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Chapter 10 This Foreign Religion of Ours: Lingbao Views of Buddhist Translation Stephen R. Bokenkamp When I was asked to participate in the discussion that has resulted in this volume, I planned to contribute a continuation of Erik Zürcher’s influential “Buddhist Influence on Early Taoism.”1 I wanted to rehearse, and hopefully improve on, Zürcher’s findings concerning what the Daoist Lingbao scriptures might tell us about Chinese reception of Buddhist cosmology, morality, narrative styles, and the like. The early Lingbao scriptures, composed around 400 CE in the environs of present-day Nanjing, contained, Zürcher found, the “lion’s share of Buddhist loans.”2 The uses to which Lingbao Daoists put this material show the oscillation between the poles of attraction and repulsion that greets a powerful “other” in matters of religious and cultural identity.3 Used judiciously, these scriptures might, I had hoped to show, reveal one strand of the multifarious early medieval Chinese views of India and its most widely exported religion. While that project might have worked out well, I was soon sidetracked. As I searched through the texts, I found myself having first to confront the ways each of these reconfigured Buddhist elements was always explicitly or implicitly tied to the idea of kalpa cycles. The Lingbao scriptures, like earlier Daoist texts, claim to be translations of celestial originals. Unlike earlier Daoist texts, though, the Lingbao scriptures present examples of the original celestial script together with their translation into humanly accessible writing. Further, the authors of the Lingbao texts accept the Buddhist idea of kalpa cycles. Thus, in their original form, the scriptures appeared first in world systems like our own, but many, many years in the past. Borrowings from other scriptural traditions, even outright plagiary, are justified in the Lingbao texts with the claim that all “later” scriptures were in fact This Foreign Religion of Ours 183 copies of Lingbao “celestial script” originals. For instance, one Lingbao scripture contains the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas of the ten directions and the names of their lands copied directly from Zhi Qian’s (fl. 220–250) Pusa benye jing. This list is followed by the explicit claim that “the Buddhas of the Ten Directions all find their source in Lingbao.”4 But references to the marvelous celestial writing claimed as the basis for the Lingbao scriptures were not limited to assertions of scriptural superiority and priority. In other passages, characterizations of celestial text are worked quite naturally into the scriptural presentation. For example, I had originally planned to write a bit about how Daoist accounts of heaven were stimulated by Buddhist models, to include the roles of Indic notions of cosmic time and of political organization . One of the most compelling Lingbao accounts of Buddhist-style chiliocosms appears in the Book of Salvation in the Numinous Writing of the Various Heavens.5 The opening pages of this text take the form of a dialogue between the highest deity of the Lingbao scriptures, the Celestial Worthy of Primordial Origins (Yuanshi tianzun), and the lords of heavenly kingdoms in the five directions. In each case the Celestial Worthy questions why there is no suffering or death in the kingdom. The answers vary, but uniformly trace the tranquility of the kingdom and the longevity of its inhabitants to the appearance of the Lingbao scriptures . Take the description of the paradise lands of the south: This kingdom has a Hall of Penetrating Yang in which there is a pool of refining fire. The citizens visit this pool three times a year to refine themselves with the flaming essences and thereby render their bodies decorous and lustrous. In this way, there are [residents] who never age. . . . The origins of this pool of refining fire of the Hall of Penetrating Yang goes back to the first appearance of the Perfected Script of Lingbao. Together with the Lofty and Great Sage, the Jade Thearch, I refined the yet illegible graphs of the Perfected Script in the fire [of this pool] so that the graphs’ shapes shone forth.6 In short, what is said in this scripture about marvelous buildings, parks, groves of seven-treasure trees, and even the health of each locale’s celestial inhabitants is always explicitly caused by the wondrousness of the scriptures. Surveying such accounts, I came to a striking conclusion. Arguably, the mere fact that Buddhism arrived in China clothed in the trappings of a complex and subtle written language that, when translated, strained the descriptive powers of...

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