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barry allen
THE VIRTUAL AND THE VACANT
EMPTINESS AND KNOWLEDGE IN
CHAN AND DAOISM
I.
Buddhism seems premised on knowledge in a way other religions are
not. Its salvation is a kind of cognitive breakthrough, an accomplish-
ment of knowledge. Ordinary life is cloaked in illusion, no more than
a dream. People do not clearly understand that, so they form attach-
ments and consequently suffer. If knowledge were perfect, there
would be no attachment and thus no suffering. I do not mean to say
there is no place for faith in Buddhism. Practitioners must have faith
that 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 follower
can internalize a set of Buddhist categories sufcient to overcome the
ignorance that dooms us to suffering and rebirth. Once we are enlight-
ened, and able through these categories to perceive things as they
really are, the root of suffering is removed and salvation attained.
1
Enlightenment, liberation, nirvanathese are the salvic accomplish-
ment of Buddhist knowledge. To nd your way to such knowledge you
need a method, a teacher, and some provisional doctrine. That seems
to be how Buddhism was taught in India at the time of the Mahayana
rift around the rst century BCE, about a century before the rst
Buddhists in China. Indian teachers had reduced Buddhism to a
problem of knowledge. The Mahayana movement is an internal
dissent among Buddhist teachers who resist, from within knowledge,
the liberating value of knowledge. Their Buddhism is renown known
for the idea of emptiness, which perhaps makes the denitive break
with their tradition because by design it resists the tendency to treat
the Buddhas teaching as unconditional truth. This idea of emptiness
will be an important Mahayana legacy to Chinese Buddhism and
especially 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 denes Mahayana in a sequence of passages
from the Lankavatara Sutra, a classic Mahayana statement. First, the
disciple must get into the habit of looking at things truthfully. He must
recognize 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 a
revolving rebrand. Then, as these discriminations come to be seen
as mutually conditioning, as empty of self-substance, as unborn, and
thus come to be seen as they truly are, that is, as manifestations of the
mind itself, this is right knowledge. The paramita, the perfections of
the Bodhisattva, are grounded in right knowledge. That knowledge
is Buddhist insight, Buddhist wisdom, but it is not yet complete
enlightenment. There is one more step. The disciple should then
abandon the understanding of mind which he has gained by right
knowledge.
2
Abandon your knowledge, take the step out of the
system, and embrace the vacant sky. In the words of ninth-century
Chan master Zhaizhou, The Way does not belong to knowing or not
knowing. 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: wide
open vast emptiness. How can you say yes or no to it?
3
Chinese tradition from long before the introduction of Buddhism
is practically without exception enthusiastic about the value of
knowledge. Chan, having important roots in the Mahayana tradition,
reverses this value. Knowledge is part of the problem Buddhism
addressesthe 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 is
not a propositional, theoretical knowledge of truth. The difculty of
enlightenment is not that of a difcult theorem. It is the difculty of
realization, of meditation, of internalizing a paradoxical orientation.
It is knowledge not of an object but of the mind; and not knowledge
of its nature but penetrating knowledge that mind is not an object, has
no nature, indeed, that it is empty, nothing at all. That is what the
enlightened know, that knowledge is empty. Of course, no one can
know that there is nothing to know; for if one knows it, there is
something to know after all. Still, there is nothing to know and
the wise know it. Knowledge brings one that far. The next step is to
understand that it brought no one nowhere, that knowledge is as
empty as the mind that knows no knowing.
That sounds sort of Daoist. It can be made to sound even more
Daoist, and Chan authors sometimes labored to make their religion
appeal to Daoists. Some scholars think Chan is Daoism, or that the
distinction is overcome. This is, for instance, the view of Kristofer
Schipper, who calls Chan typically Chinese, practical, concrete, and
above all Taoist. Chan thought, at odds with the scholasticism of the
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Buddhism of the Great Vehicle, borrowed from Taoist mysticism its
shattering of concepts, its teaching without words, and its spon-
taneity.
