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$Title{History Of Religions
Chapter V}
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$Author{Foot Moore, George}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{buddhism
chinese
religion
buddhist
china
monasteries
life
salvation
buddha
monks
see
pictures
see
figures
}
$Date{1913}
$Log{See Buddha*0078701.scf
See Tibetan Monks*0078702.scf
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Title:       History Of Religions
Book:        Religions Of China
Author:      Foot Moore, George
Date:        1913

Chapter V

Buddhism

     Introduction and Spread - Character of the Religion - Two Great Branches
of the Church - Reasons for Its Success - Persecutions and Restrictions
-Charges Against Buddhism - Status under Later Dynasties - Modern Chinese
Buddhism.

     Three foreign religions have in different ages established themselves in
China: Buddhism, Mohammedanism, and Christianity.  The last two have remained
essentially foreign, and have exerted little influence on Chinese thought or
life; but Buddhism has been so fully naturalised that it is commonly counted
one of the three religions of the country, and it has contributed in large
measure to the composite, or conglomerate, religion of the masses, as well as
to the teaching and practice of various heretical sects.

     It is related that the emperor Ming-ti, in the year 61 A.D., in
consequence of a dream in which he had seen hovering above the palace a golden
image which was interpreted as a statue of Buddha, sent to India for Buddhist
teachers and copies of the Buddhist scriptures.  The story implies some
previous knowledge of Buddhism; and we have other grounds for believing that,
through trade with India and Chinese military expeditions to the westward, the
Chinese had come into contact with Buddhism as early as the second century
B.C., if, indeed, Buddhist missionaries had not already imported their
religion into China itself.  Ming-ti's envoys returned after six years,
bringing with them Indian scholars who made the first Chinese translations of
Buddhist books.

     During the three following centuries Buddhism made gradual progress in
China, but, although temples were built in the chief cities, it was not until
335 A.D. that it was made lawful for subjects to receive the tonsure. In the
latter half of the fourth century many large monasteries were erected in
northern China - a writer of the sixth century mentions no less than ten in
the capital, Loh-yang, and thirty-six more in the neighbourhood - and the
native historians report that a large part of the people had embraced the
foreign faith.  In the beginning of the fifth century a considerable body of
Buddhist literature was translated into Chinese by Indian scholars under royal
patronage.  About the same time Chinese Buddhists began to make pilgrimages to
India for the purpose of visiting the sacred places and studying the doctrines
of their religion in its home, and brought back their precious collections of
books.  The most famous of these pilgrims in this period was Fah-hien, who
left China in 399 A. D., and returned home by sea after an absence of fourteen
years.  His descriptions of the countries through which he passed on his way
and of India itself are of great interest.

     It would be hard to think of a religion with which the Chinese mind and
temperament had less affinity than with the doctrine of Buddha.  The Indian
religion was born of a profound pessimism: to exist was to suffer, and the
sufferings of the present life were multiplied by infinity in lives past and
lives future with heavens and hells between - the eternal series of rebirth -
in the inexorable causal nexus of the deed and its consequence (Karma).  The
cause of this misery lay in desire - ultimately, in the will to be; the only
salvation, in the extinction of desire.  To accomplish this, man must sever
the ties of kindred and affection, renounce all social and civil obligations,
and become a member of the mendicant brotherhood, practising under its simple
rule the art of dying to the world.  The goal was the endless peace of
Nirvana, freed from the illusions of self and soul, from desire and dislike,
from the consequences of deeds done, from the wheel of rebirth - a state of
which the master declared it profitless to ask whether it was existence or
non-existence.

     In the centuries between the rise of Buddhism in India and its
introduction into China it had undergone a development comparable to that
through which Christianity passed in the first five centuries of its history.
In both, besides the thinking out of the implications of the original
teaching, two factors principally contributed to this development: the
construction of doctrine in the concepts of an alien metaphysics, and the
influx of popular paganism from the religions of the converted peoples.

