B

Buddhism in China: A Historical Survey

Whalen LAI

Buddhism occupies a central place in the history of

Chinese thought, as the system that attracted some of
the best minds in the millennium between the Han and
the Song (second to twelfth centuries). However, integrating Buddhist thought into Chinese philosophy
poses some problems, because Buddhists worked from
a different set of texts and spoke what seems to be a
different language. Christianity began as a hellenized
biblical faith whose theology combined theos and
logos from the start; by contrast, long before Buddhism
found its way into China there was an extensive history
of reflection by Indians on the Buddhist dharmaso
that Chinese Buddhists had to think through an inherited tradition before they could embark on their own
Sinitic reading. As a result, much of the convoluted
scholastic detail in Buddhism remains alien to most
Chinese. The fact that the neo-Confucian Zhuxi
(11301200) openly advised his students against debating with Buddhists (lest they be seduced into the
Buddhists mind-boggling dialectics and thus defeated) also means that there was a calculated break
between the two traditions. To this day, Chinese Buddhism remains isolated and is often left to Buddhologists. Also, because of the way the field has developed,
Chinese Buddhism is often treated as an interim in a
pan-Asian development beginning in India and ending
in Japan. Integrating Chinese Buddhist thought into
the history of Chinese philosophy did not begin until
Fung Yu-lan. It is a formidable challenge to attempt

integration while fully recognizing the emerging findings of Buddhologists.

Certain paradigms describing the overall cultural
interaction are still in use. People still speak of initial
Indianization and subsequent Sinicization; of Buddhist
conquest and Chinese transformation; of Indians as
proverbially otherworldly and Chinese as, by inclination, down-to-earth. Under scrutiny, such generalizations often seem simplistic; but at some macrocosmic
level they remain useful heuristic devices, and for certain ends they can even lend overall clarity. The same
can be said of several periodization schemes. They all
depict a rise, growth, and decline of Buddhismthat
is, looking at it from the outside. For adherents of the
faith, and for others who still perceive its vitality, the
story is one of seeding, flowering, and continual tension or consolidation. The present overview will minimize historic and political details in order to suggest
larger sociocultural implications. It will focus on the
major developments and their contributions to a history
of Chinese ideas and ideals.

A Cultural History
Buddhism came into China sometime in the first century C.E. At first, it remained within the pariah communities of foreign traders and made few inroads into the
larger Han Chinese society. Around 150 C.E., translators such as An Shigao began to leave a literary trace

BUDDHISM IN CHINA: A HISTORICAL SURVEY

of this tradition. Judging from the reception by the Han
of the Hinayana works and from the early commentaries, it appears that Buddhism was being perceived and
digested through the medium of religious Daoism
(Taoism). Buddha was seen as a foreign immortal who
had achieved some form of Daoist nondeath. The
Buddhists mindfulness of the breath was regarded as
an extension of Daoist breathing exercises. The
Buddhist law of karmic retribution impressed many
and is said to have struck fear into the ruling elite; but
it was also thought that to break free of the horror of
multiple rebirths, a person had only to refine his vital
force until his spirit realized nirvanic immortality.

Changan in 401 would that situation be substantially

changed. Only then did the treatises of Nagarjuna (c.
150), architect of the philosophy of the middle path
or emptiness, become available in translation. Only
then was the special status of the Lotus Sutra made
known. Subsequently Sengzhao (374414) became the
first Chinese to master that Madhyamika philosophy,
althoughbecause he believed in the centrality of
emptinesshe did not grasp the full import of the
Lotus Sutras teaching about the singular reality of
the eternal Buddha.

Emptiness and Nonbeing

Another major doctrine, an extension of Buddhas omnipresence, concerns the universal Buddha-nature.
But this teaching was not known to Kumarajiva. It
came in only after his death, when the Mahayana Nirvana Sutra was translated by Dharmaksema in northern Liangzhou. This, together with the later translation
of the Queen Srimala Sutra in the south, proclaimed
that the Buddha-nature or tathagatagarbha (embryo
or seed of the Buddha) was Buddhas final, positive
teaching. Instead of the Hinayanist no-self or no-soul
(anatman), Mahayana finally revealed the self or
great soul that is the Buddha-nature. Ultimate reality
was not just empty (sunya) of self-nature but, in a more
important sense, also not-empty (asunya) of the infinitely positive attributes of Buddha. With this, the
stage was set for postulating a progression in Buddhas
teaching following this basic teleological format.

The collapse of the Han dynasty in 220 C.E. weakened

the Han Confucian state ideology. The message of
Buddhism then became timely and attractive. As there
was a revival of Daoism during the Wei-Jin era (third
century), there arose a philosophical appreciation of
the Mahayana doctrine of emptiness. Since Laozi (ch.
40) had asserted that being comes from nonbeing, the
neo-Daoist Wang Bi now made nonbeing the substance
of being. And since the Prajnaparamita (Transcendental Wisdom) Sutras also declared that all forms are
empty, it was widely held by the Chinese Buddhists
that Laozi and Buddha had taught the same need to
return to the roots of nonbeing, or emptiness.
Zhuangzi had praised the freedom of going along
with nature (jiran, self-being). Now the Mahayana
sutras seemed to speak of the same freedom as the
ability of a bodhisattva to see or to abide with things
just as they are. The term for this, tathata, or thusness, was accordingly translated as ru, suggesting naturalness. With that, the Mahayana idea of a nonabiding
nirvana (nirvana being anywhere) came to be associated with roving freely with the dao. The freedom exemplified by the householder bodhisattva Vimalakirti
was especially appealing. A wealthy layman in the
mercantile city of Vaisali, Vimalakirti lived in samsara
as if it were nirvana. Since the neo-Daoist gentleman
claimed to be dwelling in the forest even while holding
political office, the urbane monks of renown then also
claimed to be transcending the world even as they circulated among the wealthy and the powerful.
From such confluences of Buddhist and Daoist
ideas came the keyi (concept matching) Buddhism
of the fourth century. Although Dao-an (312388) objected to this dilution of dharma and urged his fellow
monks to undertake a more diligent study of the analytical subtleties of abhidharma (Hinayana scholastics),
he himself was not entirely free of Daoist assumptions.
Only after the learned translator Kumarajiva arrived in

The Beginning of a Tenet-Classification

Scheme

1. Hinayana teaching of the four noble truths:

samsaric realities are many and impermanent.
2. Mahayana initial teaching of universal emptiness.
3. Lotus Sutras further teaching of the one vehicle
(that is, reality) of Buddha.
4. Nirvana Sutras final doctrine of permanence.
There are variations to this scheme. Sometimes the
Vimalakirti Sutra is placed between stages 2 and 3,
mediating the empty and the one vehicle, because
Vimalakirti taught with his noble silence the truth of
the nondual: that samsara and nirvana as well as any
and all distinctions are not two. Whatever the variance, the basic teleology of this tenet-classification
scheme is to move from the impermanent, multiple
realities of the mundane, through their universal emptying and the nondual, to seeing some transcendental,
permanent principle.

