You Chongxia: How Buddhism integrated into China

The Essence of China 2011-08-12 Source: Utopia

China has experienced three ontological crises in history, namely the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties, and the modern era to the present day. During these three periods, the entire national culture has been shaken or even in danger. During the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, there were hundreds of schools of thought, and no one could agree on one. During the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties, there was an impact from the religious culture of India. In modern times, there was an impact from the Western industrial culture, or economic culture. The first two times were a close call, and various thoughts were tempered and stirred, but they eventually returned to the unification of the Confucian political culture, which led to the Han and Tang dynasties. However, the prospects for the most recent one are still unclear.

It is no accident that Buddhism eventually became an organic part of Chinese culture. From the perspective of origin, Buddhism is an atheist heresy of the mainstream religious culture of ancient India’s Brahmans, just as Marxism is an anti-capitalist heresy of the mainstream industrial culture of the West (various cultural heresies generally cannot stand in their place of origin and can only go far away). Since China’s traditional political culture is not strong in religion and economy, it can only absorb the heresies of the above two cultures for its own use, namely Buddhism and Marxism. This is the historical fact since the Southern and Northern Dynasties and the May Fourth Movement.

As an independent cultural entity, China is inherently incapable of accommodating and integrating liberalism and Brahmanism, because those are the mainstream ideologies of Western and Indian cultures, which are too far away from us. Netizens said, If we practice liberalism, the Chinese nation will be completely destroyed. This is probably what they meant. In view of this, it would be helpful to review the process of Buddhism\'s eastward spread.

Around the fifth century BC, as the power of the Maurya Dynasty in India continued to grow, the Brahmanism that was revered by mainstream society gradually declined due to its stubbornness and rigidity. A Sramanic trend that reflected the ideological tendencies of the Kshatriyas (royal family) and competed with it arose. The most influential of these was Buddhism founded by Sakyamuni, a prince of the Sakya clan.

The Maurya Empire was the first unified dynasty in ancient India , named after its founder, Chandragupta, who was born into the Maurya family. The Maurya Empire during the reign of King Ashoka was a monarchy , with the king having absolute authority in administration , military affairs , and justice . The country was divided into several provinces, and the governors were usually princes . However, there were still many relatively independent tribes within the provinces, so it did not reach the high degree of centralization that was achieved during the Qin and Han dynasties in China.

Buddhism , as a heresy of Brahmanism in history, was initially only a school of thought, at most a quasi-religion similar to Confucianism, because it does not worship spiritual entities such as Brahma that are indispensable to ordinary religions. Buddhism does not regard gods as the master, creator, or only one. If the gods do not have the wisdom of Prajna that understands the emptiness of dependent origination, they are still one of the sentient beings in the six realms of reincarnation. Regardless of what caste people belong to, as long as they follow the sequence of precepts, concentration, and wisdom to study, they can also become arhats, bodhisattvas, or Buddhas. Buddha nature is enlightenment. Everyone has the ability to realize dependent origination and has the possibility of becoming a Buddha.

The founder of Buddhism, Sakyamuni, is also like Confucius and Laozi, not a god, but a fully enlightened person. His ideas are similar to Laozi\'s, leaving the two extremes and advocating the middle way, advocating all actions are impermanent, all dharmas have no self , and nirvana is tranquil, sweeping away the emptiness of mind and matter, self and dharma. Later, Nagarjuna inherited this middle way thought and formed the Madhyamaka philosophy, the core of which is emptiness, which is roughly a kind of intermediary existence of two-way negation.

As the Maurya Dynasty, which believed in and supported Buddhism, gradually unified India, Buddhism gradually became the dominant religion in India. In the era of Ashoka, it was vigorously promoted as the state religion, which was quite similar to Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty\'s abolishing all schools of thought and respecting Confucianism alone. Since the Brahman theocracy caste system and the separatist forces supported by the lords were not conducive to the political unification of the dynasty and the smooth flow of commercial trade, Buddhism, which opposed the theocracy caste system and advocated the equality of all beings, was widely welcomed by the whole country. This phenomenon reflects the rise and fall of power between the Kshatriyas (royal families) and Brahmans (monks and priests) in India at that time, and between the emerging landlords and merchants and the separatist forces of the lords.

Buddhism is divided into Hinayana and Mahayana. Hinayana Buddhism focuses on Buddhist doctrines and is called self-enlightened by the world; Mahayana Buddhism deifies the Buddha, advocates that there are countless Buddhas in the three worlds and ten directions, and preaches great compassion to save all living beings and establish a Buddhist Pure Land. It is more religious in form and more suitable for the tastes of dynasty rulers. In this regard, Chinese Confucianism, due to the lack of the profound religious history of the mother body of Brahmanism, can only remain at the Hinayana stage. If you are poor, you can only improve yourself (self-enlightened), and if you are rich, you can help the world (enter politics).

However, with the popularity and prevalence of idolatry, Buddhism could no longer satisfy the Indians\' thirst for profound principles. The Maurya Dynasty\'s excessive support for Buddhism caused resentment from other sects, and conflicts began to intensify. After Ashoka\'s death, these factors eventually led to the collapse of the dynasty\'s central power, and the rise and fall of Buddhism coincided with the rise and fall of the Maurya Dynasty. After a period of contention among a hundred schools of thought, Brahmanism was revived, which later became Hinduism. It absorbed the ideological elements of Buddhism and other heterodoxies, and the propositions of various sects were finally reconciled.

