Buddhism: The "Imported" Tradition

The Place of Buddhism in Chinese Society

• Other forms of Buddhism from Tibet and Mongolia:

  • Christianity in different guises

  • Manichaeism

  • Zoroastrianism

  • Judaism

  • Islam

• although historical Budhha was believed to be a prince and was placed on a high scale of social respectability, he was still a foreigner in Chinese eyes.

• Buddha’s teachings were part and parcel of the early Indian worldview which often differed from the early Chinese cosmology

  • but it brought to China a new form of social organization that stood at the odds with the traditional Chinese social structure — institution of a celibate priesthood (Buddhist monks and nuns)

• Many differences between Indian and Chinese cultures can be magnified in theory

  • one could construct an ahistorical picture of radical differences between the two monolithic cultures represented by early Indian Buddhism and Chinese religion

• Buddhism learned in China was alreadly fully consistent with the rest of their social and religious world.

  • had no independent access to Indian Buddhism

• Chinese Buddhism consists of the inerpretation and reinterpretation of the many strands of religious conception

  • some native to China and some translated from Indian texts

The Origin of Buddhism and the Early Indian Worldview

• Buddhism was articulated in the context of traditional Indian cosmology in the first several centuries BCE

  • to make their teaching about Buddha understod to the non-Indian audience, they would explain the understanding of human existence

Reincarnation and the Forms of Life

• All human beings are destined to be reborn in other forms.

  • human and non-humans over vast stretches of space and time

• the process of reincarnation is without beginning or end and life takes six forms.

  • Gods

  • Demigods

  • Human beings

  • Animals

  • Hungry Ghosts — wander for food and water yet unable to eat/drink

  • Hell beings — denizens of various hells suffering tortures but will eventually die and be reborn again

Gods of Buddhism

• Gods of Buddhism resides in the heavens and lead lives of immense worldly pleasure

  • they are without exception mortal, at the end of a very long life are reborned lower in the cosmic scale

Karma

• logic that determines where one will be reborn

• Sanskirt word “Karma” means deed or action

  • means that every deed has a result : morally good leads to good consequences and evil leads to bad

• law of karma means that circumstances an individual faces are the result of prior actions

• the regulating idea of good works and other Buddhist practices

The Cycle of Existence

• wisdom to which buddhas awaken is to see that the cycle is marked by

  • impermanence — all things, whether physical objects, psychological states, or philosophical ideas, undergo change.

    • brought into existence by preceding conditions at a particular point in time and will eventually become extinct.

  • unsatisfactoriness — sense that not only do sentient beings experience physical pain but also face continous disappointment when people and things they wish to maintain change

  • lack of a permanent self — often placed in creative tension with the concept of repeated rebirth

• the act of clinging contributes to the perpetuation of desires from one incarnation to the next

  • grasping — both a cause and result of being committed to a permanent self

The Path to Salvation

• Path to salvation begins with the observance of morality

• followers pledged to abstain from the taking of life, stealing, lying, drinking, and enganging in sexual relations outside of marriage

• ideal path also included the cultivation of pure states of mind through the practice of meditation and the achieving of wisdom rivaling that of a buddha

Understanding the “Buddha”

• The two understandings of Buddha are:

  • Buddha — an unusal human born into a royal family in ancient India in the sixth or fifth century BCE

    • renounced his birthright, followed religious teachers, and achieved enlightment

    • gathered lay and monastic disciples, preached throughout India for almost 50 years and achived final extinction

    • was called Gautama Siddhartha and later was refered to a various names such as:

      • Śākyamuni — sage of the Śākya clan

      • Tathāgata — Thus-Come One

    • followers lack direct access due to his final extinction but his influence can be felt through gods who encountered him and are still alive, long-lived disciples, places hes visited and touched, and physical remains / shrines

  • buddhas — a generic label for any enlightened being

    • Śākyamuni and other buddhas that preceeds him are one of the many amongst this label

    • Maitrya or Mile (Chinese) — thought to reside in a heavenly realm close to the surface of the Earth.

    • dispersed over space and exists in all directions

    • Amitāyus ( Amitābha ) or Emituo ( Chinese ) — presides over a land of happiness in the West.

  • bodhisattvas — “one who is intent on enlightment”

    • found in most forms of Buddhism but role emphasized many traditions claiming the polemical title of Mahāyāna

    • not as advanced as buddhas on the path to enlightment

    • often serve as mediating figures whose compassionate involvement in the impurities of this world makes them more approachable

    • functions both as models for followers to emulate and as saviors who intervene actively in the lives of devotees

    • Bodhisattvas popular in China are:

      • Avalokitesvara ( Chinese: Guanyin, Guanshiyin, or Guanzizai )

      • Bhaisajyaguru ( Chinese: Yaoshiwang )

      • Ksitigarbha ( Chinese: Dizang)

      • Manjusri ( Chinese: Wenshu )

      • Samantabhadra ( Chinese: Puxian )

The Three Jewels: Buddha, The Dharma, The Sangha

• Chinese Buddhist represented the tradition by the formulation of the “three jewels”

  • coined in India, three terms carried both a traditional sense as well as a more worldly reference that is clear in Chinese sources

• Buddha — first jewel, in China term refers not only to enlightment beings but to the materials through which buddhas are made present

  • statues, buildings that house statues, relics and their containers, and all the finances needed to build and sustain devotion to buddha images

• Dharma ( Chinese: fa ) — second jewel, means “truth” or “law”

  • includes doctrines taught by Buddha and passed down in oral or written form.

