As we've already seen the second period of major paradigm shift in Chinese cultural and political history is the emergence of Daoism —the native religion—and the introduction of Buddhism into China, and these two religions are going to massively change China. We saw how already in the proceeding period the Confucian canon had been established. In this period, there will be a Buddhist and a Daoist canon whichemerge in which the state takes a very direct interest in, so that at the very end of this period we have the so-called <i>sanjiao heyi</i> 三教合一, that is to say, the unity of the three religions as promulgated and propagated by the state but also in society. So in order to look more closely at what really distinguishes this period from say the Warring States period or the Song-Yuan period that will follow, we have to look at Buddhism and Daoism comparatively. So we look at their rituals, we look at their scriptures, we look at their literature, we look at their sacred geography. So we'll start with the scriptures, and the chapter that we'll be working with is by Sylvie Hureau, who teaches at the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris and the name, of the title of her chapter is "Translations, Apocrypha, —we'll talk about that in a moment—and the Emergence of the Buddhist Canon." The first centuries of Buddhism in China are inseparable from a long list of foreign translators: Lokaksema, Dharmaraksa, Kumarajiva, Dharmaksema, and so forth and so on. Through these translations, the foundations of all the major schools of Buddhism were laid, and ideas that were hitherto unthinkable were expressed in Chinese, for example, on the perfection of wisdom. You use the word wisdom in Chinese, you immediately think of the word <i>zhihui</i> 智慧 and you hear the words <i>zhihui</i> and anybody who knows anything about Chinese cultural history immediately thinks Buddhism. Okay, so the perfection of wisdom —a whole literature on the perfection of wisdom— and on Buddha's former lives. So the idea that the Buddha had former lives and reincarnation and this then infiltrates its way into the general Chinese mentality of how they looked at themselves as subjects, subjects now who are individuals, who have a previous life that explains their present life, and in their present life they can impact their future life, but the model for this is the Buddha himself, who has previous lives. One of the most important concepts of all is "the Buddha's womb," <i>rulai zang</i> 如來藏 in Chinese, because it evokes "the existence of a potential Buddha latent within each being." And when I make that statement, I always refer to the idea of democracy, that is to say the idea that all people are equal is clearly key to a long-term emergence of the people on the stage of history and therefore to any concept that we can have in present times of democracy. So this idea of "a potential Buddha latent within each being" is extremely important, and we'll see right through the following chapters of Chinese cultural history how this continued to impact Chinese thinking, including the thinking of the Confucian elite. There were sermons attributed to the Buddha, doctrinal treatises, sūtras of meditation —all forms that didn't exist before in China—and "sūtras from the Great Vehicle, Mahayana Buddhism, that explained the so-called bodhisattvas' rules, addressed to laymen, laywomen, monks and nuns." So there's a separation between monks and nuns on the one hand, lay persons on the other hand, but there are rules that can be transmitted to each of these four groups. And all four of these groups "are described as bodhisattvas." What's a bodhisattva? A bodhisattva is somebody who in fact is all ready to become a buddha, that is to say an awakened person, but who says: no, I'm not going to go into <i>nirvana</i>, I'm not going to go into extinction, I'm going to continue to be present so that I can help to <i>pudu zhongsheng</i> 普渡眾生, save all beings. This is the key, core concept that makes Buddhism a universal religion such as China did not have before and did not have after, so the idea of universal salvation is straight from Buddhism. "By the end of the Six Dynasties, the corpus of Chinese Buddhist texts amounted to more than 2000 titles." The plethora of translations was soon joined by a host of native productions often referred to as "apocrypha." Texts like the <i>Sūtra of the Divine Formula for Pacifying a House</i> 安宅神咒經 used incantations for the "protection" of houses and this practice was then borrowed, like so many other Buddhist practices, by the Daoists. Other apocryphal texts, that is to say texts written directly in Chinese and not translated —we will talk more about that in a moment— responded to the Daoist idea of the transformation of the barbarians, the <i>huahu</i> 化胡 myth, that said that Laozi at the end of his life went west and became the Buddha and therefore the Buddha was just a latter-day incarnation of Laozi, meaning of course that Daoism was superior to Buddhism. Well, one of the "apocrypha," that is to say one of the texts written directly in Chinese and not translated, was called the <i>Sūtra of the Questions of Kongji</i> 空寂所問經 and it answered by saying —this <i>huahu</i> idea, this transformation of Laozi into the Buddha— by saying that "Laozi, Confucius and [Confucius's favorite disciple] Yan Hui 顏回 were all disciples of the Buddha" —so it turns the thing upside down— "[who] were sent to China in order to civilize it." So it's not China now that is the center of civilization going out and civilizing <i>tianxia</i> 天下 all under heaven, it's the other way around; it's the Indian religion, Buddhism, coming to civilize China. And Emperor Wu of the Liang dynasty, to whom we've already referred, who was the greatest Buddhist monarch in Chinese history, "used the argument [of this text in Chinese] to justify [of course] the superiority of Buddhism over Daoism." And this is one of the characteristics of this entire period, that there are debates at court both in North and South China as to which of the "three teachings"—Confucianism, Buddhism, or Daoism— was superior and therefore should be ranked first in the statutes of the state. Some of the most interesting native Buddhist scriptures —the so-called "apocrypha"— are eschatological in nature, that is to say they talk about the end times of what is called the "counterfeit law." In other words, the law—the dharma— will no longer be active and it will be a counterfeit law <i>xiangfa</i> 像法 that replaces it and this will in turn "[lead] to all kinds of calamities." That's why they speak of the end times —the apocalyptic vision of the end of the world. And this goes as very often with apocalyptic literature about end times with the idea of "the imminent arrival of a messiah who will