北宋“文字禅”出现背景探究

Abstract

One can argue that the concept of language of Chinese Chan Buddhism has experienced a general process of “denial of denial.” This process is exhibited by the alterations from “thanks to the teachings get Buddhist Enlightenment” to “learning the Buddhist thoughts without literary assistance”, from “non reliance upon the written words” to “not independent from the written words”, and from Literary Chan to KanhuaChan and MozhaoChan. This considerably long process of modification could be understood as a product of combination of both internal and external causes of Chan Buddhism. Although usually there is a tendency to interpret the advent of the Literary Chan, that is “not independent from the written words”, as a mark of Chan Buddhism’s decline, this writer does not agree with this tendency and interpretation. The appearance of the Literary Chan is understood as an inevitable turning point caused by the persistence of the motto of Chan Buddhism, “not independent from the written word.” The ideology of the Literary Chan is a blossoming of the times: it intensively developed Chan’s viewpoint of language, and in fact played a dominant role in eliminating the detrimental consequences resulted by “non reliance upon the written word”, if anything. This thesis analyzes from different perspectives the reasons for transformation from “not independent from the written word” to “non reliance upon the written word.”