledge. It is to overcomeknowledge as such, overcome knowing by overcoming all objects,even the most virtual. Penetrate the delusion of objects; then it ismind alone, then emptiness, then nothing, extinction, nirvana.

We see a Chan author using Daoist ideas about knowledge asskillful means to enhance the appeal of Buddhism in a work entitledIlluminating Essential Doctrine (Xian Zong Ji ), attributed toShenhui, a disciple of Huineng and possibly the real author of thePlatform Sutra, the work that establishes Huinengs patriarchy.36 Illu-minating Essential Doctrine makes an unexpectedly strong case (inChan) for the value of knowledge. This knowledge may not be whatthe world calls knowledgenot learning, not a craft. But it is a subtle,enlightened, esoteric knowledge that turns out to resemble nothing somuch as the knowledge Daoists require to do wu wei (a Buddhisttranslation of nirvana).37 Acting through non-action reaches theOther Shore.38 This knowledge is identified with the Buddhist prajna,a wise knowledge described as the highest of the high.39 Prajna isthe cause of nirvana; nirvana is the result of prajna.40 Later, this wiseknowledge is outright identified with enlightenment:

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Nirvana and prajna differ in name, yet in actuality they are thesame.41 The wisdom of this knowledge, its function, is to enable andactivate despite being empty it is empty yet it always acts.42 Suchknowledge is not knowledge; it is prajna which is no prajna (huiwu hui ), the substance whose function is wu wei efficacy,action that is free from action.43 In a gesture that may have beencalculated to appeal to esoteric Daoists, this wise knowledge is said tobe a secret transmitted from the Buddha through the Chan patriarchs.Shenhui uses a Chan lineage legend he may have constructed in thefirst place to make Buddhist enlightenment appeal to the esoteric,secret, dark knowledge Daoists admire. Buddhist enlightenmentis like an alchemical stone, the crown jewel of a king which [must]never be given to the wrong person.44

It all sounds sort of Daoist. Then there is the predictable swerve.Like Laozi and Zhuangzi, Shenhui neutralizes the value of what theworld calls knowledge, while reserving a place for the greater knowl-edge of the enlightened, a knowledge that does not know, and awisdom that does not act. But this wisdom leads to the emptiness ofknowledge, even of wisdom itself. The last thing to know is thatknowledge is empty. Once you know that you are beyond the func-tioning of knowledge, which is the ultimate wu wei, our enlighten-ment, nirvana. Despite a skillful appropriation of the lexicon, twoqualities mark this thought as alien to Daoist traditions early and late.One is the claim of unconditional transcendence; the other, a phe-nomenological concept of emptiness as vacancy, absence, or lack-of-being. Chan claims a transcendence that reveals the virtual plane ofimmanence to be empty. The tenuous xu-emptiness Daoists esteem iskong-emptya resourceless, vacant lack-of-being; just more samsara,more delusion, more suffering. There is no virtuality; it merely seemslike there is to deluded consciousness. That is another implication ofdependent origination. There is no unactualized potential, no latent,merely virtual difference that might not be actualized. Daoist xu is afallow field in winter, actually empty and virtually replete. Buddhistkong is a sterile lunar desert. Zhuangzi must give up giving up andforget about forgetting. The dao is emptier than even he imagined;it is an apparition without virtuality or virtue, actually dead, and onlygiven the appearance of life by the delusions of karmic consciousness.

Daoist emptiness is ontological. The virtual exists, it is real but notactual, and therefore to Buddhist eyes not nearly empty enough. Thatis certainly a difference between the classical Daoist texts and Nagar-juna. It also seems like a difference from Chan, despite the alacritywith which Chan authors imitate Daoist philosophemes. Daoismremains optimistic about knowledge in a way Chan is not. Daoismenvisions conditions under which knowledge enhances life. For Chan

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even that knowledge is an obstacle. Life cannot be enhanced. It issuffering through and through and has to be gotten over. The self, thebody, the qiall of that is empty, empty of actuality, empty of virtu-ality, empty of virtue, or power, incapable of overcoming the obstaclesthat keep us stuck in this so-called life. Buddhist wisdom exhaustslife, extinguishes it, and does not nourish it. The ultimate implica-tion of Chans Nagarjunian understanding of emptiness thereforecannot satisfy the Daoist conviction concerning the value of knowl-edge. Of course, on many other points there is room for importantsimilarity and association between Daoism and Chan, and the distinc-tion between them, while philosophically interesting, is clearly notabsolute.

