By
ARTHUR WALEY
LONDON:
LUZAC & CO., 46, Great Russell Street, W.C.1.
1922
ZEN BUDDHISM
ZEN BUDDHISM
AND ITS RELATION TO ART
Books on the Far East often mention a sect of Buddhismcalled Zen. They say that it was a “school of abstract meditation”and that it exercised a profound influence upon artand literature; but they tell us very little about what Zenactually was, about its relation to ordinary Buddhism, itshistory, or the exact nature of its influence upon the arts.
The reason of this is that very little of the native literaturewhich deals with Zen has yet been translated, perhaps becauseit is written in early Chinese colloquial, a language the studyof which has been almost wholly neglected by Europeans andalso (to judge by some of their attempts to translate it) by theJapanese themselves.
The present paper makes no attempt at profundity, but itis based on the study of original texts and furnishes, I hope,some information not hitherto accessible.
Before describing the origins of Zen itself I must give somegeneral account of Buddhism. At the time when it reachedChina[1] there were two kinds of Buddhism, called the LesserVehicle and the Greater. The former, Primitive Buddhism,possessed scriptures which in part at any rate were genuine;that is to say, they recorded words actually used by Shākyamuni.The ordinary adherent of this religion did not hope tobecome a Buddha; Buddhas indeed were regarded as extremelyrare. He only aspired to become an Arhat, that is “an asceticripe for annihilation,” one who is about to escape from thewheel of reincarnation—whose present incarnation is an antechamberto Nirvāna. To such aspirants the Buddha gives noassistance; he is what children in their games call “home,”and his followers must pant after him as best they can.
Those who found this religion too comfortless inventedanother, which became known as Mahāyāna, the GreaterVehicle. Putting their doctrines into the mouth of Shākya[8]muni,they fabricated ad hoc sermons of enormous length,preached (so they asserted) by the Buddha himself in his“second period” to those who were ripe to receive the wholetruth.
The great feature of this new Buddhism was the interventionof the merciful Bodhisattvas, illuminati who, though fitfor Buddhahood, voluntarily renounced it in order to helpmankind.
The first Buddhist books to reach China emanated fromthe Lesser Vehicle. But the Greater Vehicle or Bodhisattva-Buddhismsoon prevailed, and by the sixth century A.D. overtwo thousand works, most of them belonging to the GreaterVehicle, had been translated into Chinese.
There were already many sects in China, the chief of whichwere:
(1) The Amidists.
This was the form of Buddhism which appealed to theuneducated. It taught that a Buddha named Amida pre