Gradual and Sudden Enlightenment

Although Daosheng (c. 360430) had an inkling of
this progression in the teachings, credit usually went to

BUDDHISM IN CHINA: A HISTORICAL SURVEY

his contemporary Huiguan for producing the seminal
scheme. Daosheng, the last of the great neo-Daoistic
Buddhists, had some notion of the doctrine of universal
Buddha-nature even before the final chapters of the
Nirvana Sutra arrived in the south. On the basis of the
Lotus Sutra, he had already argued that if the truth is
one, then enlightened realization of this truth of the
one vehicle must also be sudden and total. He was
opposed by Huiguan (and Sengzhao), who successfully
defended gradual enlightenment. That Huiguan won
the debate is not unjust. Tibetan Buddhism also adhered to that general consensus, which can be traced
back to Indian Buddhism. Daosheng was ahead of his
time. (Chan, or Zen, Buddhism later endorsed sudden
enlightenment.) But then the southern Buddhists were
also putting aside his type of neo-Daoist intuitionism
and were showing a new patience in working through
the intricacies of Indian Buddhist thought step by step.
The Lushan circle under Huiyuan (344416) had previously taken Daoans advice and began studying Abhidharma with Sanghadeva, so much so that Kumarajiva saw them as sliding back into the analytical realism
of Sarvastivadaa Hinayana atomist school which insisted that everything conceivable must be real in itself.
The realist legacy survived Kumarajivas critique, and
the southern Buddhists would spend the next century
interpreting Nagarjuna through a lesser figure: Harivarman, author of the Chengshilun (Satyasiddhi, Treatise on Establishing the Real), which the Chinese mistook as somehow overcoming the nihilism of the
mundane by confirming as real the truth of a transmundane nirvana. (More on this later.)

Should Monks Bow before Kings?

Meanwhile, from 316 on, the north had been overrun
by barbarians. War and chaos were hardly the ideal
environment for philosophical speculation, but they
were a perfect setting for seeking out quietude and
rebuilding a community life that could withstand them.
Fotudeng, the founder of the northern Sangha, did not
sit down and translate even a single text, but he was
instrumental in converting the Chinese population en
masse. The Chinese literally took refuge with this holy
man, whose aura of sanctity held the bloody killers at
bay. He could protect his flock and mediate effectively
on its behalf before the barbarian rulers, who, being
Buddhists, honored Deng as the great reverent and
pillar of the state. This was based on a Buddhocratic
ideal that kings who supported dharma would be protected by it and by the powers of the four heavenly
guardians. Moral precepts, ascetic living, and social
reconstruction became the forte of the northern monk

leaders, whose Sangha flourished under strong state

patronage.
In this regard, the difference between north and
south is seen in the careers of Faguo and Huiyuan. The
north did not record any debates on the immortality of
the soul; the south had many. Although Buddha had
renounced the Hindu notion of a soul (atman), Chinese
Buddhists long presumed that if there was to be rebirth,
there must be a soul to be reborn, and if a person could
attain nirvana, his soul must be what entered nirvana.
They knew that the religious Daoists also taught a doctrine of an immortal soul, but they would have held
that the Daoist soul sought a materialistic longevity
whereas the Buddhist soul aspired to a transcendental, spiritual nirvana. Although this was an imperfect
understanding, Huiyuan used it to justify the Buddhist
calling. The quest for spiritual transcendence is what
impels the monk to leave the world. And because the
monk lives beyond the mundane, he is also beyond
the jurisdiction of the son of heaven who ruled over
everything within the mundane sphere. Thus would
Huiyuan defend the monks autonomy (spiritual selfrule) and the Sanghas right not to bow to the king. If
anything, even the ruler should be grateful to the monk
for working for the welfare of the world. With strong
support from the magnate families, the southern Sangha successfully defied the state that wanted to subordinate it.
The Sangha in the north was well aware of the
monastic rule that prohibited paying homage to kings.
But then the relationship between king and Buddhathe two wheels of dharmawas much more intricate there. A custom had been established since the
Kushan Empire in northwest India in the first century
C.E. of paying homage to both king and Buddha. The
idea that the ruling king is a bodhisattva destined for
future buddhahood (e.g., Maitreya) was nothing new.
What might have been new was that the barbarian ruler
Holin Bobo went further and declared himself a living
buddha. The idea of a tathagata-king was also endorsed by the Doba who founded the Wei dynasty in
the north. The Wei emperor Taizu (r. 386409) commanded the homage due him from Faguo; the leader of
the Sangha he appointed around 396398 acquiesced.
This set a norm for the north, where the king would
assume the dual roles of king of the domain and effectively also the vicar of the Sangha.
What scholars called state Buddhism can easily
give the wrong impression that the state was in full
control of the Sangha. Although it has become proverbial that dharma flourishes and declines according to
the fortunes of the state, this does not mean that state
support translated into state control or even into the
Sanghas prosperity. One clear proof that state Bud-

BUDDHISM IN CHINA: A HISTORICAL SURVEY

dhism repeatedly failed to police the Sangha is, of
course, the states repeated persecution of the faith. If
the Sangha had been under the states control, the use
of forcethe last political resortwould not have
been necessary. In fact, often a pious ruler woke up
one morning to find on his hands a state within a state.
And even after persecution, the Sangha frequently rebounded. But all that belongs more to a sociopolitical
history than to our concerns here.

The Huahu Controversy

In 520, in Loyang, there was a court-sponsored public
debate between the Daoists and the Buddhists over the
huahu thesis: did Laozi leave China and reappear in
India as Buddha? Or did Buddha will his own rebirth
in China as Laozi? This debate was a product of the
Han perception of Buddha and Laozi as equal sages,
and each side sought to absorb the other. (Centuries
later, the Hindus would also claim that Vishnu had
masqueraded as a heretical Buddha in order to deceive
and weaken the demonic hosts.) In the process of the
debate, the Chinese Buddhists and Daoists pushed the
relative dates of their respective founders farther and
farther back until Buddha was said to have died in
1052 B.C.E. The Buddhists won the debate, but that
also moved the date of the demise of the dharma, set
by one popular count as coming 1,500 years after Buddhas death, which would move the beginning of the
last age to 552 C.E. When 552 came around, reality
seemed to confirm that prophecy. A civil war was raging, and the temples of Loyang had gone up in smoke.
The darkest hour came with the anti-Buddhist persecution of 574577. Yet out of that trial by fire, the Buddha dharma would rise like a phoenix, and a result
would be the Sinitic Mahayana schools that flourished
in the Sui and the Tang dynasties.
The mature Sinitic Mahayana synthesis was not
like the earlier concept-matching syncretism. The
period of digesting Indian subtleties had ended; a time
of independent creativity had begun. But before we
consider a philosophical analysis of the Sinitic Mahayana schools, we need to consider the building blocks
of that edifice.

Paradigm Shifts before 600 C.E.

The four major concerns of Chinese Buddhist thought
before the Sui and Tang era were as follows.
1.
2.
3.
4.

10

Before 400: emptiness and the immortal soul.

After 420: two truths and one reality.
Around 500: speculations on Buddha-nature.
Around 550: synthesis under the one of ekayana
(one vehicle).

Although these do represent significant shifts, their unfolding naturally overlapped.

