Rebirth as an Animal in Early Medieval Buddhism and Daoism

The doctrine of rebirth, particularly rebirth as an animal, was for early medieval Chinese one of the most difficult Buddhist doctrines to accept. This article explores the influence of pre-Buddhist Chinese ideas concerning the human-animal continuum on elaborations in tales of rebirth as an animal that appeared in apocryphal Buddhist scriptures likely written in China and in a late sixth-century Daoist scripture. I argue that this Daoist scripture borrowed Buddhist formulas explaining rebirth through the medium of a confession text authored by the Buddhist monks surrounding Liang Wudi 梁武帝 (r. 502–549), the first Chinese emperor to adopt the Buddhist religion. These texts elaborate a karmic hierarchy of beings, extending from the most loathsome of animals to the most exalted of humans. Thus these texts elucidate the social and political utility of the idea of animal rebirth for the religious writers who presented it to the ruling elite.

䷃锣:

轉世爲動物是中國中古早期最受抵觸的佛教觀念之一。本文探討古代人與動物之間的鬆散邊界及其對佛教偽經與一部六世紀晚期道經中轉世爲動物敘事的影響,並認爲這部道經模仿了梁武帝治下僧人撰成懺悔文中的輪迴觀,最後對階層式的輪迴概念及其社會政治作用加以闡述。