Download buddhist-inspired options: aspects of lay religious life in the lower

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barend j. ter haar
BUDDHIST-INSPIRED OPTIONS:
ASPECTS OF LAY RELIGIOUS LIFE IN THE
LOWER YANGZI FROM 1100 UNTIL 13401
BY
BAREND J. TER HAAR
Leiden University
When people in the Lower Yangzi region during the period
from A.D. 1100 until 1340 (roughly corresponding to the southern Song and Yuan dynasties) faced some kind of existential
problem in their lives, a wide range of religious and other options
existed to define the problem and then solve it. In the following
investigation I look specifically at which Buddhist-inspired options were on offer to lay people and at people’s motivations for
making specific religious decisions.2
A religious option can be defined as “Buddhist” according to
different criteria, but here I define it rather loosely as “all of
those elements in lay religious life that are somehow linked to a
Buddhist background”. These elements could be divine figures
from Buddhist texts or institutions, such as the Bodhisattva Guanyin or monks worshipped posthumously as a source of benefit; or
texts and rituals with a Buddhist doctrinal background; or else
practices that are often seen as Buddhist, such as the avoidance
of meat and liquor, donations to Buddhist institutions, and acts
of charity to accumulate karmic merit. Once we have defined the
“Buddhist” option in the above broad way, the investigation de1
I wish to thank the participants in the Conference on Sung Buddhism
(April 1996) for their critical and stimulating remarks, especially T. Griffith
Foulk, Dan Getz and Peter Gregory. Furthermore, I wish to thank Hans van Ess,
Alexander Mayer, Henrik Sørensen, Anne Gerritsen, Oliver Moore as well as the
two anonymous T’oung Pao reviewers for extensively commenting on successive
drafts of this article.
2
On the non-Buddhist repertoire, see Valerie Hansen, Changing Gods in
Medieval China, 1127-1276 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990) and
Judith Boltz, “Not by the Seal of Office Alone: New Weapons in the Battle with
the Supernatural”, in Patricia Buckley Ebrey and Peter N. Gregory (eds.), Religion and Society in T’ang and Sung China (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press,
1993), pp. 241-305.
© Brill, Leiden, 2001
T’oung Pao LXXXVII
buddhist-inspired options
93
rives its analytical tension from our expectations of what Buddhist
religious culture should be and what is actually found in the
sources. Since the 1980s at least, scholars of East Asian Buddhistinspired religious culture have increasingly looked at their object
of study from the inside out and from the bottom up, rather than
from the outside in or from the top down. The result is a picture
in which doctrine and meditation (the supposed core of Buddhist
belief and practice) occupy a place much less important than
before.3
Ian Reader and George Tanabe have recently made a major
contribution with their research based on contemporary Japan.
We will see in the course of this study that their conclusions on
the practical nature of religious culture (including Buddhist culture) in Japan today and in the past applies equally to Southern
Song and Yuan China. Not only do they show that the pursuit of
worldly benefits (genze riyaku
) is a quintessential part of
Japanese religious life, they also argue convincingly that
the provision of benefits is used to demonstrate religious truth claims and
to affirm the validity of specific religious traditions; as such it underpins a
worldview and a religious sense of belonging or faith. Thus there is a reciprocal relationship between truth and benefits: scriptural and doctrinal truth
legitimises worldly benefits, which in turn validate the truth of scripture,
doctrine, and, most important, institutional traditions. 4
And, lest the reader should be tempted to believe that this is
merely true of the debased religious practice of everyday Japanese (a common stereotype), the authors analyse in some detail
how this orientation towards practical benefits is quite fundamental to the most basic scriptures of East-Asian Buddhism, which
were ultimately derived from India.5 Despite statements by some
Just a few examples: Bernard Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy: A Cultural
Critique of Chan/Zen Buddhism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); T.
Griffith Foulk, “Myth, Ritual, and Monastic Practice in Sung Ch’an Buddhism”,
in Ebrey and Gregory, Religion and Society in T’ang and Sung China, pp. 147-208;
Robert H. Sharf, “Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience”, Numen, 42 (1995), pp. 228-283; Eric Reinders, “The Iconoclasm of Obeisance: Protestant Images of Chinese Religion and the Catholic Church”, Numen,
44 (1997), pp. 296-322.
4
Ian Reader and George J. Tanabe Jr., Practically Religious: Worldly Benefits
and the Common Religion of Japan (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1998);
quotation p. 257.
5
Reader and Tanabe, Practically Religious, pp. 71-82; they also describe the
efforts of Japanese theorists to explain this away, pp. 82-106.
3
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barend j. ter haar
educated elites to the contrary, Reader and Tanabe also stress
that their findings apply to all social and educational layers. Although the present investigation was carried out before their
study appeared, it is quite clear that they do not describe a quasiexceptional modern Japanese situation, but account rather for
living Buddhist culture in its most typical sense.
The Buddhist option typically started with the practical question of what it could do for the individual. This was true for
people who had only occasionally recourse to a Buddhist option,
as much as for others who went as far as taking the Three Refuges
(sangui
, namely in the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha)
and Five Injunctions (the wujie
). These Five Injunctions were
rather practical rules: not to kill, not to steal, not to commit
licentious acts, not to speak falsely, and not to use intoxicating
drinks (busha, budao, buyin, buwang, bujiu
). People certainly thought about doctrinal issues and often
had their own interpretations, all of which comes through clearly
in the critical writings of the eminent Yuan monk Pudu
(1255-1330). However, his criticisms of local approaches to Buddhist doctrine and practice also make clear that these approaches
were still generally connected to concrete issues of life, disease
and misfortune, and death.6
Those familiar with Buddhist-inspired religious culture in other
periods of Chinese history will recognize much in the following
pages, and I certainly do not want to claim that my analysis is
unique to the 1100-1340 period. However, it seems imperative to
me to study this period on its own terms and from its own rich
historical sources. Only then can we begin to ask questions about
historical change and continuity. Buddhist-inspired religious culture was by no means restricted to the uneducated, but it was
truly a popular religious culture in the sense of being shared
(and often practised together) by all layers of society. If there was
such a thing as an elite approach to religious culture—including,
of course, the Buddhist option—then it certainly did not exclude
what I am describing here.
6
Lushan lianzong baojian
(reprinted in Yang Ne
, Yuandai
bailian jiao ziliao huibian
(Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1989), especially Chapter Ten. I use Pudu’s material as a rare source on non-canonical
interpretations, but keep in mind that he provides no information on their
further social and geographical context.
buddhist-inspired options
95
Preliminary considerations
The restriction of this study to the Lower Yangzi region has
been determined by the a priori methodological assumption that
distinct cultural regions have their own forms of religious life.
The actual testing of this assumption must be left to another
occasion. If we define the Lower Yangzi region in terms of transportation facilities and commercial coherence, it stretched from
Nanjing along the Imperial Canal to Hangzhou and then further
down along another transportation canal to Mingzhou (modern
Ningbo). Strictly speaking, Taizhou, further to the south, was
outside the Lower Yangzi region, but in religious matters it was
sufficiently oriented towards the north for us to include it in the
present investigation. Within the Lower Yangzi region we will
focus on the regional core between the prefectural capitals of
Suzhou, Songjiang, Hangzhou and Huzhou. The Lower Yangzi
region is the only region documented by such a variety of
sources, including anecdotal collections, epigraphic materials,
contemporary local gazetteers, as well as a large amount of colophons concerned with Buddhist printing projects.
The important monastic Tiantai
tradition of Buddhism originated in Tiantai in the prefecture of Taizhou, and was especially influential in the Hangzhou area.7 The Lower Yangzi region
was also the birthplace of two major lay Buddhist movements: the
White Cloud Tradition (baiyun zong
) had its patriarchal
monastery in Yuhang near Hangzhou and remained confined to
the Lower Yangzi region; the White Lotus movement (bailian
), for its part, originated in a little-known monastery on Lake
Dianshan, located between Wujiang and Songjiang, and eventually spread to large parts of southern and even northern China.
Several Buddhist canons were reprinted under the leadership of
local monasteries, including the editions of Nanshan Puning
(the central monastery of the White Cloud Tradition)
and Qisha Yansheng
(an otherwise little-known monasChi-chiang Huang, “Elite and Clergy in Northern Sung Hang-chou: A
Convergence of Interest”, in Peter N. Gregory and Daniel A. Getz, Jr. (eds.),
Buddhism in the Sung (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1999), pp. 295-339;
Daniel B. Stevenson, “Protocols of Power: Tz’u-yün Tsun-shih (964-1032) and
T’ien-t’ai Lay-Buddhist Ritual in the Sung”, in id., pp. 340-408; Daniel A. Getz,
Jr., “T’ien-t’ai Pure Land Societies and the Creation of the Pure Land Patriarchate”, in id., pp. 477-523.
7
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barend j. ter haar
tery). The donors came from the Lower Yangzi regional core.
The spheres of influence created by pilgrimage cults, such as the
Travelling Palace of the Eastern Marchmount in the township of
Fushan near Changshu and the Guanyin cult in the Upper
Tianzhu Monastery in Hangzhou, also extended across large
parts of the Lower Yangzi region.
Instead of selecting a dynastic framework, such as the more
customary southern Song period (1127-1276), the period 11001340 is treated here as a coherent unit of time. Although dynastic
change was by no means irrelevant for certain religious developments, particularly where it concerned imperial support for specific doctrinal interpretations or monks and monasteries, it was
less relevant to local religious life throughout the Lower Yangzi
region. There are several indications that 1100-1340 is a single
coherent period, with the early twelfth century as its starting
point. Thus, while regional temple cults had often originated
much earlier, their supra-local spread only took off during the
late twelfth century. 8 From circa 1100 onwards, several exorcist
(Daoist) ritual traditions attained national prominence, and during the subsequent two centuries many new and influential ritual
texts appeared. 9 The period 1100-1340 was a time of important
and well-documented lay Buddhist movements. The White Cloud
Tradition and the White Lotus movement both originated in the
first decades of the twelfth century and flourished until the midfourteenth century.10 Subsequent to a long planning stage, the
Puning canon project started in circa 1279 and lasted until 1288.
The Yansheng project started in circa 1231 and was largely completed by 1322. Thus, these publication projects transcended two
dynasties. Official recognition for Buddhist monasteries was common during the Northern Song, whereas local temples became
the main focus for this type of government support only from the
Hansen, Changing Gods, p. 75 and passim; also see the review of Hansen’s
book by Richard von Glahn, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 58: 2 (1993), pp.
623-624.
9
See for instance Judith Boltz, A Survey of Taoist Literature: Tenth to Seventeenth Centuries (Berkeley: Center for Chinese Studies, 1987), pp. 23-53, building
upon ideas formulated by Michel Strickmann. Also see Poul Andersen, “Taoist
Talismans and the History of the Tianxin Tradition”, Acta Orientalia, 57 (1996),
and Paul Katz, Demon Hordes and Burning Boats: The Cult of Marshal Wen in Late
Imperial Chekiang (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), pp. 32-38.
10
Barend J. ter Haar, The White Lotus Teachings in Chinese Religious History
(Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1992; reprint, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1999).
8
buddhist-inspired options
97
late eleventh century onwards. This latter development went
hand in hand with growing organizational strength and independence on the local level, centred on and expressed in the temple
cult.11 This seems to indicate a changing role and decreasing
power for Buddhist monasteries, which is confirmed by the decrease in mass attendance at monastic ritual festivals that was
noted for Hangzhou and Kunshan (in the vicinity of Suzhou)
during the same period.12 This decrease in power should be seen
in relative terms, however, for the social influence of the monasteries still remained substantial throughout the period.
Whereas the Lower Yangzi region seems to have survived the
Song-Yuan transition relatively unscathed and religious developments continued despite the change of dynasty, it was severely hit
during the last decades of the Yuan by civil war, natural disasters,
and epidemics. Then the founding emperor of the Ming, Zhu
Yuanzhang
(r. 1368-1398), formulated specific policies to
deny the region its leadership potential (including removing its
elites and increasing the land tax), and the Lower Yangzi was
caught up in a nationwide ideological campaign to reshape culture. (This was also directed against mainstream Buddhist and
Daoist institutions.) The White Cloud Tradition and the White
Lotus movement had virtually disappeared as recognizable religious traditions by the late fourteenth century. For this reason,
1340 or thereabouts can be taken as a rough terminal point for
our period of inquiry.13
As already noted, the Buddhist-inspired option was part of a
broad repertoire of options for addressing problems of life, illness and death. Selection took place on the basis of a case by case
11
Chikusa Masaaki
, Chûgoku bukkyô shakaishi kenkyû
(Kyôto: Dôhôsha, 1982), pp. 83-110, esp. 109; Hansen, Changing Gods, pp. 79-81.
The reason for these changes may have been increased attempts by the state to
control Buddhist monastic institutions. The result appears to have been the
increase of smaller establishments (an and tang), which were directly controlled
by lay people.
12
Wu Zimu
, Mengliang lu
(Hangzhou: Zhejiang renmin, 1980),
pp. 181-182. On the date of this work, see Wilt Idema and Stephen H. West,
Chinese Theatre, 1100-1450 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1982), pp. 13-14. Kunshan
zhi
(Song Yuan difangzhi congkan
; Beijing: Zhonghua shuju,
1990), 1: 1a-b, 2a. Compare this with the older Yüfeng zhi
(Song Yuan
difangzhi congkan), shang: 17a-b.
13
Ter Haar, White Lotus Teachings, pp. 123-130, and Edward L. Farmer, Zhu
Yuanzhang and Early Ming Legislation: The Reordering of Chinese Society Following the
Era of Mongol Rule (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995).
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barend j. ter haar
efficacy, in a kind of religious economy. People might or might
not be aware of the Buddhist background of a given religious
element, such as, for instance, a divine being, a ritual or a text,
a religious specialist or otherwise. They might not even be certain
whether this background consisted in the element’s historical
origins, its doctrinal content, or its affiliation with an institution
that outside observers would identify as “Buddhist”. Furthermore,
the efficacy ascribed to a particular Buddhist-inspired option in
one particular instance was not necessarily generalized to all the
problems that people might face in life and death.
Still, for some the use of Buddhist elements went much farther
than for others. They would adopt a set of practices, aiming to
achieve larger Buddhist soteriological goals. Instead of religious
activities at single points in time and directed towards well-defined goals, they would change their entire lifestyle to varying
degrees. The direct reasons for more intensive practice might be
quite banal, such as the fear of retribution or simply family custom, and people might still have very concrete aims in the back
of their minds. Nonetheless, intensive practice affected people’s
lives as a whole and was not confined to specific moments in time
until they had reached their original goals. I have attempted to
make the distinction just sketched clearer by dividing my presentation into two sections, entitled “Buddhist elements in people’s
lives” and “Buddhist lifestyles”, respectively. It is crucial, however,
to keep in mind that the choice for a Buddhist lifestyle rarely
meant the repudiation of the overall spectrum of religious options. This seems to be true even when people identified themselves as “Buddhist” in various explicit ways. Instead, the
soteriological or “other-worldly” approach both built upon and
intensified the economic or “this-worldly” approach; but it did
not replace it.
Whatever approach people adopted, they constructed their criterion as the perceived long-term “efficacy” of a given (set of)
belief(s) and practice(s), expressed with such terms as ling
(powerful, numinous), yan
(confirmation), ying
(response,
resonance), gan
(stimulus), bao
(reward, retribution), and
others. This criterion was not, as might easily be supposed, limited to local temple cults or to a predominantly oral (and therefore supposedly more “folkish”) Buddhist discourse of religious
practice.14 On the contrary, it was just as important in more intel14
P. Steven Sangren, History and Magical Power in a Chinese Community (Stan-
buddhist-inspired options
99
lectual and scriptural forms of Buddhist traditions.15 Basically, it
connoted the perception of a direct, almost causal relationship
between the expression of a wish and its subsequent fulfilment.
From an outsider’s point of view, the success or failure of beliefs and practices must have depended on other factors than the
sole criterion of “efficacy”, since in fact it was the customers
themselves and the larger audience who determined their relevance and efficacy. One factor would be the completely coincidental availability of a religious option, since people would
choose first of all from whatever happened to be present in their
immediate surroundings. Their wealth would then determine the
size of the ritual, the sacrifice or the charitable act. Their social
and political background might prescribe (or prohibit) certain
choices. Related to this would be considerations about the kind
of efficacy ascribed to oral or literate forms of religious practice,
since higher education undoubtedly predisposed people towards
more literate forms. Finally, different sexes or age-groups might
have their own prescribed religious responsibilities within the
larger group.
To conclude, I should note that the information used for this
investigation has been extracted from a wide range of sources, so
as to enable a reasonably complete coverage of the full width of
the “Buddhist option” and to balance sources produced within a
Buddhist institutional context with sources from outside such a
context. Included are anecdotal materials, inscriptions, local gazetteers, colophons, polemics, and some Buddhist normative literature. 16 Even though what is described and discussed included
ford: Stanford University Press, 1987), passim, discusses this dimension, using the
concept of ling, which he interprets as a “mediating power” between order and
disorder. The concept of ling is mentioned in Hansen, Changing Gods, but not
explicitly analyzed. Robert Campany, Strange Writing: Anomaly Accounts in Early
Medieval China (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), pp. 86, 322-323, 367-368, and John
Kieschnick, The Eminent Monk: Buddhist Ideals in Medieval Chinese Hagiography
(Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1997), pp. 96-101, have excellent discussions of the Chinese notion of efficacy.
