Coming to Terms with Chinese Buddhism: A Reading of the Treasure Store Treatise

Introduction: Prolegomenon to the Study of Medieval Chinese Buddhist Literature

Introduction Prolegomenon to the Study of Medieval Chinese Buddhist Literature If atoms are really to explain the origin of color and smell of visible material bodies, then they cannot possess properties like color and smell. —WERNER HEISENBERG The modern study of medieval Chinese religion has been divided broadly between two camps: the sinologists and the buddhologists. While the former often ignored Buddhism, the latter tended to ignore everything but. Such proclivities are not difficult to fathom. Sinologists were predisposed, by virtue of their historical and philological training, to identify with the literati culture of the “Confucian” elite, a culture that held Buddhism to be a morally corrupting foreign intrusion. Sinologists thus felt little compunction to venture into the arcane labyrinth of Buddhist scholasticism. (This is ironic: in many respects, the Chinese pedigree of late imperial Buddhism was of greater antiquity than that of the reinvented Neo-Confucian tradition cherished by the late imperial literati.) Buddhologists, in contrast, were naturally influenced by their training in Buddhist languages, history, and doctrine as well as by the considerable weight of contemporary Japanese Buddhist scholarship. Consequently, when seeking historical and intellectual antecedents for Chinese Buddhist phenomena , they tended to look toward India rather than toward nonBuddhist China. There were, needless to say, important exceptions to this division of labor; a number of scholars, particularly those associated with the “French school,” brought the weight of their sinological talents to bear on their reading of Chinese Buddhist intellectual history. But for the most part, Anglo-American studies of Chinese Buddhism, particularly the Buddhism of the clerisy, have been dominated by buddhological models.1 The sinologists and buddhologists did have one thing in common: they both regarded Chinese Buddhism as the result of a protracted encounter between Indian Buddhism and Chinese civilization, an 1 encounter that led to the sinification of Buddhist teachings and practices. Chinese Buddhism was rendered, in effect, the mongrel offspring of an accidental, if not serendipitous, marriage whose progeny was never granted full citizenship in China. Yet on reflection, the notion of an encounter between India and China may be historically and hermeneutically misleading. The Chinese were fully cognizant of the Indian origins of Buddhism, but their actual exposure to South Asian clerics or Sanskrit texts was severely limited throughout medieval times. The Chinese “encounter” or “dialogue” with Buddhism took place almost exclusively among the Chinese themselves, on Chinese soil, in the Chinese language. This study is, in part, an argument for treating Chinese Buddhism as the legitimate, if misunderstood, scion of sinitic culture. Whatever else it may be, Buddhism is the product of Buddhists, and the Buddhists in the case at hand were Chinese. Background to the Book This volume emerged from my attempt to understand a single medieval Chinese treatise of uncertain origin. I came upon the text quite by accident, while glancing through volume 45 of the Taish& edition of the Buddhist canon. Tucked away in that volume is a little-known work titled the Treasure Store Treatise (Pao-tsang lun
 ), attributed to the fifth-century exegete Seng-chao
 (374–414). I would, no doubt, have quickly passed the text by were it not for the opening lines: “Emptiness that can be deemed empty is not true emptiness. Form that can be deemed form is not true form.” These lines were immediately recognizable as a Buddhist pastiche of the opening passage of the Tao-te ching
 : “The Way that can be talked about is not the constant Way. The name that can be named is not the constant name.” My first reaction was to consider the Treasure Store Treatise passage a rather tawdry literary gambit. As I continued reading, this initial and somewhat hasty judgment seemed on target; the text appeared to be little more than a confused muddle of Juist, Taoist, and Buddhist ideas, expressed in unnecessarily turgid prose, with little obvious literary cohesion or philosophical subtlety. When I learned that modern scholars consider the attribution to Seng-chao to be apocryphal, I felt my intuition confirmed. Surely the attribution to the great exegete and disciple of Kum4raj∏va alone, and not intrinsic literary merit, led to the preservation of the Treasure Store Treatise and its inclusion in the canon. 2 Introduction As it turned out, my original estimation of the text was not shared by the Chinese Buddhist exegetical tradition. A little research soon revealed that the Treasure Store Treatise was held...