Download - Tsukamoto Zenryu Ch 1 a History of Early Chinese Buddhism

A HISTORY OF

EARLY CHINESE BUDDHISM

From Its Introduction to the Death of Hui-yiian

Volume 1

by Zenryu Tsukamoto

KODANSHA INTERNATIONAL LTD. Tokyo, New York, San Francisco

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Originally published as Chagoku Bukkyll tsashi, volume 1, by Shunjosha, 1979.

The translation of this work was assisted by a grant from the Ministry of Education of Japan.

Distributed in the United States by Kodansha International/USA Ltd., through Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 10· East 53rd Street, New York, New York 10022. Published by Kodansha International Ltd., 12-21 Otowa 2-chome, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 112 and Kodansha International/ USA Ltd., with offices at 10 East 53rd Street, New York, New York 10022 and The Hearst Building, 5 Third Street, Suite 430, San Francisco, California 94103.

Copyright © 1979 by the estate of Zenryo Tsukamoto.

English-language copyright © 1985 by Kodansha International Ltd.

All rights reserved. Printed in Japan. First English edition, 1985

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Tsukamoto, Zenryii, 1898-A history of early Chinese Buddhism.

Translation of: Chiigoku Bukkyo tsiishi. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Buddhism-China-History-To 581 A.D. I. Title.

BQ636.T75713 1985 294.3'0951 83-48873

ISBN 0--87011-{;35-5 (US: set) ISBN 0--87011-{;45-2 (US: vol. 1) lliSN 4-7700-1135--0 (Japan: set) ISBN 4-7700-1145-8 (Japan: vol. 1)

CONTENTS

VOLUME 1

TRANSLATOR's FOREWORD vii

' AUTHOR S PREFACE X1

1 The Special Shape of Chinese Buddhism: What Molded Its Character 1

A. A Chinese Religion That Had Shed Its Indian Skin 3 I B. Foreign Char-

acteristics 7 I c. The Impact of Indigenous Learning and Ideas 21

2 First Arrival : Buddhism in the Latter Han

A. Emperor Ming' s Quest of the Dharma in Response to a Dream 41 I B. Buddhism on Its First Appearance

in China 51 I c. The Emergence and Influence of Buddhist Scriptures in Chinese Translation 78

3 Buddhism under the Three Kingdoms

A. Buddhism and the Collapse of the Latter Han 115 I B. The Discontinuation of Popular Shrine Worship and the Suppression of Shamans in Early Wei 1191 c. Buddhism and

4 Buddhism under the Western Tsin

A. The Community of Learned Buddhists and the Society of theW estern Tsin 167 I B. Movements of the Religious Community under the

the Rise of "Dark Learning" under the Wei 123 I D. Wei Buddhism, with Its Center at Lo-yang 133 I E. Wu Buddhism, with Its Center at Chien-k'ang 141

Western Tsin 188 I c. Dharmarak$a as Translator and Evangelist 193 I D. The Translations of Chu Shu-Ian 230

5 The Rise of Buddhism under Non-Chinese Rulers in the North

A. Social Dislocations Beginning under the Late Western- Tsin 241 I B. The Rapid Conversion of the

North under Fo-t'u-ch'eng 249 I c. The Recluse Chu Seng-lang and the Homilist Chu Fa-ya 285

39

113

165

239

6 The Rise of Buddhism South of the Yangtze under the Eastern Tsin 311

A. Collapse of the Western Tsin and Buddhism at Chien-k'ang under the Buddhism's Southward Trek 313 I Late Eastern Tsin 385 I E. Develop-B. Monkish Recluses and the Com- ment of a Community of Nuns 417 I munity of "Pure Talkers" and "Dark F. TheW estward Pilgrimage of Chi-Learners" at Chien-k' ang and K' uai- nese Buddhists in Quest of the chi 331 I c. Doctrinal Disputes and Dh~rma 430 I G. Problems Posed by the Advance of Prajiiaparamita Study the New Buddhist Arrivals in East-361 I D. The Advance and Decline of ern Tsin 440

Notes to the Text 461

VOLUME 2

7 Tao-an and His Place in the History of Chinese Buddhism 655

A. The Achievements of Tao-an 657 I Third Period: At Ch'ang-an 723 I B.

B. The First Period: A Wandering Tao-an as a Believer in Maitreya Practitioner 660 I c. The Second and Tu$ita 753 Period: At Hsiang-yang 691 I D. The

8 Hui-ytian and His Circle 757

A. Introduction 759 I B. The Formation of Hui-yi.ian' s Ideas before His Entry into the Order 764 I c. Huiyi.ian as a Disciple of Tao-an 778 I D. Hui-yi.ian on Mount Lu 805 I B.

The Dispute between Huan Hsi.ian and Hui-yi.ian 828 I F. Comrades Vow to Recollect Amitabuddha: The

Notes to the Text

Appendixes

Notes to the Appendixes

Bibliography

Index

White Lotus Fellowship 844 I G.

The Acceptance of Kumarajiva's Buddhism 869 I H. Problems Confronted in Old Age 878 f I. The Cave of the Buddha's Shadow 885 I J. Death: The Mount Lu Community and the Monastic Code 889

899

1001

1143

1217

1237

1 THE SPECIAL SHAPE

OF CHINESE BUDDHISM: WHAT MOLDED ITS CHARACTER

A. A Chinese Religion That Had Shed

Its Indian Skin

In the present work, when we say "Chinese Buddhism," we mean the religion which, founded in India by Sakyamuni (the sainted ascetic of the Sakya clan, whose name appears, in its Mandarin Chinese guise, as Shih-chia-mou-ni),a proceeded from the land of its origin and the mission territories of Central Asia, occasionally even from Ceylon and Southeast Asia, to a totally different cultural sphere, a land with a highly developed and virtually unique civilization whose people referred to themselves as "central" and "flowering" (chung hua). Once there, through the instrument of a huge scriptural corpus now rendered into Chinese, a medium of expression different from the original in both language and script, and subjected by the Chinese themselves to selection, reinterpretation, and reorganization, it is a religion that came to be realized and propagated as a set of ideas and beliefs in its own right, thus to become long and widely current in Chinese society under the rubric of "the Buddha's teaching" (Po chiao).1h

Chinese Buddhism in the History of Asian Civilization. Chinese Buddhism was born of the meeting between two of Asia's oldest and most highly developed civilizations, the Indian and the Chinese. As is generally known, these two before this meeting had been pursuing two totally dissimilar and unrelated courses of development. While India and China are, to be sure, both part of the same Asian land mass, they have been separated by mountain ranges, plateaus, and deserts, by jungles sheltering ferocious beasts, and by broad expanses of water, most of these marked by terrain forbidding any kind of human existence, all of them virtually impassable to the ancients. Thus both the Indians and the Chinese, characterized by the unrelated civilizations just mentioned, lived long in virtual isolation with no exchange of cultures or even of artifacts.

Yet human civilizations, being what they are, could not remain isolated forever. There is ample grounds for belief that an admittedly very modest exchange of culture between East and West, in all likelihood unknown even to the respective governments, took place from quite an early date, just as water, finding its own cracks and crevices, will seep even through gigantic boulders. As early as the end of the second century B.C. there took place an historically dramatic event, the opening of a through passage from East to West, passing through Central Asia. We are referring, of course, to the contact made possible through the westward expedition commissioned by Emperor Wu of the Han and led by Chang Ch'ien.2c After Ch'ien's return to China (126 B.c.), his country's government embarked on a course of what is frequently called "management of the Western Regions," i.e., a policy of extending Chinese power to the oasis countries that dot the dry regions of eastern Turkestan and, proceeding thence, of furthering trade across Central Asia and

A :A RELIGION THAT SHED ITS INDIAN SKIN • 3

establishing friendly relations with countries even farther west. Thanks to this policy, even the great empires to China's west, such as Rome and Persia, became eager to acquire not only silk from China but a wide variety of Oriental artifacts and treasures from the caravans that crossed that so-called Silk Road.d In this way, through a series of events that are now a matter of common historical knowledge, China came to have a flourishing intercourse, both direct and indirect, not only with the Pamir plateau countries to its immediate west but even with countries farther west yet. As a result, western artifacts made their way first into the region of Ch' ang-an and Loyang, which was the center of China's cultural life, then into the Yellow River basin.

Eventually Indian artifacts joined this stream and, most important for our purposes, Buddhism began to flow with it, exerting an enormous influence not only on Chinese cultural forms but on those of the rest of Asia as well. Buddhism, in origin a religion that had arisen in the Ganges basin of Central India as a reaction to the tradition-bound Brahmanical culture that was already in control of virtually the whole country, had by about the first century of the Christian era spread throughout almost all oflndia and beyond to India's northwest, to what is now the Kabul region in Afghanistan, then out oflndia altogether, to the country east and west of the Pamirs. Buddhism, this rebel child of Indian culture, proceeded eastward quite as if it were the representative of Indian civilization, functioning very actively and over an extended period of time as an embassy of peace, uniting the sophisticated, and at the same time utterly dissimilar, cultures of India and China. Buddhism, by now a religion practiced in India and in all theW estern Regions, also in the mainland and island countries of Southeast Asia, made its way over land and sea routes to China. There it was received on a wide scale into a cultural sphere governed by a different but no less tradition-bound civilization, particularly by the sense of the superiority of the "central and flowering" to everything else.e In the latter country, eventually becoming inextricable from the life of the nation, it came to form a religion that is fully entitled to be called by the name "Chinese Buddhism."

The Buddhism of China, no less than that oflndia, accepted the Indian Sakyamuni as its Founder, regarded His teaching as that of Sakyamuni turned buddha (which they rendered with chueh che, "the One of enlightened intuition"), as a doctrine that would lead the believer himself and all others to the same status of enlightened intuition. In these respects, it was no different from the Buddhism oflndia or indeed of any other territory. Chinese Buddhism, on the other hand, being a religion that had grown on the vast soil and amid the conditions peculiar to the "Middle Kingdom," wherein the ancient and highly advanced civilization of the Chinese had taken root and spread, could not but undergo certain changes that were to distinguish it markedly from Buddhism in the land of its origin. It was precisely these Chinese transformations that made it a religion able to spread and prosper in Chinese society.

Acceptance of Scriptures in Translation. As one example of the transformation just mentioned, one might cite the fact that the scriptures of this foreign religion, written with a phonetic script or recited orally, in a language with a highly developed morphology, were now rendered into a literary language of a totally different character,

4 • THE SPECIAL SHAPE OF CmNESE BUDDHISM

that of China, written with ideographs each of which had an independent meaning of its own and characterized by an absence of morphology. Now the Chinese had recourse not to the original but to Buddhist scriptures translated into their own language, which they read, interpreted, and equipped with commentary, developing a set of Buddhist doctrines and practices able to function in Chinese society. Mistranslations there may have been. Abbreviations and omissions there may also have been, thanks to imperfections in the originals or to distortions on the part of the translators, whether through inattention or by design. No matter. Once China's Buddhists had got the scriptures rendered into their own language, never troubling to compare the Chinese translations with the originals, seldom if ever bothering even to establish the meaning of the originals by a conjecture based on the reading of the translations, convinced as they were of the superiority of Chinese culture and given as they were to venerating their own script and trusting the written word rather uncritically, they accepted these scriptures in Chinese translation, although couched now in a very different language, as a veritable record of the Dharma preached by the Buddha, and proceeded to construe them as Chinese literature. Under the circumstances, the original sense of the Indian Buddhist scriptures inevitably underwent a typically Chinese interpretation. However mistaken this interpretation might be from the point of view of the originals, Chinese Buddhism developed on the assumption that the interpretation was an accurate one.

India1s Buddha1 China1s Sages and Sylphs. The changes that took place were not all due to differences in language and script. China's people, as has already been suggested, prided themselves on an extremely old and sophisticated culture, thus assuming the superiority of everything Chinese and the contemptible inferiority of everything foreign. Before the advent of Buddhism, they had had a belief in a pantheon, presided over by a supreme deity called, among other things, t1ien ti, and consisting of a whole host oflesser gods, including those of mountains, rivers, stars, and planets. They also had had their own ancient Sages (sheng jen) and sylphs (shen hsien), as well as a body of ancient books authoritatively handed down from generation to generation as repositories of the teachings of these holy men. There were also shamans who mediated between gods and men, pronouncers of charms and spells, and practitioners believed to be skilled cultivators of the sylphs' recipes of longevity. Buddhism, a foreign religion accepted in translation as the teaching of a sage or sylph of a barbarian land, could not be received without some resistance from the systems of China's own indigenous Sages and sylphs. The foreign religion contrived to develop into a Chinese Buddhism functioning organically within Chinese society itself through confrontation and compromise with China's traditional teachings and beliefs. Here too is observable the process whereby Chinese Buddhism shed the skin oflndian Buddhism and achieyed a growth of its own.