4
Borrowed, that is, from Laozi, Zhuangzi, and later Daoist
thought, and not from, say, Nagarjuna and the Mahayana thought on
emptiness, or from sources inYogacara andTathatagarbha Buddhism.
There is something to this theory. Daoist monasteries provided the
model for Buddhists in China, where monks are temple-based, a
Daoist practice is not usual in India.
5
The rst Buddhist books
selected 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 rst century CE.
Buddhist monasteries appear there in the third century. Daoism is in
its splendor during the Six Dynasties period, fourth to sixth centuries
CE. The old interest in breathing exercises, calisthenics, and alchemy
takes center stage. Life and death are not fates to endure but technical
challenges to superior, esoteric knowledge. The immortality of the
body 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 Daoists
Buddhism seemed like a new method for the immortality that
obsessed them. Buddhism had the reputation of an especially pure,
moral, balanced, reasonable practice, one that avoided alchemy and
emphasized meditation, and they eagerly studied it.
6
Nevertheless, I think the similarities between Daoism and Chan are
often merely verbal, a skillful appropriation by Chan authors of a
vocabulary and way of thought that seems Daoist only up to a point,
and then departs in an often predictable way. What makes the
departure predictable is the completely different understanding of
emptiness 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 the
inuence of Nagarjuna. It absorbs and appropriates from the Daoist
classics, as well as earlier developments in Chinese Buddhism. It is
also a critique of Indocentrism in Chinese Buddhism, impatient with
a Buddhism of translated sutras, imported relics, and foreign tradi-
tions.
7
Complicating the genealogy is an internal history of Chan that
proves to be a fond fable. For instance, according to the internal
account Chan goes back to Bodhidharma, and has been in China since
his arrival from India in the fth century. But scholars cannot see any
459 emptiness and knowledge in chan and daoism
Chan at all until the eighth century, when it rst becomes an estab-
lished identity with a corp of monks and temples, and it begins in a
community unaware of descent from Bodhidharma. They did not call
their school Chan either. They are known as the Dongshan or East
Mountain school, a community of monks in south China near Lushan,
founded ca. 650.
8
I want to take a closer look at Chans specically Nagarjunian
inheritance.
9
I single out this one thread of genealogy because Chans
approach to enlightenment seems to me a kind of practical inference
from the Nagarjunian thought on emptiness. Of course, it must remain
an open question exactly how much or little his thought is a paradigm
in all Chan treatments of knowledge throughout the tradition. But I
do think his ideas help us to appreciate what is philosophically at
stake in Chan thought on emptiness and especially the emptiness of
knowledge.
The emptiness Nagarjuna alludes to means absence. What is absent
or lacking is svabhava, meaning self-nature,inherent existence, or
own being.
10
A thing has svabhava when a specic characterizing
property individuates it and renders it nameable and knowable.
Candrakirti, in a classical commentary on Nagarjuna, says, This is the
denition of it: Svabhava is not articially created and not dependent
on anything else.
11
To use a Greek expression, the svabhava is auto
kath auto, itself from itself, self-identical, enjoying substantial, non-
relational identity and existence. Nagarjunas teaching on emptiness
is a correction of a mistaken belief in svabhava. The emptiness it
reveals 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 right
understanding. Through the cessation of this and that, this and that
will not come about. The entire mass of suffering thereby completely
ceases. In his commentary on this passage Candrakirti says, The one
who sees dependent origination correctly does not perceive a sub-
stance even in subtle things.
12
There is nothing to things, no identity
or being. Change is merely, rst this, then that. There is nothing more
to causality than concomitance. Things (what we call things) have no
latency, no virtuality, no nature, no principle; there is nothing to them
that 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.
