The Human Journey, Volumes 1 - 2

by Kevin Reilly

  The idea of salvation was not entirely new to Mahayana Buddhism. After all, the core message of the Buddha had been the need to escape the veil of illusions that ensnared one in the world. That the root of suffering was desire, that one overcame suffering by relinquishing the world, went without saying. But Theravada Buddhists, in all likelihood Gautama Siddhartha, who became “the Buddha,” and many Hindu holy men before and since sought peace in meditation, ascetic practices, and renunciation, not in the worship of a god or goddess. It was the Mahayana followers who turned the guru into the god and then prayed to him—and his Bodhisattvas—for salvation.

  Buddhism in Central Asia and China . The Buddhist conversion of China is an unlikely story. “It is difficult to understand,” a modern historian writes, “why Chinese would find any attraction in an alien faith that espoused strange ideas in an unfamiliar language.”6 The family and the state were the central institutions of Chinese society and Confucian belief. The Buddha abandoned his family, and his followers practiced celibacy in monastic communities independent of family or state. Buddhist missionaries were mendicant monks, while Chinese culture valued productive farmers. Buddhists taught that life was suffering; the Chinese taught that life was to be enjoyed.

  We can almost hear this debate in the instructions of The Disposition of Error (450–589), a manual for Buddhist missionaries in China that resembles a modern “frequently asked questions” format:

  The Chinese questioner will ask: Of those who live in the world, there is none who does not like wealth and position and hate poverty and baseness, none who does not enjoy pleasure and idleness and shrink from labor and fatigue. . . . But now the [Buddhist] monks wear red cloth, they eat one meal a day, they bottle up the six emotions, and thus they live out their lives. What value is there in such an existence?7

  The Buddhist manual’s answer to this question is equally revealing: people desire rank and wealth most of all, but if they cannot obtain them in a moral way, they should not enjoy them at all. People hate poverty and meanness, but if they can avoid them only by departing from the Way, they should not avoid them at all. Lao Tzu (Laotzi) has said that “the five colors make men’s eyes blind, the five sounds make men’s ears deaf, the five flavors dull the palate.”

  The Way of the Way . Buddhist missionaries drew on a non-Confucian tradition of Chinese thought: the teachings of Lao Tzu about “the Way,” the natural path, or Dao. Lao Tzu was a Chinese contemporary of the Buddha who also disparaged worldly struggle and counseled a passive acceptance of nature’s “way.” Like Buddhism, Daoism reversed the ethics of active engagement with the world. “The way is like an empty vessel that yet may be drawn from, without ever having to be refilled,” Lao Tze wrote in the Dao De Ching.8

  Buddhism was most successful at winning Chinese converts in the centuries of instability that followed the fall of the Han dynasty. At the beginning of the Six Dynasties Period of Division (220–589), Buddhism was limited to communities of foreign merchants and monasteries mainly along long-distance trade routes. In the second century, all the monks in the monastery at the capital city of Luoyang were foreigners from India, central Asia, and Parthian Persia. But by 600, China was a Buddhist country with thousands of monasteries. Luoyang alone constructed 1,000 new monasteries within 40 years of its rebuilding in 494. What accounted for such a change? Certainly the salvation message of Buddhism fell on more willing ears in this period of political instability, population decline, and social disorder. Temple and cave inscriptions from the period decry lost families, suggesting the breakdown of the Confucian faith. Monasteries that in times of prosperity had linked chains of merchants became, in times of need, lifelines of support for the surrounding population, providing food and consolation. Mahayana Buddhism offered a hope of salvation from the trying world of suffering between the third and seventh centuries, between the collapse of the Han around 220 and the rise of the Sui (589–618) and Tang (618–907) dynasties.

  The Uses of Magic . In addition to translating a foreign creed into Chinese characters by way of Daoism, Buddhist monks practiced an age-old technique for winning converts: magic. The very influential Buddhist monk from central Asia, Fotudeng, recognized the difficulty of conveying foreign philosophical ideas to his Chinese audience, and so, it is said, he took a monk’s begging bowl full of water, burned incense over it, and chanted a few words, and suddenly there appeared a water lily in blinding blue and white.

