This is the third book from Albert Welter in recent years, each revolving around issues concerning the formation of mature Chan 禪 (Jpn.: Zen) in Five-dynasties 五代 and early-Song 宋 China (tenth to twelfth centuries). In Yongming Yanshou's Conception of Chan in the Zongjing Lu, Welter turns to the Chan persona of Yongming Yanshou 永明延壽 (904–976). Yanshou was a highly prominent Buddhist master in the prosperous Wuyue 吳越 kingdom (907–978), and is recognized as a third-generation descendant in the Fayan 法眼 Chan lineage. Nevertheless, Yanshou occupies a somewhat odd position in the Chan school: universally recognized as a major thinker and prolific writer and yet in many quarters not fully accepted as a true Chan master.

Welter has previously written a book about Yanshou and his Wanshan tonggui ji 萬善同歸集 (“Treatise on the Common End of Myriad Good Deeds”), which was focused on an analysis of Yanshou's Pure Land thought.Footnote ¹ Here Welter concludes that Yanshou in the Wanshan tonggui ji was not primarily concerned with a synthesis between Pure Land and Chan but rather wanted to promote a non-sectarian, inclusive approach to Buddhism. It was only later that Yanshou was appropriated as a Pure Land Patriarch. But because of this label and because of his emphasis on the importance of scripture Yanshou came to be viewed with suspicion (especially in Japanese Zen), a suspicion that has been carried on into modern scholarship.

In Yongming Yanshou's Conception of Chan, Albert Welter focuses on Yanshou's magnum opus, the hundred-fascicle Zongjing lu 宗鏡錄 (the “Records of the Source-Mirror”). Welter wants to make us aware of the importance of the Zongjing lu and of Yanshou's Chan thought in general, both of which, he points out, scholars have largely overlooked or failed to take seriously. Welter's book very successfully shows how a study of Yanshou's understanding of Chan can tell us much about the formation of Chan ideology in the tenth century and demonstrates how the Zongjing lu, with its many quotes from Chan masters, indeed ought to be a major source for our understanding of pre-Song Chan history. Welter is quick to point out that his book is only a beginning in the process of better understanding Yanshou and his contributions, but Yongming Yanshou's Conception of Chan will certainly be a crucial starting point for anyone who wants to pursue this quest further.

