From “Pointing Straight to the Human Mind” to “Pointing Round to the Human Mind”

Today the Zen school is thought of as having been founded, in China, through the efforts of Bodhidharma. Later generations of Zen practitioners, however, going back far beyond the First Patriarch Bodhidharma, sought the sect’s deeper origins in the Buddha himself. According to a legend found in various texts,1 at the end of his life the Buddha, giving up on teaching by means of words, presented his disciples instead with the sight of a single flower taken to hand. None of them could understand what this signified, but there was one, Mahākāśyapa, who alone understood and smiled subtly. This “subtle smile at the plucked flower” (nenge-mishō 拈華微笑) was taken to be the origin of Zen. Its essence was in “mind-to-mind transmission” (ishin-denshin 以心伝心)—transmission beyond the bounds of words—and in “non-elevation of writing” (furyū-monji 不立文字)— the refusal to invest any text with ultimate authority. The foundational teachings of Bodhidharma in turn were encapsulated in the Buddhist slogan “pointing straight to the human mind, one sees its nature and becomes a Buddha” (jikishi ninshin, kenshō jōbutsu 直指人心, 見性成仏), meaning essentially that, through a direct demonstration of the human mind’s identity with the Buddha’s Mind, one comes to see one’s own buddha-nature, realizing thereby that one is, already, a buddha oneself. Stories resembling the above can be found in several different sutras. For instance, in the Ru bu’er famen ben 入不二法門品 (“Grasping the Teaching of Non-Duality”) chapter of the Vimalakīrti-nirdeśa Sutra (Ch. Weimo-jing 維摩経, Jp.