One point that I keep bringing up, but I don’t find it getting recognized, is the fact that the capabilities that we now have when we conduct research in the Digital Age enable us to easily significantly revise, if not outright refute, the scholarship that was produced in the Analog Age.
I’ve spent a lot of time challenging/refuting scholarship that was produced in the Analog Age, so let’s look here at how earlier scholarship can be revised.
In the 1990s, at the end of the Analog Age, Cuong Tu Nguyen translated and annotated a fourteenth-century text called the Collection of Outstanding Figures of the Zen Garden (Thiền uyển tập anh 禪苑集英). He then published that annotated translation along with a scholarly introduction as Zen in Medieval Vietnam: A Study and Translation of the Thiền Uyển Tập Anh (Kuroda Institute and University of Hawaii Press, 1997).
The Collection of Outstanding Figures of the Zen Garden consists of biographies of Vietnamese Buddhist monks from the ninth to thirteenth centuries, and those biographies are linked together in lineages.
When it came out, Cuong Tu Nguyen’s study and translation of this text was arguably the best piece of scholarship in English on a topic in premodern Vietnamese history that had ever been published (at least that’s how I saw it). Sure, there are small issues that we can find here and there, but in general Cuong Tu Nguyen did a really good job of translating and annotating this text.
Cuong Tu Nguyen also did a great job of contextualizing this work. At the time, there were scholars in the field of Chinese religion who were revealing the ways in which Zen monks in China had more or less invented/manufactured idealized histories about Zen lineages, and Cuong Tu Nguyen argued that the Collection of Outstanding Figures of the Zen Garden essentially did the same thing.
The scholarship in this book was basically as good as scholarship could be in the Analog Age.
Now, however, we are in the Digital Age, and we can figure out certain things in seconds which Cuong Tu Nguyen probably never would have been able to figure out in the Analog Age (I certainly never would have been able to figure them out).
Let’s look at an example of what I’m talking about.
In the Collection of Outstanding Figures of the Zen Garden, there is a biography of a monk by the name of Viên Thông (1080-1151) which contains the following information:
In the third year of the Đại Thuận era (1130), Emperor Lý Thần Tông summoned [Viên Thông] to Sùng Khai Palace to enquire about the principles of political order and upheaval, or prosperity and decline in the world. Viên Thông said:
“The world is like an instrument. Put it in a safe place, it is safe; put it in a perilous place, it is in peril. It all depends on how the leader of the people behaves himself. If his benevolence is in harmony with the hearts and minds of the people, then they will love him as a parent and look up to him like the sun and moon. This is putting people in a safe place.” [201]
When I read this, I thought to myself, “Wow! This is strange! This does not sound Buddhist at all. It’s totally Confucian.”
Fortunately, Cuong Tu Nguyen included the original classical Chinese text as an appendix in his book, so I checked that passage, transcribed some of it, put it into Google, and. . .
. . . I found that it consists of lines taken from various Confucian texts.
I have highlighted below the passages that come from other texts, and have indicated which text each passage comes from.
天下猶器也，置諸安則安，置諸危則危，願在人主所行和如耳，好生之德合于民心，故民愛至如父母，仰之如日月，是置天下得之安者也。
“The world is like an instrument. Put it in a safe place, it is safe; put it in a perilous place, it is in peril [History of the Han, Biography of Jia Yi]. It all depends on how the leader of the people behaves himself. If his benevolence is in harmony with the hearts and minds of the people [Shangshu (Venerated Documents), Da Yu mo], then they will love him as a parent and look up to him like the sun and moon [Zuozhuan (Zuo Commentary), Xianggong 14]. This is putting people in a safe place.” [201]
However, it didn’t stop there, because Viên Thông “said” more:
又云治亂在庶官，得人則治，失人則亂，臣歷觀前世帝王未嘗不以用君子而興，以用小人而亡者也。原其致此，非一朝一夕之故，所由來者漸矣，天地不能頓為寒暑，必漸於春秋，人君頓為興亡，必漸於善惡。古之聖王知其若此，故則天不息其德以修已，法地不息其德以修安人。修已者，慎於中也。 。 。
He also said: “Order or chaos depends on [the behavior of the] officials. If they can win the people over, then there is political order; if they lose the people’s support, then there is upheaval.
I have observed [the activities of] emperors of previous generations. No one succeeded without employing true gentlemen, or failed unless he employed petty men.
When we trace how these things come about, it does not happen overnight, but develops gradually. Just as heaven and earth cannot abruptly produce cold and hot weather, but must change gradually through the seasons like spring and autumn, etc., kings cannot suddenly bring about prosperity or decline, but rather it is a gradual process depending on their good or bad activities. The sage kings of old knew this principle, and so they modeled themselves on Heaven and never ceased to rely on virtue to cultivate themselves; they modeled themselves on Earth and never ceased to rely on virtue to pacify the people. . .
The final passage above comes from an essay by Tang dynasty scholar-official Bai Juyi 白居易 (772-846) called “Forest of Policies” (Celin 策林). It’s almost entirely word-for-word the same.
I didn’t find evidence that the second passage had come from anywhere, however, that passage is also very generic.
As for the first passage, it starts with a line from the Confucian classic, the Venerated Documents (“Order or chaos depends on [the behavior of the] officials”). The next line is actually an annotation for that line which appears in (I believe) Kong Yingda’s Corrected Meanings of the Venerated Documents (Shangshu Zhengyi 尚書正義).
What it means in that context is “if you obtain the right people (meaning morally upright officials), there will be order, if you lose them, there will be chaos.”
In any case, the fact that this text contains a line from the Venerated Documents as well as an annotation for that line and presents all of this as if it was spoken by Viên Thông to Emperor Lý Thần Tông is a good example of how problematic this text is.
To be fair, Cuong Tu Nguyen was well aware that this text is problematic. However, issues like the ones above were difficult to discover in the Analog Age.
In the Digital Age, these issues are now incredibly easy to discover.
That being the case, if we can discover all of this in a matter of seconds in relation to good scholarship, like Cuong Tu Nguyen’s Zen in Medieval Vietnam, think of what we can discover if we re-examine topics addressed by scholarship that is not as strong as the work of Cuong Tu Nguyen.
Indeed, in my opinion, this should be the mission of this generation. We should be going over the established Analog Age scholarship with our Digital Age capabilities.
There should be no sacred cows. Anything produced in the Analog Age should be re-examined in the Digital Age, because that is the great opportunity that the Digital Age has granted us.
It has enabled us to enter the Revision Age.