China1s Social Structure and the New Religion. Note must also be taken of the structure of the Chinese society into which Buddhism made its way. Chinese society, numbering several millions of human beings, consisted of an upper and lower class, the rulers and the ruled, the former being a governing class (the so-called shih) ex-

A :A RELIGION THAT SHED ITS INDIAN SKIN • 5

tremely small in number, the latter a commonalty comprising the vast majority of the population. The former were, in turn, a highly educated group, the central position in whose lives was occupied by a body of traditional texts, whose very words, spoken as well as written, were measured to these classical writings; in sum, they were the bearers of China's highly sophisticated civilization. The latter, on the other hand, being cut adrift of education and learning, were rather left to toil productively in ignorance and to do their duty in obedience to their rulers, to whom they were also bound by obligations of tax and corvee. Such being the definition of "good people" (liang min), the society of commoners was constantly attended by ignorance and poverty. The Buddhist scriptures, even when rendered into Chinese, were illegible to the rna jority of these people.

A foreign religion accepted by two social strata so widely differing as these could not become anything other than a Chinese Buddhism with equally great differences in the degree of understanding and the character of its adherents. Buddhism for its own part, being the preserve of persons who had "forsaken the household life" (ch'u chia, i.e., monks and nuns), persons outside the framework of these two classes, the rulers and the ruled, would naturally recommend itself to such persons otherwise than to the lay Buddhist. The clergy were, needless to say, the carriers of a developing Chinese Buddhism, its leaders. In view of this, the emergence and development of their own Buddhism was undeniably at the kernel of the religion as a whole. Yet, one who thinks of Chinese Buddhism may never forget the religion received into a Chinese society that consisted of more than monks.

Thus, Buddhism in China, a land whose government, economy, and entire civilization were different from those of India and the countries of Central Asia, could not help being different from Buddhism in the land of its origin. It could not possibly be obedient to the prescriptions of Indian Buddhism even in regard to food, clothing, and shelter.

Acceptance of Many Buddhisms as the Word of the One Buddha. The emergence of a Chinese Buddhism was conditioned not only by the situation of the receiver but by the character of the incoming religion as well. For all that it might be practiced and accepted on faith as the doctrine of Sakyamuni, it was not the so-called "primitive Buddhism" of the Founder's own time, or even of that of His disciples, accepted tel quel from India. The odyssey of Buddhism with which we are dealing had its start about the beginning of the Christian era, several centuries after the Founder's death, and consisted principally of the Western Regions, the vast territory of Central Asia. The translation of the Buddhist scriptures begins only in the second century, some two hundred years later, and continues uninterruptedly for almost a thousand years. In other words, only after Indian Buddhism had spread throughout that whole land, struck out to areas beyond India, and become influenced by the natural surroundings and political and economic conditions in those several countries; after the religious community had split into a large number of rival sects and schools and become scholastic and partisan; after the Mahayana had arisen, finally, as a reaction to this sectarian splintering-only after all this did a certain number of

6 • THE SPECIAL SHAPE OF CHINESE BUDDHISM

schools within this multiple Buddhism spread from India and Central and Southeast Asia to China. A wide variety of Buddhist teachings, of both the Greater and the Lesser Vehicles, were translated as sacred sermons of the Buddha, and all of them were accepted as the Holy Writ of Buddhism, as a record of the spoken teachings of Sakyamuni, by the Chinese, who were quite ignorant of conditions within the Indian Buddhist church itsel£

Buddhism in India had been developing and, in particular, had proceeded to turn out a large number of scriptural texts in conjunction with the striking florescence of the Mahayana. Buddhism, this changing and developing religion, passed into China in successive waves and over a long period of time, conveyed by missionary translators of different schools and from different countries, the mission territories as well as India itsel£ As is to be expected, the Buddhism of China which emerged from this prolonged and complicated transmission took a variety of forms and underwent a variety of changes.

The goal of the present work is to record the time from which Buddhism began its passage into China, the manner in which it was received by the Chinese, and the manner of the emergence, development, and growth of Buddhism as a form of Chinese thought, as a religion current in Chinese society, by confronting, and by coalescing and compromising with, traditional Chinese ideas and beliefs.

Spread of Chinese Buddhism throughout the Far East. While Chinese Buddhism has lost none of the original stuff of Buddhism, in respect ofbeing a doctrine that directs the believer toward becoming a Buddha, i.e., a person of enlightened intuition, it has not in all cases faithfully transmitted the teachings ofSakyamuni. On the other hand, Chinese Buddhism spread into, and furnished an impulse for religious growth in, countries besides China, such as Korea, Japan, and Vietnam-in short, throughout the area in which the Chinese written word holds sway. More than that, in company with the development of communities of overseas Chinese, it spread throughout Southeast Asia1 most notably on the Indo-Chinese peninsula. In this sense, it is Chinese Buddhism, based on the Buddhist scriptures in Chinese translation, that is the source of religious civilization for the whole Far East.

Let us now consider under separate headings the character of this foreign religion and the conditions of the receiving culture, both of which combined to form the nature of Chinese Buddhism, a religion based on translations of the Buddhist canon, once this latter had spread into this new mission terrttory.

B. Foreign Characteristics

As we have seen above, the emergence of a Chinese Buddhism different from its Indian prototype was conditioned first by the character of the foreign religion itself, then by the ideas, the beliefs, and the general social situation of the society that received it. Thus we must now point out two or three noteworthy facts about Buddhism at the time of its passage into China, since that is what furnished the base for the development of Buddhism in China itsel£

B : FOREIGN CHARACTERISTICS • 7

1. THE PROLONGED TRANSMISSION OF "MULTIPLE BUDDIITSM," BOTH

MAHAYANA AND HINAYANA, FROM MANY LOCALITIESa

While the arrival and acceptance in China of Buddhism itself was a slow process, dating presumably to the first century B.C. but to no later than the beginning of the Christian era, the availability of the scriptures in Chinese translation to the ruling circles and to intellectuals in general at the cultural center of gravity, where they all lived, and-most important-in significant quantities was due to An Shih-kao, a Parthian, and Lokak~ema, a Yiieh-chih, both of whom arrived almost simultaneously in the latter half of the second century.b These two Buddhists were, however, representatives of two different schools, subscribing to two manifestly different forms of Buddhism. They were, namely, a Hinayanist and a Mahayanist respectively, spokesmen for two religious movements that in their Central Asian homeland were in mutual opposition and even conflict. To be more specific yet, the former missionary was, more than anything else, a propagator of Sarvastivada doctrines, while the latter was a disseminator of the early Mahayana scriptures, most notably those of the Prajfiaparamita corpus. The Chinese, unaware that the Mahayana and Hinayana were Buddhist movements that in their homeland opposed and even attacked each other, accepted the translations of both varieties of scriptures, bearing as they did the title "canon preached by the Buddha" (Po shuo ching), as being equally and without distinction the sacred sermons of the Dharma preached by the Sakyabuddha Himsel£ Thus Buddhism as a specifically Chinese religion had from its very point of departure a set of premises different from those that had underlain it in its native land.

Indian Buddhism, from about the time ofits passage into China, was experiencing major changes in its very homeland. The first of these was the rise and sudden development of the Mahayana. The second was the fashioning of Buddhist icons. The latter signifies the transformation of Buddhism from a religion in which, at least at first, the stfipa (reliquary) was the central object of worship and there were no icons, to one in which the objects of worship and adoration were the stfipa and the icon, now placed side by side. The former, in turn, signifies the sponsorship of a passionate reform movement and the uninterrupted production and ceaseless propagation of the so-called sermons of the Great Vehicle (mahiiyiinasutrii~;~i), containing the movement's message, by persons, both lay and clerical, sharply critical of the traditional Buddhist schools and of their monkish representatives, who by now were divided into many schools and sects, each clinging tenaciously to its own traditions, all of them scholasticized and in stark opposition to one another. These were denigrated by the reformers as the "Lesser Vehicle, "c one in which the clergy was monopolizing the Teaching of the Buddha, now distorted by the monks into a petty dogma designed for their own pleasure. The reformers referred to themselves as the "Greater Vehicle," hoisting aloft as their banner a return to the Buddha's original Message and a vow to place before everything else the salvation of all mankind, both present and future, a goal in devotion to which they should be "bodhisattvas," cultivating ascetic practices themselves and rendering unlimited service to others in total disre-

8 • THE SPECIAL SHAPE OF ClllNESE BUDDHISM

1

.,

gard of their own lives for the fulfillment of this vow. As we have said above, scriptural texts of the Greater and Lesser Vehicles, schools standing in mutual opposition, were presented to the Chinese simultaneously during the reigns of emperors Huan and Ling of the Latter Han, that is, early in the latter half of the second century, as the first translations of the Buddhist scriptures into Chinese. The presentation took place at Lo-yang, both purporting to be the recorded sermons of the Sakyabuddha, both endowed with the name ching,d which would assure them the respect and authority enjoyed in China by books purporting to contain the teachings of China's own ancient Sages~

Development and Spread of Indian Buddhism. For all that it originated in India, Buddhism was not really in the mainstream of Indian civilization. On the contrary, it was a stepchild, the rebellious progeny, oflndia's traditional culture. The mainstream of Indian civilization, that magnificent civilization that shed its glow as one of the world's oldest, had its origins in the Vedic hymns presented to their gods by the Indo-Aryans who settled in ancient times in the Punjab, on the upper reaches of the Indus in Northwest India, there to institute an agricultural way of life. These people eventually made their way southward and eastward, where, in the course of a prolonged struggle with tropical heat, wild beasts, epidemic disease, and foreign peoples, they opened the Ganges valley to cultivation and developed the "forest philosophy" of the Upanishads. It was this way oflife, based on these now sanctified classics, that led to the creation of a number of philosophic schools and, in turn, to the development of the popular Hindu religion. The bearer of this civilization was the Brahmanical caste, which both insisted with pride that it was the highest class in Indian society and was recognized as such by the society in general. Indian society had become an already rigidified society, with the Brahmans (briihmava) at the top and under them, in descending order, the warrior-kings (k~atriya), the merchants and artisans (vaisya), and the lowest class (sudra), then, beyond these, a vast number of minute sub-castes. The hold of the Brahmans on the world of ideas was not, however, unshakable. Even to the Brahmans, long honored though they had been as sacrificial ministers to the gods, as transmitters and students ofVedas and Upanishads, and as the country's sole leaders in matters of religion and philosophy, there came a time of decline, wherein they neglected scholarship and craved only idle selfamusement. Simultaneously, the K~atriya and V aisya castes gained in power and enhanced their social position. As a consequence there emerged from their ranks persons who themselves moved in the direction of study and thought, learned the hallowed classics, becoming first skeptical, then critical, of Brahmanical theories, and finally proceeded to put into practice their own ideas and beliefs. Representative of these latter are Sakyamuni and Mahavira, both non-Brahmans, each of whom, about the fourth or fifth century B.c., dissatisfied with the ideological and religious poverty of the Brahmans, attacked their traditional ideas and established a new religion of his own, namely, Buddhism and Jainism, respectively. Rebellious children, even stepchildren, of the Brahmanical tradition they may have been, but these new religions very rapidly spread the net of their teachings. This was particularly true of

B : FORmGN CHARACTERISTICS • 9

Buddhism, which unlike Jainism-for the latter got as far into India's northwest as the Mathura region but not very far north of that-moved from its religious base of Northwest India, which it shared withJainism, throughout all oflndia and even beyond.

Buddhism, riding the crest of a political wave of religious and spiritual proselytization, in which belief in Buddhism, peace, and compassion were all equally emphasized by King Asoka (r. ca. 288-232 B.c.), third member of the Maurya clan that had unified India in a way never before accomplished, was able not only to spread and flourish throughout virtually all oflndia but also to move from the mainland to the island of Ceylon and to cross India's northwest frontier in a march to both north and west.

