The Philosophy of Chinese Moral Education by Zhuran You A.G. Rud & Yingzi Hu

Author:Zhuran You, A.G. Rud & Yingzi Hu
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan US, New York

Hui-neng ’s Approaches to Moral Education

As a Buddhist master, Hui-neng particularly underscored the role of confession (chan-hui) in facilitating Buddhists’ moral self-cultivation. To confess, he noted, was to perceive one’s own faults, which was needed to correct mistakes and follow the right path. While the Chinese character chan denoted a person’s acknowledgment of wrongs done in previous behaviors, the Chinese character hui referred to the determination that he or she would never do the evil deeds again, which was a first step to rectifying one’s delusion s and obtaining serenity of mind. However, confession to Hui-neng was not just a way of obtaining mental relief, but more importantly an approach to nurturing moral conscience in guiding one’s own behavior. Confession should be an integration of action and speech in one’s whole life. No matter how a person prayed or repented before Buddhist statues, he would get nowhere if he would not stop doing evil deeds or thinking about evil ideas.

Heart-to-heart transmission or communication, an esoteric technique in Chan, was Hui-neng ’s most important approach to obtaining sudden-awakening, which simultaneously worked for moral understanding due to the inextricable ties between the two. In contrast to the traditional method of reciting sutras or praying to Buddhist statues, Hui-neng’s approach was dubbed a separate transmission from mind to mind (Hui, 2010). Such a transmission could occur only within the close relationship between a Buddhist master and his disciple. The master usually utilized many ways, mostly one-on-one conversation, to stimulate his disciples to achieve an epiphany. Here, nothing was literally transmitted from Chan master to disciple; rather, enlightenment or Bodhi must be realized by disciples themselves with inspiration from their masters.5 With the spread of Chan Buddhism in East Asia, this heart-to-heart communication became a philosophical method and a teaching/learning approach, not only for moral education and religious teaching but also in the teaching or appreciation of arts, crafts, and literature in Asian culture.

It is noteworthy that Hui-neng ’s approach of heart-to-heart transmission was overwhelmingly dialogical. While engaging in a conversation, master and disciple exchanged witty insights on various topics concerning Chan, and the master usually used a special action—such as a remark or a lion’s roar or even a knock on the disciple’s head with a stick to wake up the disciple spiritually—on the special occasion of a paradoxical argument, which helped the latter suddenly understand all the sources and causes of human suffering, thereby recovering the seed of Buddhahood in the heart. One may compare Chan dialogs with the Socratic method of teaching in the West, which made sense in comparing the master’s role as a midwife. But unlike the Socratic method, which chiefly relied on logic and evidence, the Chan dialogs placed the emphasis on intuition, inspiration, and aesthetic perception, with the result that the process was highly situational. Each witty conversation was unique and could not be repeated.

In fact, the origin of Chan dialog can be partly traced back to the Chinese tradition of pure conversation of the Study of Xuan in the Wei and Jin Dynasties.

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