ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Sheng Yen's Dharma Drum Chan Lineage, under which he subsumed the different, earlier and later, forms of Buddhism. Specifically, it examines his 1998 doctrinal classification chart, drafted in preparation for his dialogue with H. H. the 14th Dalai Lama in New York City. This chart reveals his biases toward the more erudite Chinese forms of Buddhism, which provided a foundation for his innovative development of a new form of Chan Buddhism that was rich in doctrine. The chapter explores in depth Sheng Yen's ambition to incorporate different traditions of the Han transmission of Chinese Buddhism into a single coherent Chan teaching, which he saw as the doctrinal fulfillment of Buddhism writ large. His chart can be divided into two parts: doctrine and practice. The doctrinal part unifies the different Buddhist ideas and practices under a coherent framework for orthodoxy. It details, in essence, Sheng Yen's soteriological map and justification for Chan practice, which challenged the received image of Chan as a timeless, ahistorical realization of the ineffable truth separated from Buddhism and opposed to doctrinal learning.
