by Peter Watson
Despite this, Buddhism was at first restricted to a very limited range of people–merchants on the trade routes which the monks followed, and the local aristocracy. One reason for the aristocratic interest was the vogue for what were called ‘pure conversations’. ‘These conversations, in which the interlocutors vied with each other in producing witty remarks, amusing repartee, and polished epigrams, were gradually to extend their range…to literary, artistic, moral and philosophical problems.’ The members of the School of Mysteries, who were also concerned with the writings of Laotzu, were fascinated by metaphysical problems, in particular the relation between being and non-being. Traditionally, these were not conceived as opposites, as we might think of them today. Instead, and this is hard to get across in the modern world, ‘non-being’ was seen as the reverse of ‘being’, an alternative and shadowy form of existence. To the School of Mysteries, the Buddhist idea of ‘not being’ as nothingness, sheer emptiness, was fascinating because it was entirely new.47
In this sense then, the Chinese interest in Buddhism began as a philosophical/ metaphysical activity on the part of the literate aristocracy, and only then in the southern part of the country. It continued that way pretty much until the end of the fourth century after which it began to grow in influence in the north of China. But this was in some ways a different form of Buddhism, sparked by the actions of monks who both worked magic tricks and helped induce trances and ecstasies, through yoga, which had a much greater popular appeal. A number of monks managed to enlist the support of a range of sovereigns, who funded monasteries and, in particular, the translation of some of the great Buddhist texts, at the same time sponsoring the journeys of Chinese Buddhist monks to India. Two of the great names in Chinese Buddhism were Huiyuan (334–417) and Kumarajiva (350–413), through whom Buddhism came of age there. Thanks to their translations and teachings which, among other things, turned into Chinese the great treatises on monastic discipline (Vinaya), an organised priesthood, endowed with its own rules, began to develop in China. This made Buddhism an even greater religion of salvation and stimulated a demand for more pilgrimages to India, with Chinese monks going to ‘seek the law’. In 402 Huiyuan assembled his whole community, both monks and lay people, in front of an image of the Buddha Amitabha (the Buddha of Infinite Light), and together they vowed to be reborn in the western paradise (Sukhavati, the Pure Land, jing du) which is the habitation of this great figure of Mahayana Buddhism. ‘This was the first demonstration of a belief shared by all the faithful, the first context in which Buddhism appears as a religion of universal salvation.’48
From the late fourth century on, China began to be dotted with storeyed towers (stupas, da) and sanctuaries. At the same time, Buddhist caves began to be carved out of rock, and the number of converts mushroomed. Conversion at this stage was no longer a matter of individual belief or conscience, but part of a group–even a mass–movement. Proof of the success of Buddhism at this time can be found in a striking parallel with Christianity in medieval Europe: the claim that the priesthood was autonomous. In 404 Huiyuan wrote his Treatise Explaining the Reasons Why Monks Are Not Obliged to Pay Homage to Sovereigns. As in Europe, church property was held to be inalienable, as were certain Buddhist practices, such as tonsure, celibacy and the observation of religious prohibitions.49 The upsurge of faith was so great after the fifth century that a number of problems arose which were peculiar to this situation. There was, for example, an excessively large number of ‘fictitious ordinations’ (so that people could avoid paying taxes, or serving in the army), and many simulated gifts of land to monasteries, again to avoid paying taxes. So many bells and statues were cast that there was a shortage of metal for coins and ploughs. Central government also worried about the disruption to family life caused by the excessive number of sons leaving home to be itinerant and/or mendicant monks. Here lay the seeds of future dissatisfaction with Buddhism.
