The Chinese Buddhist Tradition and Violence
The teachings of the Buddha, which had clearly reached China by the late first century ce, at first sight provide a contrasting demilitarised zone. ‘Wherever the Buddha goes, all under Heaven is harmoniously ordered...
There is no need for soldiers or weapons' runs one text widely circulated in China.[658] Where military analogies are adduced in another famous scripture, it is made perfectly clear that they are no more than analogies for more spiritual matters.[659] Not only did monks and nuns undertake vows of non-violence, but the most widely known Chinese rules governing Buddhist lay adherents also commanded abstention from any form of involvement in killing.[660] Even violence against the self was not permitted: in one early scriptural compendium in Chinese the Buddha condemns self-castration.[661] One can further appreciate that the Buddhist notion of the transfer of merit allowed for the expeditious propitiation of the marauding, non-socialised ghosts of victims of mass slaughter through such straightforward means as the copying of the Buddha's word, rather than the complex, text-based interventions of Daoist priests or the unrestrained sacrificial appeasement of dead generals undertaken by adherents of popular cults - one of the earliest Chinese Buddhist manuscripts we possess, from 359, is dedicated to precisely such a task.[662]But the picture is not quite so clear cut, and this not simply because within the vast wealth of Buddhist stories imported into East Asia were some that prominently featured not only self-sacrifice but also more negatively portrayed reprehensible violent acts, such as parricide. Eminent Buddhist monks, for example, might be thought to have gained through their meditative exercises the power to predict the outcome of battles, which inevitably excited the interest and unsolicited patronage of warlords.[663] An eschatological strain in Buddhist thought had also arrived in China that predicted both destructive foreign invasions and fratricidal dissent within a future much corrupted monastic community. A mid-fifth-century suppression of Buddhism in north China, prompted in part by the willingness by this point of Daoists to offer an alternative, seems further to have foregrounded fears of the extinction of the tradition through the murder of its clergy, a notion of Chinese origin that was thereafter deemed a true account of Indian events.[664] Though subsequent control of the canonical literature of Chinese Buddhism appears to have kept at the margins further innovations ascribing Indian origins to accounts of the spirit world as violent as those in Daoist texts, such sources became influential, and remain so.
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