460 barry allen
Emptiness reigns everywhere we thought being is. That may seem
to make emptiness a new name for being, but the subtle Nagarjuna
skirts this paradox. Critics were eager to fault his self-refuting irreal-
ism. Are Nagarjunas assertions empty? If so, then he has nothing to
say, and says nothing. If he communicates at all, then it cannot be true
that all is empty, because that assertion is not empty, not if it truly is an
assertion. Nagarjuna agrees with this argument but says it does not
apply 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 that
they stand for entities or even make sense, whatever that means.
Emptiness is neither a metaphysical conception nor an ontological
reality; 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 repudiating
the premise of the imputed self-refutation. It is empty is not to be
said, 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 ction.
14
We
think, 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, deny
both p and not-p, which is what Nagarjuna does. Either cold or not
cold. But to be cold is to be a body; if something were not a body it
would be neither cold nor not. Either empty or not empty implies that
something 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 thinker
instructs the lover of truth to say and think only this: being is.
15
For
Nagarjuna this would have to become even more ambiguous. Do not
say 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 between
being and not-being as the Eleatics were. Parmenides says we must
suspend the not, say and think only is. If we adhere to that rule we are
promised access to reality and realitys truth. For Nagarjuna,
although, the emptiness of not being does not imply the ultimate
reality of being. Instead, the distinction between is and is-not is defec-
tive. But isnt that what Parmenides already said? The difference
is that for Parmenides nondifferentiation (saying only Being is) is
true, the ultimate truth, disclosing the monadic essence of being.
Nagarjuna never says emptiness is the truth. In fact, he says that
nothing is true in the sense Parmenides assumes. It is because he
461 emptiness and knowledge in chan and daoism
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 Reality
and Appearance. To insist on these distinctions, to say we must make
them, 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 not
obvious. The usual contrary of dualism is monism, as for instance in
materialist theories of nature from Democritus to Diderot. However,
monism is not the same as nonduality; indeed, monism is dualistic
through and through, as it discriminates and attacks dualism. The
most consistent nondualism is not monism but emptiness. First you
overcome all the distinctions, then you overcome your overcoming,
overcome thinking of yourself as having overcome something, of
having accomplished something others have not. Duality may seem
inextricable from thought. What would we think if we made no
distinctions, differentiated no opposition? Nondualistic thought
would have to be nonobjective too. It is not thinking emptiness (as
a paradoxical object); it is emptying thinking (of objects), emptying
consciousness of objectivity, forgetting distinctions, even the distinc-
tion between is and is not. It is not just that thought has no objects, one
is not interested in them, does not care about objectivity or lack of it,
whether things are the same or different, better or worse, right or
wrong, and so on. The cessation of ignorance is not to arrive at the
truth of emptiness; it is to realize the emptiness of truth. The wisdom
of the enlightened is not knowledge of the empty; it is the emptiness
of knowledge.
III.
What Chan seems to make of this paradoxical tradition is precisely its
paradoxes, its gongan , and its insistent thought on emptiness.
Chan is not a metaphysical idealism; it does not teach that objects
belong to consciousness or are constructions of the mind. It is not
ontology, not the ultimate truth of reality. If we must use Western
terms, Chan seems like a nonintentional phenomenology, which is
another paradox inasmuch as phenomenology is the science of con-
sciousness and consciousness is dened by intentionality, the relation
to an object. Chan phenomenology is a phenomenology of the absent
object, the void, the unfullled, the vacant, the seen-throughthe
emptiness on the other side of suffering and sense.
We see this paradoxical phenomenology in the analyses of the
Platform Sutra, attributed to Huineng, sixth in the line of Chan
462 barry allen
Patriarchs going back to Bodhidharma.
16
The sutra identies
no-thought (wu nian ) as its principal teaching. As wu wei
does not mean literally no action but rather a special kind of action
with a peculiar intentionality, so no-thought does not mean no think-
ing but a particular quality of thought. No-thought is not to think
even when involved in thought.
