In his 1996 article on Chan historiography and Chan philosophy,
1. Chung-ying Cheng notes how early studies of the Chan Buddhist tradition have approached Chan enlightenment (answering the questions “What is nlightenment?”,“Can anyone attain it?”,“How is it to be attained?”, and “Why is it important to be attained?”) from an internal and philosophicalperspective. In Cheng’s words, they have been on the side of wujie (“understanding according to my mind, signifying a self-realization of my nature or/and my mind”). Recently, however, much research on Chan enlightenment has taken an external, historiographic perspective, focusing on how notions of enlightenment are formed, and how and why claims to enlightenment have been accepted as warranted by certain kinds of people (Cheng describes this as the lijie approach: “understanding according to reason or rational thinking”). These philosophical and historiographical perspectives have increasingly been at odds with another. Stephen Heine has given an overview of the current standoff in Chan/Zen Studies between an internal philosophical and an external historiographical approach. The traditional Zen narrative views enlightenment as “a direct, unmediated experience of reality beyond the realm of conditioning, which does not require intercession through the conventional use of objects of worship, such as images, symbols, or representations of deities.”
2. Such a notion of a “pure” Zen, which privileges enlightenment as an unmediated experience of reality, has been contested by modern scholarship. Historical and cultural criticism points out the importance of speech and mediation throughout the historical Chan tradition, which “makes traditional claims for the priority of iconoclasm seem like little more than idle rhetorical flourishes.”