15
Brook Ziporyn, “What is the Buddha Looking at? The Importance of
Intersubjectivity in the T’ien-t’ai Tradition as Understood by Chih-li”, in: Gregory and Getz eds., Buddhism in the Sung, pp. 442-476; Stevenson, “Protocols of
Power”, pp. 382-385.
16
The late-Song Buddhist histories Shimen zhengtong
and Fozu tongji
provide much specific information, but largely from a monastic point of
view. Likewise, they are not very informative on lay perceptions. Other Song and
Yuan internal Buddhist sources tell us much on lay devotional and ritual prac-
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barend j. ter haar
a strong oral component and took place amid speakers of one or
more of China’s local languages, the sources themselves are invariably in polished literary Chinese. They were written from different points of view and some writers seem to have reproduced
the viewpoints of their informants better than others, but all the
authors ultimately shared the same type of basic training in a
group of texts that were either Confucian in origin or interpreted
from a Confucian perspective.17 Thus, by virtue of being highly
literate, our authors already shared the same basic norms and
values. Therefore, they had more in common with each other
than with most of the people featuring in their texts.
Furthermore, especially in the anecdotal genre, even the least
literate protagonists belonged to social groups most likely to
come into contact with literate elites. Thus, farmers (some 80%
of the population) are notably rare, either as informants or as
actors, but we regularly meet with shopkeepers, nannies, prostitutes and maids, as well as travellers, fortune-tellers, clerks, yamen
runners, monks and priests. Officials and other members of the
educated elite naturally also appear. The selection of anecdotes
is therefore skewed towards all kinds of non-farming groups.
Buddhist elements in people’s lives
To most Chinese of the period 1100-1340, it would have
seemed a rather odd question to ask whether they were “Buddhists” or not. Virtually all people of that time shared the same
belief in karmic retribution, the cycle of endless rebirths, and
punishment (briefly or for a very long time) in the underworld.
We find these conceptions not only in Buddhism, but also in
Daoist traditions and in large parts of the Confucian tradition, as
well as among mediums (shamans) and in temple cults.
Most people, therefore, would not necessarily have associated
notions such as karmic retribution exclusively with Buddhist
ritual specialists or institutions. To Buddhist specialists, it may
also have mattered little whether people established an exclusive
tice, but without much information on motivations, and also often without specification of time and place.
17
Erik Zürcher, “Buddhism and Education in T’ang Times”, in Wm. Theodore de Bary and John W. Chaffee (eds.), Neo-Confucian Education: The Formative
Stage (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 19-56, esp. 36-39, 4650.
buddhist-inspired options
101
relationship with their tradition, except in terms of the economic
benefits offered by having a permanent group of customers. Freeing oneself from the suffering produced by the cycle of death and
rebirth was a long-term process extending over many existences.
Everything that was attained now was one step in the right direction. In the following two sections, I will concentrate on elements
outside the context of a broader Buddhist lifestyle, most often
interacting with elements from other religious traditions.
Solving problems
The recitation of Buddhist texts might or might not take place
in a Buddhist context, practitioners might or might not understand its content, but the practice of reciting was considered to be
effective by itself. Many Mahâyâna texts of great popularity in
China, such as the Lotus Sutra or the Diamond Sutra, explicitly
refer to the importance of recitation as one way of incorporating
their power, quite irrespective of the religious status of the person reciting.18 Therefore, from an internal Buddhist point of view
there appears to be no epistemological difference between the
functioning of texts and words as independent elements (which
I discuss in the following paragraphs), and as parts of a larger
Buddhist practice (which I describe further below).
The underlying and generally Chinese, rather than uniquely
Buddhist, assumption here is that specific texts and words have
an inherent power which can be ritually reproduced or internalised. 19 Recitation is only one means of making texts or words
18
For this reason, Gregory Schopen, “The Phrase ‘sa prthivîprade²a² caityabhto bhavet’ in the Vajracchedicakˆ: Notes on the Cult of the Book in Mahâyâna”, Indo-Iranian Journal, 17 (1975), pp. 147-181, postulated the rise of a “cult
of the book” in early Mahâyâna. For a recent contribution, see Donald S. Lopez
Jr., “Authority and Orality in the Mahâyâna”, Numen, 42 (1995), pp. 21-47, with
further references. Here one might add that the fact that the Mahâyâna tradition was so much more successful in China than in India may have been linked
to the strong power that was ascribed in Chinese culture to texts and writing
already before the advent of any Buddhist elements.
19
See for much relevant discussion Anna Seidel, “Imperial Treasures and
Taoist Sacraments: Taoist Roots in the Apocrypha”, in Michel Strickmann (ed.),
Tantric and Taoist Studies in Honour of R.A. Stein, II (Bruxelles: Institut Belge des
hautes études chinoises, 1983), pp. 291-371, and Mark Edward Lewis, Writing
and Authority in Early China (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999). The Lianhua jing
xianying lu
, ZZK 134.890-891, gives a series of stories that illustrate the
power of the Lotus Sutra to survive fire and water.
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“work”, alongside oral consumption, learning by heart, multiplication through copying or printing, or the production of commentaries. The one thing that is not done with religious texts is
to read them silently. This does not, incidentally, preclude attempts to understand the content of a text (when this is technically possible), but such an understanding is usually not deemed
essential to making the text “work”. Instead, a text should be
approached with respect, which demands washing oneself and
lighting some incense before the recitation. Reading is first and
foremost a ritual event. For many people, Buddhist texts and
words functioned as repositories of power on a par with amulets,
Daoist scriptures or the Book of Changes. To recite texts such as the
Diamond Sutra or the Lotus Sutra invited protection against the
wrath of angry underworld deities—that is, it was done out of
fear—and sought to retrieve the body after its owner had been
called to the underworld, and so on. In ascribing efficacy to the
act of recitation, the sources do not differentiate according to the
technical or doctrinal level of any preceding religious practice,
least of all Buddhist. What they do stress is the significance of a
person’s intentions and a moral lifestyle.20
The following example illustrates some of the non-doctrinal
dimensions of the practice of recitation. After the death of his
father, the physiognomist Xu Daoheng
, who was from
Dinghai in Mingzhou (modern Ningbo region), travelled around
with his mother, whom he served with great filial piety. One day,
probably in 1175, he was staying in a hotel in Taizhou, in the
north of the Lower Yangzi region, when he was hit by “red eyes”
and developed an internal blockage after eating crab. Such a
mishap could be constructed as a karmic punishment, but the
narrative leaves this implicit. The physiognomist could not travel
any further. Since he used to recite and explicate the Prajñâpâra), he went out begging in the market
mitâ-sûtra (banruo jing
place, and—we are led to assume by the structure of the narrative—recited this text to make some money. In this way, he and
his mother managed to survive. After five years, he dreamed of a
monk who washed his eyes and told him to eat a specific medicine for one hundred days. He followed the monk’s prescription
20
Hong Mai
, Yijian zhi
(Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1981), jia 6: 47
(trsl. in Ter Haar, White Lotus Teachings, p. 21); Yijian zhi, yi 15: 310; Huhai
xinwen yijian xuzhi
(early 14th century; Beijing: Zhonghua shuju,
1986), houji 2: 194.
buddhist-inspired options
103
and his eyesight was completely restored. He returned home with
his mother, and after she died he “relinquished his family and
entered the Way”.21
This account is part of a larger group of anecdotes transmitted
to Hong Mai by the Daoist monk Yang Zhaoran
. They
mainly feature Daoist protagonists and ordinary lay people. Their
religious universe—and by implication Yang Zhaoran’s as well—
includes both Daoist and Buddhist elements, as well as local
cults.22 The phrase “relinquished his family and entered the Way”
(qijia rudao
) is not the usual term for becoming a Buddhist monk (which would be chujia
, “to leave the family”).
Elsewhere in Yang’s anecdotes, “the Way” (dao ) refers to the
Daoist way. Given the overall narrative context of the anecdotes
told by Yang Zhaoran, it is likely that the physiognomist became
a Daoist religious figure, rather than a Buddhist monk. The beggar is also a typical Daoist topos.23 His eyes have been blinded, we
are led to assume, through eating crab, but there is no mention
of a conversion to vegetarianism. He had active recourse to the
text independent of a religious specialist.24 He is certainly not
described as an active practitioner of a more evolved Buddhist
lifestyle, and this holds true for many similar accounts of miracles
worked through recitation.
Lay people also recited spells or the names of divine Buddhist
figures for practical effects. 25 Hong Mai describes the use of the
name of an otherwise relatively obscure Buddhist figure from the
), Vˆsanta-vayanti (poshan
Flower Garland Sutra (huayan jing
), as a protection against one’s fears during the
poyandi
21
22
Yijian zhi, sanren 8: 1527-1528.
Yijian zhi, sanren 8: 1525-1532; on Yang himself, see pp. 1526, 1529 and
1532.
23
We possess no explicit evidence, however, except that no Buddhist religious name is given and Xu’s personal name “The Way is Constant” fits in rather
well with Daoist conventions (as well as the Book of Changes).
24
This does not preclude that he originally learned the text from a Buddhist
monk, as is suggested by the anecdote on the Huzhou butcher, discussed at the
end of the section “Intensified practice” below. Furthermore, many people
would have acquired their literacy in a Buddhist monastery. This was certainly
the case in an earlier period: see Zürcher, “Buddhism and Education in T’ang
Times”, pp. 19-56.
25
Sawada Mizuho
, “Sôdai no shinjuku shinkô
, in Chûgoku
no jukuhô
(Tôkyô: Hiragawa, 1984, revised 1990), pp. 457-496, surveys
all instances in the Yijian zhi in which spells were recited, irrespective of their
geographical provenance.
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barend j. ter haar
night. The capital official who used this “spell” was completely
unaware of its Buddhist context, although this usage did fit into
the context of the scripture itself.26 People who watched a butcher from Deqing killing his cows in a particularly cruel way
“spoke [the words] ‘Heavenly Worthy who Rescues from Bitterness’ and others recited the Mantra of Deliverance, in order to
assist [the butcher] against [the animals’] vengeance in the underworld”.27 The completely ad hoc use of recitation should be
clear.
Examples of Buddhist monks and priests performing miraculous healings or exorcisms on the basis of their personal powers
or charisma, rather than of their ritual performances or of Buddhist texts, are surprisingly scarce in our sources, at least during
the period considered and in the Lower Yangzi region. In fact, I
have only found some cases from the first half of the twelfth
century, and the texts recited or the ritual performed, rather
than the monk himself, are often described as the source of efficacious power. 28
A monk in Changguo (near modern Ningbo) is described as a
highly successful proselytizer. By the time he died at the age of
80 in 1143, he had “transmitted the way” to more than two hundred lay students. Thanks to his indefatigable practice, he pos26
Yijian zhi, bu 14: 1680-1681. Discussion in Sawada, “Sôdai no shinjuku
shinkô”, pp. 486-487. See Dafangguangfo huayanjing
(TS), 279.369373; Thomas Cleary, The Flower Ornament Scripture (Boston and London: Shambhala, 1987), pp. 160-171.
27
Yijian zhi, sanxin 1: 1390-1391. The butcher was sent to the underworld of
the Boiling Pot nevertheless. Sawada, “Sôdai no shinjuku shinkô”, pp. 482-483.
28
An important Northern Sung case is that of the famous Tiantai monk
Biancai yuanjing
(1011-1091), as recorded in his biography in the Xianchun Lin’an zhi
(Song Yuan difangzhi congkan), 78: 21b, and more elaborately in the Yijian zhi, bing 16: 498-499. In the Yijian zhi version, a boy had been
possessed and shamans had been unable to “restore order” (zhi ). The monk
expelled the demon with a simple ritual that included the assistance of Guanyin
and pronouncing a spell. The demon was thereupon converted. On Biancai
yuanjing, see Huang, “Elite and Clergy”, pp. 306-308. On the ritual, see
Stevenson, “Protocols of Power”, pp. 358-359 and 403 n. 62. For three other
instances of healing and/or exorcism from the Lower Yangzi region, see Yijian
zhi, yi 14: 302 (1138: recitation of Lengyanzhou
by monk[s] to expell an
unruly demon who has possessed a concubine, although here it was the power
of the text which worked); yi 17: 331-332 (from circa 1102-6, but really a nonexorcist healing through medicine); and zhiyi 1: 796-797 (undated; a Daoist
priest and Buddhist monks all fail to defeat a rapist demon. Here, too, it is the
rituals rather than the inherent power of the monks which is expected to work).
buddhist-inspired options
105
sessed tremendous healing and exorcist powers. In 1122, when he
had just arrived in the county, the entire prefecture was plagued
by a drought, and the magistrate asked him to recite the Clouds
and Rain Sutra. As soon as he had ascended the open-air altar—
that is, before the performance of the ritual—it started to rain
and the region was saved. In the case of the possession of a Ms.
Dai, both shamans and Daoist priests had been “not effective”
(fuxiao
). As soon as our monk appeared and recited a spell,
the demon vanished. 29
In a similar case, a monk who was active in Hangzhou city
during the early southern Song was famous for his practice of
meditation. Whenever ordinary people met with suffering, “the
teacher would take on the meditation posture and enter into the
‘sâmadhi in which everything is seen to be like an illusion’. He
would ladle out water and make them drink it. All afflictions were
healed”. He also helped out in years when people worried about
droughts or floods and encountered pestilences.30
The exorcist and healing abilities of these two monks derived
from their command of meditation, rather than texts or rituals.
They were not professionally active as exorcists and/or healers,
but mention of these activities served to underline the excellence
of their meditation practice. These monks’ activities are also a
good example of the general observation, made at the outset of
this section, that a Buddhist practitioner could help people out of
religious devotion and compassion, regardless of whether they
had an exclusive relationship with Buddhist traditions or not. For
the monks, the point was helping people; for their customers, it
was being helped. Being “Buddhist” did not enter either party’s
calculations.
In the same way that Buddhist spells, texts, and monks were accessible to everyone, regardless of personal religious background,
Buddhist monasteries were often used as hotels, or even as semipermanent residences, particularly after the loss of the north to
the Jürchen of the Jin dynasty had brought many northern families to the south.31 Illustrative of the open nature of these monQiandao Siming zhi
(Song Yuan difangzhi congkan), 11: 20a-b.
Liang Zhe jinshi zhi
(Shike shiliao xinbian
[Xinwenfeng,
Taibei, 1986]), 10: 2b-4a, and Xianchun Lin’an zhi, 76: 13b.
31
Yijian zhi, yi 3: 209, and yi 10: 264-265 (both as hotel); yi 5: 224-225, yi 7:
235-236, yi 13: 295, yi 14: 302, zhijing 4: 913, zhiwu 3: 1075 (long-term residence).
29
30
106
barend j. ter haar
asteries is a story in which a specialist in Daoist ritual stayed for
the night with his family in a Buddhist monastery and used his
ritual abilities to deal with a local spectre. 32 In another account,
from early southern Song Hangzhou, the protagonist, Zhou Hao
, wanted to get away from his wife and concubine who were
fighting fiercely. He rented a room at the Transmitting the Dharma Monastery, but his wife and concubine succeeded one after
the other in tracking him down. He was forced to spend the night
with each of them, and in both instances woke up lying in shallow
water, about to drown. His superior called a Daoist priest to control him, but the priest was “not effective” (buyan
). Four
soldiers assigned to keep watch over him were no more successful. Exasperated, Zhou Hao’s superior sent someone to Jiankang,
who had a chance encounter on the road with the famous Daoist
ritual specialist Lu Shizhong
(fl. 1107-1134). Lu was finally
able to identify the women as water monsters and had them
caught by the deities of the waters from where they lived.33 As a
numinous place, the Buddhist monastery was able to provide
some safety for Zhou Hao, but only a highly competent Daoist
specialist turned out to be capable of exorcising the monsters.
By and large, it would appear that, at least in the anecdotal
material which I have gathered for the Lower Yangzi region for
the 1100-1340 period, the Buddhist option was not very important
for exorcist purposes.34 It was still widely believed at the time that
vicious and violent demons could possess people, causing illness, possession, nightmares or other disturbances. Such demons
might even take hold of local society as a whole, causing epiYijian zhi, yi 19: 347. Guo Tuan
, Kuiche zhi
(Biji xiaoshuo daguan
), 2: 4a and 3: 3a-b, provides two other cases in which Buddhist specialists are unable to defeat demons. In the first case the requisite protection is
provided by the Daoist deity Zhenwu
, in the second case by a local magistrate using bureaucratic procedures (which are basically the same as the methods of a Daoist ritual specialist).
33
Summarized from Mr. Shen , Guidong
(Zhibuzu zhai congshu
), 2: 1a-2a. On Lu Shizhong, see Boltz, “Not by the Seal of Office Alone”,
pp. 260-263, 266. Yijian zhi, jia 11: 97, gives a brief anecdote with the same point.
In it, the Fifth Lad, who possessed a female medium in Hangzhou, was able to
visit her in the famous Lingyin Monastery, but was successfully prevented from
entering by the god of the gate of the residence of a feudal prince.
34
Given the vast increase of sources after 1100, it is unsatisfactory to blame
this on a gap in our sources. One type of material which I have not systematically
checked, mainly because no easily accessible materials were available, is Buddhist biographical sources from the southern Song onwards.