  The traditional story of the victory of Buddhism in Japan is a similar testament to the power of association with the supernatural. Accordingly, in the early sixth century, a Korean king sent a present of a Buddhist image to the emperor of Japan. The emperor decided to set up an experiment in which he gave the image of the Buddha to a willing clan chief to see what happened. The clan chief set the image in a temple and worshipped it. Shortly afterward, however, a pestilence broke out in the land, and many people died. Deducing that the native Shinto deities were offended, the emperor took the image, threw it into the river, and burned down the temple. The Buddhist experiment had failed. In 584, however, another Korean image of the Buddha arrived in Japan. This time a monk tried to break the statue with an iron sledgehammer but broke the sledgehammer instead. Then he threw the stone in water, but it floated. In response, the monk built another temple, and Buddhism grew in Japan.

  Monks, Missionaries, and Monarchs . These stories follow the route of Buddhist expansion from central Asia to China, Korea, and then Japan. Buddhism always entered a kingdom as a foreign religion, but it always entered from nearby. Consequently, Buddhism often first attracted those who were drawn to foreign ideas. Before Buddhism swept through China, it won over some of the nomadic peoples in central Asia and the kings and religious leaders of the northern kingdoms who were only marginally part of Chinese culture. The rulers of the Northern Wei dynasties (386–354) declared each new dynasty to be an incarnation of the Buddha. Within China, Buddhism first attracted foreign merchants, immigrant communities, and people out of power.

  Buddhism brought different things to different people. The early monasteries in Silk Road oasis towns brought agricultural produce, trade goods, and urban culture to nomadic peoples. For rulers of nomadic dynasties, such as the Toda, Buddhism offered a common ground with their Chinese subjects. To the tribal leaders and minor monarchs of northern China, Buddhism conferred spiritual legitimacy and provided literate advisers and luxury markets. For illiterate Confucian Chinese peasants, Buddhist festivals, like the popular Feast of All Souls, included ancestor cults. Chinese Daoists added the Buddha to their pantheon of protectors. In times of political instability or famine, all benefited from the refuge and reserves of the monasteries.

  Pilgrims and Writings . While most Buddhists, like most people in any premodern religion, were illiterate, the spread of Buddhism owed much to the travels of literate missionaries and pilgrims. Stories about the Buddha, reported sermons and sayings of the Buddha, and stories and theological texts written by the Buddha’s followers all played an important role in the development of Buddhism. Buddhism became increasingly bookish in China, the land that invented paper in the first century and printing in the eighth to ninth centuries. In fact, the spread of Buddhism to Korea may have generated the world’s first example of printing as early as the ninth century. Earlier Theravada Buddhists in Southeast Asia spread their stories in stone monuments at places like Borobudur on the island of Java and Angkor in the Khmer kingdom of Cambodia. By contrast, the Mahayana monks in China built less graphic if often larger Buddhas,9 and they more often studied manuscripts for literary meanings. This may reflect different levels of literacy or differences in classical Indian and Chinese culture—the Indian more tactile and plastic, the Chinese more visual and literate. It is interesting, in any case, that of the thousands of Buddhist missionaries and pilgrims who traveled between India and China, the only extant written accounts come to us from the Chinese pilgrims to India.

  Indian missionaries first went to central Asia and
China to bring the word orally, to establish communities, and to trade. Later, Chinese pilgrims traveled to India to read and copy the sacred texts and visit the sacred sites where the Buddha lived and his early followers built monasteries, schools, and hospitals. The first Chinese pilgrim whose story we have was Faxian (334–420), who traveled to India in 399 and returned 15 years later with copies of numerous texts that he translated from Sanskrit to Chinese. In 645, the Chinese Buddhist Xuanzang (596–664) returned from India after nineteen years with 22 horses loaded down with texts, relics, and statues. The monk Yijing (635–713), after almost 25 years in India and Southeast Asia, translated 230 volumes of texts and wrote biographical sketches of 56 other Chinese pilgrims in India. In addition to the scriptures, the Chinese monks also brought back stories of Buddhist communities from northern India to Java. This Chinese attention to the sacred writings kept Chinese Buddhism close to the original Sanskrit meanings. Indian Buddhism was translated into Chinese through the language of Daoism, but it remained distinct from Daoism.

