Buddhism and Indigenous Chinese Religions
by Tina Quintana
Buddhism, though originated in India, is considered to be one of the “Three Doctrines” in China along with the indigenous religions of Daoism and Confucianism. Buddhism is, by itself, a complex and diverse tradition that underwent more changes as it entered China, whose society and economic structure was very different from India’s at the time. Taking into account these factors, as well as the purely religious ones, we can see how and why Buddhism developed as it did in Imperial China.
Buddhism began with the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama, born to a prince of the Sakya tribe in what is today Nepal in the 5thcentury BCE. Buddha means “enlightened one” or “awakened one” in Pali, a title that has been given to more people than to Gautama Buddha, who became known as Buddha Shakyamuni (“sage of the Shakya people”). He spread his teachings in a simple and repetitive manner to reach a greater audience, and these were transmitted orally over the generations.
To recognize oneself as a Buddhist is to take refuge in the so-called Three Jewels which are the Buddha, the Dhamma (teachings) and the Sangha (community). According to Buddhists, there are three marks to reality: change or impermanence (anichcha), lack of identity (anatta) and suffering (dukkha). This marked a departure from Hinduism, with which its concept of atman advocated the existence of an ultimate essence or self. (Anatta is anatman in Sanskrit, which is the negation of the atman). However, Buddhism shares with Hinduism the idea of samsara, the cycle of birth and rebirth.
The main beliefs of Buddhists are summarized in the Four Noble Truths:
1) To live is to suffer (dukkha);
2) Desire or tanha is the source of dukkha;
3) Extinction of tanha brings about nibbana, the end of dukkha; and
4) This could be achieved by following the Eightfold Path, which consists of right belief, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness and right concentration. Ahimsa, to do no harm, is an important maxim.
Three main currents exist in Buddhism: Theravada (“path of the elders”), Mahayana (“the great vehicle”) and Vajrayana (“vehicle of the diamond”). Mahayana is the less conservative and more diverse of the three, and the one from which the major traditions of Chinese Buddhism would spring.
Daoism and Confucianism
Daoism and Confucianism, the two greatest Chinese indigenous religions, find their origins in traditional folk belief. This included veneration of ancestors, the yang and ying, divination, spirits and the observation of patterns in nature. Laozi is considered to be the founder of Daoism and the author of the Daodejing, even though his actual existence has been questioned. Daoism is all about living in accordance with the Dao or “the Way”, and it also contains some mystic and shamanistic elements. There was a focus on the search for longevity and even immortality.
Confucianism is named after Confucius or Kong Qiu, who is known for a fact to have existed. It didn’t contain any of the esoteric elements of Daoism, focusing instead on etiquette, values, virtues and ethics for the correct functioning of society. Xiao, or filial piety, is one of the most important virtues. The most revered texts of Confucianism are the Four Books and the Five Classics.
Buddhism was first spread beyond India by Emperor Ashoka (268–239 BCE) of the Magadhan Empire, who had converted after witnessing mass deaths in the battlefield and decided to embrace pacifism. Buddhism, however, is generally thought to have been introduced into China around the Later Han period (25–220 CE) , and reached its highest growth during the Tang Dynasty (618–906 CE). It continued prospering in China until around the 11th century. Buddhism, however, was by all accounts incompatible with Chinese society and ideals. Mou Tzu’s classic text The Disposition of Error lays out several conflicting points between Chinese belief and Buddhism. For instance, there is the question of “why do Buddhist monks do injury to their bodies?” referring to the shaving of the heads, which seems to be at odds with the Confucianist maxim that one must respect one’s body out of respect for one’s parents. But most importantly, not only was Buddhism foreign, which made it suspicious in a country that was already full of internal strife, but it was also too mystical and otherworldly. This doesn’t mean that the Chinese had a problem with the ethereal, as as we’ve seen they had abundant supernatural beliefs, but Buddhism was simply a negation of the things of this world. To live in a monastery would be to accept the fact of never having children, not taking care of one’s elders and not being a productive member of society. In the religious aspect, reincarnation conflicted with the Daoist ideal of immortality. Furthermore, the begging of the monks may have been common in India, but in China begging wasn’t seen as a dignified activity.
On the other hand, Buddhism was attractive to the Chinese for several other reasons. For the poor, calm monasterial life seemed like a haven from the strains of war and hunger. It also appealed to the intellectuals and elite who may have seen Daoism as too superstitious and Confucianism as too rigid and conservative. The mercantile culture made it possible for merchants who traveled from place to place to also spread the ideas. Joseph Bulbulia spoke of religion providing a means for the so-called costly-commitment signaling, a mechanism of trust that made it possible for monks to tell who really was a devoted Buddhist and thus introduce people who could do business together.