32
buddhist-inspired options
107
demics, military upheaval or flooding and similar disasters. These
demons were violent beings and therefore various forms of
counterviolence were deemed to be effective. 35 In earlier periods,
Buddhist teachers and ritual specialists had been very active in
combating demons of all kinds by using concrete means of defeating them, such as spells or water. This thaumaturgical approach was enabled by the specialists’ powers of meditation and
their Buddhist understanding. 36 They might also take a more
direct approach by convincing the demon of its karmic burden,
through a dialogue with it or the performance of rituals. There
is no intrinsic doctrinal reason that Buddhist specialists should
have played a much smaller role in combating demons from the
southern Song onwards: as a result, the explanation presented
below is no more than tentative.
Since the early northern Song, the Tiantai tradition, which
stressed the individual’s own effort in reaching the Pure Land,
had been increasingly successful in the Lower Yangzi region. The
same tradition was a major force behind the spread of the Water
and Land Gathering and other rituals, in which “hungry demons”
were incorporated back into the community by feeding them and
were provided with karmic merit to assist in a better rebirth.37
This approach through conversion potentially made exorcist rituals superfluous. In addition, we should consider the increasing
pressure among the socio-educational elites during the Song
against violence as an acceptable cultural value for expressing
elite identity. This pressure may have affected the monastic community in so far as it attempted to remain acceptable to the socioeducational elite. Therefore, it is entirely possible that the violent
expulsion of the demonic other was becoming problematic in a
Buddhist context, while violence directed at oneself remained
35
See Stephan Feuchtwang, The Imperial Metaphor: Popular Religion in China
(Routledge, London, 1992), and Barend J. ter Haar, “China’s Inner Demons:
The Political Impact of the Demonological Paradigm”, China Information, XI:2/
3 (1996-1997), pp. 54-88. Paul Unschuld, Medicine in China: A History of Ideas
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. 34-50, 67-73, discusses the
demonological origins of Chinese medicine.
36
Stevenson, “Protocols of Power”, p. 354 and passim, notes that such healing was very common during the early Northern Song. See the recent work by
Kieschnick, The Eminent Monk, esp. pp. 70-111, and Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy, pp. 96-131; Michel Strickmann, Mantras et mandarins: le bouddhisme
tantrique en Chine (Paris: Gallimard, 1996) largely concerns the pre-Song period.
37
Stevenson, “Protocols of Power”, pp. 340-408.
108
barend j. ter haar
more or less acceptable, at least within the monastic community. 38
Whatever the precise explanation, demons still were violent
beings and therefore ritual specialists from competing religious
options possessing the ability to use violent forms of exorcism,
such as mediums and vernacular Daoist priests, were at an advantage in cornering this particular segment of the market. 39 At the
same time, independent lay recourse to elements from the Buddhist tantric tradition (specifically its spells or dhâranî, and the
spell-like use of other types of text) continued, as did direct reliance on Buddhist divinities, but this was without involving violent expulsion. Interestingly, most materials of this nature revolve
around the figure of Guanyin; and yet, Guanyin still featured
frequently as part of Buddhist monastic establishments, not as an
independent cult with its own place of worship.40
In the Lower Yangzi region, Buddhist cults and ritual specialists
were quite central in the activities of the state to obtain rain.
Already from circa 998 onwards, the Monastery of the Guanyin
that Divinely Responds (Linggan Guanyin si
) on Upper
Tianzhu Mountain in Hangzhou was famous for its response
(ying) to prayers for rain addressed to its Guanyin. These prayers
involved local officials and even the imperial court, who sent
incense and paper money.41 The same Guanyin from Tianzhu was
38
See the discussion below at the beginning of the section on “Taking vows
to keep Buddhist precepts”.
39
See Boltz, “Not by the Seal of Office Alone”, pp. 241-305. She also suggests
(pp. 265-269) that from circa A.D. 1100 there was actually an increased need
among the southern Chinese elite for exorcist expertise to deal with the new
threats that were posed by the local supernatural beings of the South to migrants from the north.
40
Steven P. Sangren, “Female Gender in Chinese Religious Symbolism: Kuan
Yin, Ma-tsu, and the Eternal Mother”, Signs: A Journal of Women in Culture and
Society, 9:1 (1983), pp. 4-25 makes the important point that by not being linked
to specific places (unlike most temple cults), the Guanyin cult was open to all
kinds of personal requests. In later periods, the cult often did have its own
temples, outside Buddhist monasteries.
41
Xianchun Lin’an zhi, 80: 13a-22a, and Zhipan
, Fozu tongji
(TS),
47: 424b, 425b, 427b, 432c. Likewise at another monastery, involving dragon
worship: Xianchun Lin’an zhi, 80: 24b (“responsive” [ying]). For a detailed account of a miracle involving the Hangzhou Guanyin and prayers for rain, see
Yijian zhi, yi 13: 292-293. Huhai xinwen yijian xuzhi, houji 2: 178, describes how
this same statue and a relic of the Buddha that adorned her head have been
“numinous and effective” (lingyan
) for all kinds of prayers throughout the
Song dynasty. A general survey of the Upper Tianzhu Guanyin cult, based on
slightly different sources, is given by Yü Chün-fang, “Pu-t’o Shan: Pilgrimage and
buddhist-inspired options
109
also worshipped in local monasteries in Jiaxing and Taizhou with
the purpose of averting droughts or excess of water. Local officials normally participated in these rites.42 Wilt Idema has recently suggested that this particular and more localized Guanyin
manifestation had replaced and incorporated an older dragon
lady cult. 43 Despite these origins, people would see this type of
worship as Buddhist-inspired.
Guanyin was worshipped as part of a larger repertoire of options for combating rain and drought, and therefore her worship
should not be understood as an isolated religious phenomenon.
Thus, when during the summer of 1257 there was a terrible
drought in Siming, the statues of the White Robed Guanyin of
the Guangren Monastery as well as the deities of the Divine Response, Shrine Mountain and City God Temples were all honoured with invitations and placed in the great hall of the yamen.
The magistrate burned incense for them and, finally, one day a
dragon appeared that brought rain. The next year there was
another drought and the magistrate repeated the same procedure. When it rained only slightly (weidaying
, “there was not
a great response”), he fasted and slept overnight in a local Daoist
monastery before organizing a Blue Jade Cosmic Renewal ritual.
This did work.44 In other words, there was no a priori choice based
on an exclusive affiliation, but only trial and error in order to
the Creation of the Chinese Potalaka”, in Susan Naquin and Yü Chün-fang
(eds.), Pilgrims and Sacred Sites in China (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1992), esp. pp. 196-202. She points out that Upper Tianzhu was the major pilgrimage center for Guanyin during the southern Song.
42
Jiahe zhi
(Song Yuan difangzhi congkan), 10: 2a, 11: 3b, and Jiading
chicheng zhi
(Song Yuan difangzhi congkan), 28: 5b-6a. Both sources state
that she was “responsive” (ying). In Suzhou a copper Guanyin statue was worshipped (also on an official level) for averting disasters caused by floods or
droughts; she too was very “responsive” (ying): see Wujun zhi
(Song Yuan
difangzhi congkan), 33: 7a. In one Changshu monastery, Guanyin, a dragon
mother and a dragon were worshipped together for dry weather or rain: see
Qinchuan zhi
(Song Yuan difangzhi congkan), 10: 12a-b, and Yijian zhi, bing
8: 434-435.
43
Wilt Idema, “Guanyin’s Acolytes”, in Jan A.M. DeMeyer and Peter M.
Engelfriet (eds.), Linked Faiths: Essays on Chinese Religions and Traditional Culture
in Honour of Kristofer Schipper (Leiden: Brill, 1999), pp. 205-227.
44
Kaiqing Siming xuzhi
(Song Yuan difangzhi congkan), 8: 16b-17b.
In Guiji a local magistrate had Shakyamuni Buddha and the Dragon King welcomed in the yamen and placed on the seat of the prefect. They were worshipped and the next day it rained: see Kuiche zhi, 3: 3a.
110
barend j. ter haar
obtain rapid results. The combination with the Shrine Mountain
cult is especially noteworthy here, since this was one of the most
popular regional cults all over southern China during our period,
(in)famous, moreover, for its prescribed sacrifice of oxes instead
of the more usual pigs.45
The Guanyin from Upper Tianzhu was also beseeched for
prognosticatory dreams. A group of seven examination candidates once prayed there for dreams to reveal their future results.
One of them dreamed that he got to eat a beautiful giant lobster.
This was taken as an auspicious sign and he did indeed pass the
following examination. Two years later, one of the same group,
together with a certain Zhou Cao
, went again to the monastery with the same entreaty. Zhou had dreamed the previous
night that his companions wanted to force him to draw prognostication sticks and that, precisely at that point, “a woman with hair
unbound as if she had just bathed” had appeared from behind
the Buddha’s back. He had retreated at once. When he and his
companion went the next day, other visitors drew lots, but Zhou
only burned incense and prayed for a dream. He got his dream,
which predicted success. In this dream, a figure appeared who
turned out to be the Daoist priest who sold prognostications at
another Buddhist monastery which Zhou Cao had visited before.46
This account, as told to Hong Mai by Zhou Cao himself, is
rather interesting. For one thing, it tells of a custom to ask
Guanyin for predictions on the future through dreams, much as
one would ask ordinary local deities. Most significantly, the auspicious dream following the first visit supplies the rather un-Buddhist fare of a lobster. In the second case, Zhou Cao had a dream
that suggested to him that drawing lots was not quite the right
thing to do and that only proper devotion could have the desired
effect. The lady with the unbound hair must have been Guanyin.
Neither asking for dreams nor drawing sticks were uniquely Buddhist prognostication practices, and Zhou Cao’s dream might
even be seen as a kind of critique of the custom of drawing sticks.
On the other hand, the fact that Zhou had also asked for a prognostication by a Daoist priest at another Buddhist monastery suggests that the critique was probably rather ad hoc, being limited to
45
46
Hansen, Changing Gods, pp. 148-159.
Yijian zhi, bing 9: 437-438. On Zhou Cao, see Songren zhuanji ziliao suoyin
, pp. 1460-1461.
buddhist-inspired options
111
the best way of addressing the deity in this particular instance.
As a matter of fact, Guanyin’s prognostication sticks at the Upper Tianzhu monastery must have been quite well-known by the
early thirteenth century. It was said that the poems which accompanied the sticks (and which must have been originally on loose
paper sheets hung out in the temple, but were later in book
form) had been revealed by a transformation of Guanyin herself.
They are still extant in a thirteenth century edition. The highly
learned monk-authors of two late southern Song Buddhist chronicles did not see any problems in this custom, whereas they vehemently opposed activist lay Buddhist traditions such as the
White Cloud Tradition, the People of the Way, and the White
Lotus movement.47
People often gained rewards for their recitation of Guanyin’s
name or of her Spell of Great Compassion (dabeizhou
),
without enacting any link between this custom and a specific monastic establishment. In some instances Guanyin manifested herself as a woman in white clothes, in other instances as a monk.
(S)he brought miraculous healing, returned property, saved
people from the Jin intruders, healed a devout orphan from her
ailments and restored her hearing. 48 In one story, the wife of a
man from Huzhou who had been banished to the south for his
role in an accidental killing practised a vegetarian lifestyle and
recited the name of Guanyin daily, all in response (the narrative
implies) to her husband’s banishment. As a result, a monk—most
likely Guanyin—appeared to him and asked if he wanted to return home to his loving wife. The monk then applied medication
(probably some kind of paste) to the man’s wrist, cut off his hand
painlessly and told him to show this to the official in charge. He
47
Originally in Zongjian’s
Shimen zhengtong
and quoted in the
Fozu tongji (TS), 33: 318c, in its encyclopedic chapter on worship, sacrifice, and
ritual. Strickmann, Mantras et Mandarins , pp. 332-334, refers briefly to the
Guanyin prognostication sticks of Upper Tianzhu, based on his Chinese Poetry
and Prophecy: The Written Oracle in East Asia (not seen by me).
48
Lower Yangzi instances: Yijian zhi, jia 10: 89-90; zhiding 1: 969. On the
spell, see Yü Chün-fang, “Domestication of the Thousand-handed and Thousand-eyed Kuan-yin in the Sung” (paper presented at the Conference on Sung
Buddhism, April 1996), and Maria Reis-Habito, Die Dhâranî des Großen Erbarmens
des Bodhisattva Avalokite²vara mit tausend Händen und Augen (Nettetal: Steyler
Verlag, 1993) (dealing with the pre-Song period). Curiously enough, all but one
of the nine instances of reciting the Spell of Great Compassion collected from
the Yijian zhi by Sawada, Chûgoku no jukuhô, pp. 460-464, come from outside the
Lower Yangzi region.
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barend j. ter haar
was then permitted to go home, probably on the assumption that
he would die anyhow and would be unfit for further forced
labour. On his way back to Huzhou, the monk reappeared and
pasted the hand back on again. 49
Guanyin was worshipped for a wide variety of reasons, ranging
from invocations for rain and healing to examination results or
getting children. Certainly in the Lower Yangzi region, by the
twelfth century the female form was rapidly becoming Guanyin’s
principal transformation. (S)he was undoubtedly the most important Buddhist figure to be addressed in petitionary prayers, but
we find the same broad scope of prayers with more narrowly
“Buddhist” figures. In Changshu (near Suzhou), people worshipped the statue of a monk in a nunnery. He was vaunted to be
especially effective (yan) in response to prayers for children. In
another local monastery, the “flesh-body” of a monk covered with
lacquer was worshipped by the local people for the same purpose.50 The unspoiled sexual nature of the monk made him a
potential donor of children. 51 Cults that secured rain, examination results, children or anything for which one would need help
were open to everybody who wished to engage in them on a case
by case basis. Still, the cults were located in specifically Buddhist
institutions and, one surmises, controlled by Buddhist monks and
nuns.
The preceding survey of examples of people’s recourse to Buddhist elements for solving problems in their lives basically conYijian zhi, jia 10: 90. This kind of miracle was in itself quite conventional
in Guanyin lore: see Robert Campany, “The Real Presence”, History of Religions,
32:3 (1993), pp. 240-241. Campany also stresses the very concreteness of
Guanyin’s presence in these accounts.
50
Qinchuan zhi, 10: 8b-9a and 18b. On the mummification of Chan monks,
see Bernard Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy, pp. 148-169, and Robert H. Sharf,
“The Idolization of Enlightenment: On the Mummification of Ch’an Masters in
Medieval China”, History of Religions, 32 (1992), pp. 1-31. Faure, The Rhetoric of
Immediacy, p. 163, gives the example of the Chan patriarch Huineng, whose
mummy was believed to bring good fortune and rain (documented already for
the early northern Song period).
51
Yijian zhi, bu 11: 1645-1646, records an example in which an eccentric
meat-eating and spirit-drinking monk succeeded in providing a couple with
children after regular Daoist and Buddhist priests had failed miserably. One
Song and several Ming sources testify to the existence of a belief that living
monks could “transmit the seed of the Buddha” to provide childless marriages
with progeny. See ter Haar, White Lotus Teachings, p. 169 (esp. notes 153 and
154).
49
buddhist-inspired options
113
firms the analysis of local temple cults proposed by Valerie
Hansen in her Changing Gods in Medieval China, where she points
out that people made their choice between different forms of
religious help on the basis of all kinds of criteria. They phrased
their criteria formally in terms of efficacy, but actually based their
choices also on access, costs, status, and so forth. They did not
seem much concerned to establish an exclusive affiliation to a
single approach.52 Buddhist divine figures, monks and priests
were all part of a much larger religious universe, which they
sometimes interpreted as demonic and with which they managed
to deal effectively, but which frequently also proved, or was believed to be, stronger than them.
The performance of rituals
Much of the Buddhist impact on Chinese society was connected
with the issue of death and what the dead might expect after
death. Buddhist ritual specialists offered rituals dealing with
anonymous hungry demons (egui
)53 who had not made the
proper transition to the underworld and/or to a following incarnation, as well as rituals for obtaining a better incarnation after
death. Their basic contribution was twofold. Firstly, it was assumed that one’s fate after death depended on one’s stock of
merit (gongde
or fu ) collected during this or preceding
lifetimes. This stock served to counterbalance one’s karmic debts.
After someone had died, his or her stock could be enlarged by
transferring the merit of rituals and of charitable acts (including
donations) by others onto the deceased. Secondly, it was believed
that the dead, especially those who had died without sufficient
rites of passage or who were being punished in the underworld,
were unable to consume their sacrificial offerings because these
would change into flames upon touching their mouths. Extensive
ritual was developed to prevent this from happening, which was
known by the generic term “distributing food” (shishi
). From
the Song onwards, there were three main groups of rituals for
dead beings, namely the Ghost Festival during the seventh
month, the Water and Land Gathering ritual, and funerary rites.54
Hansen, Changing Gods, pp. 29-47.
The conventional translation is “hungry ghosts”, which underplays their
danger and the people’s fear of them.
54
On the Ghost Festival see Stephen F. Teiser, The Ghost Festival in Medieval
China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), and “The Ritual behind the
52
53
114
barend j. ter haar
Anecdotal materials on Buddhist rituals often refer to their
success or failure and, pertinently of course, to their correct performance. The stories stress the typical Buddhist notion of merit
and observe that the efficacy of the rituals was influenced by the
moral stature of the person for whom they were being performed. They also testify to some understanding of ritual content
and of the way in which Buddhist-inspired measures might work.
