作業

Teiser wrote in page xiv, “to invert the usual priority of textus receptus” over everything else. The field of Buddhist studies thus had been reoriented toward a new direction, which the “real Buddhism” is defined based on the understanding and practice of its practitioners, rather than purely scholarly conjecture and speculation. In this book, the question of medieval religious practices is the primary concern. Thus, the fact is “the usual sources for medieval religion are notoriously silent… Answers can be found by looking outside the officially sanctioned repositories of Chinese Buddhist doctrine” (19).

The Idea of Purgatory was not something new for medieval Chinese Buddhists since they had accepted the Buddhist cosmological notion of the cycle of existence (saṃsāra). However, in fact, “the location of purgatory is slightly more vague than its duration… This purgatory is a Sino-Indian synthesis” (1-2). Classic Buddhist cosmology involves into two types of categorizations, a more profane one, which divide the world of rebirth into six realms, and a more sacred one, constituted by “the realm of desire, the realm of form and the realm of no form. (11)” Sentient beings are constantly reincarnating inside the six realms of rebirth. And when Buddhists meditate, they can transcend themselves into the realm of form and the realm of no form, which supposedly where those devas live. Nonetheless, both the idea of the Buddha land (Pure land) and the notion of purgatory are not located inside the previous schemes.

Here we have a problem, because this notion of purgatory is not found in the Indian Buddhist sutras, but widely appreciated in the Scripture on the Ten Kings. Once a sentient being dies, will it be automatically reborn in the six realms, or will it need to go over some processes? Thus, Chinese bureaucratized this notion of purgatory outside the six realms and the three worlds, and now the purgatory located “on the space between one rebirth and the next, the transition of which required help from the living” (12). Thus, Buddhism, in medieval China, actually “provided a new means for expressing the ambiguous sentiments… and represents the last stage in the imposition of bureaucratic metaphor on the experience of death” (15).

In part one, Teiser tried to trace the root of Ten King post-mortem practice and stated, “the inspiration for the last three of the ten memorial services derived from indigenous Chines ritual practice, and fact that Buddhist clerics were proud to announce” (25). The basic idea and the fundamental belief of memorial rites is widely shared by medieval Chinese populace disregarding their religious categorization, which is “after death the deceased lives in a liminal stage lasting forty-nine days, possessing a body that is not fully human. The stay in purgatory ends in accordance with the dead person’s own karma and the solicitude of the family in sponsoring mortuary rituals” (28). Combined with the Confucian notion of memorial rites and Taoist gods, the Scripture on the Ten Kings offers both premortem and post-mortem Buddhist service for preparing one’s own or mourning other’s death.

Based on the artistic representation, we can reconstruct an animated and visualized illustration of the death experience believed by medieval Chinese. A bureaucratic system, as same as the one in the human realm, is functioning in the purgatory, and Ten Kings are Buddhist gods, as well as the bureaucrats, in charge of helping the deceased to the next rebirth. Holding monthly feasts supposedly can mitigate the pain of this transitional process. The notion of purgatory is built on “a view of the cosmos as a bureaucracy, with higher-level deities sending down their assistants to inspect deeds and to forward reports on what they have observed” (55). Buddhas and Bodhisattvas are the only hope for the deceased, because they “exercising compassion toward the group of sentient beings currently moving through the intermediate state” (63).

Even though the Scripture on the Ten Kings had never collected in any Buddhist canon prior to 1912 and acknowledged by Buddhist scholars (9), and its origin story is derived from a “verisimilitude of near-death experience” (75). Further, the miniscule version of the scripture seemingly implies that the scripture itself is a talisman (101), and the behavior of copying the text itself is a ritual which accumulate merits (115). All these religious significances suggest the multifunction of the Scripture on the Ten Kings, widely ranging from memorial rites, preparing one’s own death, healing diseases, blessing the living family members, and cultivating merit for one’s ox. The usage of this scripture is much more versatile than scholars used to think, and the studies of the “grassroot” Buddhism should not only concentrated on “canonical scriptures were copied ad hoc by government order” (162).