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Chapter 6 Imperial China and Early Japan

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Chapter 6 Imperial China and Early Japan History 2 Chapter 6 Imperial China and Early Japan When Xuanzang returned to China in 644, he had covered over 10,000 miles (16,000 km). The Gaochang kingdom had fallen to the armies of the Tang dynasty, and Emperor Taizong welcomed Xuanzang enthusiastically. He sought both Xuanzang’s skills as a translator and the valuable information he brought about distant lands. Historians of India and Central Asia are particularly grateful for Xuan- zang’s detailed accounts of his trip, which supplement sparse indigenous sources. After he returned, Xuanzang translated over seventy Buddhist texts, many still read today because of their accuracy. The overland routes through Central Asia that Xuanzang took to India—and the sea routes around Southeast Asia taken by others—are known today as the Silk Routes. These routes were conduits not just for pilgrims like Xuanzang but also for merchants plying their goods, soldiers dispatched to fight in distant lands, and refugees fleeing dangerous areas for safety. Their tales of powerful rulers in India and China inspired chieftains in border areas to introduce new writing systems, law codes, ways of recruiting government officials, and taxation systems, often modifying them to suit their own societies. Some, like the Gaochang king and the rulers of Korea, Japan, and Tibet, patronized Buddhism and adopted Tang policies. Others, particularly in South and Southeast Asia, emulated South Asian monarchs and built temples to deities such as Shiva (SHIH-vah) and Vishnu (VISH-new), the most important deities in the emerging belief system of Hinduism (see Topic 2A). The individual decisions of these rulers resulted in the religious reorientation of the region. In 100 C.E., a disunited India was predominantly Buddhist, while the unified China of the Han dynasty embraced Legalist, Confucian, and Daoist beliefs. By 1000 C.E., the various kingdoms of India and Southeast Asia had become largely Hindu, while China, Japan, Korea, and Tibet had become Buddhist. This religious shift did not occur because a ruler of an intact empire, such as Constantine in the West, recognized a single religion. It was the result of many decisions taken by multiple rulers in different places over the course of centuries. 1 1. Buddhism and the Revival of Empire in China, 100–1000 With the fall of the Han dynasty in 220 C.E., China broke up into different regions, each governed by local military leaders. When the first Buddhist missionaries from the Kushan empire arrived in China during the first and second centuries C.E., they faced great difficulties in spreading their religion. Buddhist teachings urged potential converts to abandon family obligations and adopt a celibate lifestyle, yet Confucian China was one of the most family-oriented societies in the world. The chakravartin ideal of the universal Buddhist ruler, though, appealed to leaders of regions no longer united under the Han dynasty. During the Sui dynasty, which reunited China, and its long-lived successor, the Tang dynasty, Chinese emperors introduced important additions to the Qin/Han blueprint for empire, additions that remained integral to Chinese governance until the end of dynastic rule in the early 1900s. Buddhism in China, 100–589 The first Chinese who worshiped the Buddha did so because they thought him capable of miracles; some sources report that his image shone brightly and could fly through the air. The earliest Chinese document to mention Buddhism, from 65 C.E., tells of a prince worshiping the Buddha alongside the Daoist deity Laozi indicating that the Chinese initially thought the Buddha was a Daoist deity. After the Han dynasty ended in 220 C.E., no other regional dynasty succeeded in uniting the empire until 589. Historians call this long period of disunity the Six Dynasties (220–589 C.E.). During this time, Buddhist miracle workers began to win the first converts. Historians of Buddhism treat these miracle accounts in the same way as historians of Christianity do biblical accounts. Non-believers may be skeptical that the events occurred as described, but people at the time found (and modern devotees continue to find) these tales compelling, and they are crucial to our understanding of how these religions gained their first adherents. One of the most effective early missionaries was a Central Asian man named Fotudeng (d. 349), who claimed that the Buddha had given him the ability to bring rain, cure the sick, and foresee the future. In 310, Fotudeng managed to convert a local ruler named Shi Le (274–333). Shi Le asked Fotudeng to perform a miracle to demonstrate the power of Buddhism. A later biography explains what happened: “Thereupon he took his begging bowl, filled it with water, burned incense, and said a spell