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Chinese Buddhism
The very name given to Buddhism offers important clues about the way that the tradition has come to be defined in China. Buddhism is often called Fojiao, literally meaning "the teaching (jiao) of the "uddha (Fo).'' Buddhism thus appears to be a member of the same class as Confucianism and Daoism: the three teachings are Rujiao ("teaching of the scholars'' or Confucianism), Daojiao ("teaching of the Dao'' or Daoism), and Fojiao ("teaching of the "uddha or Buddhism). But there is an interesting difference here, one that requires close attention to language.
As semantic units in Chinese, the words Ru and Dao work differently than does Fo. The word Ru refers to a group of people and the word Dao refers to a concept, but the word Fo does not make literal sense in Chinese. Instead it represents a sound, a word with no semantic value that in the ancient language was pronounced as "bud,'' like the beginning of the Sanskrit word "Buddha The meaning of the Chinese term derives from the fact that it refers to a foreign sound. In Sanskrit the word "Buddha means "one who has achieved enlightenment,'' one who has "awakened'' to the true nature of human existence.
Rather than using any of the Chinese words that mean "enlightened one,'' Buddhists in China have chosen to use a foreign word to name their teaching, much as native speakers of English refer to the religion that began in India not as "the religion of the enlightened one,'' but rather as "Buddhism,'' often without knowing precisely what the word ""uddha means. Referring to Buddhism in China as Fojiao involves the recognition that this teaching, unlike the other two, originated in a foreign land. Its strangeness, its non-native origin, its power are all bound up in its name.
Considered from another angle, the word "uddha also accentuates the ways in which Buddhism in its Chinese context defines a distinctive attitude toward experience. Buddha--enlightened ones--are unusual because they differ from other, unenlightened individuals and because of the truths to which they have awakened. Most people live in profound ignorance, which causes immense suffering. "uddhas, by contrast, see the true nature of reality. Such propositions, of course, were not advanced in a vacuum. They were articulated originally in the context of traditional Indian cosmology in the first several centuries B.C.E., and as Buddhism began to trickle haphazardly into China in the first centuries of the Common Era, Buddhist teachers were faced with a dilemma.
To make their teachings about the "uddha understood to a non-Indian audience, they often began by explaining the understanding of human existence--the problem, as it were--to which Buddhism provided the answer. Those basic elements of the early Indian world view are worth reviewing here. In that conception, all human beings are destined to be reborn in other forms, human and nonhuman, over vast stretches of space and time. While time in its most abstract sense does follow a pattern of decline, then renovation, followed by a new decline, and so on, still the process of reincarnation is without beginning or end.
Life takes six forms: at the top are gods, demigods, and human beings, while animals, hungry ghosts, and hell beings occupy the lower rungs of the hierarchy. Like the gods of ancient Greece, the gods of Buddhism reside in the heavens and lead lives of immense worldly pleasure. Unlike their Greek counterparts, however, they are without exception mortal, and at the end of a very long life they are invariably reborn lower in the cosmic scale. Hungry ghosts wander in search of food and water yet are unable to eat or drink, and the denizens of the various hells suffer a battery of tortures, but they will all eventually die and be reborn again.
The logic that determines where one will be reborn is the idea of _karma_. Strictly speaking the Sanskrit word karma means "deed'' or "action.'' In its relevant sense here it means that every deed has a result: morally good acts lead to good consequences, and the commission of evil has a bad result. Applied to the life of the individual, the law of karma means that the circumstances an individual faces are the result of prior actions. Karma is the regulating idea of a wide range of good works and other Buddhist practices.
The wisdom to which Buddha awaken is to see that this cycle of existence (say msmara_ in Sanskrit, comprising birth, death, and rebirth) is marked by impermanence, unsatisfactory, and lack of a permanent self. It is impermanent because all things, whether physical objects, psychological states, or philosophical ideas, undergo change; they are brought into existence by preceding conditions at a particular point in time, and they eventually will become extinct. It is unsatisfactory in the sense that not only do sentient beings experience physical pain, they also face continual disappointment when the people and things they wish to maintain invariably change.
The third characteristic of sentient existence, lack of a permanent self, has a long and complicated history of exegesis in Buddhism. In China the idea of "no-self'' (Sanskrit: _anmatman) was often placed in creative tension with the concept of repeated rebirth. On the one hand, Buddhist teachers tried to convince their audience that human existence did not end simply with a funeral service or memorial to the ancestors that humans were reborn in another bodily form and could thus be related not only to other human beings but to animals, ghosts, and other species among the six modes of rebirth.
