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Seeing Through Zen: Encounter, Transformation, and Genealogy in Chinese Chan Buddhism. By McRae, John Robert. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2003. Pp xx + 204. $19.95. The title of John McRae’s Seeing Through Zen works on at least two levels. The title explains that the book will allow the reader to see through the eyes of historical people in the Chan (Japanese: Zen) Buddhist tradition in order to understand better their texts, communities, and practices. Simultaneously, the book also encourages the reader to see through the rhetoric of the Chan tradition’s romanticized self-understanding toward constructing a more accurate history of Chinese Chan Buddhism. McRae engages Chan from its earliest appearance supposedly slightly before the Tang Dynasty (581-906) to its heyday in the Song Dynasty (960-1279). He argues that modern historians and practitioners of Chan have merely replicated the history that the Chan Buddhist community created for itself in the Song Dynasty. McRae’s understands this history as largely imagined, proposing a more “journalistically accurate” history for Chan as well as piecing together how such a history came to be imagined in the Song in the first place. Instead of portraying Chan as a ‘teaching’ passed on by individual patriarchs, McRae understands Chan practices, rhetoric, social institutions, and charismatic individuals as occupying and evolving within historical “phases.” With McRae’s corrective, the Song is seen no longer as Chan’s period of stagnation or decline but as one of great vitality wherein Chan communities invented the narrative of its rise and flourishing and supposed present collapse. As a result, McRae can discuss the intricacies of doctrinal and ritual formations, the emergence of “dueling” (14) factions that define themselves through constructions of Others, the layers of myth stacked upon one another regarding the seminal “heroes” of the tradition, and Chan Buddhism’s place(s) in the nexus of Chinese societies and economies. As a post-modern corrective to overly simplified presentations of the history of Chinese Buddhism, Seeing Through Zen argues against the historian’s tendency to consider histories as either entirely true or fallacious to varying degrees: McRae’s “first” rule that “It’s not true, and therefore it’s more important” (xix) indicates that while the fictions and inaccuracies collected in Song histories of the Tang certainly misrepresent Chan in the Tang, they certainly represent a self-understanding of Chan in the Song. In proper historical context, the story of the second Chinese Chan patriarch Huike (ca. 485 to ca. 555) cutting off his arm to get the attention of the first Chinese (and traditionally the twenty-eighth Indian) Chan Patriarch Bodhidharma (d. ca. 530) is rendered a useful hagiographical fiction – the story is told by Song Dynasty monks to raise funds, impress would-be converts, and inspire novices to try harder. This seems a “middle way” reading of the material which appropriately does not relegate this ‘event’ either to the realm of the scientifically implausible or that of the wholly miraculous. While I’ve suggested some “crossover audiences” which could gain from reading this book, the most obvious would be scholars in Buddhist Studies and in East Asian Religions. Chapters of the book could also stand alone as appropriate readings for survey courses at the graduate or undergraduate level. At the very least, McRae’s argument should remind every kind of historian to keep herself open to the possibilities and necessity of “seeing through” historical religious traditions to get a better idea of what she is looking at.

2022-10-26 03:23