17
The idea is to eliminate attachment,
clinging in thought. The cling of thoughts is what western theory calls
reference, or the intentional relation to an object. The relation is not
merely intentional; it is also a kind of clinging, a kind of suffering,
and a delusional, empty non-relation to nothing at all. No-thought is
thinking without clinging to objects. The Dharma of no-thought
means: 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 not
accepted as the reidentiable referents of egocentric attitudes. It is
consciousness uncommitted to objects.
Someone impressed by the Western tradition of philosophical
psychology might say that is impossible. Consciousness is dened by
intentionality, 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, a
glancing ray from the pure Ego is directed upon the object of the
correlate consciousness for the time being.
20
It is the unintentional
contribution of Chan, however, to reveal this so-called intentionality
thesis as a dispensable stipulation. Buddhists say the delusion of
objects is a karmic effect of clinging and selshness. How can it be the
foregone conclusion of transcendental logic that consciousness is con-
demned to this suffering? In the words of the eighth-century Suran-
gama Sutra, a denitive work for Chan, because you have lost touch
with your minds true nature by identifying yourself with the objects
you perceive, you keep on being bound to the cycle of death and
rebirth. 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 stopping
over things. If one instant of thought clings, then successive thoughts
cling; this is known as being fettered. If in all things successive
thoughts do not cling, then you are unfettered.
22
In the later words of
Chan 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. Thinking
of some objectan object of knowledge, description, desire, or
purposeis a form of clinging to a moment, the delusion of a
content that might return, a reidentiable object with a nature of its
own. Successive thoughts that do not cling are unburdened by objects.
463 emptiness and knowledge in chan and daoism
You are thinking, there are thoughts; but you are not clinging, they
are not your objects, you do not know or care whether they are the
same again or different. There is no object posited, yet still there is
thought, 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 but
nothing 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. Dont
try 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 knows
something others do not, or that there is any knowing at all is baleful
attachment. In the Record of Baizhang, from the Mazu school of
Chan, we read:
If one uses ones mind to engage broadly in intellectual study, seeking
merit and wisdom, then all of that is just birth and death, and it does
not serve any purpose as far as reality is concerned. Blown by the
wind of knowledge, such a person is drowned in the ocean of birth
and 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, Erudition
and 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 either
your 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, understand
not understanding. . . . True understanding isnt just understanding
understanding. Its also understanding not understanding. If you
understand anything, you dont understand. Only when you under-
stand nothing is it true understanding.
27
I take True understanding is understanding not understanding
as the cognitive complement of the thought that detachment requires
detachment from detachment. You have to throw away detachment,
with its implicit dualism of the detached and the clinging, to realize a
careless consciousness. That comes from understanding, but what is
understood 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 an
accomplishment of understanding, of wise knowledge. The appear-
ance of appearance as no appearance cant be seen visually but can
only be known by means of wisdom.
28
To look at appearance and see
464 barry allen
no appearance is to look at appearance without positing an object
replete with objectivity, self-identity, being. Everything still looks as it
did before, except now you are radically unattached. You do not think
there is any permanence in appearances or back of them, or that there
is any real difference of value, that some appearances are better than
others, that some ought to be and others not. Knowledge, wisdom,
insight takes you that far, to the brink of sense, where knowledge itself
is nally seen through and ceases to function.
IV.
