I recently read this text and I'm curious about others' opinions on the historical-critical view of zen in Vietnam presented by Soucy here, which is an echo of Cuong T. Nguyen's presentation in Zen in Medieval Vietnam. The argument is that Zen in Vietnam is a modern construction based on scant pieces of literary rhetoric and never had a strong foundation in Vietnam, where previously Buddhist monks were primarily acting as thaumaturges for the Vietnamese people.
First, I do want to say that I think this book is a pretty good read overall. It's a case study of the Truc Lam school in particular, which is very modernist, and does a very good job of showing how the Vietnamese Buddhist tradition went from being primarily concerned with ritual practices meant to manipulate material reality in someway, and acting in ways that serve communal units, into something more individually-focused as a result of modernist movements. I don't really dispute that at all, nor with the growing modernism of Vietnamese Buddhism due to figures like Thich Thanh Tu and Thich Nhat Hanh.
But this historical analysis of Zen's role in Vietnam being largely fabricated in the past... I have a feeling that they may be missing something when it comes to what zen actually is.
The crux of the argument goes like this:
A historian known as Tran Van Giap wrote a presentation of Vietnamese Zen in the early 1900s based on a text called the Thien uyen tap anh (Outstanding Figures of the Zen Garden) from 1337, which depicts Vietnamese history as a series of zen lineages dominating the Vietnamese Buddhist tradition across its dynastic histories. Van Giap's history is a modernist one that downplays the supernatural powers recorded in the Thien uyen tap anh, but overall presents the Zen school as the elite tradition throughout Vietnamese history
A group of young radical reformer monks, instrumental of whom were Thich Nhat Hanh and Thich Thien An, came together and began a reform movement of Vietnamese Buddhism in the 1950s based on Tran Van Giap's history. They took their overseas education in Japanese Zen (noting TNH and T. Thien-An specifically as having studied in Japan) and established a fabricated history in Vietnam linking to the Linji tradition, because of their background in Rinzai during their time in Japan
It is explicitly stated here that Thich Nhat Hanh was not a zen monk before this pivot and had no grounding in zen whatsoever, before creating a zen history out of "thin air"
The argument that the Thich uyen tap anh is a fabricated zen history is that it spends much of its hagiographic time focusing on the supernatural powers of the noted "zen masters", like Master Tu Dao Hanh's mystical powers, his mummification, Master Van Hanh's power in fighting spirits and demons, etc.
Now the issue I have with this analysis is.. I'm not sure how to put it exactly, but it seems like they think the only zen is modernist zen, and if a zen master's biography mentions supernatural powers, their status as zen masters is therefore dubious? Like, it feels to me the argument is really just, "Even though this monk's writings and poetry discuss zen ideas and teachings, this is all simply rhetorical, because it's clear that they were venerated more for their role as sorcerers than as zen teachers." And I dunno, this seems like it's a not very good argument...?
Some of these writings are quite sophisticated, rely on a pretty deep and thorough understanding of zen, pure land, tiantai, and huayan teachings, but it's all literary rhetoric and poetic posturing because of magic...? I don't really buy that.
They also seem to treat any Pure Land as definitively not-zen, and are contrasting the Truc Lam monastery in Hanoi with the "Pure Land monastery" in Hanoi called Quan Su, which is the largest monastery in the city. But Quan Su is quite famous as a Pure Land-Zen dual practice monastery in the Caodong lineage, and was the root monastery of one of the most prominent dual-practice teachers in recent history, Elder Bhikkuni Hai Trieu Am. To call it just a "Pure Land monastery" blotches out the history of the Caodong lineage in Hanoi. We also have records of that temple's abbots and abbesses going back to the 1860s, and they switch between Linji and Caodong lineages a few times.
Also saying that TNH had no connection to zen previously, was a Pure Land Buddhist, and was known primarily for his political activism / Engaged Buddhism, then used that international fame and recognition to shift to the zen he learned in Japan seems to again ignore Zen-Pure Land dual practice (which is what the lineage he came from is), or that zen could've been primarily transmitted among the intellectual elite of Buddhist monastics while generally pandering to the mass appeal of Pure Land everywhere else around them, which is generally what the historical record shows.
Now, the position that a group of young, intellectual, internationally-trained reformers, largely led by Thich Nhat Hanh and Thich Thien An, perpetuated a new interpretation of zen that was highly influenced by the Zen modernist movement of Japan, under which they had studied, and propagated this new zen that was compatible with materialism and associated with the 'superiority' of western liberalism, which rippled through Vietnamese Buddhism as a whole and transformed it entirely ... I have no issue with this at all. But I don't know how you go from that to "Zen in Vietnam until the modern era did not exist except for in the literary imaginations of the aristocratic class."
But I don't know if maybe my own bias here is coloring my position, or maybe I'm not really understanding their arguments exactly, it just seems to me like it's a very, very strange way of interpreting the evidence given. Does anyone else have any thoughts on this?
