Kuiji's Abhidharmic Recontextualization of Chinese

296 Teng

Chapter 9 Kuiji’s Abhidharmic Recontextualization of Chinese Buddhism

Weijen Teng

1 Introduction: Contextualization and Recontextualization

Elsewhere I have tried to show that Kuiji 窺基 (632–682) who was recognized historically as the successor of Xuanzang 玄奘 especially in the latter’s legacy of the Chinese Yogācāra school, the Faxiang school (Faxiang zong 法相宗), intended to set Chinese understanding of Buddhism aright by reorienting it toward Indian Buddhism. I tried to demonstrate in that work that what consti- tuted such a reorientation was not a mere promotion of a Yogācāra form of Buddhism as has been generally understood by scholars of Chinese Buddhism. I argued that Kuiji’s more significant potential contribution to such a reorientation lay in his construction of a methodological foundation for Chinese Buddhist intellectual practice, which can be interpreted as a response to the much debated issue of the ‘sinification of Buddhism’. The three methodological dimensions of Kuiji’s endeavors I emphasized are: recontextualization, exegesis, and logic. The present study explores the ‘recontextualization’ dimen- sion of Kuiji’s methodology.1 In the prolonged course of the spreading of Buddhism to China, Buddhist texts and ideas were studied and interpreted divorced from their home cultural, historical, and intellectual contexts. On the other hand, they were received, digested and made use of the new contexts informed by the local cultural and socio-political concerns. Echoing Yūki Reimon, Robert Gimello has tried to show that in response to the socio-political context of the late sixth and early seventh centuries, most of the leading Buddhists in that period were concerned to relieve Buddhism of the onus of its foreignness and approached Buddhist texts and teachings in such a context.2

1 See the “Introduction” of Teng’s unpublished doctoral dissertation (2011), “Recontextualization, Exegesis, and Logic: Kuiji’s (632–682) Methodological Restructuring of Chinese Buddhism”. This chapter is a modification of Teng, 2011’s Chapter Two, “Doctrinal and Historical Recontexualization of Chinese Buddhism”. 2 Gimello, 1976: 95–97.

According to Robert Gimello and others, the innovation of panjiao 判教 sys- tems was a demonstration of the leading Chinese Buddhist thinkers’ determination to show that “these new Chinese modes of Buddhism were in no way inferior to their Indian counterparts but were, in fact, superior rendi- tions of the Buddha’s truth”.3 Gimello further cited several predominant Chinese expressions of Buddhism that emerged as a response to the local contexts. He illustrates, for instance, that in a time of socio-political turmoil and a ‘Buddha-less’ age, Buddhists aspired to be reborn in the Pure Land of the West by pure faith in Amitābha Buddha. More prominently, Zhiyi 智顗 (538–597), the founder of the Tiantai 天臺 school, put forward that “ignorance is identical with dharma nature and the defilements are identical with awakening (wum- ing ji faxing, fannao ji puti 無明即法性煩惱即菩提)” and Zhiyan 智儼, the Second Patriarch of the Huayan 華嚴 school, proposed that “saṃsāra and nirvāṇa are not two and are without distinction of one another (shengsi ji nie- pan, wu er wu ci bi 生死即涅槃，無二無此彼)”.4 Expressions such as these were put forward by the Buddhist elites, who were “most sensitive to historical indications of the inception of ‘the last phase of the Dharma (mofa 末法),’ least bound to the alien institutional forms of Buddhism, and most concerned with providing a less intimidating path to a more readily accessible religious goal”.5 Chinese contextualization of Buddhism as mentioned above was inevitable and in a sense necessary.6 However, it also resulted in a ‘context-shifted’ reading of Buddhism that was viewed as doctrinally unsystematic and indiscriminative in the critical eyes of Xuanzang and his student, Kuiji. Like his master, Kuiji was concerned that when such contextualized expressions of Buddhist con- cepts, doctrines, and the texts themselves were taken by the Buddhists of later

3 Gimello, 1976: 95. Peter Gregory has a similar suggestion. (Gregory, 1991: 110–112). A compre- hensive historical survey in English of the Chinese Buddhist ‘doctrinal classification’ system (panjiao 判教 can be found in Mun’s The History of Doctrinal Classification in Chinese Buddhism. However, Mun did not address the hermeneutical issue or exegetical nature of the panjiao system. 4 Gimello, 1976: 111. 5 Gimello, 1976: 113. More Chinese expressions of the ‘new Buddhism’ can be found in the same reference. 6 The necessity of a “contextual theology” has been argued for initially by Shoki Coe (Coe, 1993), and more recently by Stephen Bevan in his Models of Contextual Theology: The Struggle for Cultural Relevance, in which he puts forward five models of “contextual theory,” namely (1) translation; (2) the anthropological; (3) praxis; (4) the synthetic; and (5) the transcendental issues related to the localization of Chinese theology (Bevans, 2002). These five models pro- vide a helpful analytical framework for thinking about various forms of encounter between ‘Buddhisms’ and ‘Chinese cultures’.