Dazu Huike

Nothing can blow it down.

Bodhidharma and Huike put it all on the table.

Buddhism in China after these two was no longer about study, about amassing learning or merit.

Bodhidharma's Zen was radical.

It is the sound of wars, climate destruction, political polarization, misogyny, racism.

It is the sound of our waking at 3 a.m., anxious about death, about the state of our world, and the lives of our children.

Huike's request for help fifteen hundred years ago was on the money.

"Please help me, I have no peace of mind," runs true and to the point.

It's all body, all flesh, all bone, all marrow, all skin.

But Huike's silence at the end here arrives like a kind of thunderbolt, doesn't it? It announces the Dharma clearly without any kind of explanation.

And it takes us right to the verse that Susan shared with us in her invitation to today's period of practice.

Where it says, words, words, words, flattering drizzle and snow.

But it does seem that when we look to the periods that McRae calls Proto-Chan or Early Chan, it's widely accepted during these times by the culture at large that Bodhidharma's school was the Lanka school.

Already by around six fifty AD, the Zhū Gaoshìguàn, a record compiled by the monk Daoxuan, contains a passage in which Bodhidharma praises the Lankavatara scripture and gives it to Huike, his immediate successor and the traditional second patriarch of Zen.

This record by Daoxuan is incredibly important to historians because it contains hundreds of biographies of prominent Buddhist monks and represents a kind of a snapshot of what was going on in the religion during that time.

It's only later when Chan begins to go mainstream and actually becomes something like the, the state religion of China during the Tang Dynasty, uh, that these more popular sutras we mentioned earlier take center stage, and the Lanka becomes more or less forgotten.

For Yogachara, the most important problems revolved around questions of causality and consciousness.

In order to avoid the idea of a permanent self, Buddhists said citta is momentary.

Since a new citta apperceives a new cognitive field each moment, the apparent continuity of mental states was explained causally by claiming each citta and the moment it ceased also acted as cause for the arising of its successor.

This was fine for continuous perceptions and thought processes, but difficulties arose since Buddhists identified a number of situations in which no citta at all was present or operative, such as deep sleep, unconsciousness, and certain meditative conditions explicitly defined as devoid of citta." If a preceding citta had to be temporally contiguous with its successor, how could one explain the sudden restarting of citta after a period of time had lapsed since the prior citta ceased? Where had citta or its causes been residing in the interim? Analogous questions were, from where does consciousness re-emerge after deep sleep? How does consciousness begin in a new life? The various Buddhist attempts to answer these questions led to more difficulties and disputes." End quote.