1. Beyond nihilism. For the Han Chinese, the doctrine of karmic rebirth entailed the transmigration of
the soula presumption that they could not do away
with even when they accepted the doctrine of emptiness. Since nirvana was seen as a return to a pure origin, it was believed to be achieved by discarding the
defiled. Refining ones inner self was thought to be a
process of attaining a sublime shen (spirit) that would
realize nirvanic immortality or nondeath.
Nearly all the early keyi Buddhists believed in refining the spirit by reducing being to nonbeing. The
monk Mindu (fl. 340) was an exception, however. He
became aware, first, that, Buddha had no doctrine of a
soul; second, that emptiness was not a Daoist, nihilistic
void; and third, that since emptiness was not other than
form, one should never empty reality but could only
empty the mindand only if the mind was emptied
would the world appear empty. A prophet is, proverbially, without honor in his own country, and Mindu
was vilified for denying the existence of the soul. Still,
because his daring concept of xinwu (emptiness of
mind) challenged the concept of benwu (original nothingness), he provided the momentum for what are
called the six prajna schoolseach of which proposed
how emptiness might be better understood.
Mindu, to repeat, held that there is no soul but
that there is a real outer world, and thus that one should
empty the mind, not objects or forms. The other
schools never conceded the no-self, but they all
knew better than to endorse naive nihilism, and nearly
all of them incorporated Mindus psychological argument. Zhi Dun (Zhi Daolin, 314366) probably developed the most complex synthesis of opinions of his
time. In three steps, he first reduced being to nonbeing
ontologically; then blamed the distinction between
being and nonbeing on a discriminating mind, which
he duly emptied; and finally united this refined mind
or spirit with the dao. Thus Zhi Dun roamed psychically in emptiness while abiding physically in the
world of forms. In a sense, he combined the nonbeing
of Laozi and the roving freedom of Zhuangzi.
The six prajna schools did not have the benefit
of Kumarajivas guidance. Sengzhao (374414), who
was tutored by the Kuchan master in the dialectics of
Nagarjuna, reviewed the past attempts and found them
all one-sidedthey missed the middle path. He selected three schools to analyze, taking benwu to task
for valuing nonbeing over being, faulting xinwu for
emptying the mind without facing up to the problem
of form, and accusing Zhi Dun of having espoused a
causalist or a relativist reduction of form by form without tackling the inherent emptiness of all form. All

BUDDHISM IN CHINA: A HISTORICAL SURVEY

three, Sengzhao held, failed to see the inherent emptiness of the unreal. Sengzhao was well received in his
own time but thereafter was soon forgotten. He was
not even counted within the Madhyamika lineage by
either the Sanlun or the Tiantai school and was not to
be rediscovered later.
2. Detour into a higher reality. One reason for
Sengzhaos eclipse is that when Nagarjuna introduced
the notion of the two truths, the Chinese evolved
a new discourse. Instead of talking about being and
emptiness at just one level, they became preoccupied
with investigating two layers. As a result, the problem
of form and emptiness was elevated to a problem of the
mundane and the highest truth. An amateurish reading
would consider the real to be the mundane truth and
the empty to be the highest truth. But since that reading
seemed to create a new dualismbetween samsara
and nirvanait led to a search for a still higher, nondual truth. We begin to hear of a third truth, and soon
of higher and higher unions of two truths.
Zhou Yong once disputed with the Daoist Zhang
Rong, arguing that whereas Buddha knew the emptiness of both being and nonbeing, Laozi knew only the
reduction of being to nonbeing. In his treatise Three
Schools of Two Truths, Zhou Yong exposed the biases
of his contemporaries, avoiding the two extremes and
staying with the middle path. After Zhou Yong, the
southerners evolved more fanciful unities of the two
truths. The early prajna schools, faced with the problem of explaining how things could be both real and
not real, could offer only relatively simple metaphors
such as dreams and magical illusions. The new theorists compared this duality to rolling and unrolling a
lotus leaf, bobbing a melon into and out of water, or
flipping a coin from front to back and vice versa. In
this way, the Chinese were sharpening their earlier cosmogonic speculations on how the unity of the great
ultimate (taiji) could evolve into the two aspects of yin
and yang. Later, this would affect the way the Huayan
school handled its pan-cosmic-Buddhist metaphysics.
Nagarjuna, however, never taught a third truth.
Nor would the Chinese have taught this, if they had
realized that the two truths were epistemic, not ontologicthat is, two ways of looking at the world and
not two sides, aspects, or levels of some singular reality. It was Jizang (549623) of the Sanlun (Three Treatises, Madhyamika) school who exposed that mistake.
He reminded the Chinese that the two truths pertained
to two modes of discourse; they did not denote principles in reality. Even so, Jizang himself had to fight fire
with fire; he had to go along with an opponents wrong
assumptions in order to expose the fallacy. Jizang even
developed a fourfold two truths (one more than the
standard three), but his goal was not to pile up more

ontic unities: he called for an end to fixation on the

yin-yang synthesis.
The Chinese did not embark on their quest for a
higher one truth without a reason. They had gathered
from the Nirvana Sutra that the final Buddhist teaching
of a universal Buddha-nature constituted the one truth.
This suggested to them that there was a positive truth
above emptiness and the two truths. It was while they
were looking for a way to reconcile emptiness and this
one truth that they came across Harivarmans treatise
Chengshilun (On Establishing the Real). Harivarman
reduced all elements to their finest parts until a virtual
nil was reached. Also, among the Four Noble Truths,
he considered the third oneabout nirvanathe one
truth. The other threedescribing the nature, the
cause, and the way out of the world of sufferingwere
too mundane to be considered transcendental truths.
But using Harivarmans basically Hinayanist scheme
to explicate the Mahayana emptiness of Nagarjuna and
the one truth of Buddha-nature turned out to be a mistake, which Jizang, again, would later undo.
3. Locating the Buddha-nature. China was attracted especially to the doctrine of the universal Buddha-nature, so much so that Xuanzangs Yogacara
school was later called Hinayanist simply for deviating
from it. By teaching the Buddha-nature, the Nirvana
Sutra seems to reverse the earlier Buddhist teaching of
no-self and the initial Mahayana teaching of universal
emptiness. Daosheng circumvented the problem, noting succinctly that there was no samsaric self of life
and death but there was a nirvanic self, which was the
Buddha-nature. Still, it was not always easy to keep
the Buddha-self from being confused with the Daoist
immortal soul, despite all cautions against this.
Emperor Wu of the Liang dynasty (r. 502549),
the King Asoka of China, once presided over a court
debate that sought to refute Fan Zhens denial of an
immortal soul. The emperor wrote an essay establishing the spirit as that which would one day become
enlightened. This essay has been criticized for confusing the transmigrating soula ghost tainted by karma
and ignorancewith the transcendental seed of enlightenment that is the Buddha-nature. But the essay
did forge a synthesis that anticipated a formula in the
Awakening of Faith in Mahayana, a text compiled
within the next half century in China that became a
cornerstone of Buddhist philosophy: in this text, the
one mind has two aspectssuchness (or thusness),
and birth and death (samsara). The emperors essay
also postulated a pure core (the enlightened spirit) that
is somehow, inexplicably, trapped in darkness (ignorance). The spirit itself, being one with suchness, is
destined for enlightenment; ignorance is what mires a
person in birth and death. The emperor probably came

