Posted 2018/7/17
As McRae demonstrates, the Chan transmission scheme as it achieved mature expression in the Song period consisted of two parts. The first section begins with the historical Buddha Sakyamuni (later amplified into the “Seven Buddhas of the Past”) and continues through the twenty-eight Indian patriarchs—the last of whom, Bodhidharma, became the first Chinese patriarch—and five further Chinese patriarchs.
Transmission in this initial section is conceived of as “straightline succession,” a form of spiritual primogeniture in which only a single patriarch in each generation embodies the dharma and passes it on to one chosen individual in the next. During the eleventh century Chan Buddhists developed an origin myth that served to set the entire monosuccessional sequence in motion. Known as “Mahakasyapa’s Smile,” this episode was redacted into one of the Buddha’s legendary sermons on Vulture Peak. According to this episode, when the Buddha held up a flower to the assembly, everyone in the samgha, or monastic community, remained silent, but the disciple Mahakasyapa broke into a (knowing) smile. Upon observing this, the Buddha declared Mahakasyapa the recipient of a “separate transmission outside the teaching,” the first such transmission within the Chan/Zen tradition. As the origination of dharma transmission, “Mahakasyapa’s Smile” occupied a privileged place within the Chan/Zen imaginary, and was frequently made the subject of koan, verses, lectures, and paintings. So potent was the rhetorical charge of this new detail of the Buddha’s life—nothing less than the primal scene of Chan/Zen’s lineal origins—that it was explicitly refuted on numerous occasions by authors of the rival Tiantai school, and even aroused skepticism among Chan/Zen’s own exegetes.
As opposed to the unilinearity of the first section of the Chan/Zen lineage scheme, its second part branched out after the sixth Chinese patriarch into an extensive group of sublineages, each with equal purchase on the Buddha’s teachings. The advantages of such a structure were obvious, as it encompassed the numerous dharma lineages that aligned themselves with the separate transmission during the Song period, and had the potential to accommodate a potentially infinite number of new lines of transmission as well.
