中国佛教史的入门书

This is a very brief introduction of Buddhism in Chinese history, its introduction, spread and decline, as well as its interaction with other elements in the Chinese culture and its influence on them. If you think about it, Buddhism is at the same time such a distant and intimate concept in the Chinese culture. Everyone of us has visited a Buddhist temple, our daily speeches are a rich thesaurus of terms with a Buddhist origin and our way of thinking about the world is tinted with Buddhist philosophy of causation and destiny. Yet we seldom look at it from a distance and ponder how this alien religion gets a hold on our society. Buddhism in Chinese History provides the answer in an extreme succinct manner.

It is not surprising that Buddhism got first spread in China during a period of breakdown of the Han order. But it was in the period of Northern and Southern states that it extended its roots. The south was governed by the elites fled from the Han establishment. The Confucian learning was preserved as the doctrine providing cultural legitimacy; Taoism was revived to answer to the fallen of the old empire. “Buddhism was initially molded by neo-Taoism.”
Buddhism caters the needs of the southern ruling elite, first in offering a new model for kingly behavior that legitimize the tottering monarchs. For the wealthy families in whom the control of the throne really resides, Buddhist temples are an opportunity to display their wealth and a place to perform their family rituals. For others in the literati, Buddhism offers a new vision of reality and salvation and a replacement of the “threadbare formulas” of neo-Taosim, which led Wright to the conclusion that “as Buddhism became more and more generally accepted, the literate monks found in it counterparts of those scholarly and cultural satisfactions which their ancestors had found in Confucianism.”

The minority ruled North is a different story. Here Wright made some interesting observations. He attributed Buddhism’s success in the north to the fact that it is a religion alien to China, which is a middle ground, an alternative for the barbarian chiefs who know that their own tribal way won’t sustain them in control of North China but are reluctant to submit to Confucian principles. There could be a deeper, metaphysical reason: the Buddhist ethic is universalistic in nature, applicable to men of all races, times and cultures which makes Buddhism a useful instrument to close some of the social fissures that plagued these minority regimes.

The next period, Sui and Tang dynasties are the ones frequently associated with the flourishing of Buddhism. Both dynasties as a state policy patronize Buddhist establishment and clergy. But to guard against Buddhist church’s resurgence as an imperium in imperio(an order within an order), state controls were exercised. Overall, however, this period was the “golden age of an independent and creative Chinese Buddhism.”

Buddhism is a doctrine suited to a period of consolidation and expansion of imperial power but would prove inadequate for a period of breakdown and crisis. Therefore, from the late T’ang dynasty, “men of learning and conscience turned with a new seriousness to Confucian canon. They sought in it ways to diagnose the crisis of their time and formulas for its solution.”

In the Sung dynasty, Confucianism is revived. On the one hand it sought to purge the Chinese tradition of Buddhist dominance. On the other hand, with all the years of experience of Buddhism, the Confucian scholars have only got to read the canons with a mind that has been exposed to Buddhism ideas. A more blunt way to put it is that the neo-Confusianism appropriated the ideas in Buddism, probably unconsciously. For example, the well known Fan Chung-yen saying of “one who is first in worrying about the world’s troubles and last in enjoying its pleasures” finds its counterpart in Mahayana Buddhism, where Santideva says “May I become an unfailing store for the wretched and be first to supply them with the manifold tings of their need. My own self and my pleasures, all my righteousness, past, present, and future, I sacrifice without regard, in order to achieve the welfare of all beings.”

The peak of Buddhism goes with the wane of Chinese society. However it can never be totally gone. “Ultimately Buddhist, Taoist, and folk-religious elements fused into an almost underentiated popular religion.” Buddhism’s history in China is also a history of Sinicization of Buddhism.

Overall the book offers an account of Buddhism and its interaction with the Chinese society, with admirable succinctness and ultimate clarity. It is nothing short of a modern classic, but I still get alarmed by the simplification that any author cannot avoid in commenting on culture. I have my doubt in the possibility of extracting an ethos, or a theme of a period from the totality of evidence presented. The same doubt applies to any causation that a historian draws. The Chinese elite embraced Buddhism in certain periods to satisfy their intellectual needs that cannot be met by a dogmatized Confucianism. All sounds reasonable. But how much of it is constituted of post event rationalization is hard to tell. The project itself reveals the danger of explaining and attributing causation to culture. The book touched on the national government period in early 20th century when scholars like Hu Shih tried to accuse Buddhism as causing all the malaise in China’s recent history. This is the very thing that deserves particular suspicion.