11

BUDDHISM IN CHINA: A HISTORICAL SURVEY

up with this ambiguous mixture by drawing on canonical references to the Buddha-nature as the innately pure
mind that is somehow accidentally polluted, or on the
idea that, like tathagatagarbha, it encompasses samsara and nirvana. The Awakening of Faith might have
done nothing more than express this paradox in a more
sophisticated way.
The similarities do not end there. The poet Shen
Yue was asked along with other courtiers to comment
on the emperors essay. In Shen Yues response
which was miscataloged by the Guang Hongmingji and
broken into a number of independent short essaysenlightenment was a matter of putting an end
to momentary thoughts. The same psychology is found
in the Awakening of Faith, where wunien (no-thought,
or a stripping away of delusions) is equated with suchness. This equation would later appear in the Platform
Sutra of the sixth patriarch as a slogan of the southern
Chan school. Sudden enlightenment is based on this
sudden cessation of the thought process. To what extent Emperor Wu, who was a patron of both Daoism
and Buddhism, had actually fostered a Sino-Buddhist
synthesis of consequence still awaits investigation. But
it is perhaps telling that he is also said to have written
a commentary on the Doctrine of the Mean. The
Buddhists were among the first to discover in this Confucian text, which later entered the neo-Confucianists
canon as one of the Four Books, a psychic depth that
Buddhists could identify with and that neo-Confucians
would regard as a distinct feature of their own philosophy.
Because humans are said to possess Buddha-nature, there was considerable speculation on its exact
location in man. And because the Nirvana Sutra noted
that this atman was somehow related to as well as
separate from the human personality, there was ample
room for debate. Like western attempts to locate the
seat of the soul, this speculation could be stimulating
but could also prove ultimately futile. In hindsight, any
location is an expedient. As a synonym for emptiness
and for wisdom, Buddha-nature is not an ontic entity
but a function of intuition, not so much a knowable
object as a metaphor for knowledge, awakening, and
realization. The mistake of the nirvana school is that
it read the text too literallyas Jizang was to explain.
4. Resurgence of the Lotus ekayana. If the early
sixth century was known for its synthesis of the two
truths and Buddha-nature, the century ended with a
rediscovery of the unity of the middle path and the
one vehicle. Both Jizang and Zhiyi of the Tiantai
school underscored this. It is customary to consider
southern China as having excelled in theory while the
barbaric north excelled in practice, but by the early
sixth century that was no longer true. After the Doba

12

Wei had reunited the north in 439 and, by 493, moved

the capital to Loyang, a sinicized emperor, Gaozu (Xiaowendi, r. 471500), initiated a cultural renaissance;
and judging from the fragments of northern works that
have survived, the north became at least equal to the
south in intellectual achievements.
Unlike southernerswho worked almost exclusively on the Nirvana Sutra and followed the authority
of Harivarmannortherners maintained their appreciation of the Lotus Sutra and Nagarjuna. Both the Sanlun school and the Tiantai school had roots in the north,
and both criticized the southerners shortcomings and
won. A merging of the northern and southern traditions
was brought about in part by the anti-Buddhist persecution of 574577 in the north. The Northern Zhou
emperor Wu out-Chinesed the Chinese by returning to
the ancient Zhou ideal, supporting only Confucianism,
and banning Buddhism and Daoism. Many northern
monks migrated to the south, and the Sinitic Mahayana
schools were born in response to this historical crisis.
North and south were reunited under the Sui emperor
Wendi in 589. And the Parthian Jizang was honored
in the capital. He took Harivarman to task, demolished
various current theories of two truths, and returned the
dialectics of the middle path to a neither-nor format
that avoided both extremes. With a sharp eye for internal contradictions in the various theories on the what,
how, and whereof of Buddha-nature, Jizang demolished their biases and revealed the true. Properly
understood, positive Buddha-nature was none other
than emptiness. In the end, there was nothing to gain
(nil to ascertain) but the freedom that comes with the
denial of pros and cons. Though committed to emptiness, Jizang also recognized the Lotus ekayana, or one
vehicle.
The metaphor of the one vehicle came from the
Lotus Sutra. In the parable of the world as a burning
house, the Buddha as father lured his children out of
danger by a promise of three carts awaiting them outside. His final gift to them all is the large, white bullock
cart. The parable is meant to show how the one Buddha
vehicle (ekayana) replaces the three vehicles of the
listener, the solitary buddha, and the bodhisattva. Kumarajivas translation had referred to this ekayanaalso known as Mahayanaas the Buddha vehicle. Kumarajiva also considered the Lotus Sutra as
teaching Buddhas secret store, a teaching more profound than the bodhisattva vehicle of the Emptiness
sutras.
By preferring the Nirvana Sutra to the Lotus
Sutra, the Nirvana school missed the import of ekayana. It knew the one truth of the Buddha-nature as
Buddhas final teaching. That one is a teleological
one which came at the end of a progression of teach-

BUDDHISM IN CHINA: A HISTORICAL SURVEY

ings. With regard to the parable of the burning house,
this is like saying that the three carts were once real
options; it is only in the end that they were superseded
by the white bullock cart. The preferred reading is that
the three vehicles were never real; they were only expedients (white lies). From the very beginning, the
truth was that there is only one vehicle, which subsumes all the other vehicles.
As a philosophical discourse, this means qualifying the ultimate one (the teleological cause) by making it also a genealogical and omnipresent one (the
material and the efficient cause). As a gift of an allpervasive Buddha-wisdom, it is a priori enlightenment
that brings about a seemingly incipient enlightenment.
If the one is the beginning, the middle, and the end,
that would make an end of all the mundane, karmadriven, causal realities. Realizing the one would then
bring an insight into the emptiness of one and all. It
would entail dissolving the distinction between past,
present, and future. Ekayana, then, absorbs all Buddhist teachings into one holistic teaching. In terms of
intellectual history, it would imply that as China was
reunited under the Sui, the fragmentation of reality that
accompanied the age of disunity had been overcome
by a synthesis of ideas and a realized harmony. The
world as disparate elements and the self as the product
of karma were no longer too far removed from the
nirvanic beyond. In the words of the Awakening of
Faithwhich summarizes the essentials of Mahayanaself and world, mind and suchness, are integrally
one. Everything is a carrier of that a priori enlightenment; all incipient enlightenment is predicated on it.
The mystery of existence is, then, not, How may we
overcome alienation? The challenge is, rather, Why
do we think we are lost in the first place?

The Sinitic Mahayana Schools

Four Buddhist schools emerged in China that had no
direct, exact precedents in India. India produced the
Lotus Sutra; Central Asia put together the Avatamsaka
(garland, wreath) corpus; but only China produced
the distinct schools of Tiantai and Huayan. Although
it is customary to regard these schools, especially Chan
(Zen), as Chinese, it should be kept in mind that they
are first and foremost Buddhist. Not even Kamalasila
at the debate in Lhasa, in Tibet, would deny that Chan
was Mahayana or label it Chinese the way Hu Shi
would.
Chinese Buddhism is often said to have reached
its apogee in the Tang era. But in one sense, it only
shared with Confucianism and Daoism the glory, the
power, and the prosperity of the Tang. Confucianism
would enjoy a revival, especially in the second half of

