Zen Buddhism

Author(s): Christmas Humphereys
Publisher: William Heinemann LTD

Page 50

THE BIRTH OF ZEN BUDDHISM 29 begging habits of the Buddhist monks. A man should work for his living, they said, and part of his duty is to provide for the memory of his father and to raise up sons to care for his own. Moreover, they deeply distrusted the metaphysics of Indian thought as displayed in the Sutras already translated, and although some of these Sutras, later found to be closely akin to Zen, such as the Vimalakirti, had already been translated by the famous Indian Buddhist, Kumarajiva, the Chinese needed a transference of Indian thought itself into the Chinese idiom before Buddhism could be assimilated into their national life. In the result, it was left to the individual Chinese thinker to choose from the wealth of material such Sutras as seemed to him of value; and about such thinkers and their Commentaries upon some favoured Sutra sprang up the manifold schools or sects which together in time amounted to Chinese Buddhism. Thus, for example, were the Tendai and the Kegon Schools developed respectively from the Mâdhyamika and Yogâchârya Schools of Indian Buddhism, and thus about the Avatamsaka Sutra, introduced to the Chinese mind in the fifth century by Buddhabhadra, was built up the School which later developed into Zen.
But the Chinese mind, essentially rationalist and humanist, though with its mystical feeling developed in Taoism, produced an immense change in the form of Buddha Dharma. From the luminous heights of Indian thought was developed an emphasis on inner values which at the same time had to express itself and be expressed in action and hard work. Wisdom to the Chinese thinker is never an escape from worldly life. As shown in the famous Cow-herding pictures, when the pilgrim has so controlled