  • thought to be equal to the universal cosmic law

  • expressed in numerical form, three marks of existence or the four noble truths

  • comprised of many different genres — Sutra ( most important )

  • Sutras — beings with “Thus have I heard. Once, when the Buddha dwelled at…” which is attributed to Buddha’s closest disciple, Ananda.

  • referred to all media for the Buddha’s law in China includings sermons and the platforms they were delivered, rituals that included preaching, and the thousands of books — first handwritten scrolls, then booklets — in which the truth was inscribed

• Sangha ( Chinese: Sengqie or Zhong ), meaning “assembly”

  • comprised board interpretation of the term, the four sub-orders of

    • monks

    • nuns

    • lay men

    • lay women

  • other sources uses the term in a stricter sense to include only monks and nuns who have left home, renounced family life, accepted vows of celibacy, and undertaken other austerites to devote themselves fully into the religion

  • Sangha in China also referred to all of the phenomena considered to belong to the Buddhist establishment

    • everything and everyone needed to sustain a monastic life which included

      • living quarters of monks

      • lands deeded to temples for occupancy and profit

      • tenant familes and slaves who worked on the famr land and served the Sangha

      • animals attached to the monastery farms

The History of Buddhism in China

• Magic and meditation appealed to “barbarian” rulers in the north, while the dominant style of religion pursued by the southerner was philosophical

• After the Tang, Buddhism entered into a thousand-year period of decline ( it is thought )

  • some monks were able to break free of tradition and write innovative commentaries on older texts

  • some managed to build significant temples or sponsor the printing of Buddhist canon on a large scale

  • highly placed monks found a way to purge debased monks and nuns from the ranks of the sangha and revive moral vigor

• Some historians suggests that cycles of rise and fall in population shifts, economy, family fortunes, and the life have little to do with dynastic history

  • meaning Buddhism and other Chinese traditions can’t be pegged simply to a particular dynasty.

• Buddhist church was always dependent on the support of the landowning classes in medieval China

  • condition of Buddhist institutions were tied closely to the occasional support of the lower classes

• very notion of the rise and fall is a teleological, or theological, one, and can be often linked to an obsession with one particular criterion

The Translation of Buddhist Texts

• Written largely in classical Chinese in the contect of a premodern civilization which relatively few people could read

• Buddhist sutras were known far and wide in China

  • magical spell — ( Sanskrit: dharani ) from the Heart Sutra

  • stories from the Lotus Sutras — painted on walls of popular temples

  • religious preachers, popular storytellers, and low-class dramatists drew on rich trove of mythology provided by Buddhist narrative.

• Scholars of Buddhism tended to focus on the chronology and accuracy of translation

  • to understand the history of Chinese Buddhism, it is necessary to know

    • which texts were available when

    • how they were translated and by whom

    • how they were inscribed on paper and stone, approved or not approved, disseminated, and argued about

Schools of Buddhism in China

• Ernst Troeltsch’s definition of a sect — voluntary religious association that people consciously choose to join and that excludes participation in other religious activites

  • type of sect the Teaching of the White Lotus ( Bailian Jiao ) was only tenuously connected to the “schools” of Chinese Buddhist

• Trends of thought and clearly indentified philosophical issues are part of the Chinese Buddhist history from the early centuries

  • sixth through eight centuries some figures indentified themselves as concerned with one particular scripture:

    • authors in the Tiantai School — focused on Lotus Sutra

    • figures of the Huayan School — emphasized the comprehensive nature of the Huayan (“Flower Garland”) Sutra

    • founders of these schools and their followers never stopped reading in a wide range of Buddhist texts

• Certain emphases also developed in Chinese Buddhist practice and Buddhology

  • the invocation of the name of Amitayus Buddha (nianfo, “keeping the Buddha in mind” ) — powers were to assit those who chanted his name and whose resplendent paradise are described at length in scriptures affiliated with the Pure Land (Jingtu) school

    • dedication was rarely viewed as a substitute for other forms of practice in late medieval Japan

• Esoteric forms of Buddhism — characterized by restricting the circulation of knowledge about rituals to a small circle of initiates who perform rituals for those who lacked the expertise

  • Monks of the Zhenyan ( Sanskirt: Mantra, “True Word” ) school participated in other forms of Buddhist thought and practices as well.

• Chan (“Mediatition”) or Zen in Japanese claimed to be founded on an unbroken transmission from Śākyamuni through 28 Indian disciples to the 1st Chinese in late 5th century

  • far less exlusive than its rheotric allows

  • claims about transmission and the indentification of crucial figures in the dram aof Chan history were always executed

  • Chan came into existence only in the 12th & 13th century as a “school” in the sense of an establishment for teaching and learning with monastery buildings, daily schedule, and administrative structure