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Zen Evangelist
 CLASSICS IN EAST ASIAN BUDDHISM

Zen Evangelist
Shenhui, Sudden Enlightenment,
and the Southern School
of Chan Buddhism

JOHN R. McRAE

Edited by James Robson and Robert H. Sharf,

with Fedde de Vries

A KURODA INSTITUTE BOOK

University of Hawai‘i Press
Honolulu
 © 2023 Kuroda Institute
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America

First printing, 2023

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: McRae, John R., author. | Robson, James,
editor. | Sharf, Robert H., editor. | De Vries, Fedde, editor. |
Shenhui, 684-758. Works. Selections. English.
Title: Zen evangelist : Shenhui, sudden enlightenment, and the southern
school of Chan Buddhism / John R. McRae ; edited by James Robson and
Robert H. Sharf, with Fedde de Vries.
Other titles: Classics in East Asian Buddhism.
Description: Honolulu : University of Hawai‘i Press, [2023] | Series:
Classics in East Asian Buddhism | “A Kuroda Institute Book.” | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022056042 (print) | LCCN 2022056043 (ebook) | ISBN
9780824895624 (hardback) | ISBN 9780824896461 (pdf) | ISBN 9780824896478
(epub) | ISBN 9780824896485 (kindle edition)
Subjects: LCSH: Shenhui, 684-758. | Zen Buddhism—China—Doctrines. |
Buddhism—China—History—581-960.
Classification: LCC BQ9299.S547 M37 2023 (print) | LCC BQ9299.S547
(ebook) | DDC 294.3/9270951—dc23/eng/20221215
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022056042
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022056043

The Kuroda Institute for the Study of Buddhism and Human Values
is a nonprofit, educational corporation founded in 1976. One of its primary
objectives is to promote scholarship on the historical, philosophical, and
cultural ramifications of Buddhism. In association with the University of
Hawai‘i Press, the Institute also publishes Studies in East Asian Buddhism.
To complement these scholarly studies, the Institute also makes available in
the present series reliable translations of some of the major classics of
East Asian Buddhism.

Cover art: Master Shenhui. Detail from the “Scroll of Buddhist Images” by
Zhang Shengwen. Song Dynasty. Reproduced with the permission of the
National Palace Museum, Taiwan.

University of Hawai‘i Press books are printed on acid-free

paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and
durability of the Council on Library Resources.
 Kuroda Institute
Classics in East Asian Buddhism

The Record of Tung-shan

William F. Powell

Tracing Back the Radiance: Chinul’s Korean Way of Zen

Robert E. Buswell Jr.

The Great Calming and Contemplation: A Study and Annotated

Translation of the First Chapter of Chih-i’s Mo-ho chih-kuan
Neal Donner and Daniel Stevenson

Inquiry into the Origin of Humanity: An Annotated Translation of

Tsung-mi’s Yüan jen lun with a Modern Commentary
Peter N. Gregory
Zen in Medieval Vietnam: A Study and Translation of
the Thiến Uyển Tập Anh
Cuong Tu Nguyen

Hōnen’s Senchakushū: Passages on the Selection of

the Nembutsu in the Original Vow
Senchakushū English Translation Project

The Origins of Buddhist Monastic Codes in China:

An Annotated Translation and Study of the Changyuan qinggui
Yifa

The Scriptures of Wŏn Buddhism: A Translation of

Wŏnbulgyo kyojŏn with Introduction
Bongkil Chung

Personal Salvation and Filial Piety: Two Precious Scroll Narratives of

Guanyin and Her Acolytes
Wilt L. Idema

Signs from the Unseen Realm: Buddhist Miracle Tales

from Early Medieval China
Robert Ford Campany

The Secrets of Buddhist Meditation: Visionary Meditation Texts

from Early Medieval China
Eric M. Greene
Zen Evangelist: Shenhui, Sudden Enlightenment, and the Southern School of
Chan Buddhism
John R. McRae
Edited by James Robson and Robert H. Sharf, with Fedde de Vries
 Contents

