Hongzhou school
First he resided on Gonggong mountain, and then he settled in Nanchang's state-sponsored Kaiyuan monastery (today known as Youmin Temple) in Hongzhou (present day north Jiangxi).
"[10] Some students of Mazu include: Nanquan, Fenzhou Wuye (761–823), Guizong Zhichang (dates unknown), Xingshan Weikuan (755–817), Zhangjing Huaihui (756–815), Danxia Tianran (739–824), Dongsi Ruhui (744–823), Tianhuang Daowu (748–807), and Furong Taiyu (747–826).
As Poceski writes, the Hongzhou school heavily relied on imperial and aristocratic patronage which allowed it to quickly emerge as a major Chan tradition in the ninth century.
[26] An inscription for Dayi, one of Mazu's students, condemns sectarianism and according to Poceski "rejects the sharp distinctions between the Northern and Southern schools propounded by Shenhui and his followers and instead argues for a rapprochement between the two."
Poceski also notes that "the inscription implies that Mazu's disciples adopted a tolerant attitude toward other Chan schools/lineages and eschewed the pursuit of narrow sectarian agendas (or at least were more subtle about it).
[32] As Poceski writes, With the passage of time, some of the luster of Mazu's religious personality was transferred to Linji, and the image of the Hongzhou school was altered in ways that reflected the ideological stances of subsequent Chan/Zen traditions.
[34] According to Jinhua Jia, "the doctrinal foundation of the Hongzhou school was mainly a mixture of the tathagata-garbha thought and prajñaparamita theory, with a salient emphasis on the kataphasis of the former.
"[41] Poceski also notes that in Baizhang's record one can find numerous scriptural citations, including "obscure references and the use of a technical vocabulary that point to a mastery of canonical texts and doctrines.
[49] According to Poceski, at the core of the teaching of Hongzhou teachers like Mazu, Dazhu, Baizhang, Nanquan, and Huangbo is the cultivation of non-attachment, "an ascent into increasingly rarefied states of detachment and transcendence, in which the vestiges of dualistic thought are eliminated.
[58][note 2]The phrase also appears in the Chao-chou Ch'an-shih Yu-Lu in which Zhaozhou Congshen (J. Jōshū Jūshin) (778–897) asks his teacher Nánquán Pǔyuàn (J: Nansen Fugan) (748–835) "What is the Way (Tao)?
Zongmi stated that "they fail to distinguish between ignorance and enlightenment, the inverted and the upright,"[72] arguing that Hongzhou Chan's mistake was rooted in its teaching that greed, hatred and delusion, good and evil, happiness or suffering are all Buddha-nature.
"[73] According to Poceski, this "detached state of nondual awareness" requires religious training and practice[74] which "involves a constant effort to abstain from giving rise to discriminating thoughts, which bifurcate reality into dualistic opposites and obscure the essential nature of the 'ordinary mind.
'”[74] Poceski says these teachings are directed at monks who are engaged in daily contemplative practices: In that context, they serve as instruction about the cultivation of a holistic state of awareness, in which the mind abandons all defilements and is unattached to dualistic concepts such as worldliness and holiness, permanence and impermanence.
The passage can also be read as a caution against quietist withdrawal from the world and the cultivation of refined states of meditative absorption, symbolized by the sages who follow the Hīnayāna path.
[78]This view was also criticized by Zongmi because he believed it “betrayed the gate of gradual cultivation.”[79] For Mazu, Buddha nature was actualized in everyday human life and its actions.
Chan practice involves nothing more than keeping the mind in a complete state and releasing it from all artificially imposed restraints, free to act naturally and spontaneously.
[83]According to Faure, the absence of such practices as the "one-practice samādhi" (yixing sanmei) in the Hongzhou school indicates an "epistemological split" between early and classical Chan.
Similarly, Mazu urges the keeping of pure precepts and the accumulation of wholesome karma, and Da'an's record uses the ox-herding pictures as a way to explain gradual progress on the path.
[102] Luis Gómez also observes that a number of texts exist in the literature which "suggest that some schools of early Ch’an rejected outright the practice of sitting in meditation.
Guifeng Zongmi (圭峰 宗密) (780–841), an influential teacher-scholar and patriarch of both the Chán and the Huayan school claimed that the Hung-chou tradition believed "everything as altogether true".
Since there is no other kind of functioning, greed, anger, and folly, the performance of good and bad actions, and the experiencing of their pleasurable and painful consequences are all, in their entirety, Buddha-nature.
[108]According to Zongmi, the Hongzhou school teaching led to a radical non-dualistic view that believed that all actions, good or bad, are expressing Buddha-nature, and therefore denies the need for spiritual cultivation and moral discipline (sila).
Zongmi's interpretation of the Hongzhou doctrine would be a dangerously antinomian view, as it eliminates all moral distinctions and validates any actions (including unethical ones) as expressions of the essence of Buddha-nature.
[3] The stories about the Hongzhou school are part of the Traditional Zen Narrative which rose to prominence in the Song dynasty, when Chán was the dominant form of Buddhism and received the support of the Imperial Court and the elite literati.
Shike Goruku, The Collection of the Four Houses), which contains the recorded sayings of Mazu Daoyi, Baizhang Huaihai, Huangbo Xiyun and Linji Yixuan.
[118] Some apocryphal “encounter dialogue” (ch: jiyuan wenda, jp: kien mondō) stories depict the Hongzhou school making use of "shock techniques such as shouting, beating, and using irrational retorts to startle their students into realization".
[119][120] The "shock techniques" found in many of these apocryphal stories became part of the traditional and still popular image of Chan masters displaying irrational and strange behaviour to help their students achieve enlightenment.
[120] According to modern scholars like McRae, this idea of a "golden age" of iconoclastic and radical Chan masters was mainly a romantic invention of later Song Buddhists:[4] ...what is being referred to is not some collection of activities and events that actually happened in the 8th through 10th centuries, but instead the retrospective re-creation of those activities and events, the imagined identities of the magical figures of the Tang, within the minds of Song dynasty Chan devotees.
[4] Mario Poceski writes:[3] an unreflective reliance on the Song texts—especially the iconoclastic stories contained in them—is problematic because we cannot trace any of the encounter dialogues back to the Tang period.
The connection with the glories of the bygone Tang era bestowed a sense of sanctity and was a potent tool for legitimizing the Chan school in the religious world of Song China.
