Chu Hsi and Buddhism

Abstract I began chapter I with a poem about opening a door: the gate to wisdom. For this book is about the religious thought of Chu Hsi, a thinker who taught pub licly and left behind a vast and coherent system that can, to a large extent, be mapped and understood. In other words, there is a door to his house, and one can go in. But a different metaphor has to be used when we talk about Ch’an Buddhism. While the Buddhist religion is also a public teaching, Ch’an prides itself on its mysterious subtlety. According to the gatha quoted above, the Way has no gate or, better still, no entry. What it has is a difficult pass, like that be tween steep mountains. We cannot speak of opening and closing the gates of Heaven and Earth, as does the Book of Changes. Nevertheless, we are assured that on the other side of the pass lie the mysteries of Heaven and Earth.