Foreword by P eter N. G regory ix

P reface by James Robson and Robert H. S harf xiii

A bbreviations and C onventions xxiii

Introduction: Shenhui and the Teaching of

Sudden Enlightenment 1

Part I. Texts 43

Editor’s Note by Fedde de Vries 45

Platform Sermon 47

Definition of the Truth 72

Miscellaneous Dialogues 129

Verses on the Five Watches 221

Verses on Sudden Enlightenment, the Birthless,

and Prajñā 226

Part II. Shenhui and the Chan Tradition 233

Religion as Revolution: Hu Shih on Shenhui’s Role

in Chan 235

Shenhui as Evangelist: Re-envisioning the Identity of

a Chinese Buddhist Monk 275

vii
viii Contents

A ppendix : Textual S ources 301

Bibliogr aph y 309
I ndex 323
 Foreword

It is with great pleasure and deep satisfaction that the Kuroda Institute for
the Study of Buddhism, in cooperation with the University of Hawai‘i Press,
is finally able to bring John McRae’s unfinished manuscript on Shenhui to
completion with this volume. Through the efforts and persistence of many
colleagues and friends of John’s, as Bob Sharf and James Robson detail in
their preface, it repre­sents the Kuroda Institute’s continued commitment
to publish major contributions to the study of East Asian Buddhism. John’s
work surely falls into that category of significance, and the result is some-
thing of which the Kuroda Institute is justly proud. The book also stands as
a tribute to John as a colleague and friend. Even in its partially realized state,
it is only fit that the Kuroda Institute should publish it, for John was a core
member of the Institute through nearly the whole of his career, from 1980
to his untimely death in 2011—a period coinciding with Kuroda’s emergence
as a leading academic institution dedicated to the promotion of high-quality,
cutting-edge research on East Asian Buddhism. John played a central role
in this development over the course of three decades, thereby helping to
establish the study of East Asian Buddhism as a vital area within the broader
academic domains of Buddhist Studies and Asian Studies.
John was one of the original cohort of young scholars who gathered for
the first Kuroda Institute conference, held at the Zen Center of Los Angeles
in the spring of 1980, at which he presented a paper on the Oxhead school
of early Chinese Chan (a revised version of which was subsequently published
in the first Kuroda book in 1983).1 This event was the catalyst for Kuroda’s
subsequent development as an academic enterprise, for the wealth of ideas
generated by the synergy among the conference participants brought future
conferences and publication possibilities into focus. The next conference,
on the sudden and gradual polarity in Chinese thought, took place at the
Kuroda Institute in Los Angeles in May 1981, with support from the Ameri-
can Council of Learned Societies.2 At this conference, John presented a

1. Studies in Ch’an and Hua-yen, edited by Robert M. Gimello and Peter N. Gregory.
2. Sudden and Gradual: Approaches to Enlightenment in Chinese Thought, edited by Peter N.
Gregory (1987).

ix
x Foreword

paper on Shenhui and the sudden teaching, a revised version of which now
serves as the introduction to this presentation of his Shenhui translations.
Kuroda’s third conference, assembling a different group of scholars to
address the significance of the thirteenth-century Japanese Zen master
Dōgen, was hosted by the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center in Big Sur in
October of the same year.3
The success of these conferences and the sense of scholarly community
they fostered among the participants brought the issue and necessity of
publication to the fore. Since no viable venue for publishing conference
volumes on these topics existed at the time, the Kuroda Institute invited the
University of Hawai‘i Press, a longtime publisher of books and texts in Asian
Studies, to enter into a copublishing agreement for a series on East Asian
Buddhism. Thus began a highly successful partnership that has lasted for
four decades.4 This volume marks the forty-third publication in our series,
with future volumes currently in production, under revision, or under review.
John was a discussant in the fourth Kuroda conference, on traditions
of meditation in East Asian Buddhism, held in May 1983. He also was an
indispensable presence in a second Dōgen conference, held at both the
Kuroda Institute and California State University, Los Angeles, in October
1983, which brought together three American scholars and four eminent
Japanese colleagues, for whom John was a deft and indefatigable translator
throughout the proceedings; moreover, he not only trans­lated but presented
the paper prepared by Takasaki Jikidō, who was unable to attend.5 The sixth
Kuroda conference, on Buddhist hermeneutics, was held at the Kuroda In-
stitute in 1984, with support from the National Endowment for the Humani-
ties. Although John was unable to attend, he had played a vital role in four
of the first six Kuroda conferences.
At the Institute’s next major event, a greatly expanded conference on
Buddhist soteriology held at UCLA in 1988, John presented a paper on how
encounter dialogue, so characteristic of the “classical” Chan discourse of
the Song dynasty, reframed traditional notions of the Buddhist path to lib-
eration. By this time, the Kuroda Institute had suc­ceeded in establishing
itself at the center of the burgeoning field of East Asian Buddhism, due in
large part to its publications with the University of Hawai‘i Press. Five of its
early conferences had borne fruit in its Studies in East Asian Buddhism

