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Hualin International Journal of Buddhist Studies 7.2 (2024): 407–412; https://dx.doi.org/10.15239/hijbs.07.02.13
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Ritual and Materiality in Buddhism and Asian Religions)
John R. McRae. Zen Evangelist: Shenhui, Sudden Enlightenment, and the Southern School of Chan Buddhism. Edited by James Robson and Robert H. Sharf, with Fedde de Vries. Kuroda Classics in East Asian Buddhism Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2023. 360 pp.
Jiang WU
The University of Arizona
jiangwu@email.arizona.edu
John McRae’s (1947–2011) book on Shenhui 神會 (684–758) became a legend even before its publication. Now, we finally have this posthumous book with John’s meticulous annotated translation and several of his reprinted articles on the subject, thanks to the editorial guidance of two capable Zen experts and the help of the graduate assistant Fedde de Vries who adopted a conservative approach to consolidate John’s manuscript. What is not included are John’s analytical chapters, though some of the relevant materials have been incorporated in the notes.
Peter Gregory’s foreword summarizes nicely John’s involvement and connection with the Kuroda Institute, which sponsored the publication of the present book. John was a major player and supporter of the institute, and played an essential role in a series of important meetings that the institute organized. James Robson and Robert Sharf also introduced the history of this manuscript and summarized the contents of the book. John had been working on the translation for several decades and delayed the publication multiple times.
Early Chan master Shenhui is perhaps one of the most important Chan teachers in shaping the teaching and practice of the entire Chan tradition in East Asia. Claiming to be the seventh patriarch after the founding patriarch Huineng 慧能 (638–713), Shenhui authored several important works, only extant in manuscript form, which were buried in the Dunhuang caves until their discovery in the 1920s and 1930s by Chinese scholar, intellectual, and politician Hu Shi 胡適 (1891–1962), a group of Japanese scholars, and French scholars (mostly Jacques Gernet). Because of this loss, the received Chan historiography simply bypassed him and even condemned his teaching based on a distorted understanding of some of his remaining texts. Since the recovery of his works, including sermons, collected dialogues, polemical essays, and even popular rhymed songs and hymns, which often have several versions of the manuscript as textual witnesses, Chinese and Japanese scholars have dedicated themselves to annotating, collating, and publishing these lost texts. The significance of Shenhui’s work lies in the fact that Shenhui led a major debate with the proponents of the so-called Northern School 北宗 and claimed to have established the Southern School 南宗 represented by Huineng as the orthodox successor of Bodhidharma’s Chan tradition. Many of his thoughts resonate with the content in Huineng’s Platform Sūtra (Ch. Tanjing 壇經), which was not even mentioned in Shenhui’s various works, indicating the possibility that Shenhui or his associates might have been involved in the reinvention of Huineng and the finalization of Huineng’s Platform Sūtra. Hu Shi, in particular, made the study and collation of Shenhui’s works his lifetime endeavour, a rare choice for a liberal pioneer in modern Chinese intellectual history who obviously had a deeply rooted rationalist agenda, as John points out in the articles included in this book.
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About the Author: Dr. Jiang Wu is currently a professor in the Department of East Asian Studies, director of Center for Buddhist Studies. He received his Master’s degree from Nankai University (1994) and Ph.D. from Harvard University (2002). His research interests include seventeenth-century Chinese Buddhism, especially Chan/Zen Buddhism, the role of Buddhist canons in the formation of East Asian Buddhist culture, and the historical exchanges between Chinese Buddhism and Japanese Buddhism. He has published articles in Asia Major, Journal of East Asian History, Journal of Chinese Philosophy, and Monumenta Serica on a variety of topics. His first book Enlightenment in Dispute: The Reinvention of Chan Buddhism in Seventeenth-century China was published by Oxford University Press in 2008. His Leaving for the Rising Sun: Chinese Zen Master Yinyuan and the Authenticity Crisis in Early Modern East Asia (Oxford, 2016) won the inaugural Tianzhu Best Book in Chan Studies Award. He received the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2023.
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