Chinese Mahayana Buddhism
May 2006
When I turn my mind to the theme of Chinese Mahayana Buddhism, I find myself at a loss as to know where to begin. Chinese Mahayana Buddhism is so vast, so diverse, and profound, that it hardly seems possible to do it justice in a column of this length. So I suppose the best I can do is to offer up some of my personal impressions of Chinese Mahayana Buddhism to share with my readers.
Firstly, I'd like to remind everyone that Chinese Mahayana Buddhism is as old as any form of Mahayana Buddhism. The simple fact that the great Perfection of Wisdom Discourse (Prajnaparamitasutra) was already translated into Chinese in the second century CE. is enough to establish this point. The other important thing to remember about Chinese Mahayana Buddhism is that unlike the Buddhism of almost every other country, with the exception of India, in the case of China, Buddhism was introduced into an immense, highly civilized and sophisticated cultural environment where the indigenous literature, philosophy and religion were already well developed. This meant that Buddhism in China had to compete and compromise with a pre-existing intellectual and cultural reality. This is not to say that in the countries of south-east and central Asia, Buddhism was introduced into a vacuum, but nowhere did it encounter the complexity of deep-seated ancient traditions that it found in China. This has made Chinese Mahayana Buddhism one of the most fascinating and marvellous fields for the exploration and admiration of scholars and devotees alike.
The first images that come to my mind when I think of Chinese Mahayana Buddhism are those of the intrepid pilgrim Scholars - men like Fa- hsien, Hsuan-tsang and I-tsing - who braved the terrors of immense deserts, vast oceans, bandits and pirates, heat and cold, to journey to far away India in search of the Holy Dharma. Imagine them traveling for years enduring tremendous hardships in order to finally reach their goal , the holy land (Aryadesha) where they visited the famous places of pilgrimage, like the sites of the Buddha's birth, His enlightenment and so forth and studied at the great monastic universities such as Nalanda. They were fantastic figures - the stuff of which legends are made. They not only returned to China with great treasures of texts and learning, but also furnished modern scholars with some of the best accounts of the state of Buddhism in the countries of Central and South-east Asia as well as in India itself in those long ago times.
Then I think of the wonderful clarity and brilliance of the Ch'an Masters, who with a single sentence or simple gesture were able to sweep away the darkness of ignorance and throw open the door to liberation. Who can ever forget Hui-neng, the illiterate wood chopper who upon hearing a single verse from the Diamond Sutra, threw down his bundle of wood and immediately entered a monastery where he served in the kitchen pounding rice. The Chinese translation of the Diamond Sutra, incidentally, is the oldest dated printed text in existence today. It was made in the ninth century and predates the Gutenberg Bible by more than five hundred years. But the story of Hui-neng did not end in the kitchen!
Not long after entering the monastery, a contest for the succession to the patriarchal robe and bowl of the Ch'an tradition took place. The favourite to succeed was the senior disciple of the fifth patriarch who composed the following verse to establish the level of his understanding: "The body is a bodhi tree, and the mind a mirror bright. Daily, we polish it so that no dust may alight." Then on the very next day, appeared Hui-neng's dramatic reply which was to make him the sixth patriarch: "bodhi has nothing to do with trees, nor is the mind a mirror bright. Since from the beginning, everything is empty, where might dust alight?" Surely Hui-neng and those great masters who came before him as well as those who followed after him gave expression to the subtlest and deepest truth of the Mahayana.
Then, I think of the warmth and beauty of the Pure Land tradition which promises so much for seemingly so little! Actually, those who denigrate the Pure Land practice and consider it too simple minded and shallow are very much mistaken. The Pure Land practice is a genuine vehicle for achieving liberation and Buddhahood. I can still remember the times I spent in a Chinese Mahayana monastery where every morning I woke to the wonderful sound of the chanting of the name of the Buddha, Amitabha. The sound of the chanting of hundreds of devotees ebbed and flowed like the sound of the ocean and it never failed to lift my heart!
When Buddhism came to China two thousand years ago, both Buddhism and China gained something unique and precious. China gained a universal religion, and Buddhism gained one of the greatest of the world's civilizations. Following the trials and tribulations of imperial decline, colonial infringement and communist dictatorship, we all now look to China to take once again its rightful place as the greatest Mahayana Buddhist civilization in the world.