3. The conference papers were subsequently published as Dōgen Studies, edited by William
R. LaFleur (1985).
4. Here I would like to acknowledge the invaluable role that two superb editors at the
press, Stuart Kiang and Patricia Crosby, played in launching, establishing, and building the
series over the course of those forty years, a role that has continued to be played by their
capable successor, Stephanie Chun. The overall success of the series owes much to their dedi-
cated support.
5. Unfortunately, this was the only Kuroda conference out of the first six that did not
make it to publication.
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Foreword xi

series.6 It had also published its first monograph by a single author, John’s
landmark study The Northern School and the Formation of Early Ch’an Buddhism
(1986); on top of which, it had undertaken a second series with the Univer-
sity of Hawai‘i Press, titled Classics in East Asian Buddhism, devoted to the
publication of significant trans­lations.7
The idea for the soteriology conference had first come up in the “what
next?” discussion at the end of the second Kuroda conference, on the
sudden/gradual polarity. It had resurfaced again at the end of the fourth
conference, on traditions of meditation, as well as the sixth conference, on
Buddhist hermeneutics. As a recurring topic in Kuroda board meetings, it
gained traction when Rob Gimello and Robert Buswell, who had both been
instrumental in getting the Kuroda Institute off the ground, proposed or-
ganizing a conference on Buddhist soteriology at UCLA, where Buswell had
just been tenured. This was an opportunity to mount a conference on a
much larger scale, bringing together a wide-ranging group of scholars with
support from new and major sources, and it led to the publication of Paths
to Liberation: The Mārga and Its Transformations in Buddhist Thought, edited by
Gimello and Buswell, in 1992.
This UCLA conference brought to a close the first stage in the develop-
ment of the Kuroda Institute. As the last Kuroda-inspired conference, it
marked a transition to a new mode of operation in which the Institute would
dedicate its main energies to its ongoing publication series. In response to
new disciplinary approaches and areas of research, the Kuroda Institute’s
publications expanded in range over the course of the following years, and
single-authored mono­g raphs came to predominate. As a member of the
Kuroda board, John continued to play an invaluable role in that evolution,
helping to guide the Institute’s activities by reviewing and assessing manu-
scripts for publication, juggling finances to keep book production on track,
and selecting future board members, not to mention a myriad of other tasks.
It is thus with deep appreciation for all of John McRae’s manifold contri­
butions to Kuroda that the Institute publishes this volume.
Peter N. Gregory
Past Executive Director

6. The fifth volume in the series was Buddhist Hermeneutics, edited by Donald S. Lopez,
Jr. (1988).
7. The first volume was The Record of Tung-shan, translated by William F. Powell (1986).
 Preface