     Buddha himself put aside metaphysical questions as unprofitable - the one
thing which concerned man was his own salvation - but his followers, by the
necessity of their own thinking, and in controversy with thinkers of other
schools, were constrained to face the problems which the master had declined,
and, under the influence of the dominant type of Indian speculation,
superimposed upon the primitive plan of salvation a philosophy of the
Absolute.  The missionary success of Buddhism brought into the church as
adherents or as members of the order multitudes whose religious needs
primitive Buddhism, without god or worship, did not satisfy; and the void was
filled by adoration of the Buddhas and by the introduction, in the guise of
Buddhist holy ones, of the popular gods of India or of the regions beyond
whither the religion spread.  To them temples were erected, images set up, and
a sumptuous liturgical worship paid.  Not only the religion but the
superstitions of the masses found their way into the new faith.  The common
Indian belief that the contemplative life, at the furthest limit of liberation
from the earthly and the individual, results in supernatural powers, very
early - if, indeed, not from the beginning - found a place in Buddhism, and
opened a back door for various forms of magic.

[See Buddha: Buddha himself put aside metaphysical questions as unprofitable.]

     Controversies over points of discipline and doctrine had divided
Buddhists into many schools and sects.  The most important of these divisions
turned upon the end which the religious man should set before himself.  The
goal of the older and more conservative school was sainthood, the attainment
by the individual of his own salvation.  The younger and more progressive
school proposed a greater end: not to become an arhat (saint) and save himself
alone, but to be a bodhisattva - one of those who in a succession of
existences are perfecting the character by which a man is fitted to be in
future a Buddha, a saviour of all living beings.

     As the goal which this school set before itself was higher and more
remote, so the means by which it was to be attained were more various, and in
the consciousness of its superiority it called its doctrine Mahayana, a "Great
Vehicle" of salvation, and named the teaching of the conservative party in
depreciatory contrast Hinayana, "Little Vehicle." In philosophy, also, the
Mahayana school was the more progressive: it was by Mahayanist thinkers that
the great coherent system of Buddhist absolutism was developed.

     In this development there would seem to be little to make Buddhism more
acceptable in China.  The existence of Taoism should, indeed, warn us against
assuming that either the metaphysical or the mystical strain is wholly lacking
in the Chinese temperament; but, as a race, the Chinese are active rather than
contemplative, eminently practical in their aims and endeavours, well
satisfied with mundane goods, and industriously bent on getting them in
satisfying measure.  Buddhism not only denied all worth to the objects which
the Chinese most highly valued - life, wealth, children - but declared
attachment to these things to be the very root of evil; it offered in exchange
for them deliverance from a world-misery which the Chinese, in the innocence
of their souls, were quite unaware of - a remote and intangible good in place
of the concrete and actual.  It was, in short, a radical "Umwertung der
Werte." Its metaphysics were incomprehensible to the ordinary mind; the idle,
unsocial, and uncivil life of its monks conflicted with the fundamental
principles of Chinese morals.

     Yet, as we have seen, Buddhism spread rapidly in China, and took root so
deeply that no violence of persecution was afterward able to eradicate it.
The cause of this success lay in part in its teachings concerning what is
after this life.  The Chinese believed that the spirits of the dead continued
to exist; that the spirits of ancestors, sages, and rulers watched over later
generations, receiving their offerings and bestowing prosperity upon them; but
beyond this their thought had not gone.  The Buddhist teachers described with
much detail the state of the departed spirits; the blessedness of the good in
heaven and the torments of the bad in hell.  The Chinese had not conceived of
any difference in the lot of the dead except between those whose filial
descendants provided abundantly for their wants and the neglected ghosts; but
the doctrine of posthumous retribution, once presented, was convincing to a
people who had well-developed ideas of retributive justice in the earthly
sphere.  The missionaries also knew not only how men could put themselves in
the way of salvation, but how they could minister to the welfare of the
departed, and to the present day Buddhist masses for the dead are an ordinary
part of Chinese funerals even in circles which have otherwise no Buddhist
proclivities.