Sectarian, Scholastic Buddhism. Now, after the death of a Founder whose religious movement has acquired many disciples and adherents, the emergence within the ranks of the believers of a senior faction and a junior faction, or of a conservative tendency and a progressive tendency, is a development not easily avoided. Sakyamuni's Buddhist movement was no more able to escape this tendency to internal opposition than were other religious movements. This led in due course to sectarian division. Apart from this, for Buddhism to spread throughout vast India in territories different from one another in natural surroundings, in government and economy, and even in race, it had to accommodate itself to the local societies if its adherents were to live, practice their religion, and proselytize in these societies amid other religious groups already settled in their respective regions. The mendicant monastic community was to find that it could not maintain itself everywhere by a set of rules worked out in the Magadha country of Central India. Affected by local peculiarities, it was inevitable that there should be changes even in the interpretation of the scriptures and of the monastic code and, as a consequence, that there should be an ever greater splintering of sects as the mission territory broadened. As Sakyamuni's death receded three, four, or five hundred years into the past, there developed a large number of sectarian schools, numbered sometimes at eighteen, sometimes at twenty. As the products of this sectarian splintering entrenched themselves, each insisting and believing that it alone represented orthodox Buddhism, different interpretations arose among them with regard to the canonical texts that initially they all had in common. This exegetical warfare led in turn to more and more hair,..splitting in textual interpretation and doctrinal formulation, then to doctrinal disputes, thus leading the monks to bury themselves in the specialized study of their own sectarian dogmas in sharp opposition to those of all other schools, to forget their own religious mission of self-cultivation and the deliverance ofhuman society, to treat the doctrines of Buddhism as their own private preserve, and to value above all else the tradition of picayune exegetical dogmatism.

The Mahayana Movement. As a reaction to this degeneration of Buddhist doctrine to hair-splitting scholasticism and, in connection with this, to a situation in which the sectarians were monopolizing the Buddhist religion as the private preserve of the monastic clergy to the neglect of the social mission of the religious, that of putting


, ...

compassion and deliverance into practice, there arose, as might have been expected, from the religiously committed among clergy and laity both a chorus of critical voices, of dissatisfied voices, a movement calling for self-examination. "Return to the spirit of our Founder, the Venerable Sakya." It will simply not do, said these reformers, to concern oneself with learned disputation to the neglect of one's own salvation. In order to rescue the totality of suffering mankind, said these same persons, one must vow to sacrifice oneself, to proceed with vigor on the path of self-cultivation-that is the essence of the Buddha's teaching! Moreover, said the reformers, the doctrines of these schools, which vie with one another for dogmatic depth and subtlety to the total neglect of self-sacrificing service in the interest of saving human society, result in distortion and misunderstanding of the Buddha's doctrine itself. Unless this sort of "Buddhism" is reformed, said these persons finally, it will simply not be possible to make the Buddha's teaching relevant to our own times. It was by uniting two spirits, that of a "return to Buddha," i.e., of a supposed reversion to the past, and of a forward movement, that of making the Buddha's teaching a religion within the reach of all its own contemporaries, that a new Buddhist movement, intent on renovating the Buddhist tradition, came into being. This is what is meant by the "Buddhism of the bodhisattva," a movement that denigrated the religion of the schools as a "Lesser Vehicle" and that called itself the Buddhism of the "Greater Vehicle," a religion that sought to clarify the Buddha's real doctrine and to make it a reality for its own time and society. It is presumably about the beginning of the Christian era that the Mahayana Buddhist movement compiled its own earliest scriptures and came to the fore as an explicit movement. During the first and second centuries this movement reached Northwest India, where the propagation of the early Mahayana scriptures was pursued with vigor.1

Simultaneous Acceptance of Multiple and Conflicting Buddhisms. No one can say with certainty where in India, when, and by whom Mahayana Buddhism was founded, nor when and by what sort of persons the first Mahayana scriptures were composed. It would be as well to consider the likelihood that they were a product not merely of conditions within the Indian Buddhist community, such as have been described above, but of traditional Indian philosophic ideas, of a variety offoreign religions and sets of ideas, such, for example, as those of Greece and Iran, as well. For closer study of this area one has scarcely any choice other than to rely on cooperation from specialists in Indian Buddhism and on students of archaeology and other disciplines. If, however, one's focus is Chinese Buddhism, one must pay special attention to two (presumable) facts, viz., that by the first or second century early Mahayana scriptures such as have been mentioned above made their way into Northwest India, the avenue to the Silk Road so intimately connected with the passage of Buddhism into China, and that the movement represented by these scriptures was engaged in feverish missionary activity in head-on opposition to the Hinayana schools, most particularly that of the Sarvastivada, already settled and established there. Since this area was already by the first and second centuries an area linked to the Silk Road leading into China, as a consequence it was an area that could easily be stimulated to broaden its


field of vision from India to the whole world. Hence, the propagation in this area of two kinds of Buddhism, Mahayana and Hinayana, in unequivocal opposition to each other eventuated in the quest-by both of new mission territories outside India and, consequently, in a march eastward. This manifests itself in the second century, at the very beginning of the acceptance of Buddhism by the Chinese, in the simultaneous translation of scriptures of both varieties, those of the Hinayana by An Shihkao, those of the Mahayana by Lokak~ema.

Several schools ofHinayana Buddhism had made their way into Northwest India, but in particular the Sarvastivada school was strong in and about the Kashmir region. Sarvastivada scholarship, commonly known as "Abhidharma scholarship," was concentrated on a minute analysis of phenomena, giving way ultimately to a minutely analytical style of scholarship monopolized by monks belonging to this school. The Mahayanists directed their barbs at the Abhidharmikas, who, in their preoccupation with an exegesis that was becoming ever more analytical, ever more philological, and ever more picayune, were neglecting their proper activities as men of religion. The rise and spread of the Mahayana quite naturally led the Hinayanists to have a good look at themselves, but it also stimulated in them a sense of resistance and rivalry, as well as the wish to do missionary work of their own. The Buddhism of the Lesser Vehicle current in Northwest India appears to have preceded that of the Greater Vehicle on to the Silk Road and eastward, where it engaged in proselytization in two countries close to China, namely, Kucha and Khotan. However, the Greater Vehicle, no less committed to eastward evangelism, proceeded southward to Khotan. Ze In this way, the Greater and Lesser Vehicles, which made their way into Northwest India in the first century and later, pursued then with vigor, side by side and in mutual rivalry, the evangelization of Central Asia. This evangelist movement, mounted on the Silk Road, that avenue of an already flourishing east-west trade cutting through Central Asia, proceeded inevitably into the target areas not only of the oasis countries through which it passed but also of its terminus, China, the "land of silk" itsel£ Thus the Buddhism that found its way into China in translation in the second century was not simply Buddhism without qualification but rather a religion of two distinct traditions, Mahayana and Hinayana, both parading under the title Po chiao, "the Buddha's teaching."

Within the Indian Buddhist church in the period spanning the first and third centuries, the Greater and Lesser Vehicles stood in opposition to each other, each producing distinguished scholars and evangelists, so that scholarship flourished and rival missionary movements also arose. The period was one in which the Mahayana strove to compile, copy, and propagate new scriptures, scriptures rich in philosophic or literary formulations like the Prajfiaparamita corpus, the Vimalakirtinirde§a, or the Saddharmapurufarfka, or scriptures lauding Buddhas other than Sakyamuni and their respective "pure lands," like the A-ch'u-Jo kuo kuo ching, the Pratyutpannasamadhi, or the Sukhavativyuha, while the Hinayana was producing a plethora of doctrinal treatises-in sum, it was an era overflowing with activity.£ In China, which at first was quite ignorant of the circumstances in which Buddhism in its very homeland had


become divided into rival sects, the traditions of these several schools, which had in fact come to mutual rivalry from mutually exclusive religious bodies, doctrines, and practices, were accepted without distinction as the the Buddha's teaching and their scriptures, which, whether of the Greater or of the Lesser Vehicle, were to the Chinese ching, "preached by the Buddha," accepted ohne Weiteres as the Dharma preached by Sakyamuni. Thus there was laid in China already at this early date the groundwork for the birth of an all-inclusive Buddhism different from its Indian counterpart.

A Religion of Culturally Conditioned Multiplicity. China did not stop at importing a Buddhism with a multiplicity of sectarian manifestations from a common Indian homeland, for it was the recipient of Buddhism from many localities. Buddhism came into China from India's north, west, and center, but also from countries outside India, such as the land of the Ylieh-chih (an empire that for a time held sway as far as Central India), Parthia, Sogdiana, Kucha, Khotan, etc., in short, from all over vast Central Asia, into whose lands it had penetrated and by whose inhabitants it was first accepted and then, once these peoples had been converted, transmitted beyond their own borders as well. Buddhism had presumably undergone certain changes in each of these countries, changes that made it different from what it had been in its homeland. It was by missionaries of divergent nationalities such as these that Buddhism was spread. It was thus inevitable that Chinese Buddhism, based on the acceptance from a wide variety of evangelists, of different national origin as well as of different schools, of a doctrine that each evangelist insisted was the teaching of the Sakyabuddha, should assume a shape and undergo a development that would make it different from the Buddhism of India, from the religion of the Founder.

Prolonged and Virtually Uninterrupted Transmission. Another fact of which sight may not be lost, when considering this developing Chinese Buddhism, is that the abovementioned transmission took place over an extent of nearly a thousand years. In India, as well as in Central and Southeast Asia, Buddhism continued to develop and to change, giving rise to new doctrines and even to new scriptures. Given the arrival of a religion of this kind in successive waves, even when the religion received and accepted by China's Buddhists had acquired a fixed form-not without considerable effort on the part of the believers-these believers found themselves confronted with a repeated need for reform in order to accommodate the new accretions. When new developments in Buddhism were made available in translation for the guidance of the Chinese by authoritative foreign missionaries who insisted that "This is the true Doctrine of the Buddha!" then the elaborate structure of dogma that the Chinese, when left to themselves, had been at such pains to construct would get a jolt, and the whole structure would find itself in need of revision. At the very least, China's Buddhists had to proceed to attach the new Buddhism by graft to the Buddhist complex that they had somehow contrived to work out for themselves, thus producing an unwieldy mongrel, and then to organize the whole into a single doctrine, supposedly preached by a single Buddha in the course of a single lifetime. This is the origin of what the Japanese call kyoso hanjaku,g a phenomenon that lies at the


base of most of the schools of Chinese Buddhism, something that developed into the arrangement of the totality of the Chinese Buddhist canon a harmonious whole. Thus came about the peculiar character of Chinese Buddhism, conditioned by a prolonged series of missionary waves from abroad.

2. THE TRANSMISSION OF BUDDHISM AFTER THE APPEARANCE OF ICONS

Yet another noteworthy fact where the sudden transmission of Buddhism into China in the first and second centuries is concerned is that before the Christian era no figures of the Buddha were fashioned. The Buddha was revered in representations of the Dharma-wheel (dharmacakra), the tree under which He had His experience of enlightened intuition (bodhivrk~a), the lion throne (si111hasana), the lotus throne (padmasana), and the like, or posthumous longing and veneration for Him were demonstrated through the use of relics (such as the alms bowl) or, in particular, through reliquaries housing the Buddha's bones (stfipa), reliquaries shaped like an inverted alms bowl. However, once Indian Buddhism, which did not originally possess Buddha-images as objects of worship, began to create images of Buddhas and bodhisattvas and to treat them as objects of worship and other pious acts, the conversion of the territories of eastern Turkestan proceeded at a very rapid pace.h The Chinese pilgrim Fa-hsien, who early in the fifth century crossed the "Ts'ung-ling" (Pamirs) to "T' o-li" (a tiny country in the Darel basin), a Hinayana land in Northern India, reports that he saw there a wood carving of Maitreya bodhisattva eighty feet high, alleged to have been executed by a certain arhant, and that he heard from the local people a story attributed by them to their elders, stating that after the fashioning of that image, which had taken place more than 300 years after the Nirval).a, an Indian monk had made his appearance, crossing that river (the Sindhu) with sfitras and vinaya in his possession. (The biography of Fa-sheng in Excerpts from the Lives of Renowned Monks [Meiso densho] says that an image, which seems to be the same as the one just mentioned, was fashioned 480 years after the Nirval).a.) This report, contained in Fa-hsien's journal, is of great interest because it tells us that Buddhism went east after the fashioning of Buddha-images had come into vogue.3

The passage of Buddhism eastward, i.e., into Eastern Turkestan, presumably began in the first century, but, by about the time that Fa-hsien set out for India, beginning with the transformation of Shan-shan, a country near China, into a Hinayana land in which more than four thousand monks were learning the language and script oflndia, Kucha was in the process of becoming a land dominated by the Lesser Vehicle, while Khotan was becoming an active Mahayana land, the Greater Vehicle having emerged there and crushed the Lesser Vehicle, which had preceded it. The proselytization of China also became suddenly quite active in the first and second centuries. This is to say that the conversion of China took an active turn from the time that a great change was coming about in practice and ritual in the Buddhist circles at least of Northwest India, thanks to the emergence of new objects of worship within the Buddhist church.

