Ancestors and Anxiety: Daoism and the Birth of Rebirth in China

Postscript

Postscript This book, while it deals with the Chinese reception and deployment of the Buddhist ideas of rebirth, karma, and samsara, is not finally about Chinese Buddhism. Rather, as I have tried to make clear at each stage, the texts we have examined are not Buddhist. Further, the “Buddhism” that appears in them is not an accurate, historical reflection of the faces of Chinese Buddhism, but a projection of the authors, who sometimes construe the Buddhism of their compatriots as “other” and sometimes ignore it altogether. And yet, I have argued, the story our authors tell is all the more valuable for that. These struggles beyond the walls of the monastery with ideas introduced by Buddhism provide us with a very different picture than that presented in Buddhist writings. While I cannot hope to have dislodged the prevailing scholarly notion that Buddhist ideas easily swept all before them in a sort of “Buddhist conquest of China,” I do hope to have brought new voices into the conversation and to have introduced novel ways to recover these forgotten voices. I have argued that it will not do to continue searching for the Chinese reception of Buddhist ideas only in texts specifically marked as Buddhist, in those writings assembled in Buddhist accounts of the adoption of their faith, or in philosophical works.1 Engagement with the new notions surrounding re193 1. I am thinking here primarily of the Japanese scholars such as Tsukamoto Zenryu, Nakajima RyÜzÖ, MichihataYoshihide, and those who follow their lead, who take the trea- birth took place on the individual level, within the context of families, and was subject to all the evasions, negotiations, and reconfigurations we have charted, and many more we have not. To keep this locus of change firmly in mind, I began with the idea that the texts I assembled are “arguments” of various sorts, and, adopting rubrics from Campany, portrayed them as “externalist statements,” arguments that function to set the ideas of a speaker or writer in opposition to certain prevailing societal values and presuppositions. I argued that these externalist statements do not simply equate with belief systems , but represent one of the many possible cultural repertoires.2 Thus, the ways that medieval Chinese made their dead to talk, like other sorts of statements, were meant to answer precise questions and concerns and to address specific anxieties. These motives are most often to be found not in abstract systems of thought or doctrines, but in the quotidian conditions of those making the statements, and they are more often personal and familial than ideological. In the case of those who animated Su Shao and Guo Fan, who argued for a specific configuration of the underworld bureaucracy (one that would privilege their relatives and serve their own interests), the “others ” who held different views are easily imagined, and the differences between the two stances rather slight. Primarily at issue was a matter of personnel rather than fundamental structures. As we learned from the 318 debate over hun-summoning burials, however, these seemingly slight differences could have for those involved immediate, and dire, real-world consequences. But, at the same time, these positionings can tell us something of how segments of Chinese society received and deployed Buddhist ideas of rebirth . All of these accounts of the underworld were composed well after ideas of rebirth were rather widely known in Chinese society. None of 194 Postscript tises, records of debate, and correspondence between Buddhist monks and the laity, all collected in such Buddhist works as Sengyou’s Hongming ji (T 2102, 52:1–97), to be an accurate record of China’s adoption of the Buddhist faith. While their work contains much of value, in this case they are, it seems to me, merely reading the record left for them to find. 2. Several recent studies have emphasized the ways in which cultures are never simple or unitary. Every culture offers a range of possibilities, and actors tend to draw promiscuously on this “toolkit” of sometimes conflicting repertoires in justifying and describing their actions. See Ann Swidler, Talk of Love: How Culture Matters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), esp. 24–40; and Robert F. Campany, “The Meanings of Cuisines of Transcendence in Late Classical and Early Medieval China,” T’oung Pao 91 (2005): 1–57. them mention it at all. In fact, the only references we find in them to Buddhism are ornamental and...