     The rites of the state religion, as we have seen, ^1 were performed by
the rulers and officials for the benefit of the people of the empire or its
divisions; to the people themselves was left only a simple domestic sacrifice
and the offerings to the family ancestors.  It is hardly conceivable that the
actual religion of the masses was ever limited to the acts of worship thus
legally recognised.  The popular religion of modern China doubtless preserves
much that has come down from remote antiquity. It is safe to affirm, however,
that the ancient popular religion was of a simple form, and directed, like the
religion of the state, to practical earthly ends.  The powers to which it was
addressed were shapeless and colourless spirits, defined only by the functions
they fulfilled. Buddhism, on the other hand, had a rich cultus; images of
Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, of genii and protecting demons, wrought in precious
materials with an art hitherto unknown, filled its imposing temples; priests
in splendid vestments murmured their holy texts amid clouds of incense and
prostrated themselves before the images.  The goodness and mercy of these gods
- for such they were to common apprehension - were the subjects of innumerable
narratives.  Buddhism thus appealed to the emotional and aesthetic sides of
man's religious nature, to which the native religion offered little, and it
awakened the soul to a need which the old religion could not satisfy.  Here
were powers who not merely worked nature for men, but loved men; gods to whom
man could come not only with his wants, but with his hopes and fears, his
aspirations and his sins.  From Buddhism the Chinese first learned a religion
of the inner man.

[Footnote 1: See above, pp. 7 f.]

     On its side Buddhism, with the power of accommodation which it everywhere
displayed, made no attack upon the established religion, and found no
difficulty in admitting to its capacious pantheon the native divinities; for
Buddhas had come among men to enlighten them and lift them up in many lands
under many names.  It is no wonder, therefore, that multitudes of all classes
embraced Buddhism.  Many of the rulers openly cultivated it, and it seemed on
the highway to complete success.

     This flourishing period was succeeded by vigorous attempts to suppress
the foreign religion by force.  In the years 444 to 446 A. D. the emperor,
T'ai-wu Ti, of the Wei dynasty, who had previously favoured Buddhism, issued a
series of edicts proscribing it, ordering that the temples and pagodas should
be burned, the images and sacred books destroyed, and the monks put to death,
and forbidding subjects of every rank, under the same penalty, to harbour or
protect them.  The motive for this sudden outburst is said to have been the
discovery that Buddhist monks in Ch'ang-an (the present Si-an-fu) were giving
aid to a rebellion, but the text of the edicts, which include in the same
condemnation native soothsayers and magicians, indicate that, whatever may
have been the immediate occasion, the persecution, like many that followed,
was animated by hostility to heterodoxy as such.  The crisis was brief, and
under the favour of the next king the temples and monasteries were rebuilt.

     In the following centuries the Chinese histories record many memorials of
ministers and other officials protesting against the alien religion as
incompatible with genuine Chinese principles of society and government and
numerous edicts of rulers intended to restrict its spread; but it is clear
that these measures were not very thoroughly or persistently enforced.  In 844
A. D., however, the emperor Wu Tsung inflicted on Buddhism a blow from which
it never fully recovered.  An investigation made by the board of sacrifices
early in that year showed that there were then within the empire more than
4,600 Buddhist monasteries and 40,000 or more minor establishments.  By
imperial decrees, the buildings, with a few specified exceptions, were to be
destroyed, the bronze images, bells, and metal plates coined into money, the
iron statues recast into agricultural implements, those of gold and silver
melted and turned in to the auditors of the treasury.  The extensive lands of
the monasteries were sequestrated by the state; the 260,500 monks and nuns
were ordered to return to the secular life; the convent serfs, to the number
of 150,000, were similarly registered.  These edicts embraced not only the
Buddhists but the Nestorian Christians (Ta-ts'in) and the Mu-hu (Magians,
Zoroastrians?) to the number of 3,000; the foreigners among these were to be
sent back to their native country.  A decree of the preceding year (843) had
put both the Mo-ni (probably Manichaeans) and the Buddhists among the Uigurs
under the ban.

