David Hinton, China Root: Taoism, Chan, and Original Zen. (Shamblhala Press, 2020).
David Hinton (b. 1954) is a poet and translator of Chinese tradition who sees Taoism as the framework, the very umbrella which encompasses all Chinese philosophy including Confucianism. In China Root, he "beautifully makes clear our participation in generative cosmos, a constantly manifesting, burgeoning Presence, even while it never ceases to be a primordial Absence." According to Hinton, the Original Zen requires of us to dismantle all of our experience and learning (knowledge, concepts, categories, and our inherited tradition) since childhood, not to mention any discipline or specialized role which we hope to play in society. In a yang-dominated world (macho, competitive, arms race), we need to balance it out with a yin (feminine) dimension, he says.
This innate longing for ultimate revelation of presence amid absence which Hinton talks about is also akin to Christianity as expressed in one of the stanzas of the hymn "Spirit of God." It asks (albeit in opposition to the Original Zen) for "no dream, no prophet ecstasy, no sudden rending of the veil of clay, no angel visitant, no opening sky, but take the dimness of my soul away." Hinton says that at the beginning of Chinese philosophy, there was a tonging for a primal past. And indeed, like the / Ching, the Tao Te Ching seems to have been largely constructed from fragments handed down in an oral tradition. As such, it represents a return to the earliest levels of proto-Chinese culture: to the Paleolithic (second Stone age), it seems, where the empirical cosmos was recognized as female in its fundamental nature.
The high Chinese civilization, for all its complexity and sophistication, never forgot its origin in a gynocentric (female) primitive. Ch'an is integral to that cultural complex, and only when it's seen this way can it (or contemporary Zen) really be understood. Americans who embrace Zen generally see this tradition as a stream of Buddhism that began in India, passed through China (with some significant developments), then through Japan (where it became known as Zen, the Japanese pronunciation for the Ch'an ideogram, and developed further), and then twelve centuries later passed on to America, where the tradition is primarily shaped by its Japanese antecedents. In short, when Buddhism arrived in China in the first century CE, ii was reshaped by Taoism and went to Japan where it became known as Zen, but oblivious of all its Chinese antecedents.
Hinton's Original Zen resonates well with Harold D. Roth's Original Tao: Inward Training (Nei-yeh,). (Columbia University Press, 1999). Roth makes good use of scholars of mysticism such Meister Eckhardt's forgetting, seen as "an intentional dropping of desires, ideas, conceptual forms (including those of one's tradition), sensations, imagery, and so on. The end result of this process is a content-less mystical experience in which constructs of tradition are transcended." As the Nei-yeh puts it, "sweep away" (ch'u) your own words and ideas and the mental constructs of your experience, for, once fixated, they come between your spiritual self and the cosmos. Roth suggests that such obstruction constitutes an "idolatry" of words. In some sense, by placing more importance on imagination (intuition) than knowledge (cognition), this reality of inspiration undergirds creative expression. This is what is essentially meant by Hinton when he speaks about the Original Zen.
I myself find what the Original Zen requires of us quite impossible to carry out, because all these constellation of forces do shape our identity one way or another. The most we can do is not to absolutize them, by holding them tentatively. Exploring other cultures by intent while holding onto our own, we may find the process enriching.
- Franklin J. Woo