Abstract
Is there a law of rise and decline, followed by revival, that governs the history of Chinese Buddhism? Here we encounter the historical fact of persecutions against Buddhism before the Communist era. That of A.D. 845 effected the decline of most Buddhist schools described in the last chapter. According to the census of 845, there used to be a quarter of a million monks and nuns, 4,600 temples and over 40,000 lesser shrines in China. The wealth and power of the Samgha invited envy and provoked persecution. The severity of the persecution meant that most of these temples were destroyed, and most of the monks and nuns were forced to return to lay life.
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Notes
English translation adapted from Philip B. Yampolsky, The Platform Sutra of the Sixth Patriarch: The Text of the Tun-huang Manuscript (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), pp. 130–32.
Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, Mysticism: Christian and Buddhist (London: Allen & Unwin, 1957), and ‘An Interpretation of Zen Experience’ (1939), in Studies in Zen (London: Rider, 1955), pp. 74–75;
Heinrich Dumoulin, A History of Zen Buddhism. Translated from the German by Paul Peachey (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965), pp. 18–22.
Consult the product of collaboration between Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, Erich Fromm and Richard De Martino, entitled Zen Buddhism and Psychoanalysis (New York: Grove Press, 1963).
See Heinrich Dumoulin, History of Zen Buddhism, trans. by James W. Heisig and Paul Knitter (London: Macmillan, 1988–90), vol. 1, Part
Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics. Translated from the German by G. T. Thompson, Harold Knight, vol. 1, part 2 (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1956), pp. 340–44. For Barth of course, Christianity is the only true religion and the name of Jesus alone is salvific.
Alfred Bloom, Shinran’s Doctrine of Pure Grace (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1965), p. 88.
Kenneth Ch’en, op. cit., pp. 357–64; Chang Chung-yuan, trans., Original Teachings of Ch’an Buddhism (New York: Grove Press, 1969), Foreword, p. vi.
Consult David Snellgrove, Indo-Tibetan Buddhism: Indian Buddhists and their Tibetan Successors (Boston: Shambhala, 1987), especially vol. 2, ch. 5.
Culla-Vagga, English translation adapted from Henry Clarke Warren, Buddhism in Translation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1896; New York: Atheneum reprint, 1963), p. 444. I have substituted ‘monk’ for ‘priest’ and ‘nun’ for ‘priestess’. These terms have become standard in the twentieth century. Warren’s translation is older.
Nancy Shuster Barnes, ‘Buddhism’, in Arvind Sharma, ed. Women in World Religions (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), 107.
Leon Hurvitz, trans., Scripture of the Lotus Blossom of the Fine Dharma (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), p. 201.
Consult Diana Y. Paul, Women in Buddhism: Images of the Feminine in Mahayana Tradition (Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press, 1979), p. 113.
Jerrold Schecter, The New Face of Buddha: Buddhism and Political Power in Southeast Asia (New York: Coward-McCann Inc., 1967), ch. 9;
William R. LaFleur, Buddhism (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1988), pp. 137–43.
E. Dale Saunders, Buddhism in Japan: With an Outline of Its Origins in India (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971).
Frederick Francke, The Buddha-Eye: An Anthology of the Kyoto School (New York: Crossroad, 1982).
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© 1993 Julia Ching
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Ching, J. (1993). Mysticism and Devotion: Buddhism Becomes Chinese. In: Chinese Religions. Themes in Comparative Religion. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22904-8_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22904-8_9
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