Tang; religious Taoism had the patronage of the ruling

house, which considered itself descended from Laozi.
Thus, during the Tang, Buddhism had to contend with
serious rivals. Earlier, in the Six Dynasties, Buddhism
was responsible for new social experiments. During
the Tang, it had to come up with more sutras of filial
piety, to accord with the family values of Confucianism. Buddhist monks in the Tang could still withstand
the pressure to pay homage to rulers (as to parents),
but the Sangha had by then lost much of its old autonomy. In the Northern Wei, the Sangha had a leader at
the court; by the Sui, that office was replaced by a
committee of ten elders; and during the Tang many of
the vacancies were left unfilled. When the Japanese
pilgrim Ennin came to China in the early ninth century,
he needed permission to travel from the local authorities. The Sangha was effectively under the control of
the civil authorities. Thus the Sanghawhich had
once been the mover and shakerhad become part of
an entrenched establishment. It owned land and had
peasants as tenants; as a result, it lost their support in
the anti-Buddhist persecution of 845. This is not to say
that Buddhism did not innovate during the Tangit
did, especially with regard to lay devotion and bodhisattvic vocationbut the most daring innovations
came from the extraordinarily successful Three Periods sect. The state, however, disestablished this sect,
with no protest from any of the major schools.
In the realm of ideas, we will focus on the Tiantai,
the Huayan, and the Chan schools. The Pure Land
school in China, which did not develop a philosophy
of faith, will be covered only in passing, as an adjunct
to Tiantai and Chan.
Tiantai (Lotus, Saddharmapundarika) school. The
first Sinitic Mahayana school was Tiantai, whose third
patriarch, Zhiyi (538597), found favor with the Sui
rulers (581618). These rulers sought to live up to the
Asokan ideal. They revered Buddha, divided the relics,
and built a network of state temples. Zhiyi finally became a resident holy man in the capital, his hopes of
returning to a meditative life at Mount Tiantai having
been repeatedly dashed. Still, the capital was then once
more the cultural center of a united China; as a trendsetter, it would also be the home of the later major
Sinitic Mahayana schools.
Unlike the Tibetan Buddhists, who followed the
Indian sastra (commentary) tradition in forming their
schools, Chinese Buddhists built their schools directly
on the words of Buddha in the sutras. By regarding a
sutra as self-revelatory, they in effect produced their
own style of commentary that, when necessary, could
bypass the Indian authorities. For example, the Tiantai
schoolnamed after Mount Tiantai, where Zhiyi
(Master Zhizhe) livedclaimed direct inspiration

13

BUDDHISM IN CHINA: A HISTORICAL SURVEY

from Buddha (to Zhiyi in a former life). It also claimed
a direct transmission from Nagarjuna, so that it could
circumvent Indian authorities such as Aryadeva and
even discount Kumarajiva, who was the translator of
the Lotus Sutra but was not considered a patriarch.
Jizang, earlier, would not have made such presumptions.
The Lotus Sutra is an inspired work, but it is not
a systematic treatise. To develop a philosophy out of
it requires nothing short of turning mythopoeic narratives into rational discourse. To do that, first, a basic
unity is assumed for the sutra; this principle had already been set by Taoan in the fourth century. Second,
a basic teleology is postulated for all sutras; this
method of classifying tenets was initiated by Huiguan
in the fifth century. To this Zhiyi added something
new, a common essence for all Mahayana sutras; this
ensured that they all would preach the one form of
the real.
Zhiyi also innovated a new reading of the Lotus
Sutra. He broke this work into two parts and located
two principles instead of one. The first has to do with
the trace aspect; this pertains to the absorption by
the one vehicle (a singular truth) of three vehicles. The
second has to do with the root aspect; this pertains
to the revelation of the boundless life span of Buddha.
This formulaoriginal root and manifest traceallowed the same one substance to be present in all three
vehicles as functions. It solved the problems of the
two truths of the transmundane, formless Dharmakaya
(Body of Law) and the mundane, physical Rupakaya
(Body of Form). It subsumed all other sutras under the
Lotus Sutra. It proclaimed the presence of the omnipresent Buddha-wisdom (another term for Buddha-nature)
in all things. It collapsed into the eternal Buddha the
three timespast, present, and future. Whereas all
sutras share this essence, only the Lotus Sutra knows it
fully. In Hegelian terms, in this work Mahayana attains
ekayana self-consciousness. That teleology, when
spelled out, becomes the theory of the Four Periods
and the Five Teachings.
Zhiyi developed a new Buddhist hermeneutics. He
distinguished the words and sentences from the hidden
meaning of the Lotus Sutra. He transformed mythos
into logos by an extensive use of allegories. The budding, flowering, and falling of a lotus blossom carry
many more shades of meaning for Zhiyi than the rather
arid correlative paradigm of the five processes (wuxing) used in the Han. In his Fahua xuanyi (The Hidden
Meaning of the Dharma Flower), he laid out the final
mystery, wisdom, and insight: the telescoping of the
limit of reality (3,000 worlds) into a single moment
of thought. Scholarly details aside, this says that all

14

realities in time and space crisscross, and all can be

made present to the mind at any time.
According to this cosmic vision, Buddha must be
present at every level of reality, from the highest (nirvana) to the lowest (hell), the top and bottom of the
ten realms. From that came the Tiantai theory of
essential evil. Even Buddha has this evil as an element
of his nature. If he did not, he would be unable to
manifest himself in the evil paths to help deliver sentient beings trapped there. Christian critics have accused the Lotus Sutra of Docetism; Zhiyis reading
here is an important corrective. His reading is firmly
committed to an existential analysis of evil. It does not
opt for a gnostic escape from the fallen world but instead works hard at accumulating merits in this life for
realizing enlightenment in the here and now. All Sinitic
Mahayana schools have this innerworldly activistic
component.
The cornerstone of Tiantai philosophy is the harmony of three in one. China was already familiar with
yin-yang harmony, but that is the harmony of a complementary pair, either member of which, by itself,
would be considered a cause of discord. Tiantai harmonism depicts perfection: a triadic round (yuan,
circle) in which all three members are equally holistic. This formulathree qua oneis the Chinese
counterpart of Christian Trinitarianism, or three in one.
However, there is a difference: the Chinese formula
has no possibility of a procession (analogous to the the
Holy Spirit proceeding from the Son and the Father);
in Tiantai, there is no first person in the threeno
apex but only the round. Any one of the three is equally
eligible to be alpha or omega.
The framework of the round is provided by Zhiyis
reading of the following verse (as translated by Kumarajiva) in Nagarjunas Madhyamika-karika (Middle
Treatise):
What is produced by cause and condition
Is what I mean by the Empty
Known also as conditioned coarising.
It is also what is meant by the Middle Path.

Nagarjuna intends the four descriptionscausation,

emptiness, interdependence, and the middleto be
synonymous. Zhiyi, however, reads the passage as noting that (1) reality is (2) empty and (3) real yet (4)
neither. This should not be considered a distortion of
the original; it is Zhiyis way of reconfiguring Nagarjunas four-cornered dialectics. Instead of piling up a
pyramid of two truths as the Chengshi masters would
do or aiming at an ultimate negation as Jizang would
require, Zhiyi rounded everything off.
Everything in the universe is thus seen as simultaneously empty, real, and neither. Any one of the