Nobody needed to be or to become a practitioner of a Buddhistinformed lifestyle to have recourse to these rituals. The rituals
did in a certain sense “convert” their deceased objects into Buddhist believers by transferring the Three Refuges upon them, but
this is never stressed in the anecdotes themselves and only becomes clear in the ritual texts.
The narrative requirements of the anecdotal genre, in which
the story is structured around an unexpected or remarkable
event, have resulted in a scarcity of sources on the routine performance of rituals, except for the ritual texts themselves. We do
have another type of evidence which provides such routine
information, however, to wit, a detailed contract (hetong
)
reproduced on the back of a stele of the Recompensing the
Nation Monastery in the township of Nanlin (modern Nanxun),
dating from 1237.55 I will therefore discuss this evidence before
proceeding with an analysis of the anecdotal material. The contract prescribes the ritual services to be performed with funding
from the interests on loans provided to local people from a huge
money donation to the monastery’s Long Life Treasury.56 On the
Opera: A Fragmentary Ethnography of the Ghost Festival, A.D. 400-1900”, in
David Johnson (ed.), Ritual Opera, Operatic Ritual (Berkeley: University of
CaliforniaPress, 1989), pp. 191-223. Charles D. Orzech, “Esoteric Buddhism and
the Shishi in China”, in Henrik H. Sørensen (ed.), The Esoteric Buddhist Tradition
(Copenhagen and Aarhus: The Seminar for Buddhist Studies, 1994), pp. 51-72,
discusses Feeding the Ghosts rituals. Makita Tairyô
, Chûgoku bukkyôshi
kenkyû
II (Tôkyô: Taitô, 1984), pp. 213-223 (in his “Zuiriku e
kokô”), discusses the early Song origins of these rituals. Michel Strickmann,
Mantras et mandarins , pp. 369-411, is rather essayistic; his historical remarks seem
to be based largely on the overall framework and sources presented already by
Makita. The most complete treatment for the early Song period is by Stevenson,
“Protocols of Power”, pp 340-408.
55
Wuxing jinshi ji (Shike shiliao xinbian), 11: 6a-8b. A similar stele from the
same monastery and from the same year is reproduced in Wuxing jinshi ji, 11: 9b15b.
56
On this banking function of Buddhist monasteries, see Jacques Gernet
(Franciscus Verellen, trsl. and ed.), Buddhism in Chinese Society: An Economic His-
buddhist-inspired options
115
different death-days of four family members, the monks should
recite the Amitˆbha-sutra and provide one set of “food with a spell”
(zhoushi
; a more formal translation would be dhˆran“-food) in
order to guarantee rebirth in the Pure Land. The “food with a
spell” probably refers to the distribution of food for hungry demons according to the appropriate ritual, so that they will be able
to consume it. For the donor’s wife, who was evidently still alive,
the monks should recite a specific dhâranî and make sacrifices to
her personal star-lord on her birthday in order to guarantee a
long life. The contract goes on to specify the death-day sacrifices
as “fruits and nuts, drinks and food, incense and candles, and
paper representations” (lit. “paper horses”, or zhima
, that is,
paper objects to be burned as a form of transportation or to
accompany the concerned persons in the underworld). Finally,
the monks should always formally report to an official one day
beforehand and then invite him to come and burn incense, and
witness the execution of the contract.
Our male donor was a minor official in Zhenjiang, but he probably originated from Nanlin, where he must have been a man of
sufficient wealth and esteem to be able to draw up a contract,
have it chiselled in stone and expect that an official would deign
to come to inspect the proceedings on the prescribed ritual occasions. The inscription records that the contract was also preserved in two paper copies kept by the original donor and by the
monastery, respectively. We can safely assume that this was in fact
the normal practice, rather than having the contracts also chiselled in stone. In the contract in question the rough content of
the ritual and even the offerings are specified, suggesting that
this was indeed relevant to the donor. Thus the donor’s interest
extended to the content of the ritual, which could not be left to
the personal whim of the ritual performers.
We hear frequently of rituals that somehow went astray or were
performed for troublesome demons. In both cases, the extraordinary events provided the kind of narrative interest that secured
their transmission (with accompanying embellishment) in speech
and eventually in writing. When the demonic threat was particularly acute, Buddhist ritual specialists were asked to perform
Water and Land Gatherings (shuilu hui
) in which the detory from the Fifth to the Tenth Centuries (New York: Columbia University Press,
1995; note that this is an authorized translation which in many ways supersedes
the French original of 1956), pp. 173-174 (mainly Song evidence).
116
barend j. ter haar
monic beings were defined as deceased beings who had not undergone the appropriate rites of passage after dying, or “hungry
demons”. This ritual was essentially the product of late tenth
century developments, and it was gradually expanded and further
popularised in the course of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. 57
In our sources it is the most frequently mentioned Buddhist ritual
in the Lower Yangzi region.
The Water and Land Gathering ritual was intended to provide
the dead with food and to accumulate merit. In terms of its effect,
namely, getting rid of the (potential) demonic beings of water
and land, the Water and Land Gathering ritual functioned in the
same way as exorcist rituals. The underlying solution was fundamentally different, however. In an exorcist ritual, the demons
were violently expelled from the community and then left to their
own devices. This contrasted starkly with the Buddhist ritual, in
which they were recognized as part of the same community of
living beings as the donors of the ritual, whether they were presently human or not. The choice between these two approaches
was probably inspired by the customer’s or donor’s perception of
the kind of beings involved. When one perceived a certain responsibility for or an intimate link with this or that being, one
would preferably appeal to the Buddhist ritual. The rise of this
ritual fits what was hypothesized above as a shift from a predominantly exorcist or thaumaturgical approach towards demonic
beings, to a moral and compassionate approach, at least where
the Buddhist option was concerned.
The difference between a violent and a compassionate approach comes out clearly in the following instance. The niece of
the magistrate of Suzhou was possessed by a demon. First, a
Daoist priest was invited to drive the demon out, but the demon
explained that there was no need to expel him, implying that no
violence needed to be used. He told how twenty years before he
had been treated unjustly by lowly local functionaries, as a result
of which the magistrate had ordered him to be beaten. He had
been thereupon beaten to death below the stone pagoda of the
Yongxi Monastery next to the yamen. Now he requested that a
Water and Land Gathering ritual be held in order to accumulate
capital for his rebirth. Since the magistrate did not have the
money to organize one himself, the man told him that he could
Makita, Chûgoku bukkyôshi kenkyû II, pp. 213-223, and Strickmann, Mantras
et mandarins, pp. 369-411.
57
buddhist-inspired options
117
simply shout his name at a place where a ritual was about to be
carried out. In the end, the magistrate bought from his own salary a place for the man in a Water and Land Gathering at the
Feng Bridge, where the ritual was especially good (“had merit”,
).58 It is left unstated in the account how the
you gongde
niece (or more likely the person actually explaining her speech—
if modern possession practice is anything to judge by) knew of
these events. Someone working in the yamen must have been a
witness to them long ago and somehow have felt a responsibility
for the soul of the deceased. It is the establishment of this personal connection between the demon and the magistrate (as a
successor to the magistrate of twenty years ago) which resulted in
a different ritual approach.
The same Water and Land Gathering ritual could be performed in order to relieve the fate of family members or friends
on the brink of dying, or of those facing a terrible punishment in
hell or in a future rebirth.59 In one instance, we learn that someone was called in a dream to the City God temple because he
used to throw away food and drinks. He was punished by being
metamorphosed into a dog-like creature which could only eat
chaff. His family “performed Buddhist offerings and offered penance rituals” (zuo futu gong huixie
, in an alternative
version zuo futu shi chanxie
). He died some ten days
later. 60 Given its position in the process, it is likely that the ritual
was a Water and Land Gathering for a demonic being (the doglike creature), not yet a funerary ritual for an ordinary human
being. Whether for unknown hungry demons or for the demonsto-be of relatives and acquaintances, the ritual was directed at
dealing with risk situations in which people who were (or might
58
Yijian zhi, bing 12: 465-466. The magistrate originally came from Fuzhou.
His father figures in an anecdote with Daoist overtones: see op. cit., bing 8: 431.
59
Lower Yangzi cases only: Yijian zhi, jia 20: 181; yi 2: 197-198, 199-200, 3:
206-207, 14: 302, 17: 331; bing 12: 465-466, 15: 497; zhiding 3: 988; sanxin 3: 14051406. The ritual was also called the Penance Ritual of [Emperor] Wu of the
Liang (Liang Wu chan
), after its purported creator. See Yijian zhi, jia 20:
181, and zhiding 3: 988. In Yijian zhi, zhijing 5: 916, a family has a “three-seven
fast-gathering” carried out when they suspect that their recently deceased father
has been reborn as a dog. Zhuang Chuo
, Jile bian
(Biji xiaoshuo daguan)
xia: 94-95, discusses a monk who performs the ritual for known persons, rather
than hungry demons. The monk talks glowingly about the people that he sees
at these rituals, of whom he makes many “take refuge” (gui) in the Buddha.
60
Yijian zhi, yi 2: 198 (second half of the anecdote starting on yi 2: 197).
118
barend j. ter haar
be) stuck in the land of death and rebirth received a kind of
emergency rite of passage.
Funerary ritual also contained demonological aspects, but an
important part of the overall funerary ritual event comprised the
rites performed by Buddhist or, much more rarely, Daoist priests.
These specific rites were rites of passage and penitence, rather
than demonological in nature. The performance of Buddhist
funerary rites was not limited to any social group; it was so common that strictly Confucian-minded literati felt the need to include an explicit prohibition on carrying out Buddhist funerary
rites after their death. During the Song, cremation was widely
practised, much to the dismay of the same Confucian-minded
literati. Still, despite their resistance, Buddhist funerary rituals
and cremation remained widespread among elite and other social
groups.61
Even after the funerary rituals themselves had been completed,
those families who could afford it had Buddhist monks perform
rituals on specific dates or even established special cloisters near
the grave (the so-called fen’an
). Both Buddhist monks and
certain types of activist lay people, such as People of the Way,
members of the White Cloud Tradition and adherents of the
White Lotus movement, would reside there. They would perform
the requisite rituals to gather merit for the deceased, ensuring his
or her rebirth in the Pure Land (or at the very least in a better
human existence), and to keep up ancestor worship.62 Elite fami61
Patricia Ebrey, “Cremation in Sung China”, American Historical Review,
95: 2 (1990), pp. 406-428, and Confucianism and Family Rituals in Imperial China
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 41-43, 73, 76-79, 88-89, 94101. Also see Alan Cole, “Upside Down, Right Side Up: A Revisionist History of
Buddhist Funerals in China”, History of Religions, 35 (1996), pp. 307-338. On
Daoist funerary ritual, see Matsumoto Kôchi
, “Sôrei. shirei ni okeru
Sôdai shûkyôshi no ichikeikô”
, in Sôdai no shakai to
bunka
(Tôkyô: Saiko shoin, 1983), pp. 169-194. Timothy Brook,
“Funerary Ritual and the Building of Lineages in Late Imperial China”, Harvard
Journal of Asiatic Studies, 49: 1 (1989), pp. 465-499, has pointed out the ongoing
strength of the practice of Buddhist funerary rituals among the social elites even
during the Ming and Qing dynasties.
62
Chikusa, Chûgoku bukkyô, pp. 111-143, and “Sô Gen jidai ni okeru andô”
, Tôyôshi kenkyû
, XLVI: 1 (1987), pp. 1-28. Also see ter
Haar, White Lotus Teachings, pp. 42, 57, 81 on grave cloisters manned by activist
lay Buddhists. Also see colophons by grave-cloister keepers in Sôjôji shiryôshû,
Bekken
(Tôkyô: Daihonzan Sôjôji, 1981; hereafter Sôjôji), nos. 99,
100, 262.
buddhist-inspired options
119
lies often had such cloisters, as for example the family of the
principal wife of Hong Mai’s father, which had a cloister in Wuxi.
Hong Mai and his brothers stayed there in 1138 to perform their
mourning period; a Buddhist monk took care of the ritual affairs
of the cloister.63 As for the performance of death-day rituals, we
already encountered above the example of the detailed contract
from 1237 chiselled in stone in the Recompensing the Nation
Monastery at Nanlin.
Funerary ritual is mentioned in passing in several anecdotes;
and we possess some interesting accounts of rituals that did not
quite go as planned. 64 One concerns the mother of a pig-seller
from Wuxi who also liked to raise pigs herself, until she died in
1134. On the seventh day after her death, when her family was
engaged in “Buddhist affairs” (referring to funerary rituals), they
heard a sound from within the coffin. When they opened it, it
turned out that she had changed into an old hag. They asked the
head of a local monastery to “administer the injunctions” (shijie
) to her. When they wanted to bury the coffin, it rained so
much that nobody could accompany it to the burial grounds;
given the social and ritual importance of sending off the deceased this was a major disaster. The grave was so full with water
that they had to press the coffin down with stones in order to
bury her finally. 65
Administering the injunctions was clearly an ad hoc improvisation in this particular context, because the funerary ritual itself
was turning out to be unsuccessful in bringing about the woman’s
passage into a better incarnation. There is no evidence that injunctions were a structural element of Buddhist funerary ritual in
Song China.66 This particular informant evidently felt that no
63
Yijian zhi, yi 10: 270. She is referred to as “furen
”, rather than as
“mother”. We know that Hong Mai’s many brothers had different mothers.
64
Cursory references in Yijian zhi, zhijing 3: 901-2; zhiding 6: 1011-1012;
zhigeng 5: 1171; Kuiche zhi, 2: 4a and 3: 1b.
65
Yijian zhi, jia 7: 56-57.
66
The custom of posthumous vows is well-known from Japanese Buddhist
funerary practice. See Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy, p. 201, and William M.
Bodiford, “Zen in the Art of Funerals: Ritual Salvation in Japanese Buddhism”,
History of Religions, 32 (1992), pp. 146-164. Bodiford stresses that this is a Japanese innovation, and indeed I have found no Chinese evidence of such a practice. Instead, the practice recalls the approach of hungry demons during the
Water and Land Gathering ritual, where they are also admonished, instructed
and converted. See Stevenson, “Protocols of Power”, pp. 368-369; Makita,
Chûgoku bukkyôshi kenkyû, “Zuiriku e kokô”, pp. 217-220; and Jile bian, xia: 94-95.
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barend j. ter haar
funerary rituals or Buddhist injunctions could save someone with
such a heavy karmic burden.67 The story also reveals something of
the creativity with which ritual performances could be adapted to
try and save an occasion. Ultimately, all ritual efforts in this instance were believed to have been unsuccessful, hence the rain
(which is implicitly constructed by the story as an expression of
Heaven’s disapproval) and the final non-Buddhist act of exorcism
by throwing in stones to press the woman’s coffin down.
There was, of course, much that could go wrong during a
ritual. A young boy from an official’s family had died far away
from his mother and sister, who were living in Changzhou while
he was with his father in Hangzhou. He descended in his
mother’s maid and told of his death a month before. He asked
that rituals for accumulating “Buddhist merit” ( foguo
) be
held to support his “passage across and rebirth” (chaosheng
).
They asked the monks of a nearby monastery “to recite sutras,
provide a vegetarian meal and write a memorial to recommend
him”. During the ritual, he descended again in the maid, this
time to complain that several monks had stopped reciting at
specific points. This caused the merit to be imperfect and made
the ritual quite useless. It turned out that he was correct and the
monks were severely reprimanded. They had to start all over
again.68 This account implies that at least the maid or the person
interpreting her speech knew what the precise content of the
recitals should be, which suggests that a certain measure of ritual
knowledge was present with the audience of such rituals.69
After his death, a man called Li Guan actually possessed his exwife and accused her of stealing the money set aside for his “Buddhist affairs” (again referring to funerary rituals) and using it as
her dowry upon remarrying. He had got stuck in the underworld
as a result. Her new husband invited a Daoist priest with a boy
medium to exorcise Li Guan. They were unable to drive him out,
67
Since the extant Yijian zhi is incomplete at this point, the identity of the
informant is unknown.
68
Yijian zhi, bing 7: 426.
69
The same concern with the proper performance of funerary ritual transpires in the account of an underworld visit by a man from Pucheng (Northern
Fujian) living in Guangde prefecture. Among other things, he transmits the
detailed message of a deceased friend and underworld underling to his family
concerning the performance of a ritual, as well as a warning that they should not
forget to report to the City God when holding “merit relatives” and should not
sacrifice bloody meat during local festivals. See Yijian zhi, bing 8: 432-433.
buddhist-inspired options
121
but the boy was able to see what was taking place in the land of
the dead. It turned out that Li Guan was right. His ex-wife was
suitably punished and he received the rituals that were his due. 70
This last story once more illustrates the rough, though not absolute, professional differentiation between Daoist priests as specialists in rites of exorcism and in re-establishing the cosmic equilibrium, and Buddhist priests as specialists in funerary rituals and
mending wrongs.71
Buddhist monasteries also provided an important service to
people whose relatives had died outside their place of origin.
