Alan Cole's Fathering Your Father offers a provocative rereading of a “text family” associated with the construction of early Chan Buddhist lineages during the Tang dynasty. Across six chapters, the book traces the collective manufacture of a literary tradition in which the claim to Chan dharma transmission figured as the central theme. Unlike many books on the early history of Chan, Fathering Your Father is not characterized by excessive evidential study of Dunhuang manuscripts and engagement with the meticulous works of Chinese and Japanese scholars. Rather, Cole's strength lies in his sensitivity to larger issues in the history of religion and postmodern thought. His sophisticated reading of texts, influenced by thinkers such as Nietzsche, Lacan, and Bourdieu, undoubtedly enriches the academic discourse on the history of Chan.
As the subtitle of his book suggests, Cole is deeply skeptical of the traditional assumption that early Chan texts offer a more or less reliable record of historical transmission and of genuine spiritual insight. Although Chan scholars have long adopted a critical and skeptical stance toward these early texts, Cole pushes this stance to an extreme. He upholds his own approach of “close reading” as the basis for a paradigm shift. In his view, early Chan texts teem with a blatant, self-interested agenda to promote the legitimacy of the lineages to which their authors belong. He argues that these texts basically do not contain any historical event of “transmission,” be it of the lineage or of enlightenment experience. This type of Chan literature therefore has nothing to do with spiritual revolutions such as antinomianism or novel meditation methods. Instead, early Chan teachers vied, through textual manipulation, to make themselves “Chinese Buddhas” and to own the “total tradition” (p. 6). As a consequence, it would be futile to read these texts as accurate history or as spiritual texts that aid readers to attain the enlightenment experience.
Chapter 1 introduces Cole's scholarly agenda and method. He gives an overview of previous scholarship and situates his work as a further development of these studies. Cole starts his excursion through Chan texts in chapter 2, which actually focuses on two non-Chan figures: Xinxing, the leader of the persecuted Three Level Movement, and Zhiyi, the Tiantai master. Although these two monks never claimed to be Chan teachers, Cole regards their Buddha-making strategies as important precedents to similar strategies in early Chan texts. Xinxing's attempt was not entirely effective, but Zhiyi was successfully promoted as a Buddha figure by his disciple Guanding. In Cole's opinion, their efforts greatly inspired the creation of early Chan texts. Chapter 3 analyzes the Shaolin stele written for the early Chan master Faru, who might be the first to have asserted his legitimacy by tracing a lineage directly from Bodhidharma. According to Cole, the stele's combination of this lineage claim with the rhetoric of sudden enlightenment made it a model for later Chan Buddhist genealogies. Faru's claim was further developed, or “stolen,” by Du Fei's Record of the Transmission of the Dharma Jewel (Chuanfabao ji), the subject of chapter 4. Rejecting Faru's claim to “total history,” Du Fei substituted Faru with Shenxiu and his disciple Puji. Chapter 5 demonstrates that Jingjue's History of the Masters and Disciples of the Lankāvatāra (Lengqie shizi ji) acknowledges Shenxiu as the successor to Hongren, but that Jingjue wanted to elevate his own teacher Xuanze as the true heir of the teaching.
The number of available Dunhuang sources about Shenhui, and the copious scholarship on Shenhui by Hu Shi, John McRae, and Jacques Gernet, require that Cole dedicate substantial attention to this important Chan figure, and his extensive discussion of Shenhui in chapter 6 makes important contributions to our understanding of early Chan history. Cole demonstrates that the debate between Shenhui and Chongyuan establishes the principle of a single transmission from Bodhidharma to Huineng, and that it denounces both Shenxiu and his disciple Puji for representing only the Northern School. Cole correctly points out that, although Shenhui frequently consults scriptures during the debate, he never quotes his teacher Huineng or the Platform Sutra.
In Fathering Your Father, Cole shows what riches may be gained by applying a sophisticated reading strategy to a group of texts that share generic conventions and an ideological theme. To this reviewer, however, Cole's reading strategy seems one-dimensional, and sometimes reductionist. By using an absolute binary to judge the “fictional” nature of Chan lineages—the lineage claims are either historically real or otherwise completely fabricated and thus useless for spiritual purposes—Cole may have created too narrow a definition of “fabrication.”
In sum, Cole's book issues an invigorating invitation to refamiliarize ourselves with these early Chan texts. Although I have reservations about its methodology, I find the book well written and entirely coherent. Its radical position reminds me of the Christ myth theory, which denies completely the historical existence of Jesus of Nazareth and dismisses all legends associated with Jesus. Cole's argument might be described as the Chan myth theory in the history of Chinese religion.
