How the Mount Wutai cult stimulated the development of Chinese Chan in southern China at Qingliang monasteries

Abstract

ABSTRACT Despite the legendary role ascribed to Shaolin monastery 少林寺 it is probably not an exaggeration to say that it has been considered sacrosanct within Chinese Chan Buddhist discourse [since at least] the mid-8th century that legitimacy comes from the south, and not the north. Since the tenth century, the rhetoric of the so-called ‘five schools’ has perpetuated peculiarly southern lineages; in practice, both the Linji and Caodong lineages (in China and beyond) propagate stories of celebrated patriarchs against a distinctively southern Chinese backdrop. What are we to make of Chan monasteries or cloisters in Ningbo, Fuzhou Jiangning, and of course, Hongzhou, apparently named to reflect the enduring significance of Mount Wutai 五臺山, a notably northern sacred site? In the first part of this article I outline the less than marginal – or peripheral – role Mount Wutai appears to have played in ‘core’ Chinese Chan Buddhist sources. Then I proceed to explain how four Qingliang monasteries 清涼寺 in southern China attest to the preservation and dissemination of a lineage of masters who supported what looks like a ‘Qingliang cult,’ with a set of distinctive teachings and practices that appears to collapse several longstanding assumptions about what separates Chan from the Teachings in Chinese Buddhism.