save beings." So this cannot but remind us of the history of early Christianity in the Roman Empire. One such messiah is the bodhisattva —once again that term, that key term, bodhisattva— Yueguang 月光, which means moonlight: "In a translation which would deserve to be classified as apocryphal," says Sylvie Hureau, "[Moonlight] was assimilated in rather explicit terms to the emperor Wen 文 of the Sui." Who is Emperor Wen of the Sui? He is the man who reunified China in the year 589 after nearly 400 years of division. Okay? So here we see how that convergence of religion and politics on the figure of the Son of Heaven is going to be operative also in Buddhism. "One answer to the decline of the Law" or the Dharma "was the observance of strict discipline," promoted in yet another apocryphal text called <i>The Sūtra of Brahma's Net</i>. "Healing practices"—which we've seen from the very beginning are absolutely central to all forms of religious practice in China and not only in China— "are also dealt with in [an apocryphal text called] the <i>Sūtra on the Way of Preserving Life and Saving Beings from Sufferings and Ordeals</i> 救護身命濟人病苦厄經." In a way, the most important text of all of an apocryphal —that is to say native Chinese origin— is called the <i>Renwang jing</i> 仁王經 or <i>Sūtra of the Benevolent Kings</i>. It became the most frequently recited scripture for the protection of the state. Just a moment ago, we've talked about a sūtra for the protection of the house on the level of the family, but here we're talking about the entire state and of course the dynasty. According to Hureau, "It provided rites to protect the state and the idea [that] the ruling class was the only guarantor of the text once the Law of the Buddha, together with monks and lay believers, had disappeared." So clearly a social dimension here—a class dimension—to this text. "As for the clergy [themselves], the text proclaimed their independence from political power and their capacity to perform the rites of state protection." So here we see once again that ambiguity: on the one hand supporting the ruling class, being related to the dynastic founder Wendi, who is associated with the Buddha and Buddhism, and at the same time an independent clergy and an independent church which is independent. So, religious independent from political power. The early Buddhists were also avid cataloguers. Before the end of the fifth century—so it's been only in China for now about three centuries— there were already "at least ten partial catalogues," lists of the scriptures that belong in the canon. The first major catalogue to survive was that compiled by the monk Sengyou 僧祐, whose dates are 445 to 518. He was counselor of the emperor Mingdi, who reigned right at the end of the fifth century. Sengyou's collection of notes concerning the publication of the Tripiṭaka, in Chinese <i>Chu sanzang jiji</i> 出三藏記集, "quoted approximately 2200 works in 4600 or 4800 [<i>juan</i> or] scrolls." That's how the Chinese books were then presented: in rolled-up scrolls. Once again, the emperor Liang Wudi created the first official canon in the year 515. Imperial involvement in canon creation also meant copying on a vast scale —I would say an unimaginable scale— and the details that I'm about to give you all come from the Chen dynasty from, starting with Chen Wudi, who reigned from 557 to 559, to Xuandi, who reigned from 568 to [5]82, so all the end of the sixth century. So, the first one had twelve copies of the entire canon made, the following emperor had fifty copies made, and finally Emperor Xuan another twelve. So the copying by the state represents of course an investment, but it also represents its efforts to propagate Buddhism as validated by the state —as validated state doctrine and church practice. From the Sui dynasty on —again I remind you that it's the Sui dynasty that reunifies China in the year 589— from then on, there were only official, imperially sponsored catalogs and canons. In other words, the state takes over what in the West —in the context of say Christianity— would be conceived of as primarily belonging to the purview of the church itself. So the church is here clearly under the state, with the state —the dynasty—in charge of catalogs of the canon, deciding what goes in the canon and what does not. The attribution of doubtful scriptures <i>yijing</i> 疑經 —this is one of the categories in all of the catalogs—doubtful scriptures, in other words, not sure they're really from India, not sure they really were the words of the Buddha; maybe they were apocryphal works, which in Chinese is sometimes called <i>weijing</i> 偽經 fake works. But one of the ways of getting around this loss of literature —because of course if they were considered to be fake scriptures they would be excluded from the canon— so, one of the ways that Buddhists got around this was to attribute these scriptures to "known authors," like famous authors like Kumārajīva, and this enabled many such works to "escape the drastic selection carried out by the author of the great official canon of the Tang [dynasty], the <i>Catalog of Buddhist Teachings [Compiled during] the Kaiyuan Era</i> 開元釋教錄 "—that is to say in the middle of the [eighth] century: it was "published in 730," this massive dynastically sponsored canon of the Buddhist—the Buddhist church. Okay. Exclusion from that canon led to the disappearance of many texts. Like cataloging and determination of the contours of the canon, translation very quickly became an imperial undertaking. When the great Kumārajīva, who's lived from around 344 to 413, was befriended by the ruler of the Later Qin —someone called Yao Xing 姚興, who reigned from 394 to 416— Yao Xing offered Kumārajīva a park outside the city of Chang'an—today's Xi'an, its capital —in order to establish there the large community centered on Kumārajīva. The emperor himself took part in the translation of various texts, of wisdom literature, "[himself reading] the preceding translation," because before Kumārajīva many of these texts had already been translated and now being re-translated by Kumārajīva. So the emperor himself is "reading the preceding translation [and examining] the additions and the lacks, while [Kumārajīva is] holding the manuscript [written] in the foreign language and explaining it orally." Orally: hold on to that word, because we're going to see how important that concept of orality is, as opposed to the written in the Daoist canon and scriptures. Starting in the Tang dynasty, dates 618 to 907, the emperor had to give his benediction before a translation could even be undertaken, and translations took place in a palace building. So once again, we see here how the state comes to control the entire process of the production of the literature and its recognition as legitimate.
