History, Ideology, and General Ideological History: A Case Study of Chan Buddhism in the Tang Dynasty

Abstract

An increasing number of studies on the history of Chan Buddhism have been published by Chinese scholars in recent years. Not counting the early work by scholars such as Hu Shi and Yin Shun or other scattered research and translations that appeared before the 1980s, a dozen or more studies were published on the mainland during the 1980s and 1990s and some in Taiwan thereafter. In addition to works of scholarly research, major progress has also been made in the archiving of material and the publication of primary materials such as the Chinese manuscripts on Chan Buddhism from Dunhuang, new editions of The Platform Sutra and Discourses of Shen Hui, and dictionaries on Chan Buddhism, all of which have greatly facilitated further research. However, despite all of this, the quality of the research published has made little progress. Many of these works echo what others have written before, leaving questions unanswered; old problems have not been solved, while new questions have emerged. After publishing my A History of Chinese Chan Buddhism in 1995, I suspended my research into the subject for a long time. One of the reasons was that when writing about Chan ideology, there is the problem of how to break out of the mainstream of historical thought. If we wish not only to go beyond the records in The Transmission of the Lamp but also to move beyond the modern works on Chan history, how can we weed through the old ideas and bring forth the new? Some of my thoughts on these issues are set out in this article.