The pilgrimage movement was also at its height between the fifth and the ninth centuries. Many monks made the journey to India and wrote accounts. By far the most famous was that by Faxian, who left Chang’an in 399 when he was over sixty and was away for fifteen years. His account, Fo guo ji (Report on the Buddhist Kingdoms), was supplemented by a number of manuscripts he also brought back and translated. These accounts by monastic pilgrims were prodigiously accurate and together now provide much of the history of the Asian region at that time. In all, according to Jacques Gernet, 1,692 different texts are known, and include the richest source of sermons attributed to the Buddha. Between 515 and 946 some fourteen bibliographical catalogues of Buddhist translations into Chinese were prepared and these too allow us to reconstruct the transfer of ideas and practices when Buddhist influence was at its height. The most prolific translating team in all China was that directed by Xuan Zang (602–664), who went to India and spent five years studying at the famous monastery/university of Nalanda. He then returned home where, in the course of eighteen years, he and his team translated about a quarter of all Indian texts into Chinese–some 1,350 chapters out of a total of 5,100 translated in six centuries by 185 teams of translators.50
In tandem with the religious ideas that made the transition from India to China and Japan, Buddhist art also exercised a wide influence. This art was already imbued with Greek and Iranian influences.51 The practice of hollowing caves out of rock also followed the Buddhist monks, and the first caves of the Thousand Buddha complex (Qian Fo Fong) near Dunhuang (at the western end of the Great Wall, near the Silk Road) were started in 366. But between then and the eighth century colossal statues were built all over China, the most notable being the caves of Yungang, where the biggest figures are 160 feet tall. Aside from the statues themselves, the walls of the caves were decorated with Buddhist paintings, almost all of which have been lost. The scenes were usually taken from the life of the Buddha, images of Buddhist hell, and so on. Religious frescoes also decorated the walls of prominent monasteries. The classical Chinese style was for purity, simplicity, exactness: the traditional Chinese artist stripped away inessentials to achieve a concise expression of what he aimed at. Buddhism was more exuberant than that: it was an art of sumptuousness, of exaggeration, repetition and ornamentation. The same qualities affected Buddhist literature, which not only produced new subjects (again exploring the Buddha’s previous lives, descents into hell, pilgrimages) but produced new forms–sermons, conversations between masters and pupils, edifying narratives–which helped the development in China of the novel and the drama.52 In many ways this made Chinese literature for a time more similar to that elsewhere: the worlds of men, gods, animals, demons and beings from the underworld were all intermingled. This, we should remember, was quite alien to the Chinese experience, which hitherto had imagined no creator god, no hell, no world of spirits or demons.
And so, for half a millennium, beginning in the last half of the fourth century, Buddhism flourished in China (and, in turn, in Japan). The monasteries became great centres of learning and culture, with the monk–poet, painter and calligrapher–paralleled by the learned layman, interested in Buddhist philosophy and practising techniques of concentration.53 Great sects grew up, of which the most important were the eclectic school of Tiantai (a mountain in north-west Zhejiang), founded by Zhi Yi (538–597), whose main text was the famous Lotus of the True Law, ‘the very essence of Buddhism’, and the zhan sect (Japanese zen), which began in the eighth century and became especially popular among the literati. This group rejected the long ascetic training so typical of many Buddhist sects, and by means of which, through ever-more difficult techniques of concentration, one could attain the ‘extremity of being’. The zhan system instead aimed at ‘sudden illumination’ and sought to achieve this by detaching the mind from any discursive thought and from dwelling on the self. Recourse was therefore had to anything that would, as we say, take people out of themselves–paradox, ‘meditation on absurd subjects’, baffling exchanges, even shouts.
But then, in the years 842–8
45, there was a massive turnaround. Buddhism was proscribed and the religious communities dispersed.
Such a momentous change never happens that abruptly, of course. Opposition to Buddhism had been growing for some time, and it had two sources. One stemmed from an important difference between the aristocracy and commoners. The aristocracy in China had always been more open to foreign influence, and indeed that class contained more foreigners than the population at large–Turks, Sogdians, Tibetans. Wars of one kind and another increasingly cut off Buddhist channels of communication, and that had an effect, too. But a more important second influence was the educated literati who had risen in society by means of the examination system. That system encouraged the study of the Chinese classics and, slowly, the view formed among this class that China had been diverted from its true roots of simplicity and conciseness. One of the great Chinese writers, Han Yu (768–824), wrote a fierce diatribe in 819 when there was an outbreak of mass hysteria because a relic of the Buddha was due to be moved. This diatribe became famous and helped promote anti-Buddhist (and anti-foreigner) feeling, which gradually spread from the literati to the rest of the people. A final complicating twist was that the monasteries held most of the stock of precious metals, in the form of bells and statues. When the bells were melted down for coins, many people refused to use them: knowing they had once formed sacred objects, they felt such coins were sacrilegious. This, too, did not endear the Buddhists to the educated scholar-bureaucrats. In 836 a decree was published forbidding the Chinese to have relations with ‘people of colour’–i.e., foreigners. This was widely seen as an attack on foreign ideas and, soon enough, the Buddhist monasteries were purged of the hypocritical elements–uneducated monks, fictitious ordinations, fraudulent land deals. The noose was tightened a little further when the monasteries were made to conform to their vows: Buddhist monks took a vow of poverty, so all rich monasteries were stripped of their assets. In this way, eventually, some 260,000 monks and nuns were secularised, meaning they now had to pay taxes, and 4,600 monasteries were either demolished or converted into public buildings. (Another 40,000 smaller places of worship were also pulled down or converted.54) In the Song period, monasticism regained some strength, but it never returned to its former glory; it was cut off from India, which was itself threatened by Islam, and only zhan (or Zen) Buddhism retained any vigour, and that mainly in Japan. Instead, in Song times, there was a new enthusiasm: what became known as Neo-Confucianism.