At the time of John R. McRae’s untimely death in Bangkok on October 22,

2011, following a sixteen-month struggle with pancreatic cancer, he left behind
a number of unfinished works, most notably a book-manuscript on the Chinese
Chan master Shenhui 神會 (684–758), which included translations of Shen-
hui’s writings and recorded lectures. McRae had been working on Shenhui
off and on since the 1980s, and in 1999, at the prodding of Peter Gregory, he
submitted a complete draft of his book on Shenhui to the board of the Kuroda
Series (of which he was himself a member) to be reviewed for publication.
The volume, entitled “Evangelical Zen: Shen-hui (684–758), the Sudden Teach-
ing, and the Southern School of Chinese Ch’an Buddhism,” received the en-
thusiastic support of the reviewers as well as from his colleagues on the Kuroda
Board, and he was encouraged to ready the manuscript for publication.
But McRae was not forthcoming with his final revisions. He was a stick-
ler, a perfectionist who felt there were still loose ends to be tied up. At the
same time, he was becoming increasingly involved with the Bukkyō Dendō
Kyōkai English translation series, translating five major texts for the series
and serving as Publication Committee Chair for the project from 2006 until
his death in 2011.1 He was also engaged in writing an introductory book on
Chan intended for a lay audience, and the finished book, Seeing through Zen:
Encounter, Transformation, and Genealogy in Chinese Chan Buddhism (2003),
incorporated some of the material from his Shenhui manuscript. His work
on the Shenhui volume seems to have taken a back seat to these other proj-
ects through much of the 2000s.
In the meantime, the hard-copy facsimile of McRae’s 1999 submission
to Kuroda circulated among his colleagues. It was comprised of two parts,
known as the “White Binder” and the “Blue Binder” from the colors of the
three-ring binders used for the original submission. (The White Binder

1. McRae translated the Questions of Mañjuśrī (文殊師利問經, T 468); the Vimalakīrti Sūtra
(維摩詰所說經, T 475); the Śūraṃgama Samādhi Sūtra (佛說首楞嚴三昧經, T 642); Essentials of
the Transmission of Mind (黄檗山斷際禪師傳心法要, T 2012-A); and the Platform Sūtra of the Sixth
Patriarch (六祖大師法寶壇經, T 2008). He was working on Jizang’s Commentary on the Meaning
of the Lotus Sutra (法華義疏, T 1721) at the time of his death.

xiii
xiv Preface

contained McRae’s extensive historical study of Shenhui’s life and work,

while the Blue Binder contained his translations of the Shenhui corpus
along with a number of appendices.) After McRae’s death, we asked his wife,
the eminent Buddhist scholar Jan Nattier, if she might be able to retrieve
the latest version of the Shenhui book manuscript from his hard drive so
that we could finally publish it. It took a lot of fiddling, but we were eventu-
ally able to recover and convert the digital files into a readable format.
The conversion was not, however, easy. McRae was a bit of a computer
geek, always experimenting with new character encoding and software tech-
nologies. He was among the first adopters of personal computers in our
field and was once a proud owner of the first “portable” (or “luggable”)
computer: an Osborne that weighed only 25 pounds. (The Osborne, com-
plete with built-in CRT monitor, was designed to travel under an airplane
seat, which was unprecedented at the time.) Long after outgrowing his
Osborne, McRae continued to keep abreast of the latest character-encoding,
word-processing, and page-layout software. In the days before Unicode, it
took considerable technical skill and ingenuity to manage both Sino-­
Japanese characters and Roman fonts with diacritics in one and the same
file, and McRae experimented with a variety of approaches over the years.
Moreover, he was intent on doing the page layout of his Shenhui volume by
himself. All this meant that the project, which had been gestating over liter-
ally decades, had gone through innumerable digital-file conversions. The
last iteration of his preface to his Shenhui manuscript, recovered from his
computer, gives an idea of the state of the electronic files:

In mid-July 2010, in need of an intellectual change of pace, I chanced upon

a manuscript hidden in a leafy subdivision of my computer’s file system.
Named “000Shenhui.pdf,” it contained a rather mangled draft of the book
now before you. There were other files as well, with extensions leading
back from INDD to RTF to XML to MIF and eventually FM, indicating a
succession of conversion efforts from FrameMaker, that workhorse of
desktop publishing packages abandoned (on the Macintosh) by Adobe, to
the present InDesign format. Most of the intermediate files were garbled
in major ways, with characters such as Ø, √, ¥, and ½ showing up in place
of diacritically marked characters. Somehow, though, the Chinese and
Japanese characters had made it through mostly unscathed.

