Mazu Daoyi - Mazu's Hongzhou School

Mazu's Hongzhou School

Mazu became Nanyue Huairang's dharma–successor. Eventually Mazu settled at Kung-kung Mountain by Nankang, southern Kiangsi province, where he founded a monastery and gathered scores of disciples.

Traditionally, Mazu is depicted as a successor in the lineage of Hui-neng, since his teacher Huairang is regarded as a student and successor of Huineng. This connection between Hui-neng and Nanyue Huairang is doubtfull, being the product of later rewritings of Chán-history to place Mazu in the traditional lineages.

Mazu is perhaps the most influential teaching master in the formation of Chán Buddhism in China. When Chán became the dominant school of Buddhism during the Song Dynasty, in retrospect the later Tang Dynasty and Mazu's Hongzhou school became regarded as the "golden age" of Chan.

The An Lu-shan Rebellion (755-763) led to a loss of control by the Tang dynasty, which changed the position of Chan. Metropolitan Chan began to lose its status, while...

...other schools were arising in outlying areas controlled by warlords. These are the forerunnersof the Chan we know today. Their origins are obscure; the power of Shen-hui's preaching is shown by the fact that they all trace themselves to Hui-neng.

The most important of these schools is the Hongzhou school (洪州宗) of Mazu, to which also belong Baizhang, Huangbo and Linji (Rinzai). Linji is also regarded as the founder of one of the Five Houses.

This school developed "shock techniques such as shouting, beating, and using irrational retorts to startle their students into realization". These shock techniques became part of the traditional and still popular image of Chan masters displaying irrational and strange behaviour to aid their students. Part of this image was due to later misinterpretations and translation errors, such as the loud belly shout known as katsu. In Chinese "katsu" means "to shout", which has traditionally been translated as "yelled 'katsu'" - which should mean "yelled a yell"

During 845-846 Emperor Wu-tsung persecuted the Buddhist schools in China:

It was a desperate attempt on the part of the hard-pressed central government, which had been in disarray since the An Lu-shan rebellion of 756, to gain some measure of political, economic, and military relief by preying on the Buddhist temples with their immense wealth and extensive lands.

This persecution was devastating for metropolitan Chan, but the Chan school of Ma-tsu and his likes survived, and took a leading role in the Chan of the later Tang.