14 • THE SPB<;:IAL SHAPE OF CHINESE BUDDHISM

Birthplace oJGreco-Buddhist Sculpture. The acceptance by the Chinese of Buddhism from the first century onward, particularly from the second century, in an uninterrupted transmission from abroad was different from what had happened before the Christian era in that there was, thanks to a new object of worship, the goldwrought Buddhist figure, a development with a totally new face. It is also worthy of note that these figures, born in Northwest India-the land from which Buddhism began the eastward march that was to take it to China-of the contact between Buddhism and Greco-Roman civilization, developed and spread at great speed.

Northwest India was by King Asoka's time Buddhist mission territory, but already before his reign, at the time of the founder of the Maurya dynasty, to which he belonged, it had experienced the Alexandrian invasion, as a result of which, and by agreement with the Greek kings, there were Greek colonies in the area. The descendants of the Greeks, settled from the upper reaches of the Indus into Afghanistan, could not be oblivious to India's religions. It was far more likely that the Greeks, who in religious as in other matters set a high value on freedom, should take an interest in Buddhism, which had come to prosper in Northwest India by denying the authority of the Brahmans and by preaching that enlightenment was equally available to men of all classes and to the whole human race in complete disregard of national boundaries, rather than in Brahmanism, an exclusive religion that insisted on the inviolability of the caste system. It was, in fact, all the more likely, in that the great King Asoka was a fervent partisan of Buddhism and a sponsor of missionary activity beyond his own frontiers, that the descendants of the Greek settlers in India should find their interests turning toward Buddhism. The Questions of Milinda (the Milindapafihii of the Pali, corresponding to the Na-hsien-pi-ch'iu ching of the Chinese)4i

tells us that the Greek king Menander (Milinda in Pali, Mi-lan-t'o in Chinese), who ruled about 160 B.C. in the Punjab, "as a result of an interview with the learned Buddhist monk Nagasena (Na-hsien-pi-ch'iu in Chinese), was converted to Buddhism." The historicity of this is generally acknowledged, but, even if one cannot accept tel que[ the story of the king's conversion, one may still surmise. that there were among the Greeks settled in Northwest India persons who took an interest in Buddhism; that there were, in turn, among these some who posed questions from the standpoint of Greek thought; that, as a result of this, Greek patterns of thought exerted a certain inevitable influence on Buddhist ideas; and, finally, that these influences posed some of the problems that confront all mankind irrespective of race or geography. Behind the Mahayana movement, which had its origin about the first century, behind the compilation of its first scriptures, it is not unreasonable to imagine the influences exerted on Buddhism by Greek or, in the broader sense, Occidental patterns of thought, hard as this may be to prove concretely.

Menander and King Pu~yamitra. Another person to confront the Greek king Menander was King Pu~yarnitra, founder of the Sutiga dynasty, that put an end to Asoka' s line after the latter's death. Pu~yami tra did suffer from Menander' s invasions, but one would do well to note that the former lives in tradition as an antiBuddhist king who not only persecuted Buddhism but also revived the Brahmanical


rituals. The presumed significance of this fact is the (no less presumptive) conclusion to be drawn from it, that one of the territories to which the Buddhists could go in flight from their anti-Buddhist persecutor, King Pu~yamitra, was Northwest India, a Buddhist mission territory under the rule of King Menander, a sponsor of, and possibly himself a believer in, Buddhism. This would be one reason for the gravitation of many varieties of Buddhism into Northwest India and their florescence there.

Saka Invasion of Northwest India. There followed in Northwest India the invasion and domination of the Sakas (known to the Chinese as Se) and the Kushans (Kueishuang) from Central Asia over the Hindukush and southward. The Sakas, a nomadic people, had, about 500 B.C., been under Persian rule, but, driven out of the Sir Daria area about the middle of the second century B.c. by the Ta-yiieh-chih invasion from the east, they crossed the Hindukush into Afghanistan and Baluchistan, then proceeded further south to control the whole Indus valley. About the beginning of the first century, when all of this was happening, the pressure from the movement of the Iranianized Sakas did no doubt prod Northwest India's Buddhists into a sense of uneasiness, thus inciting them to go east of the Pamirs in order to escape their troubles, but a fact no less important is that these Sakas were no wreckers oflndian Buddhism. On the contrary, the surviving Buddhist inscriptions are proof that among these very Sakas were not a few Buddhist converts. The Saka state that was formed in the Indus valley was by no means the exclusive protector and sponsor of Buddhism alone, but it was tolerant of all the religions under its rule.

The political situation in Buddhist Northwest India underwent an even greater change. This was the emergence of the Kushan dynasty, known in the Chinese histories as the "land of the Great Yiieh-chih" (Ta yiieh chih kuo), creators of a great empire bestriding India and Central Asia. This happened when the Ta-yiieh-chih, who had driven the Sakas into Northwest India, left a number of satraps to govern these territories, and when one of them, a Kushan chieftain (or "marquess," as he is called in the Chinese sources-kuei shuang hou), built up his own power to where he was able to act independently. About the second century this line produced rulers who were themselves Buddhists, a particularly fervent one about the middle of that century, King Kani~ka, under whose reign Buddhism flourished so mightily.k This succession of invasions and of the imposition of foreign rule on the Buddhists of Northwest India presumably left these latter no choice but to direct their energies to the conversion of the foreigners.

These rapid political shifts that took place about the beginning of the Christian era may well be among the things that stimulated to reflection a Buddhist church that vaunted itself on a picayune dogma monopolized by monks, each of whom, sealed up within his own school, would engage in cantankerous disputes with representatives of other schools. Political shifts may also have stimulated the new Mahayana movement, which placed the highest value on a self-sacrificing service to "teaching and conversion for the weal of others." Both the Saka state and the Kushan dynasty had contacts with the civilization of the Occident, and both were active in east-west trade. Thus they were characterized by broad cultural tolerance, a circumstance that


endowed the activities of the Buddhist church as well with a certain universality. At any rate, the period ofSaka rule over Northwest India and, following that, of the establishment of the Kushan dynasty was a period of florescence at least for the Buddhists of Northwest India, one in which the eastward proselytizing activities of both the Greater and the Lesser Vehicles were realized. The detailed treatment of these questions we leave to the Indologists. but at any rate we are led to conclude that from about the beginning of the Christian era the foreign mission activities of the Buddhists of Northwest India showed a sudden burst, and that in a series of rapid moves the stage was set for the promotion of a new Buddhist movement and also for its eastward march.

Influence of the Icons. Now, next in order, what reinforced in an epoch-making way the changes, particularly the specifically religious changes, in the doctrine and ritual of Buddhism and what increased its powers of diffusion in a no less epoch-making way was the birth of the Buddhist icon.

For a long time after the Nirval).a India's Buddhists fashioned no Buddha-images. The posthumous veneration and adoration of the Buddha took the form of reverence for His .relics and traces, leading to worship of the stfipa, which housed His bones. The gate (torava) of the stUpa at Saiici and the revolving stone fence, covered with outstanding sculptural representations of scenes from the life of the Buddha and from the j:itakas that developed into a Buddhist literature, tell of the antiquity and of the power of diffusion of narrative literature such as the Jataka stories. However, among these surviving sculptures there is no image of the Buddha. Where the Buddha would be expected to be, a Dharma-wheel (dharmacakra), or a lion's throne (sif!'lhiisana), or a tree (bodhivrk~a), symbolizing Him, is worshiped by the believers in His stead. Yet, by about the first century, in Gandhara, a section ofNorthwest India where Buddhism was flourishing, where there were also Greeks living and where Greek civilization had been maintaining itself from generation to generation for quite some time, anthropomorphic Buddha-figures began to be fashioned in imitation of the sculptural representations of the Greek gods.

From the elements that make it up the art is called "Greco-Buddhist art," or else it is called the "Buddhist art of Gandhara" on the basis of where it was produced. Extremely distinguished works of art, as is well known, were these Buddha- and bodhisattva-images fashioned in the Greek manner in Gandhara, a region which, though within India, was open to the world; which was in contact with western Central Asia, into which flowed the civilizations of Persia, Greece, and Rome; in which there was, in fact, a settled Greek population and into which there was a constant flow of Greek culture; and where, in addition, all of the civilizations of the west entered and mingled. There can be little doubt that they exerted an enormous charm on the Buddhist worshipers of a Founder no longer living. Not only were images of the Buddha Himself fashioned, but the whole Sakya lineage would be carved with precision. The venerable form of the Found~r, Who Himself had been worshiped posthumously and from afar, as well as the glorious traces of His ascetic practices and activity as a teacher, were now concretely, very artistically, even impressively,


realized, something that had a strong attractive pull on the reverent sentiments of the believers and very rapidly made a vogue of the carving of Buddha-images and of scenes from the Buddha's life. It was inevitable that these icons should be celebrated as objects of worship. Under the reign of King Kani$ka as well, the icons were received even into the Hinayana schools of Northwest India, of which the Sarvastivada was the most important and which were under the particular protection of the king himsel£ The Mahayana also made use of images.

Buddhism and the Lay Believer. For example, in the chapter on Dharmodgata bodhisattva, the twenty-ninth, in roll 10 of the Tao hsing po-jo ching, Lokak~ema's

translation of the A~tasahasrika prajnaparamita sutra, made by him in 179 (second year of Kuang-ho, in the reign of Emperor Ling of the Latter Han), hence one of the oldest of the Buddhist scriptures extant in Chinese, we read as follows :5

"It is as if after the Buddha's ParinirvaJ:.la there were a person who fashioned an image of the Buddha. Of men who saw that image of the Buddha, there would be none who would not kneel before it with palms joined. The image would be erect and lovely, no different in appearance from a Buddha. Men, upon seeing it, would not fail to praise to it, nor bring to it offerings of fragrant flowers and fine cloth, 0 worthy one !"1

If one were to call upon that Buddha, would His spirit reside in that image?

Sadaparibhuta said, "It is not in the image. The reason that Buddha-images are fashioned is merely the wish to enable men to gain merit [from making and/or worshiping them] .... Mter the Buddha's ParinirvaJ:.la, it will be in recollection of the Buddha that His images shall be fashioned, out of the wish to enable worldlings to make offerings to them and gain the merit thereof."m

Objects of Buddha-Contemplation in Samadhi. The scriptural text says, in particular, that the wish was to enable worldlings, i.e., many laymen, to make offerings and gain merit therefrom. One may surmise, in other words, that image-making was encouraged and became fashionable among lay believers. Also, in the belief that recollection of the Buddha in single-minded piety, with the icon as object, was a method of quickly achieving samadhi (concentration of thought)-in this case the "samadhi of Buddha-contemplation" (kuan Jo san-mei)-icons became associated with the Buddhist's most important practical approaches to religion. For another example, the Pratyutpannasamadhi, which, like the Tao hsing, is also one of the oldest of the Buddhist scriptures available in Chinese, was translated three times under the Latter Han. (All three are in T13. The first, entitled Po-chou-san-mei ching, is in one roll. The second, under the same title, is in three rolls. The third, entitled Pa-po-p'u-sa ching,n

is also in one roll. The third is regarded, on textual evidence. as the oldest version.) All three list four methods of quickly achieving pratyutpannasamadhi, of which "one [method] is to fashion an image of the Buddha or draw His picture." In other words, the scriptural authority is recommending the fashioning of an icon as a practical approach to meditation, then the concentration of one's thought on the Buddha's form


by using the icon as an object of contemplation. In connection with a practical religious approach such as this one, that of using the icon as an object of contemplation, there was presumably a rapid development of the architecture of the shrines in which the images were lodged, and which thus became centers of religious activity, of the art of decorating them, and, finally, of the body of rituals devoted to the Image.

