religious and philosophical thought within Chinese culture to firmly establish a comprehensive system of thought. Thus Buddhism could get along with Confucianism and Taoism, absorbing and recasting the best of all philosophies, forming the particular characters of the three great streams of Chinese culture. These are the three reasons why Buddhism spread widely during the T'ang dynasty.
When beings peak in power, they wane; when things come to an extreme, they change. Therefore, the transformation and change in the direction of Buddhist studies and the Zen schools that came after the late T'ang and the Five dynasties period (906-960) were inevitable trends in cultural history. Once the beginning of the Sung dynasty had arrived, the founding rulers and ministers revered the doctrines of Confucius and Mencius, and at this point the literati (who were of course Confucian intellectuals) semiconsciously absorbed the spirit and methods developed in Buddhist studies and practice over the preceding four hundred years (since the Sui and T'ang dynasties). This stirred them to change, and they produced four schools on the study of Inner Design.
The educational methods and manners of the Study of Inner Design schools, as well as the scope of their library system, were all adapted from the formats of the Zen schools. Speaking objectively, one would have to say that the Inner Design Studies of the Sung and Ming dynasties were equivalent to a Confucianist Zen, whereas the Zen school of Buddhism was like Buddhist Confucianism and Taoism. In actuality, this similarity is not to be overestimated, since it just refers to their outward forms. If we investigate the differences and similarities among their real contents, we find considerable distinctions.
Having gone through two or three hundred years of mutual struggle for supremacy through the Northern and Southern Sung dynasties, when Zen Buddhism and Inner Design Studies came to their latter days, they both tended to decline at the same time. Zen Buddhism was adulterated by the false Zen of "silent illumination" (keeping silent) and "crazy Zen," whereas in Inner Design Studies there arose the controversy between Chu Hsi and Lu Hsiang-shan on honoring the essence of virtue and pursuing scholarship on the Way.
Once the Yuan dynasty Mongols invaded China militarily, bringing with them the Lamaism of Esoteric Buddhism, this caused the great houses of both Confucianism and Buddhism to produce disconnected, fragmentary weeds and brambles. From this point onward, three centuries of culture and education in the Ming dynasty were trapped within an atmosphere characterized either by Inner Studies of crazy Zen, or by crazy Zen of Inner Studies.
Even though Wang Yang-ming (1472-1529) appeared and founded the genuinely practical doctrine of innate knowledge and innate capacity, nevertheless, because it was neither Confucianism nor Buddhism but something in between, great problems still remained. This caused the great Confucians of the late Ming period to scorn Wang Yang-ming's teaching and hurl the criticisms that "Sages fill the streets," and "Under ordinary conditions they sit quietly and talk about the essence of mind; when they face a crisis they simply die to repay the ruler of the nation," and so on. There certainly was a reason for this criticism; it was not purely an emotional reaction. Although a genuine revival of Buddhist studies and the Zen school occurred in the beginning of China's Ch'ing dynasty, they still were not able to recover from their fall and could not become powerful because the established national policy was to use the foreign cult of Lamaism to control the western and northern borderlands.
To sum up, this simplified and compact introductory exposition should give one a general understanding of the important points in the causes and conditions of the cultural history of Buddhism and China. This synopsis is extremely terse, with many details and explanations absent because we are only introducing the flavor of overall trends. Don't be disheartened if the names of dynasties, personalities, and philosophical movements seem a little too much at present. To become a specialist in the history and influence of the Zen school in China would require deep familiarity with all of this material, but for the general reader this overview is sufficient.
CHAPTER 2
The Background of Indian Culture
Buddhist study is the content of the teaching established by Shakyamuni Buddha. In Buddhist study, the three concepts of (1) Buddhist teachings, (2) Buddhist principles and methods, and (3) the process of learning Buddhism each have different meanings. Buddhist teachings are the teachings left by the Buddha, which are of a religious nature. Buddhist principles and methods include the philosophical and academic aspects of Buddhist study as well as all its methods of seeking realization. Learning Buddhism means to actually carry out the teachings left by the Buddha, studying in accord with his methods of guidance.
Chinese scholarship has a proverbial saying that "Buddhist study is as vast as the misty ocean," from which one can imagine the richness of its content. So if we are to introduce the important points of Buddhist study simply and very briefly from an academic point of view, we must first understand the cultural background of ancient India.
When we bring up this subject, we have to recognize that for thousands of years Indian culture and thought evolved circuitously in the context of religion and philosophy, and in light of the practical cultivation methods used by various religions and philosophies to attain realization. The teachings in present-day India are no exception. All of India's historical culture has gone through periods of religious struggle, ideological conflict, and inequality among social classes. And when foreign powers invaded the country beginning in the seventeenth century, at all times and in all places they used the contradictions in Indian religious thought as a method of control.
The doctrines of ancient Indian religions, including the religious and philosophical ideologies around the time of Shakyamuni Buddha, were so many and various that they could in fact be a blueprint for a comparative religion and comparative philosophy of the world. Usually discussions of Indian philosophy mention six teachers to explain what the six major schools of philosophy were like, but actually in the translated literature of Chinese Buddhist studies it often says that there were as many as ninety-six different schools of philosophical thought. Although the entire body of information is inadequate, fragmentary accounts still contain much valuable material. However, international discourse on Indian philosophy or Buddhism has been influenced by European academics since the seventeenth century and has never considered Chinese Buddhist resource materials important, thus causing both Chinese and foreign scholars to erase the value of Chinese Buddhist studies with a single stroke. This is very regrettable and indeed lamentable.
In sum, ancient Indian philosophy and religion already addressed all such topics as the existence or nonexistence of a supreme being, monism and pluralism, idealism and materialism, and so on. As far as Buddhism is concerned, by about the middle of the Sung dynasty it had entered completely into China due to the infiltration of foreign teachings, and had become Chinese Buddhism; after that the evolution of Indian cultural history has nothing at all to do with Buddhism. This point calls for special explanation so as to avoid misunderstanding.
The Situations and Political Conditions of Ancient India
The time of Shakyamuni roughly corresponds to China's Spring and Autumn era (722-484 B.C.), but the matter of exactly when he lived has been a bone of contention among Chinese and foreign scholars past and present. From the point of view of world cultural history, at this stage, in the course of no more than a single century of historical evolution in the East and West, welter of confusion that it was, a succession of philosophers emerged, a magnificent array. In China there were people such as Lao-tzu and Confucius, India had Shakyamuni's community of philosophers, and in Greece there were individuals such as Socrates and Plato. All were people whose influence on human civilization was to last for thousands of years.
At that time, China operated under a feudal system, but