Until the deceased could be transported back, they were laid out
in local monasteries, who had special halls for this. This service
derived directly from the role of Buddhist monks as specialists in
funerary rituals.72 As a result, however, these monasteries were
often haunted by the demons of the deceased whose coffins they
lodged: after all, they had not yet been provided with a final
burial place and the accompanying concluding rituals. Hence,
they still were to a certain degree “hungry demons”.73 Here, Daoist ritual traditions and various types of non-canonical specialists
appear to have been more successful in dealing with irregular
demons. This confirms my earlier remark on the relative inability
of Buddhist institutions (monks or monasteries) to control the
demonic threat, at least as perceived by the outside world. Most
likely, the Buddhist monastic community did see itself as capable
of controlling the dead and was quite happy with having cornered this piece of the market for disposing of the non-local dead!
Finally, these different types of Buddhist rituals all involve
elaborate conceptions of the underworld, always in the indigenous form of the Ten Kings of hell, rather than the more elaboKuiche zhi, 4: 2a-b.
Matsumoto, “Sôrei.shirei ni okeru Sôdai shûkyôshi no ichikeikô”, pp. 169194, records some instances of Daoist priests carrying out their own form of the
Water and Land Gathering ritual as well as Daoist funerary rituals.
72
Yijian zhi, yi 2: 200-201, 10: 264-265; bing 10: 454; zhiyi 7: 846; zhijing 3: 901;
and the instances quoted in the next footnote.
73
For instance Yijian zhi, bing 10: 454; ding 4: 568; Yiwen zonglu
(Biji
xiaoshuo daguan), 4: 6b-7b. This last story comes from lost sections of the Yijian
zhi: see my “Newly Recovered Anecdotes”, pp. 19-41. The Yiwen zonglu, 4: 5a-b,
contains another lost anecdote from the Yijian zhi that tells of a monk who is
seduced by a girl buried in a grave next to the monastery. In Yijian zhi, ding 6:
1011-1012, the apparition is the recently deceased friend of a visitor to the
monastery (who stresses that he has no intention of causing “strange events or
delusions”).
70
71
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barend j. ter haar
rate hells of Buddhist lore.74 In several anecdotes the presumed
demon or deceased person communicates his or her wish for a
Buddhist ritual through the possession of a medium (voluntary)
or of a young girl (as in the involuntary possessions of the Suzhou
magistrate’s niece and the maid of the official’s family in Changzhou), sometimes with the help of the exorcist specialist who had
been hired to drive the demon out.75 Possession was still fully
recognized by members of the Song-Yuan educated elite as a
legitimate means of communication with the world of demons
and divine beings, though it was no longer practised via possession of these male members themselves. It had become a suitable
means for the socially weak to express their interpretation of
events or to voice an appropriate course of action.76 Thus, Buddhist ritual practices were intimately connected with other religious means for solving problems; they cannot be understood
independently of them.
Buddhist lives
Some people had recourse to Buddhist elements in a more
pervasive and intense manner. I suggested at the outset that this
corresponded to a different religious approach wherein a set of
Buddhist practices was adopted with a clearer view of at least
some Buddhist soteriological goals. This did not preclude the
hope of specific benefits as well, but the efficacy of one’s practice
was perceived as being more general. Thus, the purposes and the
criteria of efficacy were very close, but the nature of the practice
and the scope of its effects were different. Buddhist authors do
not tire of pointing out that a truly pervasive practice, even when
only during a very short period of time, should bring about a
better reincarnation, or even rebirth in the Pure Land. But the
actual people who feature in the accounts below often had more
limited goals.
74
Stephen F. Teiser, The Scripture on the Ten Kings and the Making of Purgatory
in Medieval Chinese Buddhism (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1994), and
Sawada Mizuho, Jigoku hen
(Kyôto: Hôzôkan, 19762).
75
Also consider a miracle preserved in the Lianhua jing xianying lu, ZZK
134.891, in which the Lotus Sutra survives terrible catastrophes and a shaman
(medium) is invited to explain the miraculous event!
76
In addition to the above examples, see Yijian zhi, yi: 3: 206-207 and 14:
302.
buddhist-inspired options
123
In the following sections I will first discuss some concrete examples of this kind of intensified practice, which usually consisted only of a small number of Buddhist elements. Then I will
investigate the two injunctions on killing and on drinking liquor.
Abiding by these injunctions had significant social and ritual
implications, since it potentially excluded the practitioner from
his or her local community and kinship group, in which the collective consumption of meat as well as the sacrifice of meat and
liquor were prime constitutive acts. In the last section, I will look
at people who took formal Buddhist injunctions in order to examine whether they had substantially different motivations from
people who did not take such injunctions. In that connection, I
will also make some suggestions on the quantitative dimension of
this type of lay Buddhist approach.
Intensified practice
Local society continually produced new instances of remarkable devotion, such as the simple silkworm raiser from a markettown near Huzhou who discovered the representation of a Buddha in the form of a cocoon. Already during the southern Song
the Huzhou region was one of China’s silk-production centres.
Producing silk meant raising every year millions of silkworms that
produced cocoons inside which they would normally transform
themselves into butterflies. But the cocoons were of course
thrown into boiling water in order to kill the worms prior to their
metamorphosis and obtain their silk. Evidently, this mass-killing
was a heavy karmic offence and it is tempting to link this fact to
the well-attested popularity of Guanyin in the region.
The silkworm raiser just mentioned was so devout that he was
nicknamed “Zhu The-Buddha-is-Great”. In 1194 his silkworms in
their cocoons were entering their third period of sleep and becoming old; in other words they were close to the moment when
they would have to be killed. One of the cocoons suddenly
changed and appeared to have a face that looked just like a
Buddha. Mr. Zhu removed the cocoon and placed it in a small
box. He respectfully worshipped it in his “incense hall” (probably
his home altar). The people from the neighbouring villages all
came to watch: the resemblance to a Buddha statue was truly
perfect. After a few days Mr. Zhu opened the box; the silkworm
had already changed into a butterfly and could fly away. 77
77
Yijian zhi, bing 15: 496-497. Yijian zhi, ding 14: 658, similarly tells of a pearl
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barend j. ter haar
The key element in this story is not the contradiction between
killing silkworms and worshipping the Buddha, but, rather, the
devoutness of Mr. Zhu. It is one of many stories that tell of the
intense devotion of a single person, showing itself in a very consistent practice over a lengthy period of time and with often
unexpected rewards. 78 It was the pervasiveness of devotion that
counted in the eyes of the practitioners and of their audience,
including the informants who eventually transmitted the story.
The presence or absence of any deeper doctrinal understanding
was not an issue, let alone moral or doctrinal consistency.
People certainly developed their own understanding of Buddhist doctrinal issues, especially as far as the issue of death was
concerned. One burning concern for many people was the moment when they became aware they were about to die soon
(linzhong
). The Yuan monk Pudu (1255-1330) writes about
how devout believers were often extremely afraid of dying: they
would wait until almost breathing their last breath “before they
started the ten recitations to sound the bell, just like closing the
door after the thief has gone”.79 In his extensive polemical criticisms of distortions in contemporary Pure Land practice, the Precious Mirror on the Lotus Tradition of Mount Lu (Lushan lianzong
), Pudu enumerates a whole range of “false”
baojian
beliefs and practices related to the last moments before death,
specifically those whose object was to find out what was in store
for people.80
in the shape of an arhat. It was found by a local man from Huzhou and donated
to a Chan monastery, where it became the subject of high-brow worship by elite
literati.
78
For some examples, see Yijian zhi, zhijing 3: 898-899 (devotion causing the
formation of a statue through fire); zhiding: 1: 969 (devotion bringing healing);
Jingang jing ganying zhuan, ZZK 149.156-158, 164 (the consistent recitation of the
Diamond Sutra over a long period of time bringing healing, freedom, long life
and protection against arrows).
79
Lushan lianzong baojian, 8: item 7: 128. Chapter Eight largely deals with the
phase just before dying and the importance of faith (“reliance” [xin ): see
Lushan lianzong baojian, 8: 122-132. In item 9: 130, Pudu writes that one should
try all “convenient means” ( fangbian
) to make someone recite Amitâbha’s
name ten times before dying. In Lushan lianzong baojian, 6: item 2: 101, he
points out that all those who practice the Pure Land ideal make life and death
into their enemy.
80
Lushan lianzong baojian, 10: item 16: 154, 20: 158, 22: 160, 23 and 24: 161162. On this list, see ter Haar, The White Lotus Teachings, pp. 96-111, and “Whose
Norm, Whose Heresy: The Case of the Song-Yuan White Lotus Movement” (to
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125
The extreme actions of the protagonist in the following account illustrate how an awareness of karmic punishment could
lead to the creative adoption of Buddhist practices to prevent its
realization. A man from a local village near Huzhou had been a
menace to the entire region. Having reached age 50, he suddenly
realized what he had been doing. For several years he daily recited the Buddha’s name (probably Amitâbha) without pause.
One day he told the people he knew that he had accumulated so
much bad karma that he needed to burn his body in order to
atone for his crimes. He begged each of them to give him some
bundles of firewood. He heaped the bundles up and built a paper
cloister on top of them. He folded his hands and sat down inside
the paper cloister with a straight back. Then he lighted the stakes
and did not move even when his fingertips were burned and fell
off.81 In a sense, he was as radical in his Buddhist practice as he
had been as a local tyrant before. Although this form of selfsacrifice had both indigenous and Buddhist roots, it is more likely
that our protagonist learned of it from local practice.82
The last two anecdotes illustrate an important point about
intensified practice, and this is the opportunity that it offered people without status or riches to engage in meaningful
Buddhist practice in order to improve their lot in this or a following incarnation. The next story further underlines this point. A
prostitute from Huzhou wrote a copy of the Lotus Sutra. Each
time she took up the brush, she would first eat a vegetarian meal,
wash herself and change her dress. She died of an illness, but on
the same night she visited her mother in a dream to say that
thanks to the “power” (li ) of the text she had been reborn as
a girl in the household of a local county clerk.83 There are several
appear in Irene Pieper, Michael Schimmelpfennig and Joachim v. Soosten eds.,
Norm und Abweichung: Häresien in religiösen Kontexten (München: Fink Verlag,
2001). Cole, “Upside Down, Right Side Up”, pp. 323-329, discusses Pure Land
death rites (i.e. preceding the final moment of death itself) in Tang monastic
practice to effect rebirth in the Pure Land.
81
Kuiche zhi, 1: 4b-5a.
82
On the indigenous background see Edward H. Schafer, “Ritual Exposure
in Ancient China”, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 14 (1951), pp. 130-184. On
the Buddhist context see Jacques Gernet, “Les suicides par le feu chez les bouddhistes chinois du Ve au Xe siècle”, in Mélanges publiés par l’Institut des Hautes
Études Chinoises, II (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1959), pp. 527-588,
and James A. Benn, “Where Text Meets Flesh: Burning the Body as an Apocryphal Practice in Chinese Buddhism”, History of Religions, 37 (1998), pp. 295-322.
83
Kuiche zhi, 1: 3a-b. Yijian zhi, yi: 13: 295, mentions a prostitute visiting a
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colophons to early Yuan reprints of Buddhist texts in which
women dedicate the merit of funding such reprints to a future
rebirth in a male body.84
Rebirth was a common concern to people interested in Buddhist practices, and nobody expected to obtain rebirth in the
Pure Land without a life of devout practice and charitable actions. Pudu even notes that people felt that since they were just
common folk, “how could they hope to be reborn in the Pure
Land and eventually become Buddhas?”. He then goes on to
argue that with faith and proper practice everything is possible.85
Apparently, scepticism about one’s hope of rebirth in the Pure
Land negatively influenced people’s Buddhist practice. With the
above-mentioned women, this attitude led to the more “realistic”
wish of rebirth as a male, or at least in a better household.
In the next case, the informant, who came from a village in
Wujiang, was sceptical that a very devout person had been reborn
in the Pure Land. He had been called to the underworld for the
wrong reasons and on his way back he encountered a neighbour.
This man had been a “Man of the Way” during his life. His was
the calling of very active lay Buddhists, who often took a formal
vow of keeping Buddhist precepts, practised a vegetarian diet and
engaged in public meritorious acts. They used different autonyms
that contained the term “Way” (dao), and used religious affiliation characters in their names to mark their adherence to a particular ideal. 86 The White Cloud Tradition and the White Lotus
movement of the Song-Yuan period were prominent representatives of this larger religious trend.
The neighbour sat there reciting sutras, his body badly scarred
and a heap of money besides him. He called out to our protagonist and told him about his sorry fate. It turned out that when
monastery to pray. Yijian zhi, zhigeng 10: 1213-1214, mentions a Huzhou prostitute who died of the bloodspitting disease (tuberculosis) and was reborn as a
boy in a poor family because of the merit acquired from reciting the Lotus Sutra.
Otherwise, there is no evidence of an intensified lifestyle in this account, and
the woman once bribed a doctor to fake a pregnancy. Since prostitutes were
excluded from society and its regular communal cult-organizations, individual
Buddhist worship was the best available means for them and other marginal
groups to obtain a better life (i.e., rebirth).
84
Sôjôji, nos. 95, 104, 233. Also see the Yijian zhi account quoted in the
preceding footnote.
85
Lushan lianzong baojian, 7: item 2: 116.
86
Ter Haar, White Lotus Teachings, pp. 28-43.
buddhist-inspired options
127
alive he had recited the Diamond Sutra, which had prevented him
from falling into a bad rebirth. However, he had only “mouthed
its text with other concerns in his heart, and also had not understood its meaning or purport. Therefore, although his riches
were sufficient, he still could not traverse and ascend [to the
Western Paradise]”. He had died in a fire because each spring he
used to spread mud on his lands to fertilize them: in this way he
had killed innumerable snails living in the mud. His karmic punishment had been death by burning, and only by continuously
reciting sutras could he alleviate the terrible pain that he was
suffering in the underworld. 87 It should be noted that the criticism does not concern primarily the Man of the Way’s intellectual
understanding of the texts, but his supposedly superficial practice. Nonetheless, the anecdote is a rare example of the view that
understanding a text’s content did matter.
In this story we learn some interesting details on this Man of
the Way, such as his constant recitation of a sutra (“his riches”),
his farming profession and his posthumous wealth (that is, the
money burned for him at his funeral, to which the “heap of
money” beside him refers). It is also suggested that he had hoped
to ascend to the Western Paradise (a common aim among People
of the Way). Since the actual telling is done by his sceptical
neighbour, we do not learn much about this Man of the Way’s
own point of view when he was still alive. It seems unlikely that
he expected to be punished in this way. Different people had
quite different estimates of whether someone was successfully
reborn in the Pure Land or not. For some, intensive practice and
funerary rituals (including burning paper money for use in the
underworld) might be sufficient, while for others only the most
consistent maintenance of certain norms would be enough.
Whereas the Man of the Way, in the eyes of his sceptical
neighbour, must have suffered in hell for his lack of sincerity and
the killing of innumerable creatures living in the mud, the silkworm farmer was accepted by his audience as a devout Buddhist
87
Guidong, 3: 1a-2b. The story probably dates from the early thirteenth century. At the end of the account, the author notes that the protagonist only met
people in the underworld whom he had known during his lifetime. The fact that
the author appended his sceptical comment at the end of the account, instead
of inserting it at the beginning or in the middle, suggests that he was attempting
to transmit the account as he had originally heard it.
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barend j. ter haar
despite his massive and conscious killing of silkworms. The
butcher in the next account shows the same combination of
devout practice over a long period of time and an essentially unBuddhist profession.
Internalising sutras or the name of a Buddha (usually Amitâbha) by means of frequent recitation was a central element in the
intensified practice of most people. 88 The following account is
especially informative about the practical dimension of sutra recitation and deserves an extensive summary. In Huzhou, a young
butcher of pigs and goats, whose family had been in this business
for generations, met a travelling monk when he was 23 years old.
The monk convinced him that he should start reciting the Lotus
Sutra and the Diamond Sutra in order to cancel his bad karma. He
disappeared immediately after his lecture and the butcher
thought he had witnessed a manifestation of a Buddha and of the
Bodhisattva Guanyin—such at least is the strange duality that the
narrative recounts.
He ordered a painter to make a scroll with Buddha Amitâbha
of the Pure Land and his two assistants Shizhi
and Guanyin,
which he then started to worship. He took a teacher to learn
reciting the two sutras, and within five years was able to recite the
Lotus Sutra by heart all by himself. “Whenever the butcher had to
slaughter some pigs and goats, he would go in person before the
Buddha the night before, burn incense, and recite the Lotus Sutra
once and the Diamond Sutra for a sequence of seven times in
order to do penance and express his remorse before the Buddha.
He would say: ‘Next morning I will kill so many pigs and so many
goats. I wish that you let the pigs and goats that are killed cross
over on the basis of this merit of reciting sutras. Thus, they can
exhaust their rebirths due to retribution and be reborn quickly in
the Pure Land. I wish that when my life comes to an end, I may
avoid their revenge for this.’” The butcher always felt much relieved by this act of penance. When he died at age 81, he was able
to invite his visitors to a vegetarian meal on his dying day. He
88
Although reciting the name of Amitabha was certainly very common, it is
not represented often in the anecdotal literature of our period; see ter Haar,
White Lotus Teachings, p. 22. The Fozu tongji, 48: 430b-c, tells of a devout official
from Mingzhou who always recited the Lotus Sutra, was well-versed in the Tiantai
and Shaolin (Chan!) teachings, and whose corpse then spread the fragrance of
lotus flowers. Biographical accounts of lay Buddhists, monks and nuns frequently include such evidential miracles.
buddhist-inspired options
129
could still wash himself and change his clothes; whereupon he
died in a straight sitting posture.89
This account is revealing in a number of ways. First, it notes
that the animals the butcher killed were incarnations of people
with a karmic burden from a prior life. 90 The implication is that
the butcher is doing them a service since he releases them from
their chain of retribution and transfers them to the Pure Land.