Centuries before Nagarjuna, Daoists innovate the concept of
emptying the mind, although their word (xu ) is not that chosen
to translate Nagarjunas sunyata (emptiness), which becomes kong
in Chinese. There is indeed an important difference in what gets
described as empty. The emptiness spoken of in the Daodejing and
Zhuangzi is the vacancy that allows fullness to fulll its effect. The
empty is the tenuous, the formless, the indeterminate, and unqualied,
which is opposed to fullness but operates correlative with it. The full
is effective through the emptiness of the empty. As I understand it, full
means actual, empty means virtual. Transformation requires virtual
emptiness as atoms require void. This is among Chinese thoughts
most rigorous intuitions. If becoming is original and irreducible, then
things have to stay uid and breathe. The generation of the cosmos
from emptiness assures that. There is a bottomless well of the virtual,
a potent potentiality at the source of things. Because these authors do
not think in terms of being as presence or identity, they do not or think
of the empty as the absent or vacant. The virtual is, is in being, really
exists. 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 the
less selsh, the less fettered the judgment. Zhuangzi says listening
with the xin is better than listening with ears, but listening with
qi is best. Ears hear words; xin adds connections; but qi, being
tenuous, responds to the environment in its virtual dimension, as
synergy and potential. Starve the xin of self-regarding desires and
feed 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 the
Daodejing conduct polemics against the value of knowledge, but
when we look closely it is clear that these always mean somebodys
so-called knowledge, typically Confucian learning about classics and
465 emptiness and knowledge in chan and daoism
ceremonies. Zhuangzi chapter 1 presents ordinary knowledge, what
the world calls knowledge, as limited, as something to get over, as little
knowledge. Little knowledge (xiao zhi ) does not measure up to
big knowledge (da zhi ).
30
Chapter 2 repeats this interesting
distinction in verse:
Great knowledge is effortless,
Petty knowledge picks holes.
Great speech is avorless,
Petty speech strings words.
31
Words of great knowledge lack avor. 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 do
things with words. It is the knowledge that gets you through school.
Great knowledge gets you through life, knowing the art of nourishing
life. This is a knowledge of the empty, meaning knowledge of the
world in virtual depth rather than actual conguration, artful knowl-
edge capable of collaborating with the virtual potentials of a situation
in their subtlest, most incipient form. Getting over little knowledge is
a step toward better knowledge. Great knowledge is knowledge
insight into the incipient, where transformation is birthing, the virtual
matrix of the future.
As in Zhuangzi so in the Daodejing there is apparent hostility
toward knowledge, together with the hint that this is not the only
thing that might be called knowledge, that there might be another,
different, more effective knowledge.
32
Hostility toward knowledge is
typically directed to what the ru-scholars call knowledge, ponderous
learning of ceremonies and ancient texts, combined with a scholars
belief in the value of linguistic distinctions. There is something else,
although, more properly valued as knowledge, and that is what you
have to master for wu wei effectiveness. To know it is to master an art
inaction. What makes inaction artful and not mere indolence is that
nothing required is left undone, there being no objection to raise
against how a situation is handled. To act without deliberate intention
is an art of the invisible. It takes subtle eyes to see opportunities
invisible to others, to discern the germ of future things, and know how
to modify their evolution when it is pliable and easy to do so.
33
The
promise of such knowledge is not Truth, God, or Eternitythese
being the leading incentives of western theorybut more realistically
to prolong your vitality to the limit of human capacity.
For Daoists there is a knowledge to accomplish, a great knowledge
by which we nourish our body and are effective without (much) effort.
It is a knowledge tapped into the virtual, knowing circumstances in
virtual depth, and where they can be effortlessly transformed. This
knowledge is empty in the sense of being empty of actuality, actual
466 barry allen
form, hence not equivalent to a formula or representation. It is
an improvisatory knowledge that does not reiterate but is capable
of functioning in the fog of incipience, where being is becoming
and functioning means ziran productivity that leaves nothing
required not done. This is not a knowledge that leads one to the brink
of enlightenment, then ceases to function. The point of pursuing
enlightenment is to master a knowledge that continues to function
and enhance ones efcacy.
Daoists want to overcome little knowledge to reach the good stuff,
knowledge that feeds life and does not exhaust it. They do not say that
Confucians are wrong about knowledge but that they are supercial.
They are stuck in a limited view. What they call knowledge is little
knowledge. Confucians say that the best sort of life is a strenuous effort
to be good. To Daoists it is a mistake to depend on language, ceremo-
nies, and classics. The problem with these artifacts is not their arti-
ciality, however, as is often thought.
34
They do not want to rely on
artifacts in the way that Confucians rely on the classics and the li .