BUDDHISM IN CHINA: A HISTORICAL SURVEY

three, taken as a starting point, will be in sequence
negated, affirmed, transcended, and returned to itself
in a full circle, a perfect round. This became the Tiantai
formula of the three truths: three perspectives on the
one form of the real (dharmata). These three modes
of knowledge are correlated with the three wisdoms
of one mind. In order make the picture complete,
Zhiyi would insist that a person should always learn
to look at reality from all sides: the positive, the negative, and neither. Ingeniously, Zhiyi had turned the four
corners of an empty square into three points on an
endlessly revolving round.
In so doing, Tiantai liberated the practitioners
mind from all conceptual bias and gave him an exhilarating sense of utter freedom before the nondual. In
that vision, every color, every aroma (any object that
can be smelled or seen) is, as such, the middle path.
Centuries earlier, Zhuangzi had pondered the question
of the truth about things and the many theories of
things. Are things different? Are they the same? Do I
have the truth? Or do you? Do we just think we do?
Does thinking makes it so? And how can we ever be
sure? In the history of ideas, it would appear that Zhiyi
had reformulated and then resolved those questions,
giving an answer that is clearly of the Mahayana and
Madhyamika. He might have been inspired by Zhuangzi to forget the pros and cons, but he was, clearly,
also more reassuring than Zhuangzi. In relatively recent times, Mou Zungsans philosophy produced
something of a stir by reversing the traditional judgment, considering Tiantai with its perfect round as a
more perfect teaching than Huayan. Unknowingly,
Mou had revived an old controversy surrounding the
advent of these two schools.
Huayan (Garland, Avatamsaka) school. Tiantai
was patronized by the Sui rulers, and so when the Sui
dynasty fell, it too fell into disfavor. The new Tang
rulers, whose surname was Li, considered themselves
the descendants of Laozi and gave Daoism official recognition and support. During the reign (627650) of
Emperor Taizong, the pilgrim Xuanzang (Master Tripitaka) returned from India and was much honored. A
new, large-scale translation project began under him,
with imperial auspices. Xuanzang had brought back
the new Yogacara philosophy of consciousness only,
which for a while was the rage of the capital, until it
was superseded by the Huayan school supported by
Empress Wu of Zhou (r. 684705). To appreciate this
ideological upheaval, we need to backtrack a little.
In India, Hinayana produced its own scholasticism, called Abhidharma, that reduced reality to a multiplicity of elements. Repudiating that, the Mahayana
Wisdom sutras deemed all such ontic distinctions
empty, and Nagarjuna (in 150 C.E.) systematized this

into the philosophy of emptiness. His middle path

school taught universal emptiness. Around 400, the
brothers Asanga and Vasubandhu built on other, later
Mahayana sutras and founded Yogacara, the idealist
school of Yoga masters who, while accepting the doctrine of universal emptiness, qualified it by declaring
that everything is empty because it is of the mind or is
known through representations only (vijnaptimatrata,
consciousness only). This school of thought entered
China in the early sixth century but was rejected by
many because it seemed to have a subjective
biasi.e., it seemed to claim that there are no cognized
objects; there is only cognition itself.
Zhiyi of the Tiantai school shared this opinion, so
even though he knew Yogacara, he kept to Madhyamika. He held that his round would avoid both extremes: subjectivism and objectivism. He then pitted
form against mind and subject against object, working
out his threefold dialectics to ensure perfect harmony.
That was important, for when it is applied to the problem of whether the pure land, the paradise that devotees of the Buddha Amitabha would seek to be born
into, is real or not real, the Tiantai would typically
answer yes-no-both-neither. Accepting it as real supports the piety of the Pure Land school. Reducing it
to a correlate of the mind entails seeing the realm as
pure only to the extent that the mind is pure; this accommodates what would be Vimalakirtis understanding, a view typical of Chan (Zen). The Tiantai school
on principle avoids both extremes of faith and wisdom;
it observes the middle path and incorporates both. It
regards the pure land as a real icon of perfection that
can induce (or be induced by) a parallel perfection in
the mind. Although it considers the mindless chanting
of Amitabhas name an expedient for lesser intellects,
the Tiantai school has traditionally been supportive of
Pure Land piety. That is true also of the Tendai school
in Heian Japan. But in the Kamakura period in Japan, a
sectarian Pure Land school developed that broke away
from Tendai and produced a well-thought-out argument for relying solely on faith. Japan also developed
an equally sectarian Zen school that in theory would
not practice Pure Land devotion. In China, by contrast,
Pure Land devotion and Chan wisdom went hand in
hand. (For lack of a systematic critique, the Pure Land
school will not be discussed further here.)
By the early Tang, Yogacara was gaining a sizable
following. But it was divided by a difference of opinion
concerning the status of the storehouse consciousness (alayavijnana, the deepest stratum of the mind,
where all experiences and forms of knowledge are
stored). The question was, Is this core psyche tainted
or pure? Is it essentially defiled, in which case it cannot
reach the fruition of enlightenment? Or is it the pure

15

BUDDHISM IN CHINA: A HISTORICAL SURVEY

Buddha-nature, destined for self-awakening? Tradition
has it that Xuanzang, unable to find a definitive answer
in China, sought one in India. What he learned at the
Nalanda university, from an existing school headed by
Dharmapala, was that the storehouse consciousness as
such was tainted; the possibility of enlightenment existed in it as seeds, so that this eighth consciousness
would not itself subsist as buddhahood. Also, there
waslogicallya class of people devoid of this seed
of enlightenment; in other words, Buddha-nature was
not universal. Chinese had accepted Buddha-nature for
a long time, so it is understandable that this new teaching of Xuanzangs would eventually be rejected and
even condemned as less than Mahayana.
The thinker largely responsible for that was the
Huayan patriarch Fazang (643712). According to
legend, Fazang was a member of Xuanzangs translation project but left after an open disagreement with
Xuanzang. A change in political fortunesthe usurpation of Tang rule by Empress Wu, who founded her
own Zhou dynastysaw the rise of Fazang and the
Huayan school. For Fazang, the right understanding of
mind was found in the Awakening of Faith in Mahayana, which postulated a suchness mind (a true consciousness) at the heart of all realities. The Huayan
formulathat the three realms are of mind onlyis
taken to mean that everything is derived from this true
mind. As in the classic debate on whether human nature is evil (Xunzi) or good (Mencius), in this case the
proponent of good, Huayan, won and the consciousness only school lost; the Tiantai doctrine of essential
evil also lost. This victory of the pure mind would
anticipate the later Mencian revival among the Song
neo-Confucians.
Huayan philosophy is usually condensed into the
formula all is one; one is all. It is called totalism,
and it holds that any one part of the universe is immediately the numinous whole of that universe. To understand how this pan-cosmic-Buddhism came about, it
is perhaps instructive to analyze how Huayan had remade the metaphor of the water and the waves that in
the Awakening of Faith to explain how delusion arose
from the pure mind. The argument is that the wind of
ignorance ruffled up the calm ocean of the suchness
mind; thereupon, the waves of phenomenal forms appeared. Although the rising and falling of the waves
may create an illusion of samsaric change, in truth the
waves, being no less watery, are identical in substance
with the suchness of the pure mind. In this way, the
Mahayana dictum samsara is nirvana is affirmed, but
it is also given a new twist. Since in this paradigm,
the forms (waves) and the abiding essence (water) are
of the same substance, appearance and essence, phenomenon and noumenon, are fundamentally one.