His devout worship also prevents him from accumulating a
karmic debt himself. Secondly, the butcher was originally inspired by a monk and had to take a private teacher, most likely
also a monk. Thus, religious specialists were still relevant to otherwise independent Buddhist practice. Thirdly, the butcher
learned from his teacher the Lotus Sutra by heart over a period of
five years, which was considered to be especially fast. Here we
read something about a little-documented fact, to wit, that it was
not easy to learn this text by heart and that for the most part even
people who succeeded in doing so probably never actually read
it. Written as it was in classical Chinese, the text could only have
been understood by reading. Thus, this account indicates once
more the priority of the internalisation of a text’s meaning and
power by repeated oral repetition, rather than analytical understanding, making it available to the predominantly illiterate
group of non-elite practitioners.91
Attitudes towards meat and liquor
One of the most basic facts of Chinese social life was and still
is the communal consumption of meat and liquor to establish
personal bonds, both between humans and between humans and
deities.92 Local society was traditionally structured around the
89
Jingang jing ganying zhuan
(late southern Song), ZZK 149.164165, based on the testimony of someone who was present at his death.
90
See also Yijian zhi, zhijing 5: 916-917, and sanxin 10: 1462.
91
Compare Yijian zhi, yi: 9: 262, an anecdote from outside the Lower Yangzi
region but revealing the power of sincere recitation (trsl. in ter Haar, White Lotus
Teachings, p. 18).
92
John Kieschnick, The Eminent Monk, pp. 22-28, also makes this important
point. See for instance Stevan Harrell, “Normal and Deviant Drinking in Rural
Taiwan”, in A. Kleinman and Tsung-Yi Lin (eds.), Normal and Abnormal Behavior
in Chinese Culture (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1980), pp. 49-59, and many contributions in C.K. Chang, Food in Chinese Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press,
130
barend j. ter haar
regular worship of deities who had to be sacrificed bloody meat
and liquor. Within the same network of worshippers, people supported each other in difficult times and invited one another to
take part in various celebrations. Not to take part meant cutting
one’s local ties and, consequently, the connections that one
needed for one’s survival. Hence, membership of the local society
and the rejection of meat and liquor entailed a deep tension.
This rejection was part of the above-mentioned set of five injunctions that any serious adherent to the teachings of the Buddha
should abide by. Pudu actually considered the two precepts
against meat and intoxicating drinks (liquor) to be the minimal
required practice of someone who committed himself to the five
injunctions.93 Indeed, we will see below that a vegetarian lifestyle
in particular was a very powerful religious statement.
From early on, Buddhist teachers had responded to the prominence of cults demanding bloody sacrifice by destroying them or
converting them into vegetarian cults. There is abundant documentation on this in the pre-Song period,94 but on the whole
Buddhism was relatively unsuccessful in obtaining a hold on local
popular (and bloody) cults.95 Bloody meat sacrifice remained the
norm in local cults throughout the imperial period and until
today. There is actually surprisingly little evidence of the conversion of local deities.96 A good example is the highly popular—
1977). The role of commensality in Chinese culture is still an understudied
topic.
93
Lushan lianzong baojian, 1: item 9: p. 25.
94
Gernet, Buddhism in Chinese Society, pp. 254-256, 261; Erik Zürcher, The
Buddhist Conquest of China: The Spread and Adaptation of Buddhism in Early Medieval
China (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1959), pp. 145-146, 208; Peter Gregory, “The Teaching
of Men and Gods: The Doctrinal and Social Basis of Lay Buddhist Practice in the
Hua-yen Tradition”, in Robert M. Gimello and Peter N. Gregory (eds.), Studies
in Ch’an and Hua-yen (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1983), pp. 288-294;
Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy, pp. 99-100, 112. The programme of the early
Song Tiantai master Ziyun Zunshi for replacing the bloody meat and liquor
liturgy of traditional local cults is well-documented, and has been studied in
detail by Stevenson, “Protocols of Power”, pp. 350-358 and passim.
95
Terry F. Kleeman, “Licentious Cults and Bloody Victuals: Sacrifice, Reciprocity, and Violence in Traditional China”, Asia Major, Third Series, VII: 1
(1994), pp. 185-211, esp. 208-209.
96
I have gone through all extant Song and Yuan local histories in the Song
Yuan difangzhi congkan for post-Tang evidence of a Buddhist conversion of
deities. One finds some cases of deity worship in monasteries (such as dragons),
but without explicit transformation from an original bloody meat cult into a
vegetarian cult. The Yijian zhi, zhiyi 9: 867-868, records the case of a god of the
buddhist-inspired options
131
among local people as much as the social elite—Wutong
cult, devoted to a group of five extremely violent and rapacious
deities, who were worshipped with bloody meat sacrifices. During
the southern Song the cult spread in close connection with Buddhist institutions, especially in the Lower Yangzi region. One of
the five deities’ incarnations in that region was the Bodhisattva
Huaguang
(a single person!), and another was the Five Luminaries (this time five persons). In several places, and throughout the imperial period, the cult’s festival was on the Buddha’s
birthday, the eighth day of the fourth month. Despite this obviously Buddhist context, no explicit conversion of the deities is
documented. The nature of their sacrifices in Buddhist institutions during the southern Song and Yuan periods is unclear, but
at least during the Ming and Qing dynasties the cult was commonly held with bloody meat sacrifices. Certainly in the Wutong
form current in the Lower Yangzi region, the deities also preserved their distinct violent behaviour, including the raping of
women. 97
In fact, only two important regional cults were wholly or partially transformed through the conversion of the deity to Buddhism,
namely those of Guan Yu
near the Jade Source Monastery in
Jingzhou prefecture (modern Hunan), and Ouyang Hu
on
Daqian Mountain in Shaowu prefecture (modern Fujian). Neiearth who had vowed during the Tang never to consume liquor or meat anymore and to protect the orthodox dharma, whereupon he had become the
protector deity of the monastery. On the other hand, the Yufeng zhi (Song Yuan
difangzhi congkan), xia: 16a-19b, esp. 17b, mentions the counter-example of a
cult devoted to a mountain god who had assisted in building a Buddhist monastery. It still flourished by the Song period, receiving bloody meat and paper
money sacrifices. On bloody meat sacrifice in general, see for instance Guiji zhi
(Song Yuan difangzhi congkan), 6: 23b (stating that in the cult for the Shrine
Mountain deity, cows should be sacrificed instead of pig’s meat, implying that
the latter was more common), and Yijian zhi, sanxin: 10: 1462 (mentioning the
high price of pig meat before the winter solstice, when everybody needs meat
for the festival).
97
Richard von Glahn, “The Enchantment of Wealth: The God Wutong in
the Social History of Jiangnan”, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 51: 2 (1991),
pp. 651-714, esp. 656-675 for the early period. On the cult’s sacrifices, see Yijian
zhi, zhigui 3: 1238, as well as Von Glahn, “The Enchantment of Wealth”, pp. 681,
690-691 (incl. his note 127). Not all deities called Wutong necessarily belonged
to the same cultic tradition. See Michael Szonyi, “The Illusion of Standardizing
the Gods: The Cult of the Five Emperors in Late Imperial China”, The Journal
of Asian Studies, 56: 1 (1997), pp. 113-135.
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ther is from the Lower Yangzi region and both pre-date the Song
period. In the case of the Guan Yu cult, it is fairly certain that his
Buddhist conversion remained confined to the Jade Source Monastery and did not spread with the cult.98 Song and Yuan sources
document only one instance in which Buddhist sacrificial practice
affected the liturgy of a local cult in the Lower Yangzi region: this
is the cult of the Emperor of the Eastern Marchmount in Haiyan
(near Jiaxing). According to an inscription of 1110, the deity was
sacrificed to locally according to Buddhist liturgy and without any
meat.99 The clearly exceptional nature of a liturgy without meat
and liquor confirms the ongoing significance of collectively consuming them in order to establish mutual bonds, whether between humans or between divine beings and their human worshippers.
If deities rarely conformed to Buddhist rules of life, what about
humans? John Kieschnick points out that in the pre-Song period
it was a religious imperative for monks to be vegetarian and not
drink liquor, whereas this remained uncommon for lay Buddhists.100 Normal lay practice during the Song and earlier seems
to have been to restrict the abstinence from meat to six or ten
specific fasting days in the month. 101 In late thirteenth-century
On Guan Yu, see Prasenjit Duara, “Superscribing Symbols: The Myth of
Guandi, Chinese God of War”, Journal of Asian Studies, 47: 4 (1988), pp. 778-795,
and Valerie Hansen, “Gods on Walls: A Case of Indian Influence on Chinese Lay
Religion?”, in Ebrey and Gregory, Religion and Society, pp. 88-90. Much material
can also be found in Günther Diesinger, Vom General zum Gott (Frankfurt/Main:
Haag und Herchen, 1984). My remarks on Guan Yu are based on my own
research in progress, which is reported upon in my essay “The Rise of the Guan
Yu Cult: The Daoist Connection”, in DeMeyer and Engelfriet, Linked Faiths, pp.
183-204. On Ouyang Hu, see my essay “The Genesis and Spread of Temple Cults
in Fukien”, in E.B. Vermeer (ed.), Development and Decline of Fukien Province in the
17th and 18th Centuries (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1990), pp. 363-364; his conversion to
a Buddhist vegetarian lifestyle is recorded in Liu Xun
, Yinju tongyi
(Congshu jicheng
), 30: 312-313.
99
Jiahe zhi, 24: 4b. Furthermore, numerous White Cloud monasteries and lay
Buddhist People of the Way organized and funded the restoration of the Eastern
Marchmount temple in Changxing. This Buddhist support suggests a similar
form of sacrifice there. See Liang Zhe jinshi zhi (Shike shiliao xinbian), 15: 9a14a. On the other hand, in the Yijian zhi, zhigui 6: 1262, someone prepares a
large meat sacrifice for the famous temple of the Deity of the Eastern
Marchmount in Fushan Township (Changshu county, in the same prefecture as
Haiyan).
100
Kieschnick, The Eminent Monk, pp. 22-28. The fact that many monks did
drink liquor (op. cit., pp. 64-65) does not invalidate this point.
101
Fozu tongji, 33: 320b-c, and Zhao Yushi
, Bintui lu
(Shanghai:
98
buddhist-inspired options
133
Hangzhou, eight or nine out of ten people would eat vegetarian
meals on the Ghost Festival, on the 15th day of the seventh
month, causing butchers to close their shops.102 One might also
restrict one’s care for living beings to special days on which one
bought fish or fowl and set them free in special Setting Free Life
Gatherings ( fangsheng hui
). This was a very popular custom
on the birthday of the Buddha, and it had been strongly propagated by the early Song Tiantai master Zunshi
.103 In these
ways, the rule of a vegetarian diet could still be reconciled with
other social and religious obligations (and with the urge for a
bite of meat or fish).
Nonetheless, during the period under investigation we also find
in different types of sources frequent mention of the all-out rejection of meat and liquor by lay people.104 It is the vegetarian dimension of strict lay Buddhist groups that is always noted by
outside observers, even those with a monastic—and thus, by definition, vegetarian— background. The Tiantai historians Zongjian
and Zhipan
refer to the White Lotus movement and the
White Cloud tradition as “vegetable [eaters]” (cai ), and emphasize that the main precept of the White Lotus movement was
“preserving life” (husheng
).105 Anecdotal sources sometimes
record a vegetarian lifestyle in passing, but such routine practices
do not provide the kind of exciting narrative structure that is
needed for inclusion in an anecdotal collection. 106 Early southern
Shanghai guji, 1983), 3: 29-30. General remarks in Zürcher, The Buddhist Conquest, pp. 164-165, and Kenneth K.S. Ch’en, Buddhism in China: A Historical
Survey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), pp. 283-285.
102
Zhou Mi
, Wulin jiushi
([Hangzhou]: Xihu shushe, 1981), 4:
44.
103
Yijian zhi, jia 11: 99 (a man from Pingjiang travelled to Songjiang to sell
fish to be set free; he himself brought a large fish to eat); Mengliang lu, 182 (on
the West Lake in Hangshou, the center of this custom). On the custom of Setting Free Life, see also Stevenson, “Protocols of Power”, pp. 367-369, and Fozu
tongji (TS), 33: 322c.
104
It would be interesting to know whether the rejection of meat and liquor
by lay people was a relatively new phenomenon. Given the vehemence of some
of the attacks against it, one is certainly tempted to speculate in this direction.
105
Zongjian, Shimen zhengtong, and Zhipan, Fozu tongji (TS), 47: 425a and 54:
474c-475a. For a brief discussion of these attacks on the White Lotus movement,
see ter Haar, The White Lotus Teachings, p. 68.
106
Two examples are the wife of the person who had been unjustly banished,
discussed in the section “Solving Problems” above, and a woman who had eaten
vegetarian and recited the name of the Buddha for some thirty years (Yijian zhi,
zhiding 6: 1013-1014).
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barend j. ter haar
Song officials engaged in political debates on dangerous religious
groups supposedly causing rebellions do mention “teachers”
(shigong
) who “admonished people to eat vegetarian” (su )
and “formed groups that took a vow to break completely with
drinking liquor”.107
Far more exciting than the routine rejection of meat and liquor, however, and therefore regularly preserved in anecdotal
collections, were conversion accounts. Our sample contains fifteen stories. They tell of individuals who suddenly realize the
karmic burden that is caused by selling and/or eating meat or
fish, upon which they are converted to a vegetarian lifestyle. The
meat is furnished by pigs, cows, various types of water creatures,
and dogs. Over half of the stories contain Buddhist elements. No
such elements are mentioned in the others, but we have no way
of determining whether this is due to lacunae in our sources or
to the actual absence of such a link in the lives of the people
described. This formal background clearly did not matter a great
deal to the authors of our records. In many of the stories, meat
or fish played a regular part in the lives of the people involved.
Nine of them concern people or households that professionally
raised, killed and sold livestock. Accounts concerning that kind of
protagonists were good propaganda and made for exciting stories, since it could be assumed by their audience that the benefits
of non-killing would apply even more to people with less dubious
professions. The other six stories concern people who eat meat;
of these, officials act as protagonists in two stories and a well-todo person in another one. 108 For officials and the well-to-do, the
107
Song huiyao
(Beijing: Guoli Beiping tushuguan, 1936), xingfa
2:
111b-113b.
108
Unless otherwise stated the stories come from the Yijian zhi. Between
brackets I have indicated the presence of Buddhist elements with a “B”. Pigs:
Jingang jing ganying zhuan, ZZK 149.164-165 (B; butcher); zhijing 5: 916-917 (B;
butcher). Cows: yi 1: 191-2 (city inhabitant and low official); yi 13: 295 (B; lay
person living in monastery, can read and can afford to eat cows often; Huhai
xinwen yijian xuzhi, qian 2: 97-98, gives a slightly different version of the same
story); yi 17: 325 (B; unclear background); Kuiche zhi, 2: 4a (unclear background). Water creatures: jia 11: 93-4 (B; court official); yi 17: 332-3 (B; someone who makes a living from framing calligraphy and paintings, his family from
selling crabs); ding 9: 611 (vendor); ding 16: 6 70-671 (vendor); zhiding 3: 991992 (B; vendor, requests the Buddha’s to inspect his oath); Gong Mingzhi
,
Zhongwu jiwen
(preface 1174; Biji xiaoshuo daguan) 5: 6a (B; fisherman).
Dog: jia 7: 56 (butcher); bu 3: 1574-1575 (B; dog butcher). For non-karmic
reasons: yi 1: 193. Nine out of fifteen stories are with explicitly Buddhist ele-
buddhist-inspired options
135
consumption of meat or fish was an important part of their
lifestyle. All in all, relinquishing meat or fish was a significant
sacrifice for most of the protagonists in our sample, whether for
professional reasons or because of their particular lifestyle.
In one story an older couple worshipped the White Robed
Guanyin to obtain children, but their wish was not fulfilled until
they stopped eating beef.109 The story also indicates that the
couple had originally worshipped Guanyin without feeling the
religious necessity of a vegetarian way of life. In another case a
fisherman was convinced by a Buddhist monk to change his profession and start making statues of the “Bodhisattva from Sizhou
” (Sengjia
). The monk enticed the man with a promise of
becoming rich. He made a thousand statues, all of them very
small, and one was placed in the famous Chengtian Monastery in
Suzhou. People prayed to it in order to learn whether their request would be answered. 110 The issue in this case was the direct
karmic danger of killing and/or eating meat. The story also
shows how personal devotion (statue making) could link up with
larger monastic establishments (the Chengtian Monastery).