  Temple and State . The ideal philosophy for ensuring the legitimacy of and popular support for the emperor was certainly Confucianism. It celebrated hierarchy, monarchy, patriarchy, rituals, and the status quo. According to Confucian doctrine, the emperor ruled with the Mandate of Heaven. Especially in times of prosperity or stability, that mandate was unquestionable. Nevertheless, Chinese Buddhists were well placed, when politics became more stabilized, to serve the interests of monarchs and dynastic officials as well as merchants, intellectuals, and the poor. The emperor Wu (502–549) of the Liang dynasty took the unusual step of ransoming himself to a Buddhist monastery, much to the chagrin of the Confucians, but in return the monks treated the emperor as a being to be obeyed and venerated. The founder of the Sui dynasty, Sui Wendi, was a Buddhist, even though the official ideology of the government was Confucianism.

  Under the more stable conditions of the Tang dynasty (618–907), Buddhism received waves of imperial support. The empress Wu Zetian (625–705), who seized power for herself late in life after the death of her son, endowed numerous Buddhist temples and cave statues in addition to practicing Daoist rituals.

  Just as Buddhism had succeeded in India as an economic power that eschewed politics, so in China Buddhist monasteries became depositories of wealth that transcended political alliances. The landholdings of Buddhism constituted about a third of Chinese farmland. Buddhist wealth was created not only through the trading networks and pawn shops at monasteries but also through the donation of gold and treasures that were converted to statues of the Buddha and richly appointed temples. One Chinese critic of Buddhism estimated that Buddhists controlled seven-eighths of the wealth of the empire, even though the number of followers was low.

  In 845, Chinese protests against “foreign religions” led to the expulsion of all imported faiths. Even Buddhism came under attack. The emperor Wuzong of Tang declared,

  We have heard that the Buddha was never spoken of before the Han dynasty; from then on the religion of idols gradually came to prominence. So in this later age Buddhism has transmitted its strange ways and has spread like a luxuriant vine until it has poisoned the customs of our nation, Buddhism has spread to all the nine provinces of China; each day finds its monks and followers growing more numerous and its temples loftier. Buddhism wears out the people’s strength, pilfers their wealth, causes people to abandon their lords and parents for company of teachers, and severs man and wife with its monastic decrees. In destroying law and injuring mankind indeed nothing surpasses this doctrine.

  Now if even one man fails to work the fields, someone must go hungry; if one woman does not tend her silkworms, someone will go cold. At present there are an inestimable number of monks and nuns in the empire, all of them waiting for the farmers to feed them and the silkworms to clothe them while the Buddhist public temples and private chapels have reached boundless numbers, sufficient to outshine the imperial palace itself.

  Having thoroughly examined all earlier reports and consulted public opinion on all sides, there no longer remains the slightest doubt in our mind that this evil should be eradicated.

  But Buddhism was not eradicated. Rather, its political power was crushed. Buddhism was the only “foreign” religion not to be expelled from China. Under the Song dynasty (960–1279), Buddhism contributed to the trappings of the emperor’s authority, turning some emperors into venerated Bodhisattvas. In addition, the neo-Confucianism of Zhu Xi (1130–1200) and others integrated Buddhist ideas into the Confucian tradition.

  More than Hinduism, perhaps even more than Indian textiles, tropical fruits, and wet rice, Indian Buddhism—in two varieties—conquered the world of South and East Asia in the centuries between 200 and 1000. For the first time, people from the islands of Ceylon and Java shared a common faith with desert nomads in central Asia and the princes and peasants of China, Japan, and Korea. For the first time in world history, entire societies directed their affairs according to sacred books. And though their interpretations might differ, they were united in the conviction that these writings could save them from the travails of a shifting world.