Missionaries, meanwhile, used what Chinese people already believed in as a basis for introducing Buddhist ideas. The result was a syncretism of these beliefs, a form of religion that mixed Chinese traditional religions with Buddhist characteristics. Buddhism was seen through the lens of the preexisting local traditions and was even sometimes conflated with them by the locals.
Around the 6th century, the Chán (Zen) teachings began in China, attributed to the Buddhist monk Bodhidharma, whose earliest transmissions are known through the writings of his disciple T’an-Lin. The word Chán is derived from the Sanskrit word dhyāna, which can be approximately translated as “meditation”, the emphasis of this sect. The principal text during this time was Two Entrances and Four Practices. Chán Buddhism viewed manual labor as a form of meditation, which made monasteries economically self-sufficient. Chán would later break up into the Northern school or East Mountain Teaching, which allegedly advocated gradual enlightment, and the Southern school, of the belief that enlightment could come suddenly. The latter can be seen in the Platform Sutra, in which Chán patriarch Huineng tells of his enlightment as he heard someone recite the Diamond Sutra while selling firewood. A way in which traditional Chinese belief influenced Chán Buddhism is exemplified by Principle, or li, which “represents a central idea of Chinese philosophy — the essence or ground of reality — taken over into Buddhism”. The practice of wall-gazing, conversely, was influenced by meditation methods brought over from India.
Other major schools that developed on Chinese soil were Tiantai and Pure Land Buddhism. The former advocated a closer reading of the original texts and appealed to intellectuals, while the latter focused on devotion and worshipped Amitabha Buddha . Tiantai accepted both sudden and gradual enlightment. A passage attributed to Tao-hsin speaks about the “natural rhythms of things” and how enlightment shouldn’t be forced, which reminds us of the traditional Chinese (and particularly Taoist) ideal of the flow of nature. The metaphor of the mirror, which appears in Tao-hsin’s text as well as in the Platform Sutra of Huineng, was common in China from the times of Laozi.
As Buddhism took hold in China, interest in its place of origin also increased. Xuanzang, who was concerned with the lack of accurate Buddhist texts and their misinterpretation, traveled to India during the Tang Dynasty and stayed there for several years (Encyclopedia Britannica). This travel would later inspire Journey to the West, written by Wu Cheng’en during the Ming Dynasty (also known in this Hemisphere as Monkey) which would later inspire the popular series Dragon Ball. Monks would bring hundreds of Sanskrit texts back to China. Now not only Indian monks were spreading it, but also the Chinese themselves, as Buddhism in India was succumbing to Hindu and Muslim pressure.
One of the main features that Buddhism adopted from the Chinese is the veneration of ancestors. In India, the strong belief in reincarnation made ancestors less important; what mattered the most was the adoration of the gods and godesses and the hope of being born in a higher status in a later life. The big cities of India had a surplus of population, which also created excess dirt and made it possible for purity to become an ideal. The physical was seen as low. On the other hand, the Chinese had from times inmemorial venerated their ancestors, which also included a special respect for their bodies. This could explain why Tantra, an Indian tradition concerned with connecting with the body, had such a big impact in China, particularly influencing the Vajrayana school. The emphasis that Tantra puts on the body — kundalini, or energy that lies coiled in the base of the spine –, and even in the sexual act as a means of achieving altered states of consciousness, was soon accepted and exalted by the Chinese.
Of course, not only was Buddhism altered and diversified by its interaction with indigenous Chinese beliefs, but it also happened the other way around. Within Confucianism, the school of Neo-Confucianism began in opposition to Buddhism while at the same time taking concepts from it such as that of the sage (Angurarohita). Neo-Confucianists sought to bring back people to tradition and worldliness, and to do this they interpreted early Confucianist ideas in the light of Buddhist understanding. This kind of syncretism reveals how it had at this point, at the turn of the second millenium, already become inevitable to consider Buddhism in order to influence Chinese conscience.
The opposition to Buddhism, however, was not only ideological but governmental. Not all rulers supported it, especially because of the tax-exempt monasteries that accumulated wealth that was out of their reach. This created friction and, together with other socioeconomic and religious factors, eventually led to the persecution of Buddhists and the downfall of this religion in China, which is still hugely influential today, especially in the West, but is past its golden age in the Eastern world.
To talk about any Eastern religion is not so much talking about religion, as organized religion would only become a concept (and a Western one at that) much after the consolidation of these beliefs. But recognizing patterns in these changing beliefs, and not only in them as isolated traditions but amongst themselves across time and space, gives us a much larger picture of any society. In this case, the complex interactions between the tradition of Buddhism and the indigenous Chinese beliefs of Taoism and Confucianism have not limited or defined but enlarged what Buddhism is today.
