Absolute Delusion, Perfect Buddhahood: The Rise and Fall of a Chinese Heresy (review)

Due to a series of perfunctory suppressions and the subordination of its literature into the apocryphal section of the scriptural catalogs, the literary legacy of the medieval Chinese Buddhist Three Levels (Sanjie ) tradition and its charismatic founder Xinxing (540-594) had been all but lost to normative Buddhism until some twenty fragments of texts were rediscovered among the Dunhuang materials by Yabuki Keiki and brought to light in his groundbreaking Sangaikyô no kenkyû at the beginning of the last century (1927; reprint, Iwanami, 1974). Since then a number of other fragments have appeared in Japan and elsewhere. The end of the last century saw the translated publication of Ochiai Toshinori's The Manuscripts of Nanatsu-dera: A Recently Discovered Treasure-House in Downtown Nagoya (Italian School of East Asian Studies, 1991). This was followed by Nishimoto Teruma's massive study also called Sangaikyô no kenkyû (Shunjûsha, 1991), which critically analyzes previous Japanese scholarship, introduces Sanjie materials found in Dunhuang collections housed in Taiwan and Russia, and takes up Sanjie monastic regulations for the first time. In all, there are now some one hundred articles by Japanese scholars, Ôtani Shôshin and Tsukamoto Zenryû notably among them, on various aspects of the Three Levels movement, its literature, doctrines, and practices. The West has also come to know something about Sanjie, mainly and most recently through earlier efforts by Jamie Hubbard and Mark E. Lewis. Yet, despite Xinxing's intriguing two-pronged doctrine of universal buddhahood and universal incorrigibility and his innovative charitable enterprise called the Inexhaustible Storehouse, for the most part the Three Levels movement has remained best known as a renegade and marginalized practice-oriented group that appeared as a mere blip in the history of the development of Buddhism in China.

Jamie Hubbard's long-awaited Absolute Delusion, Perfect Buddhahood should change that. In this carefully researched and well-articulated book—the first in a Western language—Hubbard begins the process of skillfully weaving Xinxing and his elusive Three Levels movement into the increasingly complex tapestry of medieval Chinese Buddhism.

Leaving for the future a study of the textual history of this tradition, Hubbard is interested in Xinxing's use of rhetoric, especially as it applies to decline theory and its polemical function and to its bids to secure orthodoxy and legitimate new interpretations of the teachings. As a corollary to this, and to redress the notion that the Three Levels tradition somehow materialized out of thin air and was vanquished for its heterodoxies, Hubbard takes particular care to situate Xinxing well within the mainstream of Buddhist ideas and practices of the late Northern and Southern dynasties / early Sui North China. Indeed, one of Hubbard's structural decisions most appreciated by this reviewer is that he leaves to the end speculations on why Sanjie was earmarked for sanction, the answer to which Hubbard prudently admits we do not know for sure.

Like most of the Chinese Buddhist world by the sixth century, Xinxing accepts the idea of the universal buddha-nature of sentient beings as expressed in the Nirvâna Sûtra. Again, like several of his contemporaries who were active in the north about a century following the Northern Wei purges of Buddhism (446) and who bore witness to the suppression of Buddhism during the Northern Zhou (574), Xinxing is fascinated by the fledgling decline tradition and the idea that particular times call for particular solutions. The problem for him is how to rectify the notion of universal capacity for buddhahood with decline theory, which for Xinxing signaled a complete breakdown in the human ability to distinguish truth from falsity and buddhas from blasphemers. For Xinxing is convinced that, left to their own devices and blinded by biases and prejudices, humans in the age of decline would inevitably...