Guishan jingce (Guishan's Admonitions) and the Ethical Foundations of Chan Practice

Abstract This chapter examines the attitudes toward monasticism and conventional morality evidenced within the Hongzhou school of classical Chan. Its main focus is Guishan jingce, one of the key texts from the Hongzhou school’s literary output, which so far has been ignored by Chan/Zen scholarship. Composed by Guishan Lingyou (771-853), the foremost representative of the Hongzhou school’s third generation, this important text is the earliest Chan document that is primarily concerned with monastic discipline, or Rules of Purity, and the place of morality in the Chan path to awakening. Its contents shed unique light on the Hongzhou school’s rather conventional attitudes toward monastic ideals and mores, and brings into question the currently prevalent views about the iconoclastic turn that Chan supposedly took under the direction of Mazu (709-788) and his Hongzhou school.