In the case of the older couple above we lack the kind of information on their subsequent lives that would allow us to judge
whether a shift took place from a religious economy approach to
a soteriological one. From their own perspective, they had probably always seen themselves as devout worshippers and adopting
a vegetarian diet was merely a further improvement. The case of
the fisherman clearly does fit in the religious economy approach,
since his aim was getting rich (and at least one statue was used in
petitionary prayers). From the Buddhist monk’s perspective, an
important turning point in the fisherman’s accumulation of
karmic debt had been achieved. The promise of “becoming rich”
can be interpreted by us as a “convenient means” ( fangbian
),
and at this point in the man’s cycle of rebirths it mattered little
whether he practised any other Buddhist elements. Thus, in these
ments and six lack them. For examples of karmic punishment see Yijian zhi, jia
4: 32 and 7: 56-57; yi 2: 298; zhijia 4: 743; zhiwu 4: 1080; zhigeng 2: 1150-1151; on
karmic reward, see bu 4: 1577. In Yijian zhi, bing 8: 432-433, people are warned
about the karmic implications of bloody meat sacrifices for deceased ancestors.
In Yijian zhi, zhijing 5: 916-917, the fate of ancestors and deceased relatives is the
main argument in relinquishing the inherited profession of butcher.
109
Yijian zhi, yi 17: 325.
110
Zhongwu jiwen, 5: 6a. On the popular Sengjia cult, see Makita Tairyô,
Chûgoku bukkyôshi kenkyû II, pp. 28-55.
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barend j. ter haar
two cases religious practice already fitted Buddhist soteriology,
but people’s motivations still had to follow.
The following offers a rather clear-cut example of the adoption
of the soteriological Buddhist approach. A dog butcher bought a
dog that turned out to be the reincarnation of his own father!
The butcher did not know, but the dog told his daughter-in-law
that he had built up so much bad karma and financial debts to
other people in his former life that he had to be killed and sold
many times in order to redeem his debt. Luckily, he had already
been killed by his son seven times and his debt was almost repaid.
He needed to be sold only one more time, and he wanted her to
keep this a secret from her husband, since otherwise the latter
might not want to kill him. She avoided being present at the
killing and, when her husband offered her some of the meat, she
claimed to be abstaining from meat that day. He pressed her to
tell him what was the matter, and when she did they decided to
change their lives radically. From then on they made a living out
of peddling their personal belongings. Furthermore, they recited
the name of Amitbˆha ten thousand times every day in order to
do penance for their karmic crimes.111 In this case, we can safely
assume that the wife is the driving force behind the events. She
probably exploited some curious behaviour of the dog to enforce
her view of a proper Buddhist life with her husband. Giving up
one’s profession naturally caused considerable hardships, since
finding a new profession in mid-life was as difficult then as it is
now. This may well have been the reason why the couple had to
sell off their personal belongings in order to survive. It also explains why the above-mentioned butcher from Huzhou continued
in his profession despite becoming a devout Buddhist practitioner.
It would seem that, at least by the period under investigation,
like underworld conceptions the notion of a karmic debt had
definitively established itself outside a specifically Buddhist doctrinal framework. For this reason it may not be too surprising that
we do not necessarily find explicit Buddhist elements in stories
involving karmic rewards and punishments. 112 The point in these
111
Yijian zhi, bu 3: 1574-1575. A similar plot, with a different location and
without Buddhist elements, is found in Yijian zhi, jia 7: 56.
112
Yijian zhi, yi 1: 188-189, for a case of karmic retribution in an explicitly
Daoist ritual context. The spread of Buddhist notions such as karmic retribution
among the population is usually assumed, without being made the topic of
serious investigation.
buddhist-inspired options
137
stories was not about becoming a Buddhist, which would be a
Western way of looking at things, but rather about changing
one’s way of life in accordance with widely accepted notions of
karma and reincarnation. Such a conversion was quite independent of the doctrinal or institutional label that might be attached
to these notions from a historical point of view.
The far-reaching liturgical and social implications of non-killing and its customary restriction to specific days in the year go a
long way towards explaining the remarkable aggressivity with
which monks and officials reacted against those relatively few lay
people who decided to stick to a strict vegetarian diet. If we remember that Chinese socio-religious ties were literally built on
sharing meat and liquor, then the strict maintenance of the five
injunctions could only mean proclaiming oneself to be a socioreligious outsider. This in fact was more than merely an individual religious act. When such self-appointed outsiders started to
come together on a regular basis without a monastic context for
their meetings, this was easily perceived as a threat both to the
established socio-political order and to the monastic claim of
being uniquely qualified to explain doctrine and carry out ritual
because of the monastic community’s practice of asceticism.
Probably for this very reason, the accusation of “eating vegetables” (chicai
), which was originally directed at Manichaean
groups, eventually became part of a general pejorative label “eating vegetables and serving the devils” (chicai shimo
). From
the 1130s, this label was used to denounce any kind of religious
phenomenon that was felt to threaten the state. 113 As a result,
vegetarian practice was now stigmatized as potentially dangerous,
and as can be easily surmised such a situation did not contribute
to the overall appeal of a more intense Buddhist lifestyle.
Taking a vow to keep Buddhist precepts
One might expect religious motivations to have been different—that is, to have been “purer”, “more intense”, and so on—
among people who took a Buddhist vow and thereby formally
associated themselves with the Buddhist institution. After some
brief remarks on such formal vows, I will test this hypothesis on
113
Chikusa, Chûgoku bukkyô, pp. 199-259, provides an analysis both excellent
and original which I have attempted to develop further in my White Lotus Teachings, pp. 44-59.
138
barend j. ter haar
the basis of a quantitive analysis of the merit dedications contained in the colophons of two Buddhist canon reprint projects,
which involved donors both with and without formal vows.114 We
will find that the hypothesis is in fact not confirmed.
Merit dedications are generally organized according to a standard structure, listing the donors and their addresses, their contributions, the beneficiaries of their meritorious deed (there was
rarely only one beneficiary), followed by a particular wish or
wishes. The wishes are often extremely formulaic and conventional, and it is likely that the monks who collected the contributions rephrased the donor’s wishes according to their own criteria. Still, people could choose between different types of merit
dedication and a number of colophons in the Qisha Yansheng
project are actually quite specific in describing the motivations of
the donor(s). The editorial distortions must also have been the
same for people with and without formal vows. Therefore, and
despite their evident formulaic character, colophons can still be
used to analyse certain aspects of people’s religious motivations.115
Pudu describes in some detail just how serious a formal vow to
keep certain precepts (that is, the Five Injunctions) was considered to be. In his words,
there is also a group of stupid people who upon submitting themselves to
the Buddha and accepting the precepts, burn incense in front of the three
jewels and swear (shiyuan
) the following: ‘When I break the precepts I
will willingly accept that evil illnesses envelop my body and that I fall in the
underworld forever.’ Others say: ‘[When I break the precepts] my left eye
shall start to bleed and pus shall come out of my right eye.’ The way they
willingly consent [to such things] resembles the arrest procedures of the
magistrature. One often witnesses people making statements without meaning
it, breaking the fasts and transgressing the vows.
Later on he specifies that these people erroneously take “punitive
self-imprecations” ( fazhou
) to be no more than “uttering a
vow” ( fayuan
),116 the latter being a routine activity.
Violent self-imprecations to accompany the taking of a solemn
Merit dedications in contemporary inscriptions for building projects are
essentially the same. However, they do not lend themselves to a quantitive analysis in the way attempted below.
115
The liturgical manuals of the Song and Yuan contain many models for
composing dedications of merit. See for example Zhongfeng mingben
(1263-1323), Huanzhu’an qinggui
, ZZK 111.980-981.
116
Lushan lianzong baojian, 7: item 2: 116; see also 4: item 1: 66 and 10: item
1: 138.
114
buddhist-inspired options
139
oath have a long tradition in China, going back to the pre-Han
period. Such oaths were taken to accomplish a certain undertaking, to speak the truth, or to conclude a covenant with certain
deities, such as the City God in his role of magistrate-judge or the
spirit-generals invoked during exorcist rituals. They were considered to be a highly powerful type of oath, in which supernatural
agencies took over the role of overseeing and punishing transgressions. Self-imprecations always involved the threat of bloody
and violent punishments.117 Taking a vow ( fayuan) was likewise
common among people engaged in a more intensified practice of
Buddhist elements: they set themselves certain long-term aims,
which they then solemnly promised to keep.118 The fact that this
type of vow shocked Pudu reflects the increasing abhorrence of
violence directed at oneself or at members of the same cultural
stratum, especially among members of the educated elite (at least
in the Lower Yangzi region) from the southern Song onwards.119
It does not reflect general social attitudes towards violence, however. Indeed, from the perspective of local people and many
Buddhist monks, such violent threats directed at one’s own body
must have been absolutely normal and a cultural prerequisite to
make the vows convincing.120
Taking the injunctions ( jie ) was a decision that might derive
from family considerations (when one’s parents were already lay
Buddhists), or come much later in one’s life (because of some
kind of special event). It depended on a range of factors that we
are rarely able to retrieve for individual people. 121 In the follow117
Mark Edward Lewis, Sanctioned Violence in Early China (New York: State
University of New York Press, 1990), pp. 43-50, 198-199, 205-212, and my Ritual
and Mythology of the Chinese Triads (Leiden: Brill, 1998), pp. 152-167.
118
See for instance Jingang jing ganying zhuan, ZZK 149.160; Yijian zhi, ding
9: 611 and 16: 670-671. The vegetarian conversion tales contain more examples.
119
See my “Rethinking ‘violence’ in Chinese culture”, in Göran Aijmer and
Jos Abbink (eds.), Meanings of Violence: A Cross Cultural Perspective (Oxford: Berg,
2000), pp. 123-140.
120
Stevenson, “Protocols of Power”, p. 357 and passim. Kieschner, The Eminent Monk, pp. 128-130, records an earlier example of a highly respected monk
from the early fifth century who claimed that his interpretation of the Nirvana
Sutra was correct, or else “may my body be covered with boils”. Compare the
discussions on Buddhist-inspired auto-mutilation and suicide in Gernet, “Les
suicides par le feu chez les bouddhistes chinois du Ve au Xe siècle”, pp. 527-558;
Kieschnick, The Eminent Monk, esp. pp. 35-50; Benn, “Where Text Meets Flesh”,
pp. 295-322.
121
Yijian zhi, zhijing 5: 916-917, tells of a butcher who lived very close to a
140
barend j. ter haar
ing account (much simplified here), two elderly men are inspired
by a miracle involving a young girl of fifteen from Huangyan
(Taizhou). She almost drowned in a shallow pond, but was able
to crawl out. According to her, the underworld underlings who
were assigned the job of catching her to be reborn as a dog said
that they could not do so because she had “heard an exposition
on prajñˆ (wisdom)”. As a matter of fact, she had once accompanied her mother to a dharma lecture on this topic by a local
monk. Because of this miracle, her own grandfather and the
elderly man in whose garden the pond was were inspired to ask
the monk of a local monastery (not the one where the lecture
had once been given) to “administer the injunctions” (shijie) to
them. 122 Hearing of prajñˆ is mentioned in different contexts
as the beginning of a lay person’s long progress to enlightenment. 123 Similarly, several accounts stress that merely hearing
about the dharma was sufficient to provide a minimal protection
against premature death.124
We do not know how many people followed an intensified practice or even took formal Buddhist vows, let alone their percentage of the total local population. But a very rough impression
emerges when we analyse two Song-Yuan canon publication projects. The Qisha Yansheng Monastery, located at Lake Chen in
Pingjiang prefecture (between Wujiang and Songjiang), was engaged in the reprinting of the Buddhist canon from roughly 1231
until 1363, although the work had been largely completed by
Buddhist monastery and was convinced to drop his profession. Here it seems
likely that he (or his family members) had been constantly exposed to teachings
about the karma by local monks. None of this, however, is explicitly stated in the
anecdote itself.
122
Yijian zhi, jia 7: 55-56, probably told by the monk Rizhi, who had been
present—but not involved— when the two elderly men came. This monk is explicitly given as the source in the previous anecdote (7: 54-55). He also appears
as an informant in yi 2: 197-198, and as an actor in yi 14: 302 (with another
informant). He was active in the first decades of the southern Song all over the
Lower Yangtze region.
123
The early-twelfth century monk Dahui Zonggao made a similar reference
to prajñâ in a sermon on death: see Miriam Levering, “Ta-hui and Lay Buddhists:
Ch’an Sermons on Death”, in David W. Chappell (ed.), Buddhist and Taoist Practice in Medieval Chinese Society: Buddhist and Taoist Studies II ([Honolulu]: University of Hawai’i Press, 1987), p. 192. In this sermon and in the colophon by Zhou
Bida discussed below, prajñâ is contextualised in the way mentioned here.
124
Yijian zhi, jia 7: 55-56, and Jingang jing ganying zhuan, ZZK 149.158.
buddhist-inspired options
141
1322.125 Donors came predominantly from the counties of
Kunshan and Wujiang, but also from the prefectures of Jiaxing
and Huzhou. The project took many decades to complete, and
still only about 17% of the colophons were composed by people
among whom one or more persons had taken a formal vow (see
Table 1, “The relative role of activist donors”).
For its part, the canon publication project of the centre of the
White Cloud Tradition, the Nanshan Puning Monastery in Yuhang, near Hangzhou, lasted from 1279 to 1288.126 The project
involved mainly people from Jiaxing and Huzhou prefectures,
many of whom privately owned Buddhist cloisters. The use of the
semi-monastic status of private land formally linked to their cloisters by White Cloud adherents to escape land taxes was infamous
during the Yuan period.127 Because this project could mobilize a
clearly defined and relatively wealthy following—that of the
Puning Monastery’s White Cloud Tradition—it took a mere decade or so to complete it. Around 36% of the colophons were
composed by people among whom one or more persons had
taken a formal vow (see Table 1). Many of them can be specifiTer Haar, White Lotus Teachings, pp. 33-37. The colophons were published
separately by Tekiya Katsuo
on the occasion of a modern reprint; see his
“Eiin Sô sekisha zôkyô bibatsu shû”
, Nikka bukkyô kenkyûkai
nenpô I
(1936), pp. 48-166. References to this canon are to the
page number and the rank-number of the colophon on that page (counting
only those which actually begin on it). Since Tekiya’s publication also contains
colophons from other Song and Yuan canonical collections, I have only considered those in which the Qisha Yansheng Monastery is explicitly mentioned.
126
Ter Haar, White Lotus Teachings, pp. 33-37. Sôjôji, pp. 319-346. On this
collection, see also the Sôjôji sandaizôkyô mokuroku kaisetsu
(Tôkyô: Daihonzan Sôjôji, n.d.; I wish to thank Sasaki Reikô for allowing me to
copy this booklet and showing me through the Sôjôji copies of the Song and
Yuan canons), pp. 28-37. Ogawa Kan’ichi
has been one of the first to use
this canonical collection as a historical source, in “Gendai hakuunshû kyôdan no
katsuyaku”
, Bukkyô shigaku
1 (1952), pp. 1-25, and subsequent articles. In 1981, a large number of colophons from this canonical
collection was published by the Sôjô Monastery in Tôkyô from its own copy.
Chikusa Masaaki has been the first, as so often, to introduce this source to a
scholarly public. References to this canon are to the rank number of the colophon in the Sôjôji-source publication. This publication does not republish all
extant colophons that I know of, but the unincluded material does not influence
the specific conclusions of this investigation.
127
Chikusa, Chûgoku bukkyô, pp. 303-304, 309-310. In itself this was hardly a
new phenomenon, of course, as it goes back to the earliest days of Buddhist monasteries.
125
142
barend j. ter haar
cally linked to the White Cloud Tradition. The strong relationship between the central monastery and its followers across several prefectures confirms contemporary complaints about the
strength of the White Cloud tradition as an interest group.128
The following table summarizes what we know of the different
types of contributors to the two canonical projects.
Table 1. The relative role of activist donors
The numbers refer to the numbers of colophons. The categories of monks,
activist and ordinary donors refer to the status of the leading contributor(s)
according to a single colophon. The actual number of people involved is, of
course, much larger.
sample
monks
activist donors
ordinary donors
Puning project
Yansheng project
282129
63 (22%)
104 (36%)
115 (40%)
20813 0
85 (40%)
36 (17%)
87 (41%)
The category “activist donors” actually includes many different
self-appellations (or autonyms) for lay Buddhists. First of all,
there were those who carried the autonym upasaka (youposai
) and/or were associated with a cloister (an ). The autonym upasaka is in itself a conventional term for people who have
taken a formal vow of minimally keeping the Five Injunctions; but
in the Lower Yangzi region this autonym and the link to a cloister
were specific characteristics of White Cloud adherents. In their
names, they often used the religious affiliation character for “the
way” (dao ). Another important group of contributors were the
People of the Way (whose autonyms came in many variants,
but always contained the term “the way”). They also often had
religious affiliation characters. A much smaller group were the
128
Consider also their involvement in the rebuilding of the Travelling Palace
for the Eastern Marchmount in Changxing (west of Huzhou) in 1314. This was
clearly a huge building, funded by all kinds of different organizations, under the
aegis of the White Cloud Tradition. See Wuxing jinshi ji, 13: 16b-20b.
129
The total number of colophons in Sôjôji is 320, of which at least 30 concern donors that we also encounter in other colophons and 8 do not indicate
a clear donor.
130
The total number of colophons that can be associated with the Yansheng
monastery in an unequivocal way is 226, of which at least 18 carry no clear
indication of the donor.
buddhist-inspired options
143
“pupils of the Three Jewels” (sanbao dizi
), among whom
such affiliation characters were quite rare. Finally, there were
those with only a religious affiliation character in their names.