     The indictment of Buddhism in these various memorials and decrees is
substantially the same.  It is a foreign religion of which nothing was known
in the good old days; since its introduction, in the time of the Han dynasty,
evils and disorders of many kinds have afflicted the empire, and have been at
their worst under the rulers who favoured the foreign faith. Its doctrines are
heretical; that is, at variance with the teaching of the national religion and
ethics as these are embodied in the Confucian literature, and are nonsense
besides; the tales it gives out for veritable history are absurd fabrications;
it promotes many superstitions, such as the worship of idols and the
veneration of relics; it withdraws men and women from useful - and taxable -
labours to a life of idleness; by playing on the superstitions of the masses,
especially their fears of the hereafter, it persuades them to impoverish
themselves to support these lazy drones and to provide means for the building
and furnishing of the costly temples and pagodas; ever widening areas of the
richest land are withdrawn from taxation by donations to the monasteries; the
celibate ecclesiastics breed neither tillers of the soil nor soldiers for the
king's armies; and, worst of all, it teaches sons to neglect their parents,
neither serving them while living nor ministering to them when dead, and
leaving no descendants to perpetuate the ancestral worship - religion, in a
word, consists in not caring for anybody but yourself.  From the point of view
of religion, of morals, or of economics, Buddhism is a pernicious evil which
must be extirpated.

     Succeeding emperors somewhat mitigated the stringency of Wu Tsung's
measures, allowing the rebuilding of the destroyed monasteries, not so much
out of favour to Buddhism as from regard to the influence of the buildings on
the natural and spiritual climate (Feng-shui); but the confiscated lands and
goods were not restored.  The legislation of later dynasties imposed onerous
restrictions on Buddhism, limiting the number of monasteries, confining the
right of ordination to a few of them, requiring a government licence to enter
the order, and establishing a registration of ecclesiastical persons.  Under
one such law, in 955 A. D., 3,336 religious house were demolished because they
could not produce an imperial charter; 2,694 were left standing.  The number
of registered monks and nuns was returned at 61,200.

     Under the Mongol rule of Kublai Khan and his successors (1280-1368),
Buddhism was freed from external restraints, and the number of monasteries
rapidly increased, while the foreign priests, chiefly from Tibet, who came in
the wake of the Mongols, did something to revive Chinese Buddhism from the low
estate into which it had sunk in the preceding centuries.  The restoration of
native supremacy under the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) was accompanied by a
national reaction, in which Buddhism had to pay the penalty for Mongol favour.
The first of the line, T'ai Tsu, though he had himself been a Buddhist monk,
was hardly seated on the throne when he renewed the restrictive laws, and in
the following years made them more and more stringent.  The same policy was
followed by his successors, one of whom decreed that ordinations should only
be held once in three years, and that only a limited number of persons in any
department or district might receive consecration; another, in the fifteenth
century, allowed ordination to be administered only once in ten years.  Severe
penalties were prescribed for violations or evasions of the law.  The later
Ming emperors treated all heretical sects with great severity; Buddhism and
Lamaism were subjected with the rest to a persecution which in 1566 provoked a
formidable rebellion.

[See Tibetan Monks: The foreign priests, chiefly from Tibet, did something to
revive Chines Buddhism from the low estate into which it had sunk.]

     The Manchu chiefs who profited by these internal dissensions to make
themselves masters of the northern provinces and eventually (in 1644) of the
empire were not more favourably disposed toward Buddhism.  The statutes of
that dynasty, agreeing substantially with the Ming code, made the building or
rebuilding of monasteries and the admission of members to the order very
difficult.  As a result, the number who have actually received the tonsure is
comparatively small.  The much larger class of so-called Buddhist priests,
who, though unconsecrated, constitute a kind of secular clergy, wearing a
distinctive dress and performing religious rites, particularly for the benefit
of the souls of the dead, live among the people, marry, and possess property,
eat meat and fish, and are consequently, from the point of view of the
Buddhist discipline, mere laymen.  They exert all the greater influence,
however, through their intimate association with their neighbours, and to them
the amalgamation of Buddhist ideas and practices with the old religion of the
Chinese people is largely due.

     In its antipathy to the sects, the government has repeatedly taken
measures to restrict or reduce the number of this irregular clergy by
forbidding them to take pupils, or more than a single pupil, and requiring
them to register and obtain certificates from the authorities.  More radical
edicts were issued in the eighteenth century, by which they were to be
compelled either to procure ordination, if the government would grant them
leave, and retire to the monasteries, or to abandon their clerical pretensions
altogether; but this law was soon relaxed.