They want instead to innovate artifacts, to create newforms, 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, or
virtual difference. The epistemological innovation of the Daoists is to
present the knowledge of Confucians as limited, as something to get
over, a gesture Chan repeats to the Daoists. They too are stuck in a
limited view, their so-called great knowledge also little, limited, an
obstacle. The solution is not a still greater knowledge. It is to overcome
knowledge as such, overcome knowing by overcoming all objects,
even the most virtual. Penetrate the delusion of objects; then it is
mind alone, then emptiness, then nothing, extinction, nirvana.
We see a Chan author using Daoist ideas about knowledge as
skillful means to enhance the appeal of Buddhism in a work entitled
Illuminating Essential Doctrine (Xian Zong Ji ), attributed to
Shenhui, a disciple of Huineng and possibly the real author of the
Platform Sutra, the work that establishes Huinengs patriarchy.
36
Illu-
minating Essential Doctrine makes an unexpectedly strong case (in
Chan) for the value of knowledge. This knowledge may not be what
the world calls knowledgenot learning, not a craft. But it is a subtle,
enlightened, esoteric knowledge that turns out to resemble nothing so
much as the knowledge Daoists require to do wu wei (a Buddhist
translation of nirvana).
37
Acting through non-action reaches the
Other Shore.
38
This knowledge is identied with the Buddhist prajna,
a wise knowledge described as the highest of the high.
39
Prajna is
the cause of nirvana; nirvana is the result of prajna.
40
Later, this wise
knowledge is outright identied with enlightenment:
467 emptiness and knowledge in chan and daoism
Nirvana and prajna differ in name, yet in actuality they are the
same.
41
The wisdom of this knowledge, its function, is to enable and
activate despite being empty it is empty yet it always acts.
42
Such
knowledge is not knowledge; it is prajna which is no prajna (hui
wu hui ), the substance whose function is wu wei efcacy,
action that is free from action.
43
In a gesture that may have been
calculated to appeal to esoteric Daoists, this wise knowledge is said to
be a secret transmitted from the Buddha through the Chan patriarchs.
Shenhui uses a Chan lineage legend he may have constructed in the
rst place to make Buddhist enlightenment appeal to the esoteric,
secret, dark knowledge Daoists admire. Buddhist enlightenment
is 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 the
world calls knowledge, while reserving a place for the greater knowl-
edge of the enlightened, a knowledge that does not know, and a
wisdom that does not act. But this wisdom leads to the emptiness of
knowledge, even of wisdom itself. The last thing to know is that
knowledge 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, two
qualities 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 of
immanence to be empty. The tenuous xu-emptiness Daoists esteem is
kong-emptya resourceless, vacant lack-of-being; just more samsara,
more delusion, more suffering. There is no virtuality; it merely seems
like there is to deluded consciousness. That is another implication of
dependent origination. There is no unactualized potential, no latent,
merely virtual difference that might not be actualized. Daoist xu is a
fallow eld in winter, actually empty and virtually replete. Buddhist
kong is a sterile lunar desert. Zhuangzi must give up giving up and
forget about forgetting. The dao is emptier than even he imagined;
it is an apparition without virtuality or virtue, actually dead, and only
given the appearance of life by the delusions of karmic consciousness.
Daoist emptiness is ontological. The virtual exists, it is real but not
actual, and therefore to Buddhist eyes not nearly empty enough. That
is certainly a difference between the classical Daoist texts and Nagar-
juna. It also seems like a difference from Chan, despite the alacrity
with which Chan authors imitate Daoist philosophemes. Daoism
remains optimistic about knowledge in a way Chan is not. Daoism
envisions conditions under which knowledge enhances life. For Chan
468 barry allen
even that knowledge is an obstacle. Life cannot be enhanced. It is
suffering through and through and has to be gotten over. The self, the
body, the qiall of that is empty, empty of actuality, empty of virtu-
ality, empty of virtue, or power, incapable of overcoming the obstacles
that keep us stuck in this so-called life. Buddhist wisdom exhausts
life, extinguishes it, and does not nourish it. The ultimate implica-
tion of Chans Nagarjunian understanding of emptiness therefore
cannot satisfy the Daoist conviction concerning the value of knowl-
edge. Of course, on many other points there is room for important
similarity and association between Daoism and Chan, and the distinc-
tion between them, while philosophically interesting, is clearly not
absolute.
