The Busless Bus

Chàn fascinates me. Founded in China during the 6th century CE, it's the parent tradition to the three current national schools of Buddhist dhyana practice – Seon, Thiền, and Zen – as well as to China's own recently reconstituted Chàn movement. Every time I dip into these waters, I find new challenges to my own assumptions and to those that contemporary gatekeepers insist are fundamental to Zen. It's a deeper and more braided source of these than anything else I've found except the historical Buddha and primordial Buddhist practice models.

Case in point: I lately learned that the early Chinese chronicles sometimes affixed the label "One Vehicle School" to the amorphous movement that would eventually coalesce into Chàn. This in reference to the Buddhist concept of ekayāna, a Sanskrit term that also translates as "one path".

Seems shockingly doctrinaire for a loose affiliation of fellow-travellers, scattered throughout the then-existing Chinese Buddhist denominations, whose defining practice was to sit on their backside and cast off delusion.

Until you realise that their "One Vehicle" has rather a lot of seats.

Specifically, it has all of the seats.

For the essential tenet here springs from the Buddha's own teaching that we all eventually attain enlightenment, whether in this life or another. It therefore follows that all paths lead to the summit.

And therefore all paths are valid.

And therefore condemnation of others' practice is not.

Ekayāna doesn't get much ink in the Buddhist press these days, for reasons any incisive student of religion can grasp. As comforting as it is – we all make it through one day, regardless of the errors that occasionally set us back a thousand years – One Path is a lousy business model.

How can you profit, in gold or glory, if all you're selling is something folks can get for free somewhere else?

But this early doctrine of proto-Chàn does tend to explain all those ancient accounts of illiterate hermits coming down off the mountain and besting the local master – and also the continuing Zen strain of "you're not the boss of me" that current-day teachers' pets so haughtily deride.

As a hermit, I might be expected to cleave to the ekayāna viewpoint myself, and of course it has always been a keystone of my perception and practice, even though I only just learned the word for it. However, like all truth, it becomes false when distilled into dogma.

It isn't true that all paths are valid, even if we do ultimately survive them. You can build a cage of freedom.

But it's a cogent corrective to the invalid paths the Great Sangha, chasing worldly objectives that have little to do with saving all sentient beings, collectively stumble down.

May we each strive to practice more and preach less.


(Photo of ancient sculpture of Bodhidharma – founder of Chàn – courtesy of Buddha Tooth Relic Temple [Singapore] and Wikimedia Commons.)