To support that argument for rebirth, it was helpful to draw on metaphors of continuity, like a flame passed from one candle to the next and a spirit that moves from one lifetime to the next. On the other hand, the truth of impermanence entailed the argument that no permanent ego could possibly underlie the process of rebirth. What migrated from one lifetime to the next were not eternal elements of person hood but rather temporary aspects of psychophysical life that might endure for a few lifetimes--or a few thousand--but would eventually cease to exist.
The Buddha provided an analysis of the ills of human existence and a prescription for curing them. Those ills were caused by the tendency of sentient beings to grasp, to cling to evanescent things in the vain hope that they remain permanent. In this view, the very act of clinging contributes to the perpetuation of desires from one incarnation to the next. Grasping, then, is both a cause and a result of being committed to a permanent self.
The wisdom of Buddha is neither intellectual nor individualistic. It was always believed to be a soteriological knowledge that was expressed in the compassionate activity of teaching others how to achieve liberation from suffering. Traditional formulations of Buddhist practice describe a path to salvation that begins with the observance of morality. Lay followers pledged to abstain from the taking of life, stealing, lying, drinking intoxicating beverages, and engaging in sexual relations outside of marriage.
Further injunctions applied to householders who could observe a more demanding life-style of purity, and the lives of monks and nuns were regulated in even greater detail. With morality as a basis, the ideal path also included the cultivation of pure states of mind through the practice of meditation and the achieving of wisdom rivaling that of a Buddha.
The discussion so far has concerned the importance of the foreign component in the ideal of the Buddha and the actual content to which Buddha are believed to awaken. It is also important to consider what kind of a religious figure a Buddha is thought to be.
We can distinguish two separate but related understandings of what a Buddha is. In the first understanding the Buddha (represented in English with a capital B) was an unusual human born into a royal family in India in the sixth or fifth century B.C.E. He renounced his birthright, followed established religious teachers, and then achieved enlightenment after striking out on his own. He gathered lay and monastic disciples around him and preached throughout the Indian subcontinent for almost fifty years, and he achieved final "extinction'' (the root meaning of the Sanskrit word _nirvana) from the woes of existence.
This unique being was called Gautama (family name) Siddh;amartha (personal name) during his lifetime, and later tradition refers to him with a variety of names, including Sakyamuni (literally "Sage of the Sakya clan'') and Tathagata ("Thus-Come One''). Followers living after his death lack direct access to him because, as the word "extinction'' implies, his release was permanent and complete. His influence can be felt, though, through his traces--through gods who encountered him and are still alive, through long-lived disciples, through the places he touched that can be visited by pilgrims, and through his physical remains and the shrines (stupa) erected over them.
In the second understanding a Buddha (with a lowercase b) is a generic label for any enlightened being, of whom Sakyamuni was simply one among many. Other Buddha preceded Sakyamuni's appearance in the world, and others will follow him, notably Maitreya (Chinese: Mile), who is thought to reside now in a heavenly realm close to the surface of the Earth. Buddha are also dispersed over space: they exist in all directions, and one in particular, Amitayus (or Amitabha, Chinese: Amituo), presides over a land of happiness in the West.
Related to this second genre of Buddha is another kind of figure, a bodhisattva (literally "one who is intent on enlightenment,'' Chinese: ). Bodhisattvas are found in most forms of Buddhism, but their role was particularly emphasized in the many traditions claiming the polemical title of Mahayana ("Greater Vehicle,'' in opposition to Hinayana, "Smaller Vehicle'') that began to develop in the first century B.C.E.
Technically speaking, bodhisattvas are not as advanced as Buddhas on the path to enlightenment. Bodhisattvas particularly popular China include Avalokitesvara (Chinese: Guanyin, Guanshiyin, or Guanzizai), Bhaisajyaguru (Chinese: Yaoshiwang), Ksitigarbha (Chinese: Dizang), Manjusri (Wenshu), and Samantabhadra (Puxian).
While Buddhas appear to some followers as remote and all-powerful, bodhisattvas often serve as mediating figures whose compassionate involvement in the impurities of this world makes them more approachable. Like "uddha in the second sense of any enlightened being, they function both as models for followers to emulate and as saviors who intervene actively in the lives of their devotees.
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