India in the Chinese Imagination: Myth, Religion, and Thought

Chapter 3. Indic Influences on Chinese Mythology: King Yama and His Acolytes as Gods of Destiny

Chapter 3 Indic Influences on Chinese Mythology: King Yama and His Acolytes as Gods of Destiny Bernard Faure Indian influence on Chinese culture is usually seen through the prism of Buddhism . For all its foreignness, Buddhism was probably one of the aspects of Indian thought and culture that was easiest to adopt by and adapt to Chinese consciousness. Indeed, as a philosophical and moral teaching, it had some obvious Chinese counterparts (and potential rivals).1 However, as Rolf Stein and Michel Strickmann have argued, an important aspect of Buddhism’s appeal for the Chinese was its mythology, and in particular its demonology.2 The latter was also its most “Indic” characteristic, although it has been largely ignored by Buddhist scholarship. It is well known, of course, that Indian Buddhism borrowed much of its pantheon from Brahmanism and Hinduism. This is even more true in the case of Tantric Buddhism, which developed in India during the sixth and seventh centuries, and was imported to China in the eighth century, then to Japan during the ninth century. Indeed, Strickmann has argued that Tantrism had a much deeper influence on Chinese religion than earlier studies, too dependent on Japanese views, have acknowledged. He went so far as claiming that much of Daoism, as well as popular Chinese rituals such as the “Land and Water Assemblies,” cannot be understood without Tantric Buddhism.3 So, in a sense, Tantric Buddhism is probably that place where Indian influence is the most visible—it is, as it were, the most “Indianized” (in the sense of “Hinduized”) form of Buddhism—inasmuch as Buddhism was also a reaction against Vedic-Brahmanic religious culture. We have become more aware of the danger of a teleological approach that takes Japanese Buddhism as its goal (telos). This teleological approach, however, Indic Influences on Chinese Mythology 47 may also have some advantages: since cultural influence is essentially a selective process, the image of later developments in a different culture—inasmuch as they are no longer seen as a telos—also reveals what has not been selected, and suggests how things could have been otherwise. It also allows us to counter another type of teleological history based on the current state of Chinese Buddhism, a modernist view that tends to reject the ritualistic and “magical” aspects of Buddhism as “superstitions.” The case at hand, the cult of King Yama (Yanluo wang), provides a good illustration of this model of “roads taken and not taken.” Its evolution in Japan, on the other hand, shows us the resilience, in medieval esoteric texts, of certain aspects that were all but erased from the Chinese records. In the case of Japanese esoteric Buddhism in particular, we are fortunate to have a large commentarial literature, whereas the canonical literature in the Taishō edition of the Buddhist canon practically stops with Yixing (683–727), Vajrabodhi (662–732), and Amoghavajra (705–774). The logic of Tantric ritual is that of worldly benefits obtained by bringing deities into the ritual arena. It usually implies that the beneficiary is still alive, and differs in this respect from funerary rituals that imply a departed beneficiary and a ritual journey to the other world (for instance to “break the gates of Hell” and deliver the damned). Thus, its main tendency is quite different from that found in texts on funerary rituals, which are looking at a post-mortem situation and trying to alleviate Yama’s judgment and the ensuing punishment. In this “worldly” conception , the main punishment is the shortening of a person’s lifespan, and the ritual aims consequently at extending his or her life. Of course, the two approaches are not mutually exclusive, and a concern for “hungry ghosts” (Skt. pretas) can also be found in Chinese Tantric texts.4 Indeed, much of the discourse on Yama is about the afterlife and the most popular texts dealt with the story of the Arhat Mulian (Skt. Maudgalyāyana) rescuing his mother or with the Ghost Festival (Yulanpen hui).5 As Stephen Teiser has shown, the Yulanpen literature spares us no details about the horrors of the Buddhist Hells. Tantric texts, on the other hand, are more concerned with Death itself, and they insist on the judicial function of Yama and his acolytes. But the first mention of these acolytes (as “companion deities”) is really about ritually rescuing the dying from Death itself, from Yama’s grip, rather than alleviating death’s aftermath.6 It is this “this-worldly” version of that religious system that...