Icons and Stapas. With the appearance of icons, the stiipa, built in the shape of an inverted alms-bowl to contain the Buddha's bones (sarira), which after the Buddha's death had become central objects of worship and veneration on the part of the Buddhists, was converted into a sort of palace to house the icon. It developed into a structure of many stories, being by now a holy temple-palace, in which the immortal Buddha actually dwelt and preached. In the SaddharmaputJ~arikasutra, which, together with the Prajfiaparamita scriptures and the Pratyutpannasamiidhisutra, is among the oldest of the important Mahayana scriptures, also one of the most frequently translated in China and among the most current in that country, there is a chapter (the StapasaY!fdarsanaparivarta, "Apparition of the Reliquary," appearing in Saq1gharak~a's translation as Ch'i pao t'a p'in, "Stiipa of Seven Jewels;'' and in Kumarajiva's as Hsien pao t'a p'in, "Apparition of the Jeweled Stiipa") where there is described with beauty and solemnity a miraculous scene in which there wells up out of the earth a stiipa made of the Seven Jewels, measuring five hundred yojanas in all three directions and adorned with numberless banners, pendants, and bells, reaching into the very heavens, where it is lavished by the gods with flowers, perfumes, music, and dance. Seated within this jeweled stiipa is the Buddha Prabhutaratna, who invites Sakyamuni to join him. The two Buddhas then sit there, side by side.

Also, in the Kuan fo san-mei hai ching we see such phrases as the following: "One is to enter the stiipa and gaze at [the tuft ofhair] between [the Buddha's] brows." "By 'gazing at the Buddha's image' is meant . 0 • that first one enters the buddha-stupa. 0 •• "o These are indications that the stiipa, by now a temple-palace for lodging the Buddha's image, developed from a receptacle ofbones into a religious center for the conduct of worship and of other religious activities.6P Also, stiipas of three or five stories, made of wood and other substances, such as evolved in China and Japan, are probably a special development, one wherein the Indian stiipa, shaped like an inverted alms-bowl, was placed atop a many-storied structure, something already developed in China.

Development of Buddhist Religious Architecture. The Pure Land scriptures, compiled in early Mahayana times like the Prajfi.aparamita scriptures and the Saddharmaput:4arika and telling of the sermons preached by Buddhas seated in gorgeous palaces situated in the "pure lands" of Ak~obhya and Arnita, furnished an impetus for the development of lovely Buddhist temple:-palaces, to house Buddha-images here on earth, in imitation of the palaces occupied by those Buddhas in their "pure lands."

Further Development of Ritual. The celebration of the Buddha's birth came to be


conducted with much pomp as a ceremony entitled hsing hsiang ("walking the image"), in which, placed in a richly caparisoned carriage, the Buddha's image was wheeled about the streets of the city. Fa-hsien tells us in his journal that on his way to India he made a point, to the extent of delaying his arrival at his destination, of stopping in Khotan to observe an elaborate hsing hsiang ceremony.7 Even before Fa-hsien' s time, in China itself this ceremony had come into vogue everywhere, and by Northern Wei times the celebration of the Buddha's birth became the most elaborate ceremony in the year, stirring up the entire citizenry. One may surmise the speed and force with which religious ceremonies to the accompaniment of Buddha-figures spread into China.8

A Mission Movement Complete with Stapas and Images. The fashioning of Buddhist images, begun about the first century in Northwest India, was suddenly intensified in the second and third centuries, and proceeded to become fashionable even in Central India. Thus the passage of Buddhism through Central Asia to the east simultaneously with the rise in image-making came to mean that to the stiipas, which were the central object of worship for the indigenous Buddhists, there were now added the newly created Buddha-figures; that the stiipas and the images became joint objects of veneration; and that a Buddhist religion accompanied, so to speak, by vigorous artistic activity was making its way into this new territory, one in which there were unfolding at great speed new art forms, new rituals, and new forms of religious practice. For China this meant that the propagation of a foreign religion was taking place to the accompaniment of religious art, represented by golden Buddha-figures and many-storied stiipas, that exerted a truly enormous influence on the Chinese nation and that also was very effective in winning converts. There must have been a difference in both degree and kind between the Buddhist missions antedating the Christian era, when there were no images, and this new religion, which, equipped as it was with stiipas and images, both novelties for the Chinese, excited the curiosity of Chinese society and gained converts in its midst. It is most interesting that recent archaeological excavations all over China have reported discoveries in Szechwan and in many other places outside of the Ch' ang-an and Loyang regions, which were then the cultural centers of the land, of simple figures, presumed to be Buddha-images, dating to the Latter Han and the Three Kingdoms (25-265). For by relying solely on written evidence, which in China was recorded mostly by, for, and about residents of the cultural center of the realm, one would have no way of knowing the extent of the spread of Buddhism during the early period of proselytization. In fact, much knowledge may be expected, thanks to the fruits of this archaeological research, of the way in which Buddhism spread with the aid of icons into areas for which there is no literary evidence. The above-mentioned reports may be found in such technical journals as Wen wu ts' an k' ao tzu

liao (References for the Study of Cultural Artifacts) or Wen wu (Cultural Artifacts). A summary description of the current status of this research, entitled "Some of the Oldest Surviving Samples of Buddhist Statuary in Our Country," will be found in Hsien tai Po hsiieh (Modern Buddhist Studies), no. 4 (1962).


How, then, did the Chinese people take to this multiple Buddhism, coming as it did both from India and from a variety of countries outside India? How, for that matter, did they take to stiipas and images, neither of which had ever existed in China, and to a religious ceremonial which, built around them, was adorned with many varieties of art, music, and craftsmanship? The question affects both the Lesser and the Greater Vehicle, for the import took place after the division of the former into schools and after the rise of the latter, which followed this division in time. The incoming foreign religion could not but be conditioned by the receiving society, as well as by its ideas and beliefs. This is all the more cogent in the case of China, a nation which, it should be noted, was heir to an ancient and highly sophisticated culturaf tradition, transmitted by a people-the so-called Han people-in whom the sense of the supremacy of the "central and flowering" and of the barbarian character of all other peoples was very strong.

c. The Impact of Indigenous Learning

and Ideas

1. THE PERIOD OF CoNFUCIAN DOMINANCE

When the way was cleared for the passage of Buddhism into China, or, in other words, when, thanks to the campaigns of Chang Ch'ien, an east-west avenue was opened and the Han policy of "managing the Western Regions" was vigorously launched, something of extreme importance happened in the history of Chinese learning, ideas, and politics. Of all the learned doctrines that had been vying with one another during the Spring and Autumn era and that of the Warring States, those of the "various philosophers and the Hundred Schools" (chu tzu po chia), Confucianism alone was adopted as State doctrine, and there was establisted a political and social structure, in keeping with the enthronement of Confucianism throughout the Han as "official learning," whose politics and morals were both based on the peculiarly Confucian classics.

Confucianism, perfected as a doctrine for rulers, became linked with monarchical power, and the study of the five "warp books" (Changes, Odes, Documents, Rites,

and Spring and Autumn Annals) treated by that school as its classics (ching), became an indispensable attainment for all officials. Thereafter Confucian classical scholarship, while on the one hand using the monarchical power as a shield bolstered by the authority of the classics, on the other placing restrictions on that very power, came to govern and to control the life of the Chinese, particularly the intellectual life of the educated, by determining the social and political order and by establishing itself as a standard for morality. The governing, i.e., the literate class, highly educated through the medium of"classicallearning," were subject to severe restrictions from the classics on their thinking, their speech, ·their actions, indeed on everything, and came to believe that it was only by close reliance on the classics that one could speak, write, and act properly.a Even after the collapse of the Han, this classical learning, the

C : INDIGENOUS LEARNING AND IDEAS • 21

scholarship premised on the assumption of the supreme authority of the Confucian classics that had achieved such a firm position under the Han, long provided a framework for China's thought processes and has continued until quite recent times as the supreme authority for that country's politics and ethics in spite of fluctuations, from time to time, in its power. Thus, if Buddhism was to be accepted by the Chinese from abroad and to play a leading role in China, it was obliged to come to trrms with Confucian classicism and Confucian ideology.

Canons of China's Ancient Sages. Now, just as the life of all ancient peoples was bound to religious elements, so the ancient Chinese too had their beliefs in a great number of gods-the "hundred spirits" (po shen)-ranging from a supreme deity known as "Heaven" (t'ien) or the "Heavenly Theocrat" (t'ien ti) down to mountain and river spirits. By reliance on shamans both female (wu) and male (hsi), of whom these gods were believed to take possession, they would shun calamity and seek good fortune, or they would decide their most important acts on the basis of prognostications by soothsayers. Recent investigations of the Yin ruins have made it clear that the Yin aristocracy, by now in possession ofinscribed bronze vessels, also permitted themselves to be governed by such religious beliefs as these. 1 Furthermore, the Chinese nation prided itself on the traditional belief that the "central flowering" land in which it dwelt-it and no other-represented a people and a territory governed by the sovereign Sages of antiquity, rulers of morally unblemished character, a land and a people both especially chosen, endowed with a unique line of sainted monarchs and the recipients of special guidance toward civilized self-improvement. About 1050 B.C., the Chou, who replaced the Yin, established their capital at Haoching, where they fell heirs to the civilization of the Yin. In the belief that "Heaven" or the "Heavenly Theocrat," and none other, was the supreme deity governing human society on earth, and that the person who, in obedience to the Deity's mandate (t'ien ming) and as His vicar, governed the Middle Realm was the Son of Heaven, the new dynasty, erecting a foundation on ideas centering about Heaven, perfected a political system and founded a moral order based on that foundation. Confucius was firmly convinced that the sainted chancellor who fixed the Chou institutions described above, who conducted government on their basis, and who handed his teachings down was the Duke of Chou. In this firm belief he held him in great veneration, with the result that the Confucianists of succeeding generations transmitted this same veneration. However, once the Chou, under attack from a nonChinese people, the Ch'iian-jung ("dog savages"), about 770 B.C., moved eastward to establish their capital at Lo-yang, the authority of the dynasty waned and the feudatories vied for power, leading to the Spring and Autumn era (770-403 B.c.) and that of the Warring States (403-221 B.c.), during which eras Chou institutions simply went to pieces.

It was in such times as these that the patriarch Confucius was born, a man who, motivated by the ideal of restoring the institutional hallmarks of early Chou, which he held in veneration in the belief that they had been institutionalized and implemented by the sainted Duke of Chou, and which were now crumbling with the


decline of the dynasty, systematized his people's ancient traditions under the rubric of "classics" (ching) and preached his doctrine in keeping with them. In the process of systematizing these ancient traditions, Confucius fashioned them into "classics" expounding the foundations of government and ethics by removing from them all pronouncedly religious and mythological elements, his attitude being that one "venerates the spirits but keeps them far from one." These texts were already regarded by the Chinese people as canons of statecra~"t and ethics, transmitting the models_ handed down by a whole series of sainted rulers, beginning with such remote Sons ofHeaven as the hallowed and idealized Y ao and Shun and proceeding to two kings of early Chou, Wen (the "king of the pacific arts") and Wu (the "king of the martial arts"), and their chancellor, the Duke of Chou. Confucius also compiled a history of the Spring and Autumn period, in which he stressed the necessity of upholding the order and the institutions of the early Chou, which he had idealized.