     In its prosperous times Chinese Buddhism was divided into many sects,
representing various Indian schools or native offshoots from them. In the
decadence of Buddhism under the Manchu dynasty the distinctions between the
schools have been mainly obliterated; regular Buddhism in modern China is the
result of a fusion of the various Mahayanist sects, in which the Vinaya and
Dhyana elements are dominant; while the secular clergy, if they may be so
called, who attend funerals and read sutras for the souls of the dead
represent the Pure Land school, with its Western Paradise to be gained by
calling on the name of Amitabha, and this doctrine has also, more than any
other, influenced the salvationist sects.

     To avoid repetition the history and distinctive tenets of various schools
of Chinese Buddhism are reserved for discussion in a later chapter on Buddhism
in Japan. ^1 Here we shall confine ourselves to a brief survey of the present
state of Buddhism in China.

[Footnote 1: See below, pp. 119 f., 122 f., 125 ff.]

     Mahayana Buddhism is a universal religion in the largest meaning of the
name; its aim is the salvation not merely of mankind, but of all sentient
beings.  The chief agents in this great salvation are the Buddhas; the goal of
the Mahayanist is therefore Buddhahood.  The monasteries are institutions in
which men are in training for this high mission, and at the same time
endeavouring to promote the spiritual and temporal welfare of others by pious
exercises.  The methods employed to attain this end are manifold, and adapted
to the varied capacities or predilections of the seekers.  The mendicant friar
of the early days of Buddhism has, however, disappeared, and the eremite
ascetic in his solitary cell or cave is rare. The monks live in their simple
fashion from the revenues of the monastery, from pious donations, or from
collections made under the direction of the abbot.

     Members are received into the order and advanced to the successive
degrees of postulant, novice, monk, saint, and Bodhisattva, or
Buddha-candidate, by a series of ordinations which were formerly separated by
considerable intervals of time, but are now completed within a few days. The
earlier steps in the candidate's progress correspond to the old Buddhist rule,
and are therefore found in all branches of the church; the last is
distinctively Mahayanist.  The novices bind themselves to observe the Buddhist
decalogue; the monks promise obedience to the discipline of the order as set
forth in the Pratimoksha.  The Vinaya in Four Chapters, originally the
recession of the school of Dharmagupta, is now universally accepted in China,
though it is, in fact, little studied.  At the final stage, the aspirants vow
that they will conform their lives in all respects to the fifty-eight precepts
for Bodhisattvas contained in the Sutra called "Brahma's Net." This, as the
higher law, is the actual guide of the Chinese monks in the path of
Buddhahood.  No Sanskrit text of this sutra is known, and no reference to it
has been discovered in China before the eighth century.

     The elementary commandments which are the foundation of Buddhist ethics
are here interpreted in the broadest sense and extended to the remotest
contingencies.  Thus, the prohibition of taking life is made not only to
include eating flesh, but trading in animals, keeping cats and dogs, borrowing
or buying and selling weapons, entering a military camp or even looking at
soldiers, or serving as an ambassador, since diplomacy often leads to war.  It
is as grave a sin to rob a man of his good name as to rob him of his property.
And it is one of the greatest sins to be directly or indirectly the occasion
to sin to another.  To the comprehensive principle, Do no harm to any being,
is joined its positive counterpart, Do good to all beings.  Not to kill, but
to save life; not to hold slaves, but to ransom men from bondage, is the duty
of the benevolent man; so far from eating the flesh of animals, he would, like
Buddha in the Jatakas, give his own body to feed the wild beasts.  Higher
still is the obligation to minister to men's spiritual welfare, to instruct
them in the truth, to guide them and further them in the way of salvation.
There are other means besides propaganda of promoting the good of all sentient
beings.  In early Buddhism the cultivation of universal benevolence was part
of the self-culture of the monk, and methodical exercises were devised to
attain this state of mind.  Mahayana Buddhism attributes to thought and wish
efficacy to realise their objects - mental concentration is a creative force.
Fixing the undivided mind on supreme blessedness attains it.  To yearn with
all one's soul for the salvation of others is the means of bringing them into
the way of salvation and helping them on to its goal. The potency of the will
to save is not confined to human beings; when the monk sees an animal he
should say, "You are a living being; may the saving intelligence awake in
you!" To neglect so efficacious a means of doing good is a grave dereliction
of duty and a great hindrance to a man's own progress in the religious life.

