"Meet your new daddies," Professor Cole told the Zen student. "Your old daddies ran off with the secretaries of Make-Believe, and you're going to have to get used to some changes around here." He grinned and the daddies collectively plopped down on the sofa, all looking at each other.



The new daddies were as brusque as they were avaricious. All they did all long was watch their own daddies write and then pass off their fathers' writings as their own. Sometimes they stitched together a pretty good

"Meet your new daddies," Professor Cole told the Zen student. "Your old daddies ran off with the secretaries of Make-Believe, and you're going to have to get used to some changes around here." He grinned and the daddies collectively plopped down on the sofa, all looking at each other.



The new daddies were as brusque as they were avaricious. All they did all long was watch their own daddies write and then pass off their fathers' writings as their own. Sometimes they stitched together a pretty good yarn, but other times, they did a fairly desultory job and wandered off to the country fair to judge wedding photographs. All they wanted was some recognition, some power, some adulation, some money.



If you ever asked the new daddies what it was precisely they were doing, they would say, "Oh, I'm writing a most delightful story about daddy, and how he became enlightened!" Then the next instant he would pull you aside and whisper, "Actually, I'm practicing BAD FAITH. I just want everyone to think I'm a Buddha so I can live the good life. Don't you want what's best for daddy?"



"You're not my daddy, and you never will be!"



"You're wrong about that. I'm daddy, but daddy's a baddy."



* * *



This book tells the story about how 7th - 8th c Chinese 'Chan' lineage texts were written, often poorly and always in bad faith. Cole accuses these texts' authors of deception, greed, mendacity, and plagiarism, which is why it often reads like an anti-popery screed from Reformation days. The rhetoric often grows to an annoying fever pitch, which distracts from the clarity and depth of the philological work.



Particularly squirm-worthy are when Cole literally puts into words the intentions of the Zen authors. "I, X, will now stitch together texts Y and Z to achieve purposes P, Q, and R and none will be the wiser." These awkward asides make me write in the margins, "Well, how do you know X *is* who X claims to be? How do you know he read the *same text* Y that you are reading? (E.g., X could have heard a rumor, or X's assistant might have told him so, or some other editor somewhere down the line wanted to change a character here and there). How do you know it was Y directly that inspired him?"



These lead to deeper questions about the medieval mindset. What would it mean to deceive knowingly? What would it mean to plagiarize? Who is writing, and for whom, and what's the circulation?



It reminds me of Nietzsche writing about how the 'bad people' started to see the 'good people' as 'evil' and ascribing wills to them, when honestly, the 'noble souls' originally had nothing to apologize for. How can you blame an eagle for eating mice?



I think Cole has a pretty good handle on the textual effects. If we do some more sleuthing, we can see how 'Chan' might be said to have won Buddhism as its prize, won over the gentry and the reunified state. But the account of authorial intentionality I find quite odd from a supposed consumer of Nietzschean and Bourdieuan approaches, which admit to the fiction of the individual, no less to the fiction of its fully knowing the consequences of that which it does.