McMASTER UNIVERSITYHamilton, Ontario

Endnotes

I am grateful for the insightful comments of Professor Chung-ying Cheng, as well as thereferee of the Journal, by which this article was much improved. I am also grateful to theorganizers and participants of the Daoist Salon, Zhengzhou, China, March 2010, forinstructive discussion, especially Brook Ziporyn and Livia Kohn. And I am grateful toWeng Haizhen for proofing my transliterations and providing Chinese characters.

1. See Mark Siderits, Buddhism as Philosophy (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2007), 2326.On the paradoxes of knowledge in Buddhism, see David Burton, Knowledge andLiberation: Philosophical Ruminations on a Buddhist Conundrum, Philosophy Eastand West 52, no. 3 (2002): 32645.

2. D. T. Suzuki, trans., The Lankavatara Sutra, ed. Dwight Goddard (Clear Lake: DawnHorse Press, 1983), 107, 71, 123, 114.

3. Zhaizhou, in Zen Sourcebook, ed. Stephen Addiss (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2008), 73.4. Kristofer Schipper, The Taoist Body, trans. Karen C. Duval (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1993), 13.5. Early monastic communities in India were not monasteries but avasas, loose collec-

tions of monks living within fixed boundaries, sometimes enclosed. Religious practiceremained individual, without collective worship or meditation. Holmes Welch, ThePractice of Chinese Buddhism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 143.

6. I draw from Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China, Vol. II, Historyof Scientific Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), 15657;Hans-Georg Moeller, Daoism Explained (Chicago: Open Court, 2004), 149; Schipper,Taoist Body, 10; Henri Maspero, Taoism and Chinese Religion, trans. Frank A.Kierman, Jr (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1981), 266, 271, 325, 344.Immortality-conferring techniques were already practiced in pre-Qin times (ibid.,416). On the relationship between Chan and Daoism, see Kenneth Inada, Zenand Taoism: Common and Uncommon Grounds of Discourse, Journal of ChinesePhilosophy 15, no. 1 (1988): 5165; Livla Knaul,Chuangtzu and the Chinese Ancestryof Chan Buddhism, Journal of Chinese Philosophy 13, no. 4 (1986): 41128; Wu Yi,On Chinese Chan in Relation to Taoism, Journal of Chinese Philosophy 12, no. 2(1985): 13154; and Livia Kohn, Daoism and Chinese Culture (Cambridge: ThreePines Press, 2004).

7. Dale S. Wright, Philosophical Meditations on Zen Buddhism (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1999), 20. On Chan as a reaction to Indocentrism in Chinese

469emptiness and knowledge in chan and daoism

Buddhism, see Alan Cole, Fathering Your Father: The Zen of Fabrication in TangBuddhism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).

8. I draw on John R. McRae, The Northern School and the Formation of Early ChanBuddhism (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1986); Bernard Faure, The Will toOrthodoxy: A Critical Genealogy of Northern Chan Buddhism, trans. Phyllis Brooks(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); and Mario Poceski, Ordinary Mind asthe Way: The Hongzhou School and the Growth of Chan Buddhism (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2007).

9. On Chan and Madhyamika, see Hsueh-li Cheng, The Roots of Zen Buddhism,Journal of Chinese Philosophy 8, no. 4 (1981): 45178; and Chen-Chi Chang, TheNature of Chan (Zen) Buddhism, Philosophy East and West 6, no. 4 (1957): 33355.

10. See Jan Westerhoff, Nagarjunas Madhyamaka: A Philosophical Introduction(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).

11. Ibid., 25.12. Ibid., 47.13. Nagarjuna, in Kamaleswar Bhattacharya, The Dialectical Method of Nagarjuna

(Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1978), 23.14. Nagarjuna, in Siderits, Buddhism as Philosophy, 204.15. Parmenides, fragment 6; in Karen Freeman, Ancilla to the Pre-Socratic Philosophers

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948), 43.16. Philip Yampolsky, trans., The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1967), 175. The no-thought idea neither distinguishesChinese from Indian Buddhism, nor is unique to Chan. See Yun-hua Jan, A Com-parative Study of No-Thought (Wu-Nien) in Some Indian and Chinese BuddhistTexts, Journal of Chinese Philosophy 16, no. 1 (1989): 3758.