Adoption of Confucianism by the Han. During the Spring and Autumn era and that of the Warring States, a time of internal chaos, thought and expression were emancipated and a considerable number and variety of thinkers were produced, leading to the rivalry of the so-called "various philosophers and Hundred Schools" and their theories. Among these, the heirs to Confucian thought also produced some outstanding scholars, thus constituting an influential school in the world of ideas at the end of the era of the Warring States. In 221 B.c., the Ch'in, who united "All-underHeaven," recognizing in due course the need for ideological unification, took the stern measures symbolized by the phrase "burning the books and burying the scholars" (fen shu k'eng ju), i.e., the suppression of all scholarship not officially sanctioned, which resulted in many cases in the permanent loss of certain books. When, however, the Ch'in were replaced by the Han, there was instituted a gathering of books, and the schools, including the Confucian school, flourished again. Yet it was to be expected that a powerful monarch who had united an empire should seek to put an end to the chaos in thought and learning as well, and that he should look to those quarters for cooperation in governing the State. During the reign of Emperor Wu (141- 87 B.c.), when the power of the State had been solidified and the emperor himself began to take an interest in matters of education, it was the Confucian scholar Tung Chung-shu who put forward very forcefully a proposal to "unite under Confucianism the schools whose theories are confused and who are fighting among themselves."2 Chung-shu, in answer to a question from the emperor, answered to the following effect:

Now every teacher has his own way, every man his own theory. The Hundred Schools, each asserting something different, know not which way to turn. Thus, at the top unification is impossible and the legal institutions are constantly changing, while at the bottom no one knows what rules to keep: such is the situation. In my view, all ways except those of Confucius must be cut off, so that they may not function. If that is done, wrong and outlandish theories shall all perish, Allunder-Heaven shall be reunited, the legal standards shall be unambiguous, and the people shall know which way to turn.3


The emperor, adopting his proposal, established Confucianism as his official doctrine, making it the guiding principle of the State, and planned for the unification of the world ofideas on that basis. The-emperor also established the post ofDoctors of the Five Classics (wu ching po shih), who were to study and comment on the Changes,

Odes, Documents, Rites, and Spring and Autumn Annals. Thus classical scholarship flourished, and eventually classical thought on the Confucian model became allpowerful.

In this way, the adoption of Confucian ideas by Emperor Wu gave the appearance, albeit in a manner very different from that of the Ch'in's "burning of the books and burial of the scholars," of suppressing other forms of thought and learning, which had revived for a time. Among these, there were some that vanished without a trace, while others became extremely distorted and descended to the level of superstitionbound teachings. In contrast to this, Confucian ideas became endowed with the status of "national doctrine," so that the most important standard for determining fitness for public office hinged on whether a person had a Confucian education, or on whether he was a practitioner of Confucian ethics. The result was the unmistakable emergence of a powerful upper class whose political philosophy was based on Confucian ideas, a class that, replacing the ruling class of early Han, whose positions of power were a reward for helping a new dynasty to gain the throne, monopolized the nomination of all official candidates, sent their own representatives into the central government, and consolidated a Confucian social order in which the domination of the lower class by the upper class was unequivocal.

Tung Chung-shu's ((Mutual Reflection of Heaven and Man." Now there was a most particularly noteworthy feature in the Confucian philosophy of Tung Chung-shu, who became the Han's leader in matters of political theory. It was the theory of the "mutual reflection of Heaven and man" (t'ien jen hsiang kan), the idea that changes in natural phenomena are manifested by the Heavenly Theocrat in response to human phenomena. Originally, the institutions of the Chou, idealized by the early Confucianists, were systematized around the notion of Heaven, the society's supreme deity. Tung Chung-shu also laid great stress on the notion of Heaven, unfolding an integral theory of government and ethics on that basis. For him, everything that happened to man on earth could be reasoned and explained by tracing it to Heaven. In his own words, as quoted in his biography,

Heaven is the Ancestor of all things. But for Heaven, nothing would be born.

As can be seen in roll11 ofhis Ch'un ch'iufan lu, he accounts for the Chinese character wang ("king," consisting of three horizontal lines joined by a vertical one) by saying that to three horizontal lines, representing Heaven, man, and Earth in that order, is added a vertical one that links them and gives currency to the Way through all three.4 Man, born of Heaven and led by a king who is the recipient of Heaven's mandate, proceeds to perfect the inborn goodness ofhis own nature. The king must, consequently, govern man in keeping with Heaven's will. Men are all beings born of Heaven in Heaven's own likeness, hence must act in obedience to the universal

24 • THE SPECIAL SHAPE OF CHINESE BUDDffiSM

Truth (li) ordained by Heaven. If the actions of men, including those of the king, are improper, Heaven will warn them and spur them to self-examination by visiting calamities and natural prodigies upon them. If even then they do not reform, Heaven will punish them.5 All of the natural phenomena that manifest themselves in Heaven and on Earth do so in response to human phenomena.

Yin Yang and the Five Elements. In China, belief in the influence of Heaven's Way and of human events on each other, which had existed since antiquity, found profound and widespread acceptance in Ch'in and Han times; it was, in fact, given the formal status of a learned theory by the "yin yang school." Tung Chung-shu succeeded in reinforcing the learned theories of Confucianists by resort to the notion of yin yang and that of the five elements (wood, fire, earth, metal, air) and in making this combined doctrine the dominant force in government and ethics for his own time.

He further says,

Heaven has yin and yang. Man also has yin and yang. When the yin vapor of Heaven or Earth arises, man's yin vapor also arises in response to it. When man's yang vapor arises, Heaven's and Earth's yang vapor may also be expected to arise in response to it. Their way is one and the same.6

On the basis of the all-pervading theories of yin yang and the five elements, he preached the interrelationship of Heaven and man. For example, he matched five attributes of the king, viz., his appearance (mao), speech (yen), visual observation (shih), auditory observation (t'ing), and thought (hsin), to the five elements, holding that a natural calamity involving one of the latter would arise in response to the king's misconduct in respect of the corresponding one of the former. Typical of his thinking is the following statement:

Since the king's appearance corresponds to the element wood, if his appearance is not dignified a natural calamity belonging to the category "wood" shall be visited upon him, for there shall be many storm-winds in summer. Since the king' s speech corresponds to the element metal, ifhis speech is improper, a calamity belonging to the category "metal" shall be visited upon him, for there shall be many violent thunderstorms in autumn. Since the king's visual observation corresponds to the element fire, if the former is improper, a calamity belonging to the element "fire" shall be visited upon him, for there shall be much thunder in autumn. Since the king's auditory observation corresponds to the element water, if the former is improper, then there shall be violent rainstorms in spring and summer. Since the king' s thought corresponds to the element earth, if he fails to be as magnanimous and as tolerant as he should be, the crops shall not mature and there shall be thunder in autumn. For the response shall be terrestrial calamity.7

u Interrelation of Heaven and Man" Tied to Superstition. These accounts of the necessary interrelationship of Heaven and man, particularly the one focused on the sovereign who carries out Heaven's mandate on earth in obedience to Heaven's will, had on the one hand the effect of hallowing and rendering absolute the all-powerful


monarch, while on the other it placed a political and moral responsibility on that monarch, regulated his behavior, and demanded of him constant self-examination and reexamination. Also, this way of concretely accounting for human misfortune by relating it to natural phenomena had an easy time convincing the Chinese people, a simple people subsisting mostly on agriculture, people who lived with a belief in Heaven, with a profound concern with these natural phenomena, and in respectful fear of them. Thus Confucianism, which, through the efforts of Tung Chung-shu, had become the doctrine of the State and been endowed with the status of an official study, single-handedly suppressed all the other schools and became a learned subject obligatory on all members of the ruling class. The Confucian classics, the so-called warp books, became the imposing code that set the tone for government and morality; the words, both spoken and written, of the intellectuals and the ruling class came to be guided by the classics alone; and the peculiar Chinese society so strictly regulated by these classics became fixed and stable.

However, there is another fact to which students of Buddhist history must pay particularly close attention. That is, that Tung Chung-shu' s emphasis on the interrelationship of Heaven and man by resort to the notion of yin yang and the five elements linked Confucianism, now gaining virtually universal currency with its newly acquired position of State doctrine, to elements of superstition such as the ch'an and the wei and, in particular, that it made the society of this time, late Former Han and early Latter Han, when Confucianism was spreading and becoming established as the sole object of veneration, into one in which ch' an wei notions were rife. That is because this was the period in which the foreign religion began to be accepted by Chinese society.

Ch' an is a name for prognostication of the future. It makes use of abnormal phenomena in the world of nature and of man to divine and foretell what is due to happen in the given society in the near future. By disseminating such prognostications as these, Wang Mang in late Han contrived to become regent, then to usurp the Han throne (A.D. 8). Liu Hsiu (Emperor Kuang-wu), who deposed Wang Mang and restored the Han, for his own part contrived to regain the throne (in A.D. 25) by taking advantage of the widespread dissemination of the rumor that there had repeatedly appeared a ch' an indicating Heaven's intention that "hare-metal, by cultivating his intrinsic qualities, shall become Son of Heaven."b

Under the Latter Han, classical learning, which was the official doctrine of the State, became linked with belief in prognostication, which, as already indicated, was rife in the society. The classics were interpreted by resort to a form of astrology alleged to have been devised by Confucius and to the warp books (wei shu), which placed a supernaturalist construction on those classics. It thus became the fashion to conduct Confucian studies, created by a man who had rejected the supernatural, in terms of yin yang, ch' an wei, and the five elements. The Confucianists, educators of the ruling class in theories that had become the doctrine of the State, now came to make use of the "woofbooks," books that spoke so much of the supernaturaJ.B

Belief in Sylphs and Magicians. Such was the nature of the society being described


.,

that a mood of total reliance on superhuman powers-gods, in short-became dominant. In the midst of this situation, there was a pronounced recrudescence of long indigenous beliefs, beliefs that preached magical spells for the healing of sickness and occult practices and elixirs for the achievement oflongevity without senescence, that sought the immortality of the sylph. The preachers of this magic found belief, adherence, and respect even among the upper classes, to say nothing of the commonalty, and among them were some that were literally believed to be sylphs who had themselves mastered the art of immortality.

Already the first emperor (shih huang ti) of the Ch'in, as well as Emperor Wu of the Han, who adopted Confucianism as the official doctrine of the State, had been fervent subscribers to the arts of the sylph, dedicated practitioners of sacrificial offerings to the spirits, and partisans of adepts (fang shih) and shamans (wu hsi): the mood, already there, merely became intensified. From the time of Emperor Ch' eng (r. 32-7 B.c.) there have come down to us LiuHsiang's Lives of the Sylphs(Lieh hsien chuan).c When Wang Mang usurped the (Former) Han and when Emperor Kuang-wu restored it as the Latter Han, the successes of both men were due to their skillful use of the general belief in ch}an and wei. In the society of the Latter Han, belief in yin yang, in the five elements, in ch} an and wei, in the superhuman skill of the sylph, and in spirits, as well as the tendency to live one's life in reliance on the adepts and shamans who preached these mysterious beliefs, became progressively more widespread and more fashionable.

Marriage of Learning with Superstition. Wang Ch' ung, who flourished in the latter half of the first century, taking a strongly rationalistic stand, vigorously attacked mysterious doctrines and behavior based on them.9 In his work, entitled Lun heng, he flatly denied everything from ch} an wei, omens, and the doctrine of the interaction of Heaven and man, which related political affairs to natural phenomena and interpreted the latter as forewarnings of good or evil events due to occur in human society, to beliefs such as those in recipes oflongevity, sylphs, and taboos, arguing that there must be a total rejection of the magicians who gave currency to such ideas. However, it is only after the Latter Han had entered its final stages that Wang Ch' ung' s book became current, for during his own time and immediately thereafter the power of the very fashionable "mystical doctrines" and superstitious practices was in no way curtailed. d Chang Heng (78-139), who functioned at the turn of the second century, commented unfavorably on the Confucianists following the Han restoration in the following terms:

Since the restoration, the scholars have been vying with one another in the study of prognosticatory charts and "woof books" [t}u wei], combining this with yao yen [unlucky phrases or phrases of ill omen]. Charts and "woof books" are vain and false; they are not standards set by Sages.

Thus he opposed studies and beliefs in w_hich the partisans of these had gone so far as to combine ch} an wei with yao yen, and memorialized to the effect that the circulation of such "vain and false" books should be prohibit;d.10e However, he was


himself a student of yin yang and the five elements, and the imperial court of the Latter Han for its own part continued to believe in ch' an and wei, so much so that whenever there was a misfortune pr a natural prodigy it would question ch' an wei specialists about methods of averting it. Thus, even in the realm of Confucianism, whose study was sponsored by the State, the Confucian scholar was welcome to the degree that he made use of theories of yin yang, the five elements, and ch' an wei in interpreting the Confucian classics.

