It is no exaggeration to say that without understanding the development of Buddhism in China, it is impossible to understand China's thought and culture since the Eastern Han Dynasty, because it has become an inseparable and important part of China culture and has a strong infiltration and influence on other parts.
China in the history of Buddhism
Buddhism has become so well known to China people in later generations that people almost forget that it is a foreign religion. However, talking about Buddhism in China must start with its initial introduction into China. A question in the Zen case was repeatedly mentioned: "How did the Buddha come to the West?" That's why Buddhism spread from the west to China. There are many famous answers to this question, but they are not direct answers, but treat it as a meaningless question. However, epiphany can be achieved, but scholars can't trace it back to the source.
Toynbee once put forward a famous assertion that the great development of religion is often accompanied by the collapse of an empire. The spread of Buddhism in China really benefited from the political division and social crisis that lasted for nearly 400 years after the collapse of the political order of Confucian civilization in Han Dynasty. Such a shaken society "has become a very promising hotbed for the implantation of foreign ideas and systems". At such a moment when it is difficult for people to predict the blessings and future disasters, both Buddhism and Taoism have made great progress, because they have at least given people spiritual peace and guidance to some extent, and through the pursuit of the other side of the world, people have got rid of the anxiety and pain in the real world.
However, when two heterogeneous civilization systems meet, they will inevitably encounter collision and constant adjustment. It can be said that most of the problems encountered after the introduction of the west wind to the east for more than 1000 years were encountered in different degrees when Buddhism entered China, such as the fierce resistance of local ideas, the self-adjustment of a foreign ideological system to adapt to changes quickly, how to make new heterogeneous ideas accepted and understood by local people, and classic translation and communication. Arthur Frederick Wright was keenly aware that in the process of translating Buddhist scriptures, many paragraphs and expressions that violated Confucian morality were deleted or omitted, and many Buddhist texts appeared, believing that Buddhist thought was "consistent with or complementary to local thoughts and values". In these ways, this foreign thing was grafted to the root of local culture.
In the troubled times of the Northern and Southern Dynasties, Buddhism had to adapt to two different political environments and cultures. This effort to take root in the local area has resulted in the initial embryonic form of the differentiation between the northern and southern sects of Buddhism in the future, and the Buddhism infiltrated by China Thought. In fact, the subsequent development of Buddhism in China can be traced back to this period. In the process of evolution, two points are particularly noteworthy, that is, Buddhism retreated from the position of "shaman does not respect the king" and "gradual enlightenment" and gradually gave up its independence and exotic color. Chen Yinque once pointed out that whether to worship the king or not is ostensibly a dispute between monks and customs, which is essentially the same as the distinction between gradual enlightenment and epiphany. The final result is that Buddhism succumbs to China's cultural tradition in order to adapt to local conditions. It not only accepted the monastic institution system established in the Northern Wei Dynasty, but also developed into the only authentic China Buddhism as an epiphany to Indian Buddhism.
Another major adjustment is the idea of equality of all beings and the so-called "putting down the butcher's knife and becoming a Buddha." India, the birthplace of Buddhism, has a strict caste thought, which advocates that "one interpretation can't make a Buddha", while Chinese civilization believes that "princes and princes will have seeds" and "everyone can think Yao and Shun". In the local Taoist classic "Taiping Jing", a special thought has been revealed: that is, people's fate is determined by themselves rather than external forces such as ghosts and gods. As long as they practice Taoism, everyone can become immortal. This idea of "self-reliance" advocates that all good and bad things are caused by oneself, and that good causes of human beings will have good results and evil causes will have bad consequences, which has nothing to do with ghosts and gods, so the so-called ghosts and gods are only a projection of their mental state. It is not difficult to understand why "the mainstream Zen advocates an ideal of redemption that is consistent with China's consistent belief and incompatible with India bound by the caste system, that is, a person can reach the peak through his own efforts in his life". In fact, as Gong Pengcheng said, in the face of such a powerful ideological reality in China society, "Buddhism will not flourish without this theoretical turn", and Zen is an absolutely "independent" school.