So while we did manage to recover the files, they were in a version of InDe-
sign that is no longer supported, and utilized a number of file extensions
that are now obsolete. With the help of Alberto Todeschini, we were able
convert the files to MS Word, giving us access to John’s most up-to-date
version of the manuscript.2

2. Among the files we recovered was the following draft of the acknowledgments for the
volume: “The research and translations included in this volume have benefitted from a number
Preface xv

We discussed McRae’s Shenhui project at a meeting of the Kuroda In-

stitute board in the fall of 2014, following which we—James Robson and
Robert Sharf—decided to conduct a cross-country graduate seminar that
would focus on the Shenhui materials recovered from Dunhuang. The
seminar, which used Skype to link our Harvard and Berkeley classrooms,
gave us the opportunity to go through his translations and assess the current
state of the volume. Among other things, the exercise reconfirmed our sense
of the historical significance of the Shenhui corpus. Scholars of Chinese
Buddhism often pay lip service to Shenhui’s role as champion of Huineng
and his Southern Chan, but apart from the pioneering work of Jacques
Gernet that appeared some seventy years ago (1949, 1951) and McRae’s own
articles on the subject (see below), there are few Western-language studies
of the Shenhui materials, much less translations of them into English. This
is due, in part, to the fragmentary state and philological challenges of the
surviving manuscripts.
Our joint graduate seminar also confirmed the quality of McRae’s work
on the subject: his exacting and copiously annotated translations, along with
his critical historical reconstructions. However, we were dismayed to discover
that, at the time of his passing, he had been in the midst of an extensive
rewrite that involved the disassembly of virtually every chapter of the histori-
cal study in the White Binder. In his draft preface to the project, he writes:

Although a lot of work was required merely to make the text readable once
again, I came to enjoy adding to the work of the younger John McRae, the
text’s original author. In particular, I was able to make use of the excellent
new resources now available to us electronically, not only the CBETA and
SAT electronic editions of the Chinese Buddhist canon that have so won-
derfully transformed our field, but the more recent Dharma Drum Bud-
dhist College Buddhist Authority Database Project (authority.dila.edu.tw).
Also, I have re-structured the book somewhat, making an entirely new
chapter out of what had been two appendixes plus other material published
and unpublished.

The new material that he was incorporating is indeed extensive and includes
a newly discovered stele with more precise biographical data on Shenhui,

of sources. I am grateful to have received financial assistance from both the National Endow-
ment for the Humanities of the United States and the Council for Cultural Planning and
Development of the Republic of China; the Council for Cultural Planning and Development
has also provided funds to help defray the costs of publication. Since I effectively stole time
from another project to finish this book, I must also thank the Foundation for Scholarly Ex-
change (Fulbright Foundation) of Taipei for their support. . . . My deep gratitude is due to
Rachel Teck, who found serving as research assistant preferable to enrolling in any of my
courses, so much so that she continued in this role well past her graduation from Cornell.
Finally, my thanks to Jan Nattier, who found the manuscript incomprehensible on first reading
and covered the entirely revised version her first reaction necessitated with blue ink.”
xvi Preface

as well as new editions of the Shenhui documents by Asian scholars. But

McRae was far from finished with his revisions, and the chapters we had at
our disposal were in various states of repair and were littered with his notes
about things to “GET,” “CHECK,” and so on.
In the end we decided it best to set aside the analytical chapters and
focus instead on making his translations of the Shenhui corpus available.
We hired Fedde de Vries, a graduate student at UC Berkeley who had been
a participant in our graduate seminar, to go through the translations, notes,
and bibliography, and ready the translations for publication. (Fedde’s edito-
rial note explains how he handled the textual issues.)
In place of the unfinished historical and analytical chapters in McRae’s
manuscript, we decided to include three of his previously published articles
on Shenhui in this volume. These articles emerged from his ongoing en-
gagement with Shenhui over many years, and cover much of what appears
in the chapters we had to jettison. The first, “Shenhui and the Teaching of
Sudden Enlightenment” (1987), is placed before the translations, as it serves
as a cogent introduction to Shenhui and his writings. The other two essays—
“Religion as Revolution: Hu Shih on Shenhui” (2001); and “Shenhui as
Evangelist: Re-envisioning the Identity of a Chinese Buddhist Monk”
(2002)—are included in the second part of this volume. We hired Guttorm
Gundarsen, a graduate student at Harvard, to convert the files to an MS
Word document, change all of the romanizations of Chinese terms to Pinyin,
add in the Chinese characters for Chinese terms, and, very selectively, update
a few of the footnotes. Finally, we would like to thank Stuart Kiang, who
edited McRae’s initial publications in the Kuroda series, for undertaking
the daunting task of cleaning up the manuscript that had passed through
so many hands.

