6 - The Taming of Ghosts in Early Chinese Buddhism

Summary

However, this does not mean that Buddhism assumed a dominating position in Chinese culture, in comparison with Tibetan Buddhism in Tibet, for example. There was no guarantee at the end of the third century CE that the Chinese people would have unconditionally accepted Buddhist teachings and given up the life that they were familiar with. In fact, never at any given moment did the entire Chinese society “convert” to Buddhism even when the rulers declared their own devotion to the faith. For a long period of time, even several hundred years after it had been accepted or, better put, had established a foothold in China, the teaching and practice of Buddhism – an Indian religion that grew out of a very different soil – were resisted by the majority of the Chinese, intellectuals as well as commoners, as fundamentally foreign to their mindset, as something that had denied the basis of their cultural identity represented by such elements as correlative cosmology, reverence of Heaven and Earth, ancestor worship, family and social ethics based on Confucian ideals, and the authority of the imperial government over people’s lives. To give up these seemed tantamount to abandoning the identity of being Chinese. The resistance sometimes even became outright persecution. Monasteries were closed; monks were forced to return to secular life. Some of these misgivings toward Buddhism persisted even into the modern day. This had to do, among other reasons, with the nature of the Chinese state. If we follow the argument to see the Chinese state as a form of religious regime,⁵ since the emperor is pronounced the “Son of Heaven,” an inherent conflict or competition for power would inevitably ensue between the state and the religious groups, even if the ruler declared his affiliation with a certain belief, Buddhist or otherwise. Thus the issue is far more complicated than simple resistance and reception.