If there had not been Ashoka\'s strong support, Buddhism might have been just a sectarian academic group circulated among the people, but this kind of royal Buddhism was quite vulgar. According to Buddhists, the Dharma taught by Ashoka seems to be slightly different from the Dharma in Buddhist scriptures. For example, the Buddha said that the final liberation of life is Nirvana, but Ashoka\'s stone teachings did not mention Nirvana at all, only saying that the highest goal of life is to obtain a blissful life in heaven in the next life. Moreover, although Buddhism uses double condemnation dialectics to deny the opposite polarity and move towards absolute emptiness, in practice it has failed to change the polarization of castes in social reality. Due to Buddhism\'s non-mainstream status in history, its influence on India is not as great as that on neighboring countries. The reason may be that as a quasi-religious form, Buddhism\'s internal mediating ontological orientation is not compatible with its external religious form.

Buddhism was originally a sect of Brahmanism, which later became Hinduism, and its origins were closely related to this mainstream religion. In this context, although Buddhism denied some of Brahmanism\'s theological theories and social systems, it also retained its main doctrines such as reincarnation and karma, so that later Hinduism regarded Sakyamuni as the incarnation of Brahma and adopted an accepting attitude towards Buddhism. With the collapse of the Maurya Empire, Buddhism no longer carried out its original purpose. After several ups and downs, it finally went with the flow and converted to theism.

A typical example of this is the Tantric Buddhism. With the re-emergence of feudal foreign states in India and the close proximity of Buddhism and Brahmanism, the Tantric Buddhism, one of the branches of Buddhism, began to rise. Tantric Buddhism, also known as Vajrayana and Mantra Vehicle, is a mixture of Mahayana Buddhism, Brahmanism and Indian folk beliefs. It is characterized by highly organized spells, rituals, and popular beliefs. It advocates that the three secrets of chanting mantras (verbal secret), making hand seals (hand gestures, body secret), and visualizing in the mind (mental secret) can correspond to each other at the same time, so that one can become a Buddha in this body.

The rituals and practices of Tantric Buddhism can be traced back to the early Brahmanic tradition, but it really emerged in the late Mahayana Buddhism, which is believed to be a special sect formed by Mahayana Buddhism absorbing the practice of Hinduism. Tantric Buddhism is full of supernatural powers, replacing the original sutra (literally translated as scripture ) with secret sutras (also known as Tantras), and using secret scriptures as the basis for practice. The Indian New Tantra itself is a mixture of Buddhism and Hinduism, advocating the practice of bliss and emptiness in this life. Take the Indian monk Tan Wuchen who came to China during the Northern Wei Dynasty as an example. According to the Book of Wei·Biography of Juqu Mengxun, there was a monk named Tan Wuchen who went east to Shanshan and claimed that he could make ghosts cure diseases and make women have many children. He had an affair with Mantou Tuolin, the sister of the Shanshan king. When he was discovered, he fled to Liangzhou. Mengxun favored him and called him a saint. Tan Wuchen taught women the art of sexual intercourse, and Mengsun\'s daughters and sons-in-law all went to learn the art. When Emperor Taizu heard about Tan Wuchen\'s art from travelers, he summoned him. Mengsun refused to send him away, so he revealed the secret, tortured him, and killed him.

As far as my country is concerned, due to the dual nature of Buddhism as a theistic religion and an atheistic philosophy, its influence on China since the Southern and Northern Dynasties is also two-sided: in terms of religion, it is obviously to blame for the long-term separatist situation of the feudal lords; and in terms of philosophy, its contribution to the construction of the system of Neo-Confucianism of the Song and Ming Dynasties in China can be said to be a blessing from heaven.

From the above, we can see that there are many reasons why Buddhism was finally integrated into the Central Plains culture:

First, its ontological orientation is a kind of intermediary existence that is neither mental nor material, which coincides with the local Confucianism and Taoism;

Secondly, it is in tune with the unified centralized political system, and therefore is widely supported (the Three Martial Arts Movement against Buddhism is an exception);

Third, it inherited a strong religious background from the Brahman mother body, which could make up for the lack of Chinese native religions and meet the specific spiritual needs of the people (for example, Zhang Taiyan praised Buddhism, saying: In the past, the Liu family of the Han Dynasty declined, Confucianism fell into disuse, and the people\'s morality was weakening. Thanks to the introduction of Buddhism, the world was maintained, and the people became sincere and honest again, which led to the prosperity of the Tang Dynasty. Until the Song Dynasty, Buddhism became weak, and people\'s hearts became more and more cowardly, and they were annexed by foreign races. Liang Qichao also lamented that without religious thoughts, there would be no hope, no unity, no liberation, no fear, and no courage);

Fourthly, Buddhism’s rigorous, meticulous, sophisticated, and highly speculative systematic way of thinking benefited Song and Ming Neo-Confucianism greatly, thus promoting the revival of Confucianism.

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