The International Sacred Literature Trust has over the years published a good number of titles in English translation that have drawn on most of the major religious traditions of the world. But inevitably the tendency has been to concentrate on the better-known works within each tradition, and the broad readership envisaged has discouraged ventures into materials requiring extensive academic annotation. Here, however, the constraints inherent in the aims of the series have been ingeniously circumvented to produce at a reasonable price a work of broad utility that also contains – despite the somewhat anodyne title – an excellent translation of indubitable academic value of a little-known but important text. The Lengqie shizi ji, composed in the early eighth century, appears to have had no readers for about a thousand years until it was rediscovered in several copies among the treasure trove of long lost Dunhuang manuscripts that came to light in the early twentieth century. But it gives precious information on the succession of meditation masters who traced their origins back some two centuries to the arrival in China of the meditation teacher Bodhidharma, while at the same time looking forward to much more conspicuous developments, in that it also mentions in passing the existence of Huineng, the obscure provincial master who by the end of the eighth century and ever since has been celebrated as the Sixth Patriarch of Chan, or Zen.
Yet here this difficult but crucial text is cunningly wrapped in the most alluring of disguises, an 80-page description of Zen that offers to explain it all, and indeed provides an overview as helpful as any in what is now a fairly crowded field. The suspicion that writing about the ineffable is pointless is briskly disposed of right at the start with the recommendation that before reading further those who prefer direct experience should get themselves to a Zen teacher, or failing that a self-help manual of Zen meditation, without delay. But this advice is followed rapidly with the caution that Zen in the West is not always quite the same thing as is encountered in Buddhist contexts in Asia; only then is an account of Zen history embarked upon. The full narrative, stretching as it does across half a dozen Asian languages, sometimes suggests that the author is on slightly unfamiliar territory, to judge from occasional lapses such as the appearance of one “Esai” in twelfth-century Japan (p. 42); it is surprising, too, to find D.T. Suzuki described as a “priest” (p. 22). But generally the treatment is both succinct and comprehensive.
Thereafter, though the last half dozen pages of the volume are devoted to a brief vocabulary explaining the most important Buddhist technical terms used, the bulk of the remainder consists of the first annotated translation into English of the Lengqie shizi ji, a translation given added authority by the fact that the translator – unlike any predecessor anywhere – has already rendered into English a Tibetan translation of the Chinese original that seems to have been carried out at a date much earlier than any of our other manuscripts. No one working on the early stages of the Zen tradition or indeed on East Asian Buddhism of the seventh and eighth centuries will now be able to ignore this painstaking yet readable version of what is despite its long obscurity a key source. If at some time in the future scholarship moves beyond the point represented by this work, it will only be because the background of the Lengqie shizi ji in the seventh century and earlier will have come into somewhat sharper focus. Meanwhile I hope that Sam van Schaik's book more than meets the sales expectations of his publishers and encourages them in similar ventures. With a possible revised edition in mind, the following small points of translation may benefit from some attention.
On p. 222, n. 40, the confusing character shan 山, “mountain”, may have a simple explanation. Unlike the generally excellent edition of the Chinese text by Marcus Bingenheimer and Po-Yung Chang used in this book, the edition accompanying the 1971 translation by Yanagida Seizan takes the word as modifying the following noun “stick”, but I would suggest that this means not a stick from a mountain but a staff forming the character for “mountain”, i.e. a trident. Note also Journal of Chinese Studies 61 (July 2015), p. 316, n. 2, for what looks like a similar usage.
On p. 234, n. 45, the phrase shouyi 守一 is in fact a very general term for meditation with a long history in Chinese Buddhism and a yet longer history before then: cf. Benjamin Penny (ed.), Daoism in History (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 42; it cannot be said to derive from Daoism, even if used in Daoist circles.
On p. 238, n. 19, the term hunyi 渾儀, which seems to have stumped even Yanagida, means quite precisely an armillary sphere. As to why such an object should have been used as a metaphor for Buddhist practice, a very full explanation is given in Antonino Forte, Mingtang and Buddhist Utopias in the History of the Astronomical Clock: The Tower, Statue and Armillary Sphere Constructed by Empress Wu (Rome: ISMEO, and Paris: EFEO, 1988).
On p. 242, n. 45, the term chongxuan 重玄 here may be purely rhetorical, but it does have two technical meanings in Chinese Buddhism of this period, and Yanagida reads it as a specific reference to one of them: cf. Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 1982/1, pp. 38–40.
A revised edition or lightly corrected reprinting might also dispose of some minor errors – on p. 253 for example Daoxin has unaccountably turned into Daoxuan. I do hope Sam van Schaik's work here gains the attention it deserves and merits rapid reprinting, and yet more I hope that it inspires others who read it to take up the demanding yet important study of the Dunhuang manuscripts that is so well exemplified here.