Neo-Confucianism is in fact a Western word for what the Chinese called either xin lixue (school of human nature and universal order), or li qi xue (school of universal order and cosmic energy). In some ways these are better terms, since they convey the central concern of Neo-Confucianism, which was for li, the central rational principle of (order in) the universe, and the way–when understood–it explains both moral behaviour and matter. This linking of moral behaviour and matter is a very Chinese way of thinking, alien to (but not necessarily unattractive to) Western ways of thinking.
The development of Neo-Confucian thought in Song times is regarded as the greatest of intellectual triumphs, the jewel in the crown of what is now known as the Chinese renaissance. It affected all walks of life, from politics to religion to law (in the Tang Code, the first Chinese code to survive in full, murder of a father by a son was much more serious than the other way around, which might, in some circumstances, not be a crime at all.)55 The achievements of Neo-Confucianism remained important down to the twentieth century. It was synthesised in the twelfth century by Zhu Xi, who listed five major thinkers–Zhou Dunyi, Shao Yong, Zhang Zai, Zheng Hao and his brother Zheng Yi–all of whom were eleventh-century figures, related to each other, pupils of one another or friends with each other, and whose concern, in one way or the other, was with the concept of the ‘Great Ultimate’, the force or power or principle which explained both the operation and development of the universe–time–and the emergence of ethical behaviour, and which ensured that this development continued in civilised fashion. All of these thinkers were scholar-bureaucrats, jinshi, graduates of the examination system, who thus shared a common education grounded in the great classics, Confucius and Mencius in particular. There were two important divisions within the Neo-Confucians. On the one hand, there were those who emphasised statecraft and ethics, and, on the other, those who emphasised li, rational principle, and xin or mind, intuitionism. Those who emphasised statecraft argued that the Song philosophers were too divorced from reality, and that the intellectual’s true role was to help achieve ethical behaviour within the boundaries of political reality, that the vast majority of men were less than ideal and that government must acknowledge this fact.
The best-known of the intuitionists, the principal spokesman for the idealist School of Mind, as it was known, was Lu Xiangshan (1139–1191). This school held a great appeal for many people because its adherents believed that one should acknowledge only those truths gained through one’s own subjective awareness, that in effect one became one’s own authority on what is right and wrong, true and false.56 ‘The universe is my mind and my mind is the universe’ was Lu’s most popular sentence, endlessly repeated. The rationalists opposed this view, seeing that it could undermine all authority, in both ethics and social behaviour.
The most distinguished rationalist Neo-Confucian thinker, indeed the man who is often spoken of as ‘the most influential figure in Chinese intellectual history after Confucius himself’, who some say ‘completed’ Confucianism, was Zhu Xi (1130–1200). He too graduated as jinshi, at only eighteen, and had a series of posts, and a series of political ups and downs, dying in exile but being completely exonerated two years later. While he was alive, his brand of Neo-Confucianism was denounced as ‘false learning’ (hence his disgrace and exile) but after his exoneration his views became overwhelmingly influential, so much so that he was vilified by the Communists in the twentieth century and blamed for the way China after the Middle Ages dropped behind other civilisations. His ideas are difficult to appreciate today, since they are so bland by later standards (this may account for the Communist attitude). But no one can deny their influence over many centuries.57
Zhu drew together a number of ideas of his immediate forerunners, such as Zheng Yi and Zhou Dunyi. Contrary to what the Buddhists and others had said, Zhu downplayed the role of the supernatural in man’s affairs. The elements–rain, thunder, wind–now became again natural forces, expressions of the principle or principles underlying the universe. Wisdom, happiness, ethical living together was to be achieved, he said, by attunement to lixue, the pattern of nature that encompassed the entire world, and which explained both its existence and development.58 Only when man pursued such a course of lixue could he discover the pre-established harmony of the world and approach perfection. Postulating that there were two ultimate forces or entities in the universe, the Supreme Ultimate and the Principle (li), Zhu said that the former, in essence, explained the existence of matter (and the absence of nothing, important since the advent of Buddhism), while the latter, li, explained the form and development (the ontology) of matter, leading to the development of humans and then of ethics. Zhu believed, as Confucius had before him, that the universe was self-renewing and to explain man’s presence in the universe he said that there was a benevolent, generative element, ren, humaneness. This explained why, as Confucius and Mencius had argued, the universe is good and man’s nature is to be, and do, good.59 Zhu’s authority partly lay in the elegance of his synthesis, but also in the great depth of his classical learning, for he was able to show, in a section called Dao Tong, the ‘Transmission of the Way’, how similar ideas had been transmitted from antiquity all the way through to Song times. In doing this, he was asserting the truly Chinese nature of these ideas, a further element in the turning away from Buddhism. One of his favourite metaphors was that between man and a pearl in a bowl of dirty water. The pearl may appear dim and lustreless (to the man) but if taken from the water it still shines brilliantly. Evil conduc
t, Zhu thought, was the product of neglect or the lack of a proper education.60