Abstract

One of the results of the secularization of the Chan thought in the Qing period was that the center of Chan learning shifted from the Buddhists to the scholars and the laymen, with Chan monks increasingly devoid of talent. Of the 104 Qing-dynasty Chan people recorded in the Xichan pian (Section on the Practitioners of Chan) in the Xin xugaoseng zhuan (New Continued Lives of Eminent Monks), with the exception of famous monks whose fame had moved high officials before the time of Yongzheng, the Chan monks of the end of the Qing were as rare as stars at dawn, such as the Chan person, the Ascetic Bazhi (Eight Fingers) Jing’an, who was a rarity of rarities; the second were the few Chan people in the lineage-institution who had ambition and knowledge. Both made efforts to reform Chan thought and to speed up the process of the secularization of the Chan School and expressed a fresh consciousness of social participation. Even though the two great authorities and the four great venerable elders made no great contributions to the development of Chan thought, their self-aware participatory spirit also had a certain demonstrative function for the later humanistic Buddhist learning and the human-world Buddhism.