Treatise on No-Mind

When D. T. Suzuki, the Japanese writer who was bringing Zen to Western readers, published his Essays in Zen Buddhism in 1927, an anonymous reviewer in the Times Literary Supplement faulted him for ignoring the Chan manuscripts recently recovered from the sealed cave library at Dunhuang. The reviewer was Arthur Waley, though Suzuki believed it was the Chinese scholar Hu Shih. Spurred by the criticism, Suzuki turned to the Dunhuang texts, and this dialogue, copied into a small notebook now in London, was probably the first of those texts he put into English. Tradition ascribes it to Bodhidharma, as the manuscript's first line does, and modern scholars doubt that he wrote it. Yabuki Keiki, the pioneer of Dunhuang Chan studies who first published photographs of the notebook, ruled him out in 1933 on its quotations and style, and Sekiguchi Shindai argued in 1952 that it came from the same hand as the writings of Niutou Farong, founder of the Oxhead line of Chan. Its opening admits its device: the highest truth has no words, so two speakers are set up to discuss no-mind. A disciple asks whether the teacher has a mind, is told he has none, and objects that someone must still be doing the seeing and hearing. The answer is that seeing and hearing are themselves no-mind; there is no no-mind apart from them, and it is not the mindlessness of wood or stone but the true mind. The disciple presses on through sin, merit and rebirth until he suddenly awakens and bows. Suzuki went on to make wuxin, no-mind, the core of his account of Zen, and in lectures published in 1939 he named it among the things that set Eastern thought apart from Western. Urs App published the first complete English translation in 1995.