16

However, this metaphor was from the Lankavatara sutra, where it served a slightly different end.
There, the wind of phenomenal forms stirs up the
waves of the corresponding six senses. The sutra describes a relationship between the (once calm) storehouse consciousness and the other (now active) consciousness; it is not about the consubstantiality of the
suchness mind and samsaric reality. The latter came
from a reinscribing of that metaphor in the Awakening
of Faith, which is most likely a Chinese, not an Indian,
compilation. Relying on this text, Fazang was able to
undermine Xuanzang. Because it separated essence
and form, the new teaching from India was called faxiang or dharma-laksana, while the old teaching (championed by Fazang) was credited with knowing faxing
or dharmata. The formerconsciousness onlywas criticized, metaphorically, for separating a
house from the ground that supports it (this is the classic Sanskrit reading of dharma). The latter was praised
for seeing that fluidity between water and waves alone
qualified as the (pure) mind only school. That Sinitic
understanding of the nature and function of mind led
to the following tenets in Huayan philosophy:
1. The mind is pure; everything generated from this
suchness mind is likewise pure.
2. The genesis of the world is due to this interaction
between ignorance (the wind) and wisdom (the
sea). The true and the false interact, somewhat like
yang and yin.
3. The discrete forms of things in the world (waves)
may delude the unsuspecting but not the wise. The
waves being no less watery, the wise can find in
any form (such as Wordsworths blade of grass)
a token of eternity (suchness).
4. Since pure suchness is the substance of the mind,
the forms of things and the essence of mind,
dharma-laksana and dharmata, are ultimately
one.
5. Since every single wave encapsulates the wetness
of the whole ocean, each wave is at the same time
all other waves and the sum of all waves.
Thus the Huayan formula: one is all and all is one.
With it, Huayan superseded the Tiantai harmonism
based on three-qua-one, upholding instead the totalism
of all-qua-one.
The final vision is hard to put into words. But if
we imagine the ocean to be boundless and churning
out wave after wave, incessantly, by itself, without
even the aid of an external wind of ignorance, so that
at any one time each part of this whole is contributing
to the regeneration of itself and the whole, that would
approximate what Huayan calls dharmadhatu causation. At one point, Fazang explained this perfect, sudden, tenfold (instead of threefold) mystery at court. He

BUDDHISM IN CHINA: A HISTORICAL SURVEY

pointed to a golden lion, saying that every speck of
gold contained the whole lion, every hair encapsulated
the whole, and every part reflected and captured every
other part. It is like the jewels woven into Indras net:
every jewel reflects every other jewel. Totalism, which
presumes a perfect fusion and interpenetration of part
and whole, is predicated on the idea of the infinite. In
an infinite universe, every part is identically infinite.
This vision is inspired by a hologramic universe revealed in the rich mythopoeic language of the Huayan
sutra. A faint echo can be detected in the philosophy
of Hui Shi, the first Chinese thinker to become aware
of the infinite.
The extravagant Huayan philosophy was patronized by Empress Wu, who ruled as a female Maitreya
and who saw her realm as, and turned it into, an incarnation of Indras net. She had a gigantic Sun Buddha
built in the capital and miniature versions enshrined
in every provincial state temple, symbolically creating
an all-penetrating dharmadhatu, a Buddha-kingdom
on earth. This vision was too good to be true, too perfect to last; when her dynasty fell, the Huayan school
had to adjust itself to an imperfect reality. Just as Tiantai had always supported the Pure Land faith, Huayan
had traditionally advocated Chan. The adjustment of
Huayan theory to the more practical ends of Chan meditation was later completed by Zongmi (780841), who
was considered a patriarch by both the Huayan school
and the Chan school.
The Chan (Zen) school. The Chan school is often
said to be the most Chinese of all schools. In legend,
Bodhidharma brought this teaching to China in the
early sixth century. A certain Bodhidharma did arrive
in Loyang, and the Record of the Loyang Temples described him as singing the praises of the spectacular
Yongning pagoda. A different picture emerged a
hundred years later, when Chan legends described a
Bodhidharma who was highly critical of the kind of
merit-making temple piety he saw in the southern capital. Instead of trying to decide which image of Bodhidharma is more authentic, we would do well to recognize that Chan was a school which claimed to rely
on secret transmission, and so its early history cannot
be determined one way or another by pitting esoteric
against exoteric records. In other words, the Chan tradition is created by its own legends. These narratives
depict Chan primarily as a school that began with
monks of the forests and ascetics of the mountains who
conflicted with city monks and popular lecturersa
very familiar tale in the history of Buddhism, and a
conflict that went all the way back to the post-Asokan
Sangha and to the birth of Mahayana itself.
What modern historians can ascertain is that
Huike (487593), a disciple of Bodhidharma (d. 532),

was an ascetic of some renown. This lover of the forest

life was eclipsed by popular Buddhist lecturers in the
city, according to the records, which blame one leading
Loyang elder monk in particular. But then the antiBuddhist persecution of 574577 in the north effectively undermined this monks urban base of support.
It drove monks to take refuge in the hills, where, in
retrospect, they criticized urban temple piety as superficial or shallow. The soul-searching undertaken in response to persecution called for a return to the fundamentals of the faith, and especially to meditation.
This beginningasceticismis clear. Huike was
a dhuta (extreme ascetic) who schooled others, and
one of his disciples was Sengzan (d. 606). However,
the link between this pair and Daoxin (580651, now
deemed the fourth Chan patriarch) is far from clear and
remains tenuous. This is perhaps unsurprising, because
with Daoxin a new style emerged. A sizable fellowship
now gathered at his East Mountain. It was supported
by a powerful local lay patron. Extreme asceticism
became outmoded; Daoxin even criticized a lone wayfarer who visited himwhen the man left, Daoxin said
he was not of Mahayana stock, i.e., not ready to rejoin
the world. Daoxins burgeoning community would rejoin the world, following a set of precepts he had compiled for bodhisattvas. Daoxin also taught a more relaxed form of meditation that would bring peace of
mind to a wider and less hardy circle of monks and
lay practitioners.
Daoxin and his disciple Hongren (601674) cotaught at the Twin Peaks, from which their fame spread
to the capital. Around 700 C.E., Empress Wu invited
Shenxiu (c. 605706), who had apparently succeeded
Hongren, to come to Changan. Whether or not the
tradition had actually begun with forest monks who
rejected the world, it had by then matured into a force
which the world had to reckon withand which, in
turn, had to reckon with the world. Considering the
politicization of the tradition, it is not surprising that
soon afterward, Shenhui (670762), seeking imperial
patronage, began a campaign in which he argued that
the real sixth patriarch was not Shenxiu but his own
master, Huineng (638713).
Up to that point, the school did not call itself Chan
(meditation), a rather colorless name. It was in fact
still looking for a name, and the custom then was to
tie a new teaching to a sutra. Huike used the Srimala
sutra, but Daoxin later drew inspiration from the
Awakening of Faith. Members of the East Mountain
Teaching, realizing that the Awakening of Faith was
a sastra, came up with the next best; they conjured up
a lineage of Lankavatara sutra masters, this being the
sutra that informed the Awakening of Faith. Shenhui
then perpetuated the myth that Huineng favored the

