When the Buddhist sutras arrived in China, they arrived in a disorderly way. Sutras that had been written over quite a long period, more than 500 years, arrived randomly.
The Chinese needed to make sense of these often contradictory sutras.
One way was that they ordered them chronologically in terms of their content. So, for instance, they would say that the Flower Garland Sutra dated from the earliest period of the Buddha’s teaching because it dealt with his enlightenment experience, and the Nirvana Sutra was the latest sutra, because it dealt with the Buddha’s death.
Another way that they organised material was by breaking it down into different schools. This wasn’t helped by them erroneously thinking that Nagarjuna and his school came after Yogacara, the “consciousness only” school, when it was actually the other way around.
In the ninth century, coming towards the end of the prominence of Tang Dynasty Buddhism in China, Zen [and Hua-yen] Master Zongmi worked out a fourfold classification.
In his classification there were three cryptic teachings and one, as it were, explicit teaching: his teaching, zen teaching. And the classification was done that way because he would say that the meaning of the first three groupings was implicit. What’s meant by that is that the teachings are in a strange sense preparatory, something both destructive and constructive. The destruction is clearing away the whole mass of beliefs and structures which stop us from living fully, but what and how that life is is left implicit.
That’s why he called these teachings ‘teachings of cryptic meaning’.
In his scheme, you firstly have Hinayana which denies the existence of the self, but affirms the existence of dharmas, the constituent parts of reality.
The clustering around the illusory self, which is the cause of so much suffering, is broken. But the constructed world – constructed by our karma, by our culture, by language and so on, remains intact keeping a dualism between person and the world.
So as an antidote to that the second teaching arises,Yogacara, which denies the existence of both self, and dharmas, saying that everything is “mind only”.
But that creates further problems. If the mind exists, we can aspire to various stages of consciousness development. So clinging, attachment – the cause of our difficulties in the first place – can re-emerge in a more subtle form.
To remedy that we then have Nagarjuna, who says that both self and world and mind are all empty, so there’s nothing to cling to (or to seek to grasp).
But the problem which Nagarjuna makes visible is that his solution appears to suggest a sort of nihilism, where nothing matters. This misunderstanding seems to have been endemic ever since, and is often there in our own time whenever Nagarjuna is thought of as being a forerunner of modern philosophy rather than as a religious figure endeavouring to map out a positive life by demolishing what gets in the way of that, the whole conceptual world.
In Zongmi’s scheme this misunderstanding necessitates the fourth teaching, Zen, which is distinctive because it is the only one which is explicit about the purpose of Buddhism. Explicit because it has a clear and stated positive message. Which is the belief in what is variously called ’ or ‘mind ground’ or ‘Buddha potentiality’ or ‘Buddha nature’, amongst others.
Distinctive because for the first time, there is an explicitly stated positive basis for our true life, after all the negative obstructions have been cleared out of the way.
Yet, in Zongmi’s account, the teaching method of Zen teachers is the same as the first three approaches; it’s negative, to clear the conceptual nonsense out of the way. To remove the confusion which stops the student from seeing their true nature.