From Doctrinal Foundation to Lived Practice: A Spiritual Ecological Interpretation of Chan Meditation in the Platform Sutra and the Compendium of Five Lamps

Abstract

This study examines Chan meditation as a resource for spiritual ecology through two foundational texts, the Platform Sutra (Tanjing 壇經) and the Compendium of Five Lamps (Wudeng Huiyuan 五燈會元). The Platform Sutra reformulates meditation as “the non-abiding of mind” (xin wu suozhu 心無所住), with “no-thought as the essence” (wunian weizong 無念為宗) and “the unity of concentration and wisdom” (dinghui yiti 定惠一體) as its core tenets, thus grounding a distinctively Chan understanding of perception and engagement. The Compendium of Five Lamps carries these principles into pedagogical practice through gong’an, in which two recurrent operations may be identified: spatial deconstruction that unsettles fixed subject–object distinctions, and temporal liberation that releases practice from teleological striving and returns awareness to the immediacy of the present. Building on these analyses, this study argues that the self-nature trikāya taught in the Platform Sutra provides an immanent articulation through which Chan awakening extends from non-dual realization to transformed perception and responsive engagement with the world. On this reading, Chan spiritual ecology is best understood not as a modern overlay on the tradition but as an unfolding of its own soteriological logic, and as one possible response to the contemporary crisis of meaning and ecological estrangement.