McMASTER UNIVERSITY
Hamilton, Ontario
Endnotes
I am grateful for the insightful comments of Professor Chung-ying Cheng, as well as the
referee of the Journal, by which this article was much improved. I am also grateful to the
organizers and participants of the Daoist Salon, Zhengzhou, China, March 2010, for
instructive discussion, especially Brook Ziporyn and Livia Kohn. And I am grateful to
Weng Haizhen for proong 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 and
Liberation: Philosophical Ruminations on a Buddhist Conundrum, Philosophy East
and West 52, no. 3 (2002): 32645.
2. D. T. Suzuki, trans., The Lankavatara Sutra, ed. Dwight Goddard (Clear Lake: Dawn
Horse 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 xed boundaries, sometimes enclosed. Religious practice
remained individual, without collective worship or meditation. Holmes Welch, The
Practice of Chinese Buddhism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 143.
6. I draw from Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China, Vol. II, History
of Scientic 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, Zen
and Taoism: Common and Uncommon Grounds of Discourse, Journal of Chinese
Philosophy 15, no. 1 (1988): 5165; Livla Knaul, Chuangtzu and the Chinese Ancestry
of 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: Three
Pines Press, 2004).
7. Dale S. Wright, Philosophical Meditations on Zen Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1999), 20. On Chan as a reaction to Indocentrism in Chinese
469 emptiness and knowledge in chan and daoism
Buddhism, see Alan Cole, Fathering Your Father: The Zen of Fabrication in Tang
Buddhism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).
8. I draw on John R. McRae, The Northern School and the Formation of Early Chan
Buddhism (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1986); Bernard Faure, The Will to
Orthodoxy: A Critical Genealogy of Northern Chan Buddhism, trans. Phyllis Brooks
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997); and Mario Poceski, Ordinary Mind as
the Way: The Hongzhou School and the Growth of Chan Buddhism (Oxford: Oxford
University 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, The
Nature 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 distinguishes
Chinese 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 Buddhist
Texts, 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 the
absence of sight in a dark room, is a theme in Aristotlean psychology. See Daniel
Heller-Roazen, The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation (NewYork: 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 seduced
by a prostitute while begging alms. Ananda, famous for his erudition, paid too
much attention to learning and not enough to meditation practice, which left
him with inadequate concentration to resist the prostitutes spell. Erudition merely
led him into idle speculation; all his knowledge is not equal to a single day of
correct practice (165). See also Jiang Wu, Knowledge for What? The Buddhist
Concept 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 text
derives from Bodhidharma, but as McRae observes, [this] material may be used as a
key 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; NewYork: Columbia
University Press, 1994), as well as practically all his later work. The most useful
introduction I have found to this difcult material is Manuel Delanda, Intensive
Science 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 Efcacy:
Between Western and Chinese Thinking, trans. Janet Lloyd (Honolulu: University of
Hawaii Press, 2004); and Barry Allen, Vanishing into Things, Common Knowledge
16, 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 the
third-century commentary on Zhuangzi by Guo Xiang. See The Penumbra Unbound:
The Neo-Taoist Philosophy of Guo Xiang (Albany: State University of New York
Press, 2003). In a more prosaic context ming might mean dark or darkness, but
it is used by Guo as a transitive verb (to darken something), and refers not to the
darkened thing but to the darkening agent as it becomes imperceptible and vanishes
into things. To vanish into things is to interact with them without obstructive, forceful
desires, 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 a
complete translation, and parenthetical references are to this source. On Shenhui as
probable 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.
471 emptiness and knowledge in chan and daoism