McRae did his PhD in the Department of Religious Studies at Yale Univer-
sity, under the supervision of Stanley Weinstein (1929–2017). Weinstein was
known for the rigorous philological training he gave to his students, based,
in part, on Japanese models of textual scholarship. It was common for Wein-
stein’s students to conduct their dissertation research in Japan, and McRae
spent several years in Kyoto studying under Yanagida Seizan (1922–2006),
perhaps the most accomplished and influential scholar of Chan and Zen in
the twentieth century.
Yanagida worked in multiple areas of Chan and Zen scholarship, but
his most important contribution may have been his work on the Dunhuang
manuscripts related to the emergence of the Chan tradition in the seventh
and eighth centuries. This large body of materials constitutes an enormous
puzzle: the Sitz im Leben of many of the documents is uncertain, as the au-
thorship, place, and date of composition are often missing or patently spu-
rious; these uncertainties contribute to the challenges in deciphering these
often-cryptic texts. Through years of meticulous detective work, Yanagida
Preface xvii

was able to organize the pieces of the puzzle into a coherent picture, rewrit-
ing the early history of Chan in the process.
McRae’s PhD dissertation built upon Yanagida’s work. The dissertation
focused on the Dunhuang manuscripts associated with “East Mountain” or
“Northern school” figures such as Daoxin (580–651), Hongren (606–674),
Shenxiu (606?-706), and Puji (651–739). Prior to the discovery of the Dun-
huang manuscripts in the early twentieth century, the writings of these
masters had been all but lost to history, and their teachings known only
through the voices of their detractors, namely, the professed heirs of
Huineng’s “Southern school.” As such, later Chan writings—the “vulgate”
Chan canon that emerged in the Song and was passed down to the present
day—would denigrate the Northern teachings as “gradualist” and inferior
to the “sudden” teachings of Southern Chan.
McRae’s meticulous analysis of the Northern school materials reveals
the distortions and biases of the received tradition. To pick a single example,
McRae takes to task the standard narrative that Northern teachers advo-
cated a gradual path—that they viewed Buddhist practice as constituting a
step-by-step ascent toward awakening. Instead, McRae shows that Northern
teachers taught something closer to “constant practice”—an approach that
anticipates later Sōtō Zen teachings in Japan. For the Northern school, Chan
practice was not a means to achieving liberation so much as a moment-to-
moment re-cognition and affirmation of what is already the case, that is, of
one’s abiding bodhi.
McRae revised and published his dissertation under the title The North-
ern School and the Formation of Early Ch’an Buddhism (1986), and to this day
the book remains one of the most comprehensive, authoritative, and signifi-
cant studies of early Chan. But while the Northern lineage masters were
undoubtedly key players in the rise of Chan, a full reconstruction of early
Chan history must take into consideration the contributions of rival lineages
as well. One such lineage is the Oxhead tradition, which, according to Yana­
gida, may have played a role in mediating the debates between Northern
and Southern masters. (Yanagida suggests that the Dunhuang recension of
the Platform Sūtra may have been compiled and edited by someone affiliated
with the Oxhead line.) McRae completed a detailed analysis of the Oxhead
materials while he was still at work on his dissertation; entitled “The Ox-Head
School of Chinese Ch’an Buddhism: From Early Ch’an to the Golden Age,”
it appeared as a chapter in the first volume in the Kuroda Institute’s Studies
in East Asian Buddhism series, Studies in Ch’an and Hua-yen, edited by Robert
M. Gimello and Peter N. Gregory (1983). McRae was also interested in the
Hongzhou lineage associated with Mazu Daoyi (708–788); Mazu and his
successors may have been instrumental in the development of Chan “en-
counter dialogue,” a genre that would come to epitomize Chan wisdom later
on. While still a student, McRae had published a translation of Yanagida’s
article, “The ‘Recorded Saying’ Texts of Chinese Ch’an Buddhism,” which
xviii Preface

