The History of Buddhist Thought c27.23

c27.23

The mystical side of Yogāchāra was emphasized by the teaching of the Zen school,² which was brought to China from south India by Bodhidharma in the sixth century. Suzuki has shown ³ that the school held their teaching to be contained in the Laṅkāvatāra-sūtra, but their tendency was to reject any external doctrinal statement as authority. Their whole method and system was meditation (dhyāna). As Ma-tsu, a pupil of Bodhidharma, said, “O monks, when you each believe that you yourself are the Buddha, your mind is no other than the Buddha-mind. The object of Bodhidharma who came from Southern India to this Middle Kingdom was to personally transmit and propagate the supreme law of One Mind by which we are all to be awakened to the truth.”¹ That is all the teaching, and there remains hardly anything in the system characteristic of Buddhism. Suzuki says that it “grew up as a native product of Chinese genius”. It reached Japan as late as the twelfth century.