Sima Daoxin, the Fourth Patriarch of Chan Buddhism

Sima Daoxin was a native of Yongning County (also known as Guangji County; present-day Meichuan Town, Wuxue City, Huanggang Prefecture, Hubei Province). His father, Sima Shen, was the first county magistrate after Yongning was established; the family ancestral home was Wen County, Henan. The county seat at that time lay in present-day Meichuan Town, Wuxue, which was the unavoidable passageway from Qichun County to Huangmei County in the Huanggang region.

Although Daoxin is nominally regarded as the fourth patriarch of Chan Buddhism, later scholars consider him the actual founder of Chinese Chan. Before him, the first patriarch Bodhidharma, the second Huike, and the third Sengcan were all peripatetic Lankavatara masters; because of their eccentric conduct they were viewed with hostility by the government, and Huike was even executed as a heretical monk. It was not until Daoxin that a theoretical system and religious organization centered on awakening were established for Chinese Chan.

Daoxin was also a physician and one of the earliest technologists; legend says he compiled the Bencao Jicheng (Collected Materia Medica), and many of the medicinal herbs used by folk herbalists in present-day Wuxue are associated with him. He is also said to have devised a primitive method of artificial rainmaking: mobilizing the people to burn large quantities of firewood on mountain summits to create smoke that seeded the clouds and brought rain successfully—showing he was no rigid conformist. During his lifetime he was deeply revered by local people.

Daoxin was of lofty moral character and strictly observed the precepts, unmoved by power and rank. Emperor Taizong of the Tang three times summoned him to the capital to receive imperial patronage, and three times he declined; on the last occasion he was even willing to offer his neck for execution rather than go to the emperor's court—though the envoy was, of course, not foolhardy enough actually to kill this renowned elder.

This quality clearly surpassed that of his contemporary the great monk Xuanzang, who clung to the powerful and even used imperial influence to exclude rivals. Daoxin's style was inherited by his disciple, the fifth patriarch Hongren, who likewise repeatedly refused imperial summonses, preferring to live self-sufficiently by farming the fields of Huangmei while teaching his disciples.

Daoxin inaugurated the indigenous Chinese Buddhist ethos of self-reliance—agriculture and Chan practiced together. Monks reclaimed wasteland and became entirely self-supporting, depending neither on lay offerings nor on elite patronage for their livelihood. This material base meant that the Chan school he founded did not need, as other sects did, to deceive believers with myths and fabrications in order to secure offerings; it could focus instead on the pursuit of prajna (wisdom) and samadhi. China's feudal age saw five persecutions of Buddhism, yet Chan survived them all thanks to this self-reliant ethos. The Chan tradition founded by Daoxin exerted a profound influence on Buddhism in China, Japan, and Korea.

As I myself am a native of Wuxue in Huanggang, Hubei—a fellow townsman of Daoxin—I am very familiar with the natural and human environment in which he lived, and I readily identify with the Chan ethos he championed. Confucius said, when the rites are lost, seek them in the countryside. In my hometown, several customs still survive that relate to Daoxin.

For example, in the 1980s and 1990s, many of the hereditary village doctors still practiced as a kind of charitable service. My village is one of the largest clan settlements in our area; within a single village there were several old doctors who sought neither fame nor gain. While supporting themselves by their own labor, they tended the sick and charged nothing for diagnosis or treatment. This medical tradition directly influenced me, now myself a physician. It was the very style Daoxin displayed when he tended the sick. I suspect the local folkways have always been this simple and honest; most of these charitable doctors were not even Buddhists.

Some local dialect words, such as chupo (going out to the fields), have become Buddhist terms. Daoxin was the first to call monastic labor chupo. In both Huangmei and Wuxue, Hubei, many villages still call going to work in the fields chupo, because the Huanggang region is hilly and most farmland consists of terraced fields behind the slopes. Whether Daoxin borrowed the folk term or the folk borrowed the Buddhist term he coined is no longer traceable. I myself lean toward the view that Daoxin adopted the folk expression.

In its beginnings, Chan did not, like other Buddhist schools, delight in displaying spirits and miracles to fool the faithful. Though today's Chan has long since become a hollow shell, utterly unlike the school Daoxin founded—because today's Chan temples have sunk to depending on lay offerings for survival, they are far less pure than in Daoxin's day.

Chan teaches, the very mind is Buddha; apart from the mind there is no Buddha. The mind is the core of the trinity, and no one-practice samadhi is apart from awakening of the mind. Chan in effect rejected the elaborate doctrines of karmic retribution, transmigration, and meritorious practice, greatly simplifying the process of Buddhist cultivation and verification into something direct and decisive that points straight to the human mind.

After the fifth patriarch Hongren, Chan split into two schools: the Southern sudden-awakening school led by Huineng and the Northern gradual-cultivation school led by Shenxiu. Yet their essential tenets all return to the method of calming the mind through samadhi taught by the fourth patriarch, Sima Daoxin. During Daoxin's lifetime he already had more than five hundred monks and disciples living with him; by the time of Hongren, the Chan following had grown to over a thousand.

Hongren later moved from Twin-Peak Mountain (where the Fourth Patriarch Temple stood) to East Mountain (where the Fifth Patriarch Temple stands). I believe the reason was simply that Chan disciples had grown so numerous that the land around Twin-Peak Mountain was no longer sufficient. At that time a great local landowner in Huangmei was willing to offer a much larger tract of mountain land to Hongren, who established his new monastery there.

Twin-Peak Mountain (also called Po'e Mountain), site of the Fourth Patriarch Temple, and East Mountain, site of the Fifth Patriarch Temple, are not far apart, and I have visited both many times. East Mountain is more imposing than Po'e Mountain and commands a wider area, suitable for building a larger monastery. While he was alive, Daoxin had hoped to build a monastery to preach on Kuang Mountain (present-day Taiping Mountain, Yuchuan Town, Wuxue City, about ten kilometers from Meichuan), not far from his hometown of Meichuan.

Taiping Mountain has long been a place I dream of retiring to in old age, but its elevation is too high to build a monastery that draws close to ordinary people. Locals have a saying, Yijian and Erjian—reach out and touch the sky; Yijian and Erjian are Taiping Mountain's two highest peaks. Even today, the deep forests of Taiping Mountain remain primeval. So in the end Daoxin gave up Taiping Mountain and chose the more accessible Twin-Peak Mountain.

Here Daoxin widely opened up skillful means for Buddhist practice, teaching his disciples not to debate with others nor to read scriptures, but instead to awaken and cultivate within the everyday activities of dressing, eating, dwelling, lying, and moving. The modern revivalist of Chan, Master Jinghui, combined this Chan-of-everyday-life idea with the thought of Humanistic Buddhism to create a distinctive style of Chan practice that has been influential, especially in the Buddhist communities of Hubei and Hebei.

Daoxin's work Rudao Anxin Yao Fangbian Men (Essential Skillful Means for Entering the Way and Calming the Mind) already contains the foundational ideas of Chan. The Platform Sutra, compiled by the sixth patriarch Huineng and his disciple Shenhui, directly inherited Daoxin's samadhi thought. Huineng summed up the true goal of samadhi with the words, being apart from external forms is called Chan; being unperturbed within is called samadhi. This plain idea has completely shed feudal superstition.

I remain especially fond of Chan to this day, perhaps precisely because its Buddhists are comparatively more honest than those of other schools, and speak more like human beings than like heavenly scriptures.