Since the rise of Zen Buddhism in the Tang Dynasty, the access to the western regions was cut off after the late Tang Dynasty, and Buddhism declined in India, so that Buddhism had to be further China-oriented, so that Zen Buddhism could hardly be regarded as a heresy of Buddhism from the point of view of Indian Buddhism, and actually became the most powerful orthodox Buddhism in China. Zen absorbed the metaphysical character of Taoism in theory, and was deeply loved by scholars, intellectuals and ordinary people. However, the "Buddha nature" in Buddhism in China has gradually evolved to mainly refer to people's mind, rather than the truth, reality and legalism that India refers to. This over-emphasis on mind and naturalism (such as Huineng's "epiphany", God's "unintentional" theory and Mazu's "unintentional non-Buddha" theory) dispels the concepts of ghosts and gods and the afterlife, and invisibly creates the Zen self. In the final analysis, chopping wood and carrying water, eating and dressing are all practices, and religion is too life-oriented. So what's the difference between this and the Confucian saying that "dressing and eating is the principle of human relations" (Li Zhiyu) and "people are the way of daily use" (Wang Genyu)?
China's thought is very secular, and he has little interest in the other side of the world, so he often pays little attention to Buddhist teachings. Even in today's Taiwan Province Province, the Buddhist community does not attach much importance to Buddhism. Often, all parties in the temple donate money, but the believers are not interested in running a Buddhist college, and "seeing nature" directly caters to their tastes. In the history of China, religion has little binding force on people. In Ge Zhaoguang's words, it "does not have the coercive force to maintain the beliefs of secular believers, but attracts the feelings of believers with the charm of ideas and interests". Eventually, "religion gradually turns into ideas, beliefs gradually turn into benefits, and literati turn religious practice into life experience, and the ultimate realm into artistic realm", but this may not be the blessing of China people, at least it avoids the terrible religious war and naturally seeks freedom and infinity in the unity of subject and object.
Buddhism developed its own special regional form in China and became the mainstream of Mahayana Buddhism. This school of Buddhism spread to foreign countries, so that the Buddhism accepted by Japanese and Korean cultures is actually not Indian Buddhism, but Chinese Buddhism strongly transformed by China culture.
Buddha's gift
Today, everyone in China inadvertently inherited the legacy that Buddhism spread in the Han Dynasty for two thousand years. If nothing else, many words in our daily spoken language come from Buddhist culture, such as: world, time, faith, equality, present, heaven, consciousness, magic weapon, magic, universe, tower, idealism, truth, cause and effect, relative, absolute, crossing the street, clubbing, and blind people touching the elephant. No wonder Zhao Puchu once said in response to the rejection of Buddhist culture: "If we really want to completely abandon Buddhist culture, I'm afraid they won't talk well."
Although the development of Buddhism in China has to adapt to this local environment and draw elements from Confucianism and Taoism, this influence and drawing is by no means one-way. On the contrary, the early Taoist classics copied and imitated a lot of Buddhist statements and ideas, which is academic knowledge. Confucianism and Neo-Confucianism, which rose in the middle and late Tang Dynasty, were obviously influenced by Buddhism. For example, Arthur Frederick Wright pointed out in his book "Buddhism in the History of China" that "even the language and negotiation methods they used were developed in the era when Buddhism prevailed. It is the experience of Buddhism that teaches them to find and discover new dimensions of meaning from ancient classics. " Even the concept of "Yi Tian" of the traditional clan in China originated from Buddhism, although it has obvious Confucian moral concept. To a certain extent, it is precisely because copying Buddhist scriptures can increase merit that printing was invented in China (many early printed materials were Buddhist scriptures) and made China culture widely spread.
Even from Japan, we can see that this influence is far-reaching: in the Middle Ages, Japan was deeply influenced by China Zen, which spread from poetry, gardens, tea ceremony, flower way, bushido, painting, calligraphy, diet and other aspects, and "Zen" became the ideological system that enveloped the whole life world. It is not only aesthetic taste and spiritual orientation, but also involves the material world.