17

BUDDHISM IN CHINA: A HISTORICAL SURVEY

Diamond Sutra. Actually, none of these labels really
indentifies the schools ideological affiliation, because
this tradition apparently never used one sutra to legitimize itself.
Shenxiu, who used five upayas (expedients)five formulas for wisdom excerpted freely from
five or more sutrasis a good example of the schools
typically loose practice. The formulas are the means;
wisdom is the end. The intention was to bring meditation out of the cloister and make it accessible to the
larger populace. Short, catchy dicta were used to encapsulate the teaching. The Platform Sutra describes
itself, for example, as teaching no-thought, no-abiding,
no-form. A school in Sichuan (Szechwan) would distinguish itself by modifing this slightly; there, even
the unlettered could join large but intensive sessions
lasting fourteen days over the new year and be tutored,
receiving certified enlightenment with dharma names
(previously given only to monks) as well. Today we
might call this pop Zen or instant Zen; it was to bring
many into a form of wisdom hitherto reserved for a
few. This was accomplished by lectures on dharma
like the one Huineng gave in the Dafan Temple in
Canton, and by massive precept platforms like the
one Shenhui presided over to raise money for the
throne.
The Platform Sutra of the sixth patriarch gives the
southern schools account of how Huineng composed
the better mind verse, for which he receivedin
secret, at midnighta transmission from Hongren.
The decline of the northern school, the success of
Shenhuis campaign, and later the destruction of major
temples (especially in the north during the anti-Buddhist persecution of 845) guaranteed the preeminence of
two surviving southern lineages. Regional styles
emerged, and an infusion of folk wisdom created a
folk Zen tradition, which has rarely been studied.
Much has been written on the depth of Chan wisdom, and most of it is true. If we take a longer view,
though, we see that there is nothing in Chan which
was not present before. What was new in Chan is its
effective and dramatic teaching. Whether one wanted
to see ones own nature, achieve sudden enlightenment, or cut off all thought, these formulas for wisdom
under the personal guidance of a master could provide
liberation. Much as Luthers dictum By faith alone
condensed a lifetime of profound reflection on the
scriptures, so Chan slogans reduced Mahayana wisdom to its essentials. The following four lines are said
to capture the essence of Chan:
No reliance on words.
Transmission outside the scriptures.
Point directly at the minds of men.
See your (Buddha) nature and be enlightened.

18

This passage is attributed to Bodhidharma or to Huineng, but it actually appeared after Mazu Daoyi
(709788) and may better describe his innovation. In
any case, however, the four lines would free many
from the letter of Buddhist law and, with their reference to mind and nature, bring the Buddhist discourse
back to an important Mencian concern. The fact that
by now Buddhismin decline in Indiacould offer
little further inspiration to China meant that Chan
would evolve its own indigenous, secondary scriptures: the colloquial Yulu and the Gongan that would
even more effectively connect the two traditions.

Conclusion
What did Buddhism contribute to Chinese thought?
Neo-Confucians in the Song era denied that they owed
any debt to Buddhists, but their denial only underscored their indebtedness. The friendships some of
them had with Chan monks tell us that, public polemics
against Buddhism notwithstanding, personal exchanges continued. Buddhist terminology appears here
and there in their writings, but it is often given a reading that is as much nonclassical as non-Buddhist. In
fact, the intercultural dialogue had a hybrid nature.
Drawing a line between what is Buddhist and what is
Confucian is not easy. For example, it is well known
that Li Ao (d. c. 844), a disciple of Han Yu (768824),
gave an evaluation to human emotions so negative that
it was deemed too Buddhist by the Song masters. In
turn, the Song masters were considered crypto-Buddhists by the Qing scholars who sought a return to Han
scholarship. So the question remains.
In retrospect, the major innovation of medieval
Buddhist thought had to do with probing the structure
of the mind and the grandeur of metaphysical reality
and considering how one reflected the other. In that
sense, Buddhist thought is inherently idealist; it isas
Lovejoy recalled of William Jamesthe mind taking
a holiday from the seemingly fragmented realities of
a world in chaos and discovering a refuge in monistic
pathos. Over the long term, however, the strength of
this inner self would return to, and bear on, changing
reality for the better. The standard complaint of the
Confucians is that the Buddhists neglect social ethics.
That is not truethe Buddhists also had a sense of
moral behavior and a moral codebut this is not the
point. Rather, the point is that, to follow Foucaults
last writings on ethics, the Buddhists delve into ethics
understood (by Foucault) as the selfs relationship to
itself. In that internal arena of spiritual exercises seeking self-transformation, there are four concerns: ethical
substance, mode of subjection, self-forming activity,
and telos. For the Buddhist, the substance is desire;

BUDDHISM, ZEN (CHAN)

the mode of control is dispassion; the activities are
largely ascetic; the goal is liberation. It is ultimately
this art of self-analysis and self-transformation that the
Buddhists would leave as a gift to all those who came
after.
See also Buddhism: Zen (Chan); Fazang; Hui Shi; Huineng:
The Sixth Patriarch; Mazu Daoyi; Xuanzang.

Bibliography
Chen, Kenneth. Buddhism in China. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton
University Press, 1964.
Cook, Francis H. Hua-yen Buddhism: The Jewel Net of Indra.
University Park and London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977.

Hakeda, Yoshito. The Awakening of Faith. New York: Columbia University Press, 1967.
Hurvitz, Leon. Chih-i (538597): An Introduction to the Life
and Ideas of a Chinese Monk, Melanges chinois et bouddhiques, 12, 19601962.
Liebenthal, Walter. The Treatise of Seng-chao, 2nd ed. Hong
Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1968.
McRae, John. The Northern School and the Formation of Early
Chan Buddhism. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,
1986.
Robinson, Richard. Early Madhyamika in India and China.
Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967.
Swanson, Paul. Foundations of Tien-tai Philosophy. Berkeley,
Calif.: Asian Humanities, 1989.
Takakusu, Junjiro. The Essentials of Buddhist Philosophy. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1947.
Zurcher, Erik. The Buddhist Conquest of China, 2 vols. Leiden:
Brill, 1959.

Buddhism, Zen (Chan)

Hsueh-li CHENG

Buddhism was founded by Gautama Buddha (563483

B.C.E.) in India about 2,500 years ago. It became popular inside and outside India, and it developed from
early Buddhism into Hinayana (Small Vehicle, also
known as Theravada) and then Mahayana (Great Vehicle) Buddhism. Both conservative Hinayana and liberal Mahayana Buddhist teachings were introduced
from India to China in the first century C.E. Chinese
people have generally preferred Mahayana to Hinayana Buddhism. Since the fifth century, Chinese Buddhist masters have transformed Indian Buddhism to
Chinese Buddhism and created many new Buddhist
schools in China. Chan, or Zen (the Japanese transcription of the Chinese term), is a new Mahayana Buddhist
school founded in China; one cannot find a counterpart
in India.
Although Chan Buddhismhereafter Chanas
established in China is a new school, orthodox Chan
Buddhists have claimed that it is the real, original
teaching of Buddha. According to Chan tradition, Gautama Buddha was the first patriarch of Chan Buddhism
in India. He is said to have gathered his disciples to
hear his holiest message at the Mount of the Holy Vulture. But instead of giving a verbal statement, he simply held up a bouquet of flowers before the assemblage. No one understood the meaning of his gesture

except the elderly Mahakasyapa, who smiled at Buddha as if he completely realized the masters teaching.
At this moment, it is said, Buddha appointed Mahakasyapa as his successor by proclaiming, I have the most
precious treasure, spiritual and transcendental, which
this moment I hand over to you, O venerable Mahakasyapa! In Chan tradition this incident has been taken
as the origin of the Chan school.
After Mahakasyapa, Chan Buddhism is said to
have been transmitted through twenty-six chief masters. Bodhidharma (d. 532) was regarded as the twentyeighth patriarch of Chan Buddhism in India. Yet he
has been revered as the first patriarch of Chan in China
because he came from India to China to bring the following special Chan teaching:
A special transmission outside the scriptures,
No dependence upon words and letters.
Direct pointing at the human mind,
Seeing into the nature to attain buddhahood.
Bodhidharma came to south China during the reign of
the Emperor Wu (520550). He is said to have crossed
the Yangtze (Chang) River on a reed, and he taught
a new way of meditation. He lived at the Shaolinsi
monastery, sat facing a wall, and meditated for nine
years.

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