  Christianity beyond Palestine

  Christianity, the other great salvation religion of the age of instability, spread across the Mediterranean, Europe, and the Middle East, while Buddhism spread through central, eastern, and southeastern Asia. Some early Christians traveled to India and China and established small Christian communities in East Asia, but Christianity did not take hold in China until after a second wave of missionaries arrived 1,000 years later.

  Hellenization

  Hellenization is a shorthand for the spread of the Greek language and Greek mythology and philosophy, especially science, reason, cosmopolitanism, and universal values. If the spread of Buddhism throughout Asia was prepared by the monsoon winds and merchant sailors of the Indian Ocean, the spread of Christianity was prepared by Hellenization.

  In fact, one might argue that Hellenization was the source of universalism in both Europe and Asia 2,000 years ago. Neither Hinduism nor Judaism was a universal religion: neither claimed allegiance beyond the tribe or tradition, neither attracted or encouraged converts, and neither offered salvation beyond this world. It was not Theravada Buddhism that offered the world salvation but the Mahayana Buddhism that developed north of India in the Hellenized Kushan area. Similarly, it was not the apostles of Jesus in Jerusalem who called Jesus the savior of mankind but the Hellenized Jew, Paul of Tarsus (in modern Turkey). Hellenism was a universal outlook before Buddhism and Christianity.

  Paul versus Peter . The letters of Paul in the New Testament detail the conflict among the early followers of Jesus. Peter and the Jews of Jerusalem expected only observant Jews to join their community. Paul, an outsider, was conscious of preaching a different faith: to Jews and Gentiles, open to all regardless of their ancestry. His faith in Jesus as the Christ, his belief that Jesus died for the sins of mankind, and his conviction that anyone could be saved by believing in Jesus—these ideas were all more Greek than Jewish, and they mobilized Gentile communities as well as synagogues from Syria to Rome. History is full of “ifs,” but one of the biggest is this: if Paul had not universalized the importance of Jesus, would there have been Christianity? There would have been a group of Jewish followers, many of whom perished by the time of the Roman conquest and destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 CE. But Paul’s insistence that Jesus was more than a Jewish rabbi, that one did not have to be Jewish to accept Jesus, and that faith in Jesus offered salvation to all humanity was a prerequisite to success beyond the Jewish community. In addition, Paul traveled the Mediterranean visiting Gentile groups as well as synagogues to create the religious communities that became the first Christians. From his first Christian church in Antioch, Syria, he planted churches in Cyprus, Greece, and throughout what is today Turkey.

  Healing and Miracles . Like Buddhist monks, Christians provided healing in this world as well as salvation beyond. The Gospels told of Jesu
s healing the sick and reviving the dead. Similarly, early Christians were often called to heal the afflicted.

  Most Greeks and Romans did not belabor distinctions between mere healing and working miracles. Gods and their representatives were expected to show their power by various demonstrations of medicine, magic, or miracles. A typical account of this mix was given by the apostle John. At Ephesus, John converted unbelievers by healing the sick. He then claimed that he entered the temple of Artemis, where he called on God to cast out the Greek god. Immediately, the altar of Artemis split into pieces, and half the temple fell down, killing the priest. In response, the assembled Ephesians declared, “There is only one God: the God of John. We are converted.”10

  Jews and Christians . Jews had a complicated relationship with their Roman occupiers. In Judea, Jews were largely left to their own devices, a policy that Romans practiced with most of their colonies. Jews outside Judea posed more difficult problems. Like Christians, they did not worship Roman gods, but because Romans recognized that Jews had their own religion, Jewish separateness was generally accepted. At times, Jews were admired; at times, they were banned from living in certain areas, like the city of Rome. From the Roman perspective, the Christians were much more problematic because they did not seem to accept Jewish or Roman religion, they worshipped a convicted Jewish troublemaker from a minor Roman province, they refused to participate in Roman civic functions, and they constantly tried to convert others to their subversive beliefs. This made them politically dangerous in Roman eyes.