The book consists of six chapters, with an appended full translation of the first fascicle of the Zongjing lu. The first chapter, “Yongming Yanshou and the Complexities of Chan Identity,” examines hagiographical records of Yanshou's life. Welter's purpose here is not to discover the “real” Yanshou, but rather to give a contextualized overview of the different roles hagiographers have assigned to Yanshou over time. Chapter 2, “Revealing the Implicit Truth: Yongming Yanshou's Notion of Zong in the Zongjing Lu,” presents Yongming Yanshou as a major representative of “Chan of words and letters” (wenzi chan 文字禪). Welter argues that to Yanshou, Chan and scriptural Buddhism are two aspects of a single unity, working in consort with each other. Yanshou employs the concept of zong 宗 to establish his own identity as someone grounded in the scholastic Buddhist tradition, and a member of the Chan lineage. Thus, to Yanshou, zong is the “implicit truth” of the entire Buddhist tradition, but also refers to the lineage claims that underpin the identity of the Chan school. In Chapter 3, “Establishing the Chan Zong: Yanshou's Notion of Chan in the Zongjing Lu,” Welter further examines Yanshou's understanding of Chan and its relationship to “words and letters.” Yanshou argued that there were no contradictions between studying the words of the Buddhas and patriarchs and direct insight. The great Chan masters of the past all awakened to their own minds through knowledge of the scriptures, and here Yanshou specifically includes famous Chan figures like Mazu Daoyi 馬祖道一 (709–788), who are otherwise generally understood to be scripture-rejecting radicals. This chapter also shows Yanshou as quoting a wide range of Chan masters, some of whom we have little or no other knowledge about. In Chapter 4, “Yanshou and Chan Lineages: An Overview of Chan Sources and Chan Patriarchs in the Zongjing lu,” Welter explores the Chan quotations in the Zongjing lu in great detail and argues that it is an important (and sadly overlooked) source for the study of Chan history. Building on the work of Ishii Shūdō 石井修道, Welter here lists all Chan texts and masters mentioned in the Zongjing lu, identifying them whenever possible and giving cross-references to other sources. This table, and another one listing all references to anonymous past masters (gude 古德, xiande 先德, xiren 昔人, and zushi 祖師), are extremely useful resources for other scholars of Chan who want to explore what the Zongjing lu has to offer. The chapter contains several more tables that illustrate Yanshou's understanding of the Chan lineages, which are also very useful and which show that Yanshou broadly accepted all Chan lineages including those of the Niutou 牛頭 (Oxhead) school and those associated with Northern Chan. Furthermore, Welter argues, Yanshou did not accept lineage claims as the basis of Chan identity and so is more objective in his treatment of lineages than other early authors. Chapter 5, “The Teachings of the Patriarchs: A Study of the Chan Lineage Fragments in the Zongjing lu,” is an another valuable chapter that contains a detailed analysis of a number of the passages attributed to Chan masters in the Zongjing lu. Welter helpfully translates many of these passages, which are also accompanied by the original Chinese text (Oxford University Press is to be commended for including Chinese characters in the main body of the book). Welter demonstrates how many of the Zongjing lu's quotations from Chan masters are different in subtle or not-so-subtle ways from other sources, and how some are unique to the Zongjing lu. Again, Yanshou was eager to show that the Chan masters he quoted did not see scriptural study as incompatible with Chan. Importantly, Yanshou's quotations from Mazu and other Hongzhou masters further press the case made by several modern scholars that the Hongzhou masters initially may not have been understood to be as radical as they later came to be portrayed. Yanshou likely saw himself as countering a growing trend to reinterpret Mazu and his disciples as radical iconoclasts, but it would seem that his own position on the harmony between scriptures and Chan was not such an outlying one in the tenth century. Chapter 6, “The Buddhist School of Principle and the Early Song Intellectual Terrain,” proposes a new typology of Song-Ming intellectual life that would help free our study of it from the rigid and distorting categories of “Confucianism” and “Buddhism.” Welter partly achieves this by casting Yanshou as an advocate of a Buddhist School of Principle. This is an interesting suggestion and one can only agree with Welter's dissatisfaction with the constraining framework that strictly separates Buddhist and Confucian thought, and reduces Buddhism to Linji Chan. Nevertheless, the chapter seems a bit out of place in the book, since it is only partially about Yanshou.

The final section of the book is a translation of fascicle 1 of the Zongjing lu with the original Chinese text included. It is a great contribution to have this important fascicle of Yanshou's work available in English, and Welter's translation is a very readable and skillful rendition of the often difficult Chinese text.

Overall, Welter makes a strong case for why we should pay attention to Yanshou and the Zongjing lu. Most Chan scholars have not been fully aware of the richness of the Chan material in the Zongjing lu, but we can now no longer claim ignorance of the importance of this work. In this connection, one might have wished that Welter had included more discussion of the Zongjing lu as a whole. It would have been interesting and helpful to get a more complete overview of what its 100 fascicles contain.

One might also question the term “syncretism” that Welter often uses in connection with the thought of Yanshou and others like him. As Welter's work shows, all indications are that Yanshou's understanding of Chan as being in harmony with scriptural study was quite uncontroversial in his time, even as voices promoting a more radical stance were beginning to be heard. To label Yanshou's approach syncretic implies that he was adding something to an existing “pure” Chan, and seems contradictory to a central argument in the book.

In any case, with Yongming Yanshou's Conception of Chan Welter has performed a great service to the field, and his impassioned and well-argued plea for giving Yanshou a major role should reverberate through the world of Chan studies.