Sometimes, different terms for “activist lay Buddhist” were used
for the same person.131 A number of people specifically indicated
that they had taken a formal vow of abiding by the Five Injunctions and had taken a “dharma name” ( faming
) or “injunction name” (jieming
).132
These different autonyms probably reflected different stages in
one’s adoption of vows to maintain Buddhist practice. According
to Pudu, who was writing for lay Buddhist practitioners of the
mid-Yuan period, taking refuge in the Three Jewels (the Buddha,
the Dharma and the Sangha) was the first step. This was followed
by the promise to obey the Five Injunctions, and finally by the ten
types of good dharma. One’s moral obligations became more
strict with each stage. The formal Bodhisattva vow was yet another
step, which is documented frequently only for adherents of the
White Cloud Tradition. Religious affiliation characters were characters with a specific religious meaning adopted as part of one’s
personal name in order to indicate that one had taken these final
formal vows.133 The table indicates that, in comparison with the
Yansheng canon, the larger number of activist donors in the
Puning project made up for the much smaller group of monkand nun-donors. The number of ordinary donors in both cases is
virtually the same.
The counties and prefectures in the Lower Yangzi region from
which the donors to the two projects came were extremely affluent and densely populated. Thus, the fact that thousands of
people had to be mobilized as donors cannot account for the
length of time actually involved in completing the projects. Instead, I would propose the following explanation. Contributing to
this kind of publication project was a highly abstract type of charitable act of which the social visibility was extremely low, unlike
See the following examples in Tekiya, “Sekisha zôkyô”, pp. 81: 2-4 and
138:2, as well as pp. 135:3 and 135:4.
132
See also ter Haar, White Lotus Teachings, 39 note 57. Tekiya, “Sekisha
zôkyô”, pp. 93:3c, 95:3, 102:3, 103:3, 114:1b, 138:1; Sôjôji, nos. 40, 107, 134, 204,
220, 222. This supersedes the analysis in ter Haar, White Lotus Teachings, loc.cit.
133
Lushan lianzong baojian, 1: item 9: p. 25 and 4: item 19: p. 85. Ter Haar,
White Lotus Teachings, pp. 36-40 explains the use of religious affiliation characters.
131
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donations for bridges, monasteries, rituals, festivals or even individual texts for local distribution. We may therefore assume that
only the more involved supporters of Buddhist options would
contribute. When we consider that even within this circumscribed
group only a minority of the donors had taken a formal vow
(respectively 17 % and 36% in the two projects), then it is not an
exaggeration to state that the number of people who actually
took formal vows must have been surprisingly small in Chinese
society as a whole—an observation that also fits the considerable
length of time needed to complete the projects.134
The social background of the donors on both canon projects
was quite diverse, ranging from people who could only afford to
contribute a few pages to those who contributed many scrolls, as
well as low and high officials and several persons with the jinshi
degree.135 There appears to be no correlation between someone’s social background and type of purpose. I also found no
strong correlation between specific purposes and the intensity of
one’s relationship to Buddhist elements, as summarized in simplified form in Table 2.
The total number of indications of purposes exceeds the total
number of colophons, since more often than not a single colophon expressed more than one purpose. The most obvious difference, applying to both canonical collections, is that between
monks/nuns and the rest. Not altogether surprisingly, monks and
nuns expressed relatively little interest in petitionary requests
(category 1), which attracted more commitment from lay donors,
and among them even more from ordinary donors. Here again
we can see how White Cloud activist donors were slightly closer
to monks than the activist donors to the Yansheng canon. On the
other hand, the lack of interest in this-worldly requests did not
mean a complete absence of any links with the “world of dust”,
134
Also consider the earlier instance of a highly successful monk from
Changguo, who had “transmitted the way” to more than two hundred lay pupils
by the time he died at the age of 80 in 1143. The rethoric of this particular
statement indicates that this was an extremely high number and represented the
sum total of this man’s long life.
135
Donors of goods etc. (=> poor?) Sôjôji, nos. 131 (clothes), 159 (trees?),
213 (clothes). Grave-keeper: Sôjôji, nos. 99, 100, 262. Only some sheets: Sôjôji,
no. 102. Elite participants: Tekiya, “Sekisha zôkyô”, pp. 85:1, 89:1, 95: 4b, 139:
2 (all with the jinshi degree); pp. 75:4, 76:1, 77:3, 105:3, 106:2, 143:2, 145:3,
149:2, 150:3 (officials). Groups of city-people: Tekiya, “Sekisha zôkyô”, pp. 71:2,
73:2 (here the link to the Yansheng canon is not entirely certain).
145
buddhist-inspired options
Table 2. Donors and motivations
Motivation
1.
2.
3.
4.
I. (Qisha Yansheng)
monks/nuns
activist donors
ordinary donors
no label
14 (10%)
19 (35%)
51 (42%)
4
42 (32%) 17 (13%)
5 (9%)
19 (35%)
15 (11%) 40 (31%)
2
2
55 (42%)
11 (20%)
23 (17%)
5
II. (Nanshan Puning)
monks/nuns
activist donors
ordinary donors
no label
5 (7,5%)
22 (20%)
41 (34%)
10
21 (31%) 29 (43%)
25 (23%) 53 (50%)
16 (13%) 57 (47%)
3
4
11 (16%)
5 (4%)
5 (4%)
-
[Explanation of Motivations: 1. petitionary (healing, good fortune etc.); 2. filial
piety (including thankfulness for “the four fields of grace and the three states
of existence” (si’en sanyou
); 3. explicit references to rebirth in the
Pure Land; 4. others (mostly Buddhist, sometimes also political).]
for, in its turn, the category “filial piety” and related aims (category 2) was particularly important for monks and nuns alike. This
reflects the extent to which monks and nuns were still emotionally integrated in their original kinship networks, despite “leaving
the family” (chujia) on a ritual level.136 Thus, as far as categories
1 and 2 are concerned quantitative differences between monks/
nuns on the one hand and lay people on the other do not reflect
the degree of other-worldly orientation, but merely different
forms of this-worldly attachments.
By and large, the differences between activist and ordinary
donors are slight. The stronger accent on rebirth in the Pure
Land in the Puning colophons may derive from the fact that this
was a conventional aim and that the Puning colophons are much
more formulaic than those from Yansheng. Although all contributors to the two canon printing projects must have shared
some form of pre-existing Buddhist commitment, one would have
expected a more significant difference in motivations between
the two types of donors. One suspects that the differences in
religious form were motivated on an individual level, maybe by
varying expectations about the success of different forms of prac136
See also Alan Cole, Mothers and Sons in Chinese Buddhism (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1998).
146
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tice. It is also possible that activist practitioners made stronger
claims of success and acquired a different kind of symbolic capital
with which to represent themselves in local society.
Some Yansheng colophons give a more precise impression of
the donors’ motivations, especially where people’s health is concerned. In 1243, a lowly official made a donation for his elder
brother (also an official), who was over sixty years of age and had
suddenly become blind in both eyes. Our donor was afraid that
this had been caused by bad karma accumulated over three generations. Of course, one’s karma is hard to escape, but he begged
nevertheless for mercy and for his brother’s cure.137 In 1322, a
woman with the dharma-name Miaohui
began by observing
that she had been blessed with the magnanimity of the Buddha,
and continued with a whole series of wishes for health and good
fortune. She also expressed the hope that the Guanyin with the
Willow Branch (a common manifestation of Guanyin) would remove disasters, that the Queen Mother of the West would bestow
long life on her, and that she would enjoy the support of the
Buddha and the protection of the Nâga-kings.138 In these and
other cases, whether the donors had taken formal vows or not
they all prayed for their own good fortune and health in very
concrete ways, much like one would pray to local deities. 139
The lists of beneficiaries often hide considerable personal tragedies, as in the following instance. In 1280, a certain Zhou Bida
(not the famous Song official) contributed on behalf of a
large number of granddaughters, great-grandsons and greatgranddaughters who had all died, in the hope that they would all
be reborn in the Pure Land. He wished that “their six roots would
be snow-pure, that their five obstructions would become crystalclear, and that they would all be clear in the good cause of prajña
and each be enlightened in the wonderful bodhi nature”.140 His
wish is quite representative of many colophons. The phraseology
Tekiya, “Sekisha zôkyô”, p. 142:5.
Tekiya, “Sekisha zôkyô”, p. 151:5. The only other colophon in which nonBuddhist deities are invoked is in Tekiya, 136:1, mentioning the City God and
the Deity of the Earth; both deities were close to Buddhist lore, however, especially in its dayly practice.
139
Other examples: Tekiya, “Sekisha zôkyô”, p. 90:4 (disease caused by
wind), 105:4 (for health and a clear eye-sight), 138:1 (healing from an eyeillness), 146:2 (for a healthy son). General wishes for health are more common
than specific ones.
140
Sôjôji, no. 115.
137
138
buddhist-inspired options
147
in this colophon and in many others resembles closely the model
texts for dedications of merit that are found in liturgical manuals,141 but Zhou Bida could equally have chosen other set phrases,
and the act of obtaining merit through supporting the printing
project would have been the same. Therefore, this colophon still
reflects his personal sentiments to a certain degree, with an explicit turn to Buddhist doctrine that may have been directly inspired by his evident misfortune.
When people asked for rebirth in the Pure Land, the merit of
their donation was consistently transferred to ancestors and deceased religious teachers, rather than being requested directly for
themselves. Their names and familial connections are always
listed in full. It was evidently not considered proper to ask openly
for rebirth in the Pure Land for oneself, certainly not as an explicit pay-off for making donations in money. Not surprisingly,
when wanting to attain rebirth in the Pure Land for oneself one
had to perform some kind of personal devotion and could not
rely on the merit of others (at least not as long as one was still
alive).
All in all, we have to conclude at this point that in terms of
documented religious motivations there was little difference between people who had taken formal vows and people who had
not, and only a limited difference between ordained monks or
nuns and lay people in general. We find as many doctrinal colophons from “ordinary” donors as we do from activist ones, which
indicates that taking a vow did not depend on one’s doctrinal
understanding or interest, but on the intensity of personal devotion. This was a matter of individual preference. Our sources do
not make clear whether further sociological or doctrinal criteria
existed for choosing the intensive approach.
Concluding observations
In what precedes I have attempted to bring out something of
the way in which Buddhist elements functioned for local people.
In order to organize the lived practice of Buddhist-inspired religious activities in a way meaningful to us, I have arranged the
evidence into two general approaches, namely the religious economy approach, in which the choice of a religious option is tied up
141
Compare Huanzhu’an qinggui, ZZK 111.980-981.
148
barend j. ter haar
with a single issue, and the soteriological approach, in which
practice is directed at Buddhist soteriological goals and the chosen religious option affects someone’s life as a whole. Since concrete benefits were often expected in the soteriological approach
as well, the distinction is not an absolute one. Furthermore,
people might have recourse to non-Buddhist options for specific
benefits without however relinquishing their practice of a Buddhist lifestyle as a whole. In colophons to reprints of Buddhist
texts, donors might pray for different concrete or more abstract
forms of relief from their misfortune, while describing this misfortune in distinctly Buddhist doctrinal terms.
From a Buddhist doctrinal point of view, both approaches are
entirely justifiable. In the religious economy approach, positive
effects are ascribed to the power of Buddhist elements, whereas
in the soteriological approach they are ascribed to the people’s
sincere Buddhist-inspired practice. In both approaches, moral
flaws or faulty practice can undo the potentially positive influence
of a Buddhist element; but in individual practice sincerity
counted more than ritual perfection, unlike what was expected
from ritual specialists such as monks. Practice in either approach
may vary from rather simple to quite complicated. One reason for
choosing a more intensified lifestyle or selecting more elaborate
rituals appears to have been one’s individual perception of the
karmic burden that one was carrying.
When we define Buddhist-inspired religious culture in the
broad way that has been used in this investigation, it is clear that
the influence of that culture during the period considered was
quite pervasive. Nevertheless, it was not the sole or even the
dominant source of religious options. Most deities continued to
eat meat and drink liquor as they had done before, and most
local people did so too for most of the time, including those who
had infrequent recourse to Buddhist-inspired religious options.
Furthermore, devout Buddhist-inspired people, such as our
Huzhou butcher, were able to rationalize their quite un-Buddhist
professional activities as a contribution to resolving the karmic
debt of former human beings caught up in an almost endless
cycle of punitive reincarnations in animal form.
Only a minority of the Lower Yangzi population, even among
those interested in the Buddhist option as such, adopted an intensive Buddhist lifestyle that would include taking the Three
Refuges and the Five Injunctions (sangui wujie
). Indeed,
the injunctions not to kill—interpreted as not to eat meat—and
buddhist-inspired options
149
not to consume liquor on a dayly basis were powerful hindrances
in taking formally the Five Injunctions. Given the freedom of
recourse to Buddhist-inspired options to resolve problems of life,
health and death through incidental worship, donations, rituals,
or different levels of intensified lifestyle, there was little need to
take such a formal step, unless one thought beyond the present
and immediately following incarnations. I suspect that the quantitative importance of more intensive Buddhist-inspired lifestyles
must have been limited most of the time, both during the period
1100-1340 and before or after. It is important to keep this in
mind inasmuch as the huge amount of sources on liturgically and
doctrinally “mainstream” Buddhist—mainly monastic—culture,
as opposed to lay religious life, as well as the superior quality of
Japanese, Western and Chinese secondary research on this “mainstream” culture, easily leads us to think that the opposite is true.
Taking up an intensified lifestyle (being a “vegetarian”, or cai)
was therefore an extremely powerful religious statement that
brought strong this-worldly as well as other-worldly advantages in
the eyes of its practitioners, but also triggered criticism from the
monastic establishment and from the state. In the case of the
Man of the Way from Wujiang, we have yet another possible response, that of the neighbour who was sceptical about the man’s
success in attaining rebirth in the Pure Land. In fact, we may
surmise that it was precisely the powerfulness of the Man of the
Way’s claims as acted out in an intensive lifestyle that originally
drew out the neighbour’s criticism. Ultimately, any lifestyle that
differed from the norm could be perceived by outsiders as an
aggression, even when the insiders felt that they were merely
maintaining what should be the real norm.
The preceding pages have left one question raised by several
authors in Religion and Society in T’ang and Sung China largely
undiscussed: this is the question of the possibility of an increasingly independent access to Buddhist and other religious elements during the Song period.142 The difficulty of the issue is
illustrated nicely by the case of the butcher from Huzhou: the
man had to be instructed for a period of five years by someone
else—most likely a monk—in the recitation of the Lotus Sutra
before he could take up his “independent” practice. Similar
See Terry F. Kleeman, “The Expansion of the Wen-ch’ang Cult”, in Ebrey
and Gregory, Religion and Society, pp. 63-65, and Stephen Teiser, “The Growth of
Purgatory”, in ibid., pp. 116 and 132-135.
142
150
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encounters must also have shaped the religious lives of others,
even if we often learn only of seemingly independent practice.
In the same way, the very people who were the best representatives of a more independent approach to Buddhist tradition, to
wit, the members of the White Cloud Tradition, the People of the
Way and the adherents of the White Lotus movement, all depended on monks for their ritual needs. They also modelled
themselves as far as possible on monks and nuns, except for
being married and having children. They founded smaller or
larger monasteries without relinquishing the property rights, often becoming their heads (they were called anzhu
, or “cloister heads”, in the case of the White Cloud Tradition). A monk
would serve as the in-house ritual specialist. These activist Buddhists did not themselves claim a privileged or radically new form
of access to Buddhist teachings, practices or texts. Here, too, I do
not think that we can speak of an increasingly independent approach, since similar types of active lay practitioners had been
active in earlier periods as well. Robert Campany’s studies on the
“records of the strange” compiled before the Tang dynasty indicate that a seemingly independent access to Buddhist elements
was already quite common in the pre-Tang period.143 The only
new dimension may have been the scale of this phenomenon,
particularly the rise of coherent lay Buddhist movements.
In the course of the Song period we indeed witness a growing
importance of Buddhist rituals in society at large, especially the
funerary rituals, the Water and Land Gathering rituals, and the
“distributing food” rituals of the Yulanpen festival during the
seventh month. These rituals required the participation of Buddhist ritual specialists to be carried out successfully. The apparent
transition from more thaumaturgical forms of healing (in which
demonic beings are simply removed) to karmic ones (in which
such beings are converted or minimally helped to improve their
karma) is interesting. It cannot be excluded that the absence of
post-1100 evidence on Buddhist thaumaturgical healing is due to
Robert F. Campany, “Notes on the Devotional Uses and Symbolic Functions of Sûtra Texts as Depicted in Early Chinese Buddhist Miracle Tales and
Hagiographies”, Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies, 14: 1
(1991), pp. 28-72; “Buddhist Revelation and Taoist Translation in Early Medieval China”, Taoist Resources, 4: 1 (1993), pp. 1-30; “The Real Presence”, History
of Religions, 32: 3 (1993), pp. 233-272.
143
buddhist-inspired options
151
the availability of sources, but given the considerable increase in
our sources during the course of the twelfth century this seems
unlikely. Such a shift also includes the rise of new ritual forms
that all belonged to the karmic approach.144 Generally speaking,
this change would fit in the more settled attitude (that is, less
missionary and less antagonistic) of the Buddhist and Daoist traditions vis-à-vis the local society and its traditional, rather eclectic,
religious preferences. This changing relationship was evidenced
in the context of this investigation by the apparent decrease of
attacks on local cults with bloody meat sacrifices, and