included a discussion of “encounter dialogue.”3 His own foray into this

­subject—a chapter titled “The Antecedents of Encounter Dialogue in
Chinese Ch’an Buddhism”—appeared in the collection The Kōan: Texts and
Contexts in Zen Buddhism, edited by Steven Heine and Dale S. Wright (2000).
McRae was, in short, interested in a comprehensive reconstruction of
early Chan, in which Northern school, Oxhead, and Hongzhou teachers
would all play major roles. But the narrative would not be complete without
taking into account the contributions of Shenhui; indeed, the problematic
shibboleths that came to be applied to the Northern school originated with
Shenhui’s critique, and arguably were amplified in the modern period
through the early work on the Shenhui corpus by Hu Shih in China and
D. T. Suzuki in Japan. It was only natural that McRae would turn his atten-
tions to Shenhui following the publication of his Northern School tome. Indeed,
he envisioned producing a trilogy on early Chan, in which his Northern School
book would be the first volume, his book on Shenhui the second, and an
unrealized volume on Mazu and the Hongzhou school the third.

Shenhui is renowned as a leading disciple and champion of Huineng and

his Southern school; some scholars believe that Shenhui may have been in-
strumental in the compilation of the Platform Sūtra, a text designed in part
to legitimize Huineng’s status as Sixth Patriarch. But despite Shenhui’s his-
torical importance, his own lineage seems to have died out rather quickly,
and records of his teachings had been few and far between until the discov-
ery of the Dunhuang materials.
By placing the Dunhuang texts alongside other historical sources such
as the writings of Zongmi (780–841), scholars have been able to reconstruct
a general outline of Shenhui’s life. Some seven years after his teacher
Huineng’s death in 720, Shenhui moved to Nanyang, near his birthplace
and not far from the eastern capital Luoyang. Sometime around 732 he
began to attack the Northern school teachers in what are called the Huatai
debates. It was here that Shenhui emerged as a passionate and strident “evan-
gelist” (to use the term McRae came to favor) for the Southern school. In
745, Shenhui moved to the Heze si in Luoyang, which gave him a larger and
more politically powerful audience for his attacks on Northern lineage teach-
ers. In 753, he was banished from Luoyang, apparently at the behest of
Northern school partisans, and in the following year he took up residence
in the Kaiyuan si in Jingzhou. In 755, with the breakout of the An Lushan
rebellion, he was allowed back to the capital, where he assisted in a govern-
ment campaign to raise much-needed funds to suppress the rebellion via
the sale of monastic ordination certificates. (The possession of such a cer-
tificate rendered the holder exempt from taxes and corvée labor.) Shenhui
died in 758 at the Kaiyuan si.