For example, Yang T'ung and his son Hou, both ofHsin-tu in Shu, were scions of a family of Confucian scholars, but T'ung's father, Ch'un-ch'ing, was at the same time heir to a tradition of charts and prognostications (t'u ch'an), which was the reason for his appointment to important posts during the reign of emperors An (r. 107-124) and Shun (r. 126-144). Incidentally, Hou late in life resigned from the service of the court to return to his ancestral home, where we are told that he "cultivated the Yell ow Emperor and Lao-tzu and trained disciples, of whom more than three thousand registered their names." After his death at eighty-two, his disciples erected in his honor a mausoleum (miao), where they sacrificed to his spirit. It is most striking that this stuaent of charts and prognostications, as well as of yin yang, should have leaned so strongly toward the Taoistic ideas represented by the Yell ow Emperor and Lao-tzu. (Cf. Yang Hou's biography in Hou Han shu 60A.U) The study of yin yang and of ch' an wei became easily allied to Taoistic learning, said to be the doctrine of the Yell ow Emperor and ofLao-tzu, who, according to the traditions of the Latter Han, had ascended to Heaven as sylphs. The Latter Han studies associated with the names of the Yell ow Emperor and Lao-tzu, placed as they were beyond the pale of official learning and changed as they were into objects of popular study, tended to acquire a pronouncedly mysterious character and to become associated with belief in yin yang, the five elements, ch' an wei, and the sylph.

Official Confucianism Degenerates. While it is perfectly true that Han Confucianism by the end of the Former Han and the beginning of the Latter had become widespread as the official form oflearning required of all members of the ruling class, it had come to include belief in the supernatural, which Confucius himself had been content to venerate at a distance, and to become strongly tinged with mystical elements. Not only this, but another fact worthy of note is that classical learning, being the object of official study, became converted into the most picayune philological exegesis, tormenting those condemned to study it and breeding in the young scholars, in particular, a fierce hatred.12

In sum, Confucianism, by now converted into official State doctrine as the culmination of a process that had begun under the Former Han, was attended by many evils, at the same time that political and ethical theories holding Confucianism in the highest esteem, rooted in the Confucian classics (ching) and based on the theories of these same classics, were permeating State and society and fixing the social order. Also, having forfeited its freedom as a philological, exegetical form of dry learning, it lost whatever charm it might have had for men of ideas. This was an era in which those very intellectuals who had been trained in Confucianism, while adopting a


r

1

Confucian stance in their public lives, in their private lives had recourse to faith in sylphs, magic, and the like. It was at such a time as this, be it noted, that the passage of Buddhism began. In other words, due attention should be paid to the fact that the society of the Latter Han, in which religious superstition was rife, and where the State's official learning was detested by men of free spirit, was in a situation conducive to the acceptance of a foreign religion propagated by shaven-headed, ascetic, outlandish srama1.1as, who in some ways resembled the magicians that were an object of faith in their own country, and by lay believers, called upasakas, who believed in the uncanny powers of the golden Buddha-images and who intoned the abracadabra of the scriptures.

2. "HuANG-LAo" THOUGHT AND THE "WAY OF THE SYLPH":

PRAYERS AND CHARMS FOR THE REMOVAL OF CALAMITY

AND THE ATTRACTION OF GOOD FORTUNE

Taoistic Learning Adopts Sylphs and Superstitions. Although the Han adoption of Confucianism as the doctrine of the State did move the official intelligentsia in the direction of elevating classical learning above all else, this is not to say that the study of the "various philosophers and Hundred Schools" dating back to the Spring and Autumn era and that of the Warring States died out completely. The school called tao chia,f which traced its origin back to Lao-tzu and which in early Han constituted a powerful school alongside that of the Confucianists, was put beyond the pale of official learning, but it remained a vigorous school throughout both Han dynasties.

In the court of the Former Han, emperors such as Hui (r. 194-188 B.c.) and Wen (r. 179-157 B.c.) treated the Yellow Emperor (Huang-ti) and Lao-tzu as objects of faith and veneration by elevating them to the status of sylphs; they also employed adepts. Emperor Wen's consort, the Lady Tou, is also alleged to have believed the sayings of the Yellow Emperor and ofLao-tzu, and to have been unhappy with the theories of the Confucianists. Another example would be Chang Liang, who had to do with the very establishment of the Han, so much so that he was known as the dynasty's most meritorious subject, yet who abdicated his position late in life and went to school to a sylph named Ch'ih-sung-tzu ("Master Red Pine"), from whom he learned the Way of the Yellow Emperor and ofLao-tzu. In other words, he cultivated the recipes of the sylph, whose purpose was longevity without senescence. Yet another example is Ts' ao Ts' an, who was active together with Liang, and who, when appointed first minister of the state of Ch'i, collected many scholars and questioned them as to the secret of good government. A certain Lord Kai told him, "By your attaching great value to purity and quietude, your people shall of themselves come to good order." Accepting this statement, he governed Ch'i as its first minister for nine years by following the doctrines of the Yellow Emperor and Lao-tzu, i.e., Taoistic theories, and was so successful that he was dubbed hsien hsiang ("wise and worthy minister"). Two other instances are Ch'en P'ing, who as a child was fond of reading and went on to cultivate the Yellow Emperor and Lao-tzu, and Teng


Chang, son of Teng Hsien, who achieved fame among the ruling aristocracy as a practitioner of the recipes of the Yellow Emperor and ofLao-tzu after the death of Ch'ao Ts'o (150 B.c.) , a man who had wielded great power during the reigns of the two above-mentioned emperors as a legalist politician, whereas the doctrines of the Yell ow Emperor and of Lao-tzu had been fashionable among those ministers most responsible for founding the dynasty in the first place.13

It was not merely the intellectuals, but a broad layer of the population as well, whose imagination was caught on a wide scale by the ideas of"the Yellow Emperor and Lao-tzu," and not only in central government circles but also in the outlying areas. As a typical representative of this, one may cite Liu An, grandson of the dynasty's founder (Kao-tsu), and his book, the Huai nan tzu. 14

& Liu An, Prince of Huai-nan, was fond of reading, and collected a following, many of them scholars, but particularly a group of adepts numbering several thousand. The Huai nan tzu, attributed to him, takes its principal stand on Lao-tzu's notions of " blandness and

no-ado" (t' an po wu wei) and introduces some of Chuang-tzu' s ideas into their midst. In other words, one is justified in including its ideas in the category of the tao chia. At the same time, it includes the notions of yin yang and the five elements, j ust as Tung Chung-shu had incorporated these and ch' an wei into Han Confucianism .

One is thus aware that tao chia ideas were rife in Han times and their learned proponents numerous, but also that both of the schools consequential enough to be representative of Han learning, not merely the Confucianists alone, who represented the official point of view, or the tao chia alone, whose discipline was excluded from "official learning," gave wide currency to their respective sets of doctrines, both of which included yin yang and the five elements. In spite of the fact that Confucius had contented himself with venerating the mysterious from a distance, taking an extremely rationalistic stand himself, in spite of the fact that Han Confucianism was an object of study for the official and ruling class, it spread abroad by incorporating not only yin yang and the five elements but also, in the broadest sense, astrology, prognosis, the aversion of misfortune, the invitation of good fortune, the sylph, and a whole host of m ystical ideas and beliefs. This is the reason that the ch' an wei books, now incorporated into Confucianism, spread so widely and became so generally accepted at the end of the Latter Han. If this was true for the ruling intelligentsia, it was doubly true for the ideas of the tao chia, which, barred from the official curriculum, became linked in the process of their spread, far more than Confucianism, with mystical ideas and beliefs. Of course, the original notions of the tao chia, exalting "no-ado" and firmly rooted in "naturalness," had rejected yin yang, the spirits, and

ch'an wei notions equally and without distinction. Wang Ch'ung, who died during the Yung-yi.ian period of the Latter Han (some

time between 98 and 104), was a Confucian scholar who took a firm stand in the rationalist camp, but who also was in tune with Taoist "naturalism." In his famous work, the Lun heng, he flatly denied a whole host of popular beliefs, beginning with ch' an wei, omens and portents (Ju shui), and the doctrine of the interaction of Heaven and man, ideas which, widespread at the time, related political matters to natural


phenomena in such a way as to make possible the prediction of human events, and extending to recipes of longevity, sylphs, spells cast by malignant departed spirits, taboos, and the like, arguing the inanity of these quasi-mystical, quasi-religious "worldly books and popular preachments" (shih shu su shuo) from the point of view of the naturalistic ideas of the tao chia. Wang Ch'ung is an outstanding and special case, that of an unofficial man oflearning who, in the very midst of the superstition rife in the Latter Han, had a pronounced inclination to a rationalism and naturalism that attacked that superstition tirelessly. The usual situation in the world of ideas of the Latter Han was one in which unofficial men oflearning, whether Confucianistically or Taoistically inclined, were partisan to the various views condemned by Wang Ch'ung as "vain," being swept along together with the masses in the general stream of belief in "woof books," yin yang, spirits, etc., so that Wang Ch'ung was not accepted by his own contemporaries.

Taoist Developments. Those persons who, rooted in the general society, preached recipes of longevity without senescence or of the repulsion of calamity and the invitation of good fortune, found in the ideas of the tao chia a system most conducive to their own tendencies, and proceeded to popularize the "Way of the Yellow Emperor and Lao-tzu" as something mysterious. They went further, to make the Yellow Emperor and Lao-tzu divine beings, "Ultimate Men" (chih jen), Sages, even sylphs; to seek authority in Lao-tzu's Tao te ching and in books traditionally regarded as being the work of the Yellow Emperor; finally to commit them to memory and to recite them as religious scriptures. In this way, the theories of the tao chia, excluded from the official curriculum, and their doctrines, the latter now widespread among the people and woven into their daily lives, both bound up with such popular beliefs as that in sylphs or in magical spells, developed in the direction of the popular religion known as Taoism (tao chiao), emphasizing the religious and the mysterious.h

The ideal of the tao chi a lay in the embodiment of the undoing "Way" (tao), which for them was the root and origin of all phenomena. One who has embodied the Way is designated in the Tao te ching with the name "Sage" (shengjen), while in the book of Chuang-tzu he is known severally as an "Ultimate Man" (chih jen), a "Superhuman Man" (shen jen), or a "True Man" (chen jen). At some point in time, the ideal personality who had embodied the Way came to be identified first with the person who had acquired longevity without senescence, then with the immortal personality who lived forever-in short, with the sylph (shen hsien) who had attained this ageless immortality, which all the Chinese longed for. In Latter Han times, the Yellow Emperor and Lao-tzu were converted into sylphs and then worshiped with sacrifice as gods to whom one could pray for longevity without senescence. The Book of the Latter Han (Hou Han shu), in its "Notice on Sacrifice" (Chi ssu chih), devotes a whole section to Lao-tzu, in which it records that Emperor Huan, in the eighteenth year of his reign (164), out of a fondness for the i.deal of the sylph began to sacrifice to Lao-tzu,15 from which it is evident that even at court Lao-tzu had become a sylph to whom both sacrifice and prayer were being dedicated. The people of the time were afraid of spells cast by malignant spirits and believed in practitioners of magic


who could mediate between gods and men, with whose help they sought to avoid calamity and to bring on good fortune. They also believed in recipes of longevity without senescence and in the existence of sylphs who had mastered them, and whose methods they too were seeking. Or else they would merely throw themselves upon the sylphs and pray to them. In the society of the Latter Han, in which such beliefs were so widespread and so deeply rooted, it was quite easy, when the political fabric began to rot and when disquiet settled like a pall on the whole society, for the general populace to become even more attached to these beliefs and for religious bodies to be formed on the basis of popular sentiments in which to the popular beliefs were now added anti-government sentiments and a longing for the remaking of the existing society.

The reigns of the emperors Huan (r. 147-168) and Ling (r. 168-188), the earliest for which are recorded translations of Buddhist scriptures into Chinese, had already reached just such a point of decay. Hsiang K' ai, 16 who had come to court from the Shantung area to remonstrate with Emperor Huan for sacrificing to the Yellow Emperor and Lao-tzu, as well as to the foreign god called "Buddha," said that at an earlier date Yli Chi had presented to the court of Emperor Shun (r. 126-144) the

Book of the Pure Acceptance of Grand Tranquillity (T'ai p'ing ch'ing ling shu), which he boasted to have got from a god.17 This book of allegedly divine origin, one that prescribed recipes for healing sickness, extinguishing calamity, and inviting good fortune, all on the basis of the doctrines of yin yang and the five elements, the words of shamans, protective amulets, mystical phrases, and the like, was in due course supplemented, developing into that important Taoist classic, the Classic of Grand Tranquillity (T'ai p'ing ching) . The court of the Latter Han may never, in fact, have come to believe in Kan Chi's book of allegedly divine origin, but popular belief in Yli Chi in the lower reaches of the Yellow R iver, the Huai, the Yangtze, and the Ch'ien-t'ang as far as the Shantung-Kiangsu area swelled amazingly, gaining fanatical believers among soldiery, officialdom, and common folk alike.

