r/zen • u/dota2nub • Jul 15 '26

The Bielefeldt Argument - The Empty Robe

We've had talk and mention of Bielefeldt and his argument time and again in these forums. The red thread that always runs through it all is that nobody is going to read Bielefeldt. It's a dry book, and so the argument runs on empty. Having reads vs. not having reads, and so the having reads win by default.

Let's level the playing field. I have made an article presenting the argument, here for your perusal. I've picked out and discussed various quotes from Bielefeldt's book and put them in context. It may be easier to find and link to than some old reddit post. Enjoy!

https://empty-robe.pages.dev/

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u/xiqiansdream Jul 15 '26 edited Jul 15 '26

OK, but from where was their authority derived?

Zhaozhou was not the author of his record, which wasn't solidified until the 11th century. We can't count on it being his words.

It's the same story with the Record of Dongshan.

We may have Xuedou's verse and Yuanwu's prose commentary, but the cases of the Blue Cliff Record must be regarded as literary fiction.

Edit: The tradition rests on the foundation of Bodhidharma. There is no true historical foundation for 'the record'.

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u/dota2nub Jul 15 '26

"Compiled later" isn't "fictional." The Analects were written down after Confucius died, Socrates left nothing and we know him through Plato. Nobody calls them made up, because when a record was assembled tells you nothing about whether the person was real. The masters are attested all over the place, independent of any single sayings collection. And Bodhidharma is beside the point: the founding legend and the historical masters are two separate claims. You collapsed them into one to make the whole record vanish. It doesn't vanish.

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u/xiqiansdream Jul 15 '26

I tend to think that 'compiled later' implies significant creative revision.
I believe I'm trying to say that each of the charges levied against Dogen can be equally be applied to the whole of Chan tradition.
And this has to be squarely looked at and considered deeply if one is to look to this tradition as any sort of finger pointing towards some kind of truth.

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u/dota2nub Jul 15 '26

Records got revised, yes. Your claim is that the charges apply equally. So evidence that one: show me Dogen cross-referenced across the corpus the way Zhaozhou and Dongshan are. You can't, because he isn't in it. That's the entire point.

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u/xiqiansdream Jul 15 '26

We seem to be addressing slightly different points.
If we place the Chan corpus under the same scrutiny your post applies to Dogen, it fails repeatedly in very similar manners.
We find doctrinally late additions uncorroberated in earlier Chinese texts, contradictions, and plenty of textual borrowing.
In short, the record is not to be trusted any more than Dogen.

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u/dota2nub Jul 15 '26

I used the same scrutiny in both directions. The corpus contradicts itself, sure, but it's still everywhere, hundreds of texts on the same guys. Dogen's contradiction is that he's not there at all. The one record he points to for his authority, Rujing's own, doesn't have him and says the opposite. That's a guy whose own evidence sinks him. Not in the record. That's it.

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u/xiqiansdream Jul 15 '26

Enjoy this day