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Buddhism in China

The Indian scriptures reached China piecemeal over several centuries, sūtras of different schools and periods all presented as the Buddha’s word. Chinese Buddhists had to say how they fitted together, and their answer was doctrinal classification, panjiao: the teachings arranged as partial grasps of one truth, ranked by how complete, literally how “round” (yuan), each is. One early classifier, Bodhiruci, took the rationale from the Vimalakīrti: “the Buddha expounds the Dharma with one sound; beings each understand it according to their kind”.

The classifiers knew there were many schemes. Fazang (643–712) of the Huayan school begins his own scheme by setting out ten earlier ones: “the teachings set up by the worthies of past and present differ, not just one; I briefly set out ten of them as a mirror”. Then: “The sage’s teachings differ in ten thousand ways, but in essence there are only five: the Lesser Vehicle, the initial Great Vehicle, the final [Great Vehicle], the sudden, and the round teaching”. The round teaching is his school’s own. The Tiantai school of Zhiyi (538–597) arranged the teachings by their manner of delivery and by their content, Tripitaka, Shared, Separate and Round. A later summary sets the scheme out as “five periods and eight teachings”: the modes of teaching are “like a physician’s prescription”, the contents “like distinguishing the medicine’s flavours”.

Zongmi (780–841) carried the classification beyond Buddhism. His Inquiry into the Origin of Humanity begins from a personal question: “I have received a human body without knowing where it came from: how could I know where it goes in another life, or the human affairs of the world, past and present? So for decades I studied with no fixed teacher, searching widely in inner and outer [Buddhist and non-Buddhist] teachings to trace my own origin.” He ranks the three teachings of China: “Confucius, Laozi and Śākyamuni were all perfect sages; following the times and responding to beings, they set up teachings by different roads.” But “the two teachings are provisional only; Buddhism has both”, the provisional and the real. “For urging the myriad practices, punishing evil and encouraging good, all returning together to order, all three teachings may be followed. For investigating the myriad dharmas, exhausting pattern and fully realising nature, and reaching the root source, Buddhism alone is conclusive.” His method runs both ways: first “from shallow to deep”, refuting each partial view until it opens onto the root, then back from the root, “gathering what was refuted before: one source, and all of it correct meaning”.

Xuanzang (602–664) answered disagreement another way. Having visited the masters of his day, he found that “each held to his own school’s road, and checked against the scriptures these too differed … not knowing whom to follow, he vowed to travel west to ask about his doubts” and to bring back the Yogācārabhūmi “to resolve everyone’s doubts” (Huili’s biography). He went to India for the texts, and spent his last decades translating them.

Chan answered by setting the texts aside. From the Song dynasty it was characterised in four phrases: “a special transmission outside the scriptures; not established upon words and letters; directly pointing to the human heartmind; seeing nature and becoming a Buddha” (tr. Hershock). Chan literature is nonetheless full of references to the canonical texts. When Wenyi (d. 958) was asked, “What is the First Principle?”, he answered: “If I were to tell you, it would become the second principle.”