The Belief in Yu Chi the Sylph. When Sun Ts' e (175-200) was governing W u-k' uai (the present Wu hsien in Kiangsu), Yli Chi, a Taoist practitioner from Lang-yeh, came from the Shantung region to the Wu area, where, "setting up a tabernacle, burning incense, reading books on the Way, and concocting a magical potion wherewith he healed the sick," he gained many adherents. Once, when Sun Ts' e was entertaining guests in a tower on the city wall, Yli Chi, dressed in all his finery, came to the city gate, where he left a little lacquered plow called "the sylph's plow." Twothirds of the military officers and other guests assembled in the tower came down and did obeisance before Yli Chi. For all that he tried to stop them, Sun Ts' e could not keep them from showing homage to Yii Chi. Sun Ts' e, enraged, seized Yli Chi and was about to kill him when the latter's many believers appealed to Sun Ts'e's mother to intercede in Yli Chi's behal£ Ts'e's mother urged him to desist, saying, "The Master Yli Chi is one who helps the armies, brings luck in battle, and saves the lives of officers and men. You must not kill him!" Sun Ts' e' s reply was, "I cannot let this fellow live, when he beguiles the minds of the multitude with his falsehoods


and incites even generals to cast aside the proper relationship between lord and subject, to forsake me and to worship him instead!" So saying, he killed him and exposed his head in the marketplace. Even so, his followers continued to worship him and to pray to him to intercede for their good fortune, saying, "The Master Yii Chi is not dead! His mortal flesh has decomposed and he has become a sylph !"18i

From this one can judge how strong that society's faith must have been in practitioners of magic such as Yii Chi or, in other words, what a fervent reliance it must have placed in such books of allegedly supernatural portent as the T'ai p'ing ch'ing ling shu. Yii Chi is presumed to have been killed about Chien-an 5 (200). At about this time the translation of Buddhist texts was proceeding apace at Lo-yang through the activities of such men as An Shih-kao, Lokak~ema, Chu Fo-shuo, An Hsiian, and Chih Yao, all of whom were gradually acquiring Chinese believers and collaborators as well.

The T'ai P'ing Tao Rebellion. About the same time, in 184 or, in terms of the Latter Han calendar, Kuang-ho 7 in the reign of Emperor Ling, the year being chia tzu (the first in the sexagenary cycle), the Han realm was visited by an odd religious uprising that struck it like a tidal wave and bade fair to shatter the very framework of the Han court. Chanting almost as a litany that "the blue heaven [of the Han] shall die; a yellow empire shall come under the heavens; the year is the first of the cycle, greatly auspicious to All under-Heaven," the rebels launched a series of desperate attacks, uprooting and scattering all local officials from the hsie11 magistrate on down. The rebels were a peasant army, their heads dressed in yellow turbans, firmly welded together by a common belief that their leader, Chang Chiieh, was a sylph. Chiieh, carrying a "staff with nine notches," said to be one of the distinguishing marks of the sylph, and calling himself "great sage" and "good teacher" (ta hsien liang shih), circulated as a preacher from village to village. "Come, all you who are sick! Confess your sins and drink this magical potion. Your ills shall be healed. Only they shall not recover who do not believe in the Way!" By preaching in this

way for more than ten years, he created thirty-six parishes and acquired several tens of thousands of adherents, whom he drove en masse into a war for the overthrow of the Han. Chang Chiieh' s doctrine was called the "Way of Grand Tranquillity" (t' ai p'ing tao).19i It probably had some connection with Yii Chi's Book of the Pure Acceptance of Grand Tranquillity.

Now the widespread uprising of a peasant army in many different places at once was not the sort of thing that could have happened at a time in which the orders of the Han court were really current, in which the social condition was stable, and in which there were few threats to life. The time in question was the exact opposite of this. For one thing, the court for several generations had been (nominally, at least) headed by emperors who had acceded in boyhood. Emperor Shun acceded at the age of eleven. His successor, Ch'ung, acceded at the age of two and sat on the throne for five months. His successor, Chih, having acceded to the throne at the age of eight, was poisoned after a tenure of a year and a hal£ He was followed by Emperor Huan, who acceded at fifteen, and he, finally, by Emperor Ling, who acceded to the throne


at twelve. The real authority at . court during this extended period was wielded by the dowager empress, her kinsmen, and the eunuchs, all of whom quarreled among themselves for power and privilege, with disastrous results where the governance of the State was concerned.k

As if this were not enough, there was a major change in the society as well. In the society of the Latter Han, in company with the development of commercial capital, in company also with the conversion of the bureaucracy into a class of hereditary power-holders, the peasantry, their land constantly being bought up by the rich and powerful, were descending to the status of paupers, sharecroppers, and wage laborers little better than agricultural slaves, hard pressed simply to stay alive. A society in which there was such an enormous gap between rich and poor, educated and ignorant, became a scene into which contradiction, dissatisfaction, and social disquiet could easily overflow. Wang Fu bemoaned the collapse of an agriculture-oriented

society in these words:

Now the commonalty as a whole are rejecting farming, which is basic, and running to trade. Oxen and horses, wagons and carriages glut the thoroughfares. Idlers and tricksters fill the cities and towns. Those who attend to their fundamental business are few, while those who float about, eating where they can, are numer

ous.

With such remarks as these, he pleaded for a cleansing of politics. Chung Ch' angt'ung (159-189), who lived through the Rebellion of the Yellow Turbans, in his work Vigorous Words (Ch'ang yen), discussing the causes for rebellions in the empire, said,

Whereas in recent times commoners who rise through the power of property to positions of class and power are too numerous to count, the sterling gentleman, concealing himself in the countryside, has ceased to devote any energy to the improvement of manners and morals.

He goes on to say,

The houses of the mighty, ridgepole to ridgepole, number several hundreds, possessing rich fields and full meadows, slaves grouped by the thousands, hangerson who number in the myriads. Their boats and wagons, selling things, circulate in all four directions. Dwelling in idleness and accumulating purchases, they fill the cities. Such are their jewels and precious objects that a great house cannot contain them; such their horses, cattle, sheep, and pigs that mountains and valleys could not accommodate them. Wonderful young boys and beautiful concubines fill their ornate mansions, while singers and musical performers line up in their spacious halls.

He goes on to say that in the outlying areas there have developed great landowners and power-holders with no official status, who yet outstrip the governmental au-


thorities in power, and under whose protection there have gathered subordinates who are to them rather like "poor relations." He bemoans this in the following terms:

Such has been the change in the apportionment of farmland that the local powerholders have increased their wealth enormously, spreading their mansions throughout the prefectures and commanderies, outdoing even the titled aristocracy in their grand life-style and pleasures and equaling the local magistrates in power. Their property they manage themselves, never being called to account even when they violate the law. Hired assassins and other desperate men entrust their lives to the likes of these. [From his Book on Gain and Loss (Sun yi p'ien), as quoted in his biography, roll179 of the Book of the Latter Han.]

It was in this society that Chang Chiieh, preaching the religious faith contained in such writings as the Book of the Pure Acceptance of Grand Tranquillity, gained the hearts of the uneducated peasantry and welded their dissatisfaction into a weapon to be wielded by warriors intent on overthrowing a government, pushing the Latter Han into the abyss of destruction not long after 220.

Doctrine of the T'ien Shih Tao. Chang Chiieh was not alone. At about the same time

in the Szechwan region a group with similar religious overtones, the leadership passing from Chang Ling through Chang Heng to Chang Lu, solidified an organization of its own, gained wide popular adherence, and eventually formalized itself as the "doctrine of the Way of the Heavenly Teacher" (t'ien shih tao chiao).

They preached that Chang (Tao-) ling had contrived to study the Way in the Mountains of the Crow's Chirp (homing shan), in the old state ofShu, and to become a sylph. For two generations, represented by Chang Heng and Chang Lu, they built a quiet chamber, where they required the sick to confess their sins and where they drew up three documents recording the names of the principals and their intention to submit to punishment for their sins. One of the documents they required to be affixed to the mountain, saying that it would ascend to Heaven, another to be buried under ground, the third to be submerged in water, thus to make prayer to the gods of heaven, earth, and water. They called these the "Manuscripts of the Three

Authorities" (san kuan shou shu). Also, since they required the sick to donate five bushels of rice each, they came to be known as the "Way of the Five Bushels of Rice" (wu tau mi tao). Once they had acquired a large number of adherents, they created the offices of chi chiu (libationer, lit., in charge of "sacrifices and wine") and chien ling ("controlling impropriety"?), whom they required to read and recite the text of Lao tzu and to supervise and direct the prayers of the sick. They also established "houses of righteousness" (yi she), where they stored II?-eat to feed to wayfarers, who could eat of it freely after measuring their own stomachs(?). They added that those who ate greedily would bear the curse of the gods. When Chang Lu succeeded to the leadership, he styled himself "Heavenly Teacher" (t'ien shih) and his by now vastly more numerous followers as "spirit soldiers" (kuei tsu), strengthening the latter into


a military organization prepared to give its life for the doctrine, fiercely resisting the Han armies sent to chastise him and carving out a theocracy on the soil of Szechwan. Chang Lu later capitulated to Ts'ao Ts'ao, but the latter then appointed him generalissimo for the pacification of the south (chen nan chiang chUn), "enfeoffing" him a "marquess" of ten thousand households and extending the titles to his five sons, so that the religious movement headed by Chang Lu and his family became economically secure, later developing into the T'ien shih tao, which maintained itself

for a very long time. The precise relationship between Chang Chiieh's T'ai p'ing tao and the Wu tou

mi tao of Chang Lu and his associates is not quite clear. At any rate, the Canonical Digest(? Tien [Ueh) cited in the commentary to Lu's biography in the Records of the Three Kingdoms (San kuo chih) says that the doctrines of the two were virtually the same. Both of them, based on the confused, popular, traditional beliefs in yin yang and the five elements, the interrelation of Heaven and man, spirits, sylphs, and the like, beliefs that permeated the society of the Latter Han, were religions praying for recovery from sickness and for the attainment oflongevity and seeking the status of the sylph. It is worthy of note, however, that they stressed the necessity of man's reflection on, and repentance of, his own sins, and that Chang Lu's group required its members to read and recite Lao-tzu's five thousand words like a Bible. Thus

purely religious elements had become predominant. The Way of the Yellow Emperor and Lao-tzu became linked in Latter Han society with the Way of the Sylph, and the road was thus paved for the conversion ofLao-tzu, turned sylph, to become in due course the patriarch of Taoism.

Under the Latter Han, both the Confucianists and the tao chia preached their respective doctrines with recourse to notions of mysticism, while the general mass of society sought the status of sylphs, feared and venerated the spirits, believed in a large variety of magic arts, and lived their lives in dependence on all of these. It is at such a time as this that the importation ofBuddhism, which began as a thin stream coming in through Central Asia early in the first century, eventually broadened its flow, until, during the reigns of Emperors Huan (147-168) and Ling (168-190), the work of translating the Buddhist scriptures into Chinese, begun at Lo-yang, proceeded apace, eventuating in a situation in which Chinese intellectuals were able to confront a Buddhist religion rendered into their own language. However, since the times were such that the whole world was carried along by beliefs in yin yang and the

1 five elements, divination, spirits, and sylphs, while the practitioners of these arts , were the object of universal trust and veneration, one may largely surmise how this

unknown foreign religion was received and what was the character of this Buddhist religion that first spread itself in Chinese society. The foreign religion was received as a sylphic, magical teaching on the model of that of the Yellow Emperor and Laotzu, while the golden Buddha-images were the recipients of sacrifice, as if they were immortal sylphs able to grant wishes and answer prayers, and the foreign monks, for their part, were feared and venerated as beings of supernatural power


who, in the manner ofYii Chi and Chang Chiieh, could enter into direct communication with the gods. Yet the Buddhism received into China, without coming to terms in some way with China's traditions, above all with classically based doctrines such as Confucianism and the tao chia and traditional popular beliefs, as well as with Taoism, which originated as a development out of these, could never have become a Chinese religion.


Download - Tsukamoto Zenryu Ch 1 a History of Early Chinese Buddhism

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