Where Zen Began | Dave's Place

China Root: Taoism, Ch’an, and Original Zen by David Hinton. Shambhala. 176 pp. $17.95. *****

This is a fascinating and important book. David Hinton is a long time—thirty-five years—translator of Chinese poetry and other texts. He has translated most of the great Chinese classics, including the Tao Te Ching, I Ching, Chuang Tzu, The Analects, Mencius, and the No-Gate Gateway. His contention in this book—which in some ways seems the culmination of all his writing—is that Zen is much more influenced by Taoism than it is by Buddhism, that Ch’an—the Chinese predecessor to Zen—is more an offshoot, or an extension, of Taoism than it is an adoption of Buddhism. He makes that argument primarily by means of translation, which he contends that other people have done badly and he has done correctly. Translation is his life’s work.

He seems to think—in a long appendix which I’m making my way through now—that most translators of Chinese texts are irresponsible and incompetent nincompoops. He doesn’t say that in so many words, but that’s the impression he gives. And it’s hard to argue with him. His translations are beautiful, and clear, and hang together from one work to another.

The words which we normally translate as form and emptiness, for instance (in the Heart Sutra, for instance, which he thinks should be called the Mind Sutra; he thinks Heart Sutra is a sentimental translation) he translates as Presence and Absence. Presence is the ten thousand things as we see them. Absence is the mysterious dark void out of which everything emerges. The Tao is “the generative ontological process through which all things arise and pass away.” So here is how he renders the first canto of the Tao Te Ching, which various commentators have said encompasses the whole work.

A Way called Way isn’t the perennial Way.

A name that names isn’t the perennial name.

the named is mother to the ten thousand things,

but the unnamed is origin to all heaven and earth.

In perennial Absence you see mystery,

and in perennial Presence you see appearance.

Though the two are one and the same,

once they arise, they differ in name.

One and the same they’re called dark-enigma,

dark enigma deep within dark-enigma,

Gateway to all mystery.

Presence and Absence aren’t really two different things, but more like two sides of one coin; Presence comes out of Absence and goes back into it, in a continual process. Dark-enigma is also an important term in this view of things, and is in general “equated with Absence, the generative ontological tissue from which the ten thousand things spring. Or more properly, it is Way before it is named, before Absence and Presence give birth to one another—that region where consciousness and ontology share their source.”[1]

All of this is intimidating for a moronic reader like me, who knows nothing about science or the Chinese language or the Chinese way of thinking. But it has always seemed to me that, if the universe began out of nothing with a Big Bang, that nothing wasn’t exactly nothing, but was full of potential and tremendous energy. As I understand what Hinton is saying, creation didn’t happen once; it is constantly happening, things coming out of absence and returning to it. But Presence isn’t good and Absence bad. They’re both aspects of the same process.

We can see this process in our own minds, in the act of meditation, which is why that is such an important practice for Taoists and subsequently for Ch’an Buddhists. In a certain way, mind (which does not reside in the brain, and is not separate from the body) is the same as Tao; it is the vast container in which this process of Absence becoming Presence continually happens. On the one hand, we all have mind, or all are mind, not the content (which is different for everyone) but the vast container of the content, in which this process continually happens. In a way the point of meditation is to see Mind in its pure form, but one doesn’t do that by stopping the process, but by allowing it to happen and seeing through it. However much we would like to stop the mind from producing thoughts, we probably can’t (I certainly can’t) and that’s not the point anyway. My favorite koan makes that point. And Hinton’s translation is unique. (Hinton translates the names of the protagonists; we knew these teachers better as Joshu and Nansen.)

“Visitation-Land asked Wellspring-South Mountain: ‘What is the Way?’

‘Ordinary mind is the Way,’ answered Master Wellspring.

‘Still, it’s something I can set out toward, isn’t it?’

‘To set out is to be distant from.’

‘But if I don’t set out, how will I arrive at an understanding of Way?’

‘Way isn’t something you can understand, and it isn’t something you can not understand. Understanding is delusion, and not understanding is pure forgetfulness.

‘If you truly comprehend this Way that never sets out for somewhere else, if you enter into it absolutely, you realize it’s exactly like the vast expanse of this universe, all generative emptiness you can see through into boundless clarity.’”

So meditation isn’t finally a process of doing anything, but of not doing, not “setting out.” Zen calls this practice shikantaza, just sitting, which is a way of bringing to meditation the practice of wu wei, which means “acting as a spontaneous part of Tzu-jan (‘the ten thousand things unfolding spontaneously from the generative source’) rather than with self-conscious intention.” You let things happen rather than trying to bring something about. You sit and watch the show, as my teacher Larry Rosenberg used to say. People find it terribly difficult to do nothing, of course. But that is the task of shikantaza.

The most fascinating translation in this book is of what Hinton calls the Mind Sutra, which I’ve been chanting in another form as the Heart Sutra for thirty years. Here’s his rendering:

And so, in emptiness this beautiful world of things is Absence,

perceptions absence, thoughts, actions, distinctions,

Absence eyes and ears, nose and tongue, self and meaning and ch’i mind itself,

Absence this beautiful dharma world,

its color and sound, smell and taste and touch,

Absence the world of sight

and even the world of ch’i mind, its meaning and distinctions,

Absence Absence-wisdom

and Absence Absence-wisdom extinguished,

Absence old-age unto death

and Absence old-age unto death extinguished.

I find Hinton’s argument convincing and enlightening. I’ve always been fascinated and enthralled by Taoist teachings, and thought there was more than a little Taoism in the Zen Buddhism I practiced. At the same time, as far as the actual practice goes, I don’t see any difference. Hinton believes the Japanese teachers distorted the Chinese teachings and didn’t translate them well, but in the end they taught me to just sit there, and that’s where Hinton arrives as well. And the aforementioned Larry Rosenberg, my first teacher, teaches vipassana meditation, but he always said that ultimate practice is sitting there doing nothing, and teaches that’s what vipassana actually is.[2]

As Henry Shukman says in an opening blurb that’s so long it’s practically a preface: “Oddly, perhaps, in spite of Hinton’s expert parsing out of missteps in the translation and transmission of this Dharma to the West, I can’t help feeling I’ve just read a staggeringly good account of the modern Zen training a contemporary Japanese-based lineage led me through.”

So in some ways I feel as if this book just explains very clearly how to do what I’ve already been doing, perhaps more clearly than anything else I’ve read. I nevertheless think it’s a book that every Zen practitioner would want to own. It is the clearest explanation of the rationale behind our practice that I’ve seen.

And it makes me want to continue to explore David Hinton’s work. He’s a dedicated and brilliant translator.

[1] My definitions come from Hinton’s glossary to the Tao Te Ching, which I bought along with China Root.

[2] https://tricycle.org/magazine/the-art-of-doing-nothing/