Khuông Việt
Khuông Việt
933 – 1011
Khuông Việt (匡越, 933–1011), birth name Ngô Chân Lưu, is the fourth-generation patriarch of the Vô Ngôn Thông line of Vietnamese Thiền and the figure regarded as Vietnam's first national Buddhist preceptor[1]. Born into the Ngô clan that briefly held the Vietnamese throne after the fall of Chinese rule in 939, he ordained at the Khai Quốc temple under Vân Phong and became one of the most learned monks of his generation[1]. King Đinh Tiên Hoàng granted him the title Khuông Việt Đại Sư ('Great Master Who Helps Vietnam') in 971 — the first time a Vietnamese Buddhist had been formally appointed to the post of national preceptor — and he served the early Đinh, Lê, and Lý courts as a religious-political advisor. The Thiền Uyển Tập Anh records his correspondence with the Song-dynasty Chinese ambassadors, in which he composed Buddhist verses that established Vietnamese literary Buddhism as a peer tradition to its Chinese parent[2].
Names
Teachers and lineage of Khuông Việt
Teacher / root master:
Teachings
The Buddha's name fills heaven and earth; the dharma's light touches every corner. Why seek enlightenment in a distant land when the pure land is this very ground? The mind that calls upon the Buddha and the Buddha that is called — they are not two. This is the first teaching in our own tongue.
When Khuông Việt was appointed National Preceptor (Quốc Sư) of Đại Cồ Việt, a visiting monk from China asked him: 'You are both a meditator and a minister. How do you hold both without one corrupting the other?' Khuông Việt said: 'In the meditation hall, there are no affairs. In the court, there is no meditator. When I sit in the hall, the affairs of the realm do not enter. When I stand in the court, the hall does not move.' The monk said: 'Is this not suppression? Do the affairs not press on the meditation?' Khuông Việt said: 'Let them press. A mountain does not collapse because a cloud presses against it. The one who knows this is already the mountain.'
Other masters in Thiền
Master Record Sources
- biographyCuong Tu Nguyen — medieval Vietnamese Buddhism scholarship
- contextLê Mạnh Thát — Vietnamese Buddhist history publications