Portrayals of Chan Buddhism in the Literature of Internal Alchemy

During the early thirteenth century, a story began to appear within texts associated with the Chan 禪 Buddhist movement, which portrays an encounter between the eminent transcendent Lü Dongbin 呂洞賓 and the Chan monk Huanglong Huiji 黃龍誨機 that results in Lü abandoning his alchemical techniques of self-cultivation and taking up the practice of Chan. This article traces the development of this tale across a number of Buddhist sources of the late imperial period, and also examines the ways in which later Buddhist and Daoist authors understood the story and utilized it in advancing their own polemical claims. Au début du treizième siècle apparaît dans les textes du bouddhisme Chan un récit qui met en scène une rencontre entre le célèbre immortel Lü Dongbin et le moine Chan Huanglong Huiji. Au terme de cette rencontre, Lü abandonne ses pratiques alchimiques de perfectionnement de soi et adopte celle de la méditation Chan. Le présent article retrace le développement de ce thème narratif au travers des sources bouddhiques de la fin de l’époque impériale, et examine la manière dont des auteurs bouddhistes et taoïstes ont compris le récit et l’ont manipulé en fonction de leurs propres objectifs polémiques.

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The White Lotus Movement and the Use of Chan

Haar

2020

J. Chan Buddh.

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In this brief investigation, the author looks at the use of elements of Chan practice in Chinese religious culture in the Yuan period, with a particular focus on the White Lotus movement. The latter movement is often judged to be a Pure Land movement, but this as well as the Chan label are not very useful in understanding actual religious life and writing on the ground. Here the author assumes that the use of a speech-phrase (huatou), the anecdotes known as Public Case (gongan), and belief in a sudden enlightenment are typical of Chan practice. The famous apologist of the White Lotus movement, and Pure Land Buddhism more generally, Pudu 普度 (1255–1330) certainly shared this approach, and it seems that other adherents shared in this view. They all had a view of what Chan should be that did not even diverge very much from each other. They also felt that they were able to pronounce on what were right and wrong interpretations and did not see their own Pure Land practices and Chan practices as mutually exclusive.

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Portrayals of Chan Buddhism in the Literature of Internal Alchemy

Cited by 6 publications

References 27 publications

Bodhidharma Outside Chan Literature: Immortal, Inner Alchemist, and Emissary from the Eternal Realm

Bodhidharma Outside Chan Literature: Immortal, Inner Alchemist, and Emissary from the Eternal Realm

Buddhist Tales of Lü Dongbin

The White Lotus Movement and the Use of Chan

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