     Every monastery has a hall where at stated times sermons are preached by
the abbot or by the preaching brothers.  Being drawn from the Sutras, these
discourses are constructively Buddha's own sermons, and all the Buddhas and
Buddha-aspirants, saints, and deities in the universe are supposed to assemble
reverently to hear the holy word.  It is a serious fault for a monk to absent
himself from such an august gathering; he ought rather to betake himself
eagerly to any place where he hears that preaching is to be held.  Preaching
and the reading of the sacred texts are more than means of enlightening
hearers in the knowledge of the truth; the holy virtue that is in them drives
away demons and averts all sorts of calamities, whence the officials, in
seasons of drought or plague, command the monks to set the "wheel of the law"
revolving.  On such occasions special altars are set up, offerings made, and
an elaborate ritual is gone through day after day.  The recitation of the
appropriate sutras - particularly the Sutra of Amitabha, the Buddha who
presides over the Western Paradise - has power to deliver the dead from his
past and advance his soul to the rank of Bodhisattva, and, as has already been
noted, all classes of Chinese cause such masses to be said for their departed
kinsmen.

     The larger monasteries have, further, their "meditation halls," where in
profound silence the brethren may immerse themselves in contemplation, or in
the mental vacuity which is the opening of the mind to transcendental wisdom.
Some of the brethren devote themselves assiduously to this way of blessedness;
certain seasons of the year are appointed when it is commended to all to
engage in this sort of retreat.  The Buddhist semimonthly confession is still
observed, ^1 and, in addition, each day begins with an act of penitence at
matins.  The Sutra of Brahma's Net, in fact, lays great stress on penitence as
a means of removing the sins which, unless removed, are an insuperable
obstacle to salvation.  Penitence consists in a man's fixing his mind on the
evil that he has done so as to be fully conscious of it, at the same time
experiencing sorrow and cherishing the hope that it may be wiped away.  Here
also the efficacy of thought and wish to accomplish their own fulfillment is
implied; it is not a god who remits the sin of the penitent, but penitence
itself that rids him of it.

[Footnote 1: See India, pp. 299 f.]

     Buddhist temples are, properly speaking, halls of worship in the
monasteries.  They have the same general arrangement in all parts of the
empire, though they vary greatly in size and splendour.  Fierce-looking genii
guard the entrance; the tutelary divinities of the four quarters stand on the
corresponding sides of the fore hall; in the sanctuary, facing the entrance,
are the images of the Triratna, viz., the Buddha, the Law, and the Order,
represented as seated human figures; or of three Buddhas, usually Amitabha,
Sakyamuni, and Maitreya, the Buddha of the next age, restorer of the law - a
Messianic figure.  Many other images of Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, or saints, are
distributed about the temple or in side chapels.  Kuan-yin, the goddess of
mercy, who has changed sex since leaving India as Avalokitecvara, has a place
of honour in almost every temple.  In these temples flowers and incense are
offered, and sometimes cakes and the like; bloody sacrifices and offerings of
flesh involving the taking of life are contrary to the whole spirit of the
religion.

     Under the favour of the Mongol emperors the Tibetan form of Buddhism
which Western scholars distinguish as Lamaism made great progress in China.
Kublai Khan took the most powerful of the Tibetan ecclesiastics, the abbot of
the La-skya monastery, as his religious guide, and conferred upon him the
title of tributary sovereign of Tibet.  The reformed Lamaism of the fifteenth
century also spread to China, and has maintained itself there under the native
Chinese Ming dynasty, some of whose rulers treated it with special favour, and
under their Manchu successors, so that both the old red Lamas and their more
recent yellow brothers are represented.