Chan monastic tea in Medieval China: a deconstruction of Chan-tea culture

Abstract

Tea has been commonly perceived as having a bond with East Asian Chan Buddhist practice, and this bond is well known as “Chan-tea” (chancha 禪茶/ chazen ちゃぜん 茶禅/ seoncha 선차). Scholars have constantly traced Chan-tea connections back to medieval China, however, recent historical reflections on modern Japanese discourse on Chan-tea raised the possibility of a modern construction.

This thesis deconstructs the Chan-tea connections and further investigates the multiple functions of tea in medieval Chinese (which collectively refers to Tang, Song and Yuan dynasty) Chan Buddhism from the perspectives of tea rituals and tea references in Chan hagiographies. It embeds the analysis of tea use in a Chan monastic ritual system reconstructed by the thesis based on rules of purity (qinggui 清 規). It contends that tea along with other monastic diets are permutated with other basic ritual units including prostrations, directions, drinks, and instruments, to efficiently distinguish monastic ranks and the relation of host and guest. Besides, this thesis analyses the use of tea in hagiographies of different Chan lineages and argues that only the Hongzhou and Linji lineages employed tea metaphors as an instrumental means for Buddhist awakening, while other Chan lineages hardly viewed tea with much significance in their hagiographies. Moreover, non-Chan contexts also bond with tea in many ways.

This study offers a new perspective in the essence of Chan Buddhism and its duality of a doctrinal aversion to material forms and a liturgical emphasis on ritual procedure, and it bridges Chan monastic practice and teachings with the analysis of Chan-tea. It is also the first scholarly attempt in reconstructing and investigating Chan rituals in a full-scale study with annotations and illustrations, as the highly formatted and nearly isolated genre of rules of purity received much less scholarly attention compared to Chan doctrines.