over it. In a moment there sprang up blue lotus flowers whose brightness 2 and color dazzled the eyes.” A Buddhist symbol, the lotus is a beautiful flower that grows from a root coming out of a dirty lake bottom; similarly, Fotudeng explained, human beings could free their minds from the impediments of worldly living and attain enlightenment. As usual with miracle tales, we have no way of knowing what actually happened, but Fotudeng’s miracle so impressed Shi Le that he granted the Buddhists tax-free land so they could build monasteries in north China. The son of a Xiongnu (SHEE-awng-new) chieftain, Shi Le could never become a good Confucian-style ruler because he spoke but could not read or write Chinese. Buddhism appealed to him precisely because it offered an alternative to Confucianism. He could aspire to be a chakravartin ruler. Fotudeng tried to persuade ordinary Chinese to join the new monasteries and nunneries, but most people were extremely reluctant to take vows of celibacy. If they did not have children, future generations would not be able to perform ancestor worship for them. A Buddhist book written in the early sixth century, The Lives of the Nuns, portrays the dilemma of would-be converts. When one young woman told her father that she did not want to marry, he replied, “You ought to marry. How can you be like this?” She explained, “I want to free all living beings from suffering. How much more, then, do I want to free my two parents!” But her father was not persuaded by her promise that she could free him from the endless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth. When Fotudeng met the woman’s father, he promised: “If you consent to her plan [to become a nun], she indeed shall raise her family to glory and bring you blessings and honor.” Deeply impressed, the father agreed to let her enter a nunnery. Many families made a compromise; they allowed one child to join the Buddhist order and transfer merit to the other children, who married and had children. Buddhists continued to win converts during the fifth and sixth centuries. They gained support because Buddhist teachings offered more hope about the afterlife than did Confucian and Daoist teachings. The original Indian belief in the transmigration of souls as expressed in the Upanishads (oo-PAHN-ih-shahdz) presumed that someone’s soul in this life stayed intact and could be reborn in a different body. But the Buddhists propounded the no-self doctrine, which taught that there is no such thing as a fixed self. Each person is a constantly shifting group of five aggregates—form, feelings, perceptions, karmic constituents, and consciousness—that change from one second to the next. 3 Accordingly, there is no self that can be reborn in the next life. This idea proved extremely difficult for people to grasp and was much debated as a result. Gradually, Chinese Buddhists abandoned the strict no-self doctrine and began to describe a series of hells, much like the indigenous Chinese concept of the underground prison, where people went when they died. By the year 600, Buddhism was firmly implanted in the Chinese countryside. A history of Buddhism written in that year explained that three types of monasteries existed. In the largest 47 monasteries, completely financed by the central government, educated monks conducted regular Buddhist rituals on behalf of the emperor and his immediate family. In the second tier were 839 monasteries that depended on powerful families for support. The final category included over 30,000 smaller shrines that dotted the Chinese countryside. Dependent on local people for contributions, the monks who worked in these shrines were often uneducated. The number of monks never exceeded more than 1 percent of China’s total population, which was about 50 million in 600.8 China Reunified, 589–907 After more than three hundred years of disunity, the founder of the Sui dynasty reunified China in 589. Then, in less than thirty years, the Tang dynasty succeeded the Sui. The Sui and Tang emperors embraced the chakravartin ideal, for they hoped Buddhism would help to bind their many subjects together. The Tang emperors ruled more territory than any dynasty until the mid-eighteenth century, and Chinese openness to the influences of Central Asia made Tang art and music particularly beautiful. Consciously modeling himself on the great chakravartin ruler Ashoka, whose support for the Buddhist order was well known in China, the Sui founder gave money for the construction of monasteries all over China. He also built a new capital at Chang’an, the former capital of the Han dynasty, with a gridded street plan. The city housed 120 new Buddhist monasteries. In 604, when the Sui founder died, his son succeeded him and led his armies on a disastrous campaign in Korea. He was soon overthrown by one of his generals, who went on to found the Tang dynasty.
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