17. Yampolsky, Platform Sutra, 138.18. Ibid., 153.19. Franz Brentano, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, trans. Antos C.

Rancurello, D. B. Terrell, and Linda L. McAlister (London: Routledge, 1995), 88.20. Edmund Husserl, Ideas, trans. W. R. Boyce Gibson (London: George Allen & Unwin,

1931), 243. Perception without an object, for instance, sensing not sensing, sensing theabsence of sight in a dark room, is a theme in Aristotlean psychology. See DanielHeller-Roazen, The Inner Touch:Archaeology of a Sensation (New York: Zone Books,2007).

21. Surangama Sutra Translation Committee, Buddhist Text Translation Society, trans.,The Surangama Sutra (Burlingame: Buddhist Text Translation Society, 2009),46, 32728. Incidentally, the Surangama directly concerns the value of knowledge.The sutra is spoken in response to a lapse by the disciple Ananda, who was seducedby a prostitute while begging alms. Ananda, famous for his erudition, paid toomuch attention to learning and not enough to meditation practice, which lefthim with inadequate concentration to resist the prostitutes spell. Erudition merelyled him into idle speculation; all his knowledge is not equal to a single day ofcorrect practice (165). See also Jiang Wu, Knowledge for What? The BuddhistConcept of Learning in the Surangama Sutra, Journal of Chinese Philosophy 33,no. 4 (2006): 491503.

22. Yampolsky, Platform Sutra, 138.23. Ibid., 35.24. Ibid., 137.25. Record of Baizhang, in Poceski, Ordinary Mind, 13132, 13738.26. Bodhidharma, Bloodstream Sermon, in The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma, trans.

Red Pine (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1989), 35. There is little chance this textderives from Bodhidharma, but as McRae observes, [this] material may be used as akey to the subsequent development of Chan (McRae, Early Chan Buddhism, 117).

27. Bodhidharma, Wake-Up Sermon, in Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma, 57.28. Ibid., 47.29. The concept of the virtual was introduced in philosophy by Henri Bergson and subject

to important development by Gilles Deleuze, beginning with Bergsonism, trans.Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (1966; New York: Zone Books, 1988), and

470 barry allen

continued in Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (1968; New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1994), as well as practically all his later work. The most usefulintroduction I have found to this difficult material is Manuel Delanda, IntensiveScience and Virtual Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2002).

30. A. C. Graham, trans., Chuang-Tzu: The Inner Chapters (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001),44.

31. Ibid., 50.32. For hostility to knowledge, Daodejing chapters 3, 10, 18, 19. There is also a down-

with-knowledge polemic running though Zhuangzi, especially chapters 813.33. On this point, see Robert Cummings Neville, Ritual and Deference (Albany: State

University of New York Press, 2008), 55; Franois Jullien, A Treatise on Efficacy:Between Western and Chinese Thinking, trans. Janet Lloyd (Honolulu: University ofHawaii Press, 2004); and Barry Allen, Vanishing into Things, Common Knowledge16, no. 3 (2010), 41723.

34. See Allen, A Dao of Technology? Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy 9,no. 2 (2010), 15160.

35. To vanish into things is Brook Ziporyn brilliant translation of ming in thethird-century commentary on Zhuangzi by Guo Xiang. See The Penumbra Unbound:The Neo-Taoist Philosophy of Guo Xiang (Albany: State University of New YorkPress, 2003). In a more prosaic context ming might mean dark or darkness, butit is used by Guo as a transitive verb (to darken something), and refers not to thedarkened thing but to the darkening agent as it becomes imperceptible and vanishesinto things. To vanish into things is to interact with them without obstructive, forcefuldesires, or self. The self is eclipsed; not gone, only imperceptible.

36. Xian Zong Ji, in Robert B. Zeuschner, The Hsien Tsung Chi: An Early Chan (Zen)Buddhist Text, Journal of Chinese Philosophy 3, no. 3 (1976): 25368. This is acomplete translation, and parenthetical references are to this source. On Shenhui asprobable author of the Platform Sutra, see Yampolsky, Platform Sutra, 114.

37. Maspero, Taoism, 259.38. Yampolsky, Platform Sutra, 258.39. Ibid., 259.40. Ibid., 260.41. Ibid., 260.42. Ibid., 259.43. Ibid., 258.44. Ibid., 261.

471emptiness and knowledge in chan and daoism