3. The translation appeared in Lai and Lancaster, Early Ch’an in China and Tibet,
183–205.
Preface xix

Of course, Shenhui is best known as an indefatigable evangelist—McRae

also suggests using the term “apostle”—for Huineng’s distinctive approach
to Chan. The rubrics of “Southern versus Northern” and “sudden versus
gradual,” seem to have been concocted by Shenhui (or those in his circle)
as rhetorical devices intended to elevate the teachings of his own lineage at
the expense of his rivals. His success in this somewhat quixotic quest speaks
to his abilities as a charismatic preacher who could appeal to a broad audi-
ence. But McRae’s use of “evangelist” is intended to capture something more
than Shenhui’s skill as a public speaker; Shenhui’s “crusade” (also a term
used by McRae) sought to induce an immediate “transformative experience”
in his rapt audience—an experience of bodhicitta (“mind of awakening”) in
the here and now. His skills as a proselytizer bringing the “good news” to
the masses were duly recognized and exploited by the imperial authorities,
who put those skills to work to raise government funds.
As mentioned above, McRae’s research reveals the degree to which the
received view of the Northern school teachings is a fiction created by Shenhui
to score rhetorical points; McRae argues that Northern and Southern teach-
ings may have been closer to each another than the canonical narrative
would have us believe. He also argues that Shenhui was not particularly ef-
fective or even active as a meditation teacher or spiritual mentor; according
to historical documents, Shenhui’s own students were few and did not leave
much of a legacy. Be that as it may, McRae credits Shenhui for his outsized
role in shaping what would later emerge as “classical Chan,” including (1)
the Chan rhetoric of “suddenness”; (2) the rise of sectarian consciousness;
(3) the evolution of “transmission of the lamp” ideology; (4) the adoption
of the “rule of rhetorical purity”; and (5) the rise of a colloquial style of Chan
dialogue.
McRae was attracted to Shenhui for the important part he played in the
rise of Chan, both institutionally (in securing Huineng’s lineage as the “or-
thodox” one), and doctrinally (in championing the Perfection of Wisdom
literature and the rhetoric of suddenness). But in working on Shenhui over
many years, McRae seems to have grown disheartened with Shenhui, notably
with his overweening evangelism, and his shrill and self-aggrandizing tirades
against rival teachers. The parallel McRae drew to the American “crusader”
Billy Graham (1918–2018) was not intended to reflect well on Shenhui.
Among other things, both Shenhui and Graham were known for consorting
with powerful politicians, raising the specter of an unhealthy if not unholy
alliance between religion and politics.
McRae was, accordingly, somewhat skeptical about the more glowing
image of Shenhui left by Hu Shih and perpetuated by D. T. Suzuki, that is, of
Shenhui as an inspired revolutionary who initiated a veritable “ ‘Chinese re-
naissance’ in which superstition and ritual were rejected in favor of a native
Sinitic proto-rationalism.”4 While McRae deemed this evaluation to be “­entirely

4. From the essay “Shenhui as Evangelist,” included in this volume.

xx Preface

wrong,” he was, at the same time, acutely aware that Hu Shih’s reading of
Shenhui reflected Hu Shih’s own time, place, and intellectual commitments.
That is, McRae was cognizant that he was himself subject to the same cri-
tique—that he too could not avoid imposing his own assumptions and pre-
conceptions on his picture of Shenhui, including, perhaps, a certain distaste
for more strident strands of contemporary evangelical Christianity.
While this volume is not exactly the book on Shenhui that McRae in-
tended, the translations and historical essays collected here do represent
his sustained efforts over many years to breath some life into Shenhui. In
the end, McRae’s stated hope was that making Shenhui’s surviving writings
accessible through his carefully annotated English translations would allow
readers to form their own opinions. We are now happy to make these trans-
lations, together with his previously published articles on Shenhui, more
widely available.

The Translations
1. Platform Sermon
This work contains a clear statement of Shenhui’s ideas about the
sudden teaching, including a criticism of improper attitudes toward
meditation practice stated without explicit sectarian identification. It
probably derives from the years 720–730, while Shenhui was living in
Nanyang.
2. Definition of the Truth
This work is an overtly polemical text, with somewhat limited doctri-
nal sophistication, containing Shenhui’s attack on the so-called
Northern school. It is based on public sermons (actually dramatically
staged debates) that Shenhui gave in 730, 731, and 732, although the
text was edited sometime during 744–749 and was further augmented
either at the very end of Shenhui’s life or after his death.
3. Miscellaneous Dialogues
There are several quite different versions of this text, apparently
edited after Shenhui’s death. These texts contain various dialogues
from throughout his career, many but not all of which parallel
material in his other texts (particularly the Northern school cri-
tiques). This is a rich but sometimes intractable resource.
4. Verses on the Five Watches
This title is used for two or three similar compositions that circulated
under Shenhui’s name, including Cycle of the Five Watches of the Heze
[Temple] Reverend [Shenhui] and Cycle of Five Watches on the Determination
of the False and True in the Southern School, in which his ideas are
presented in a popular song format. They are interesting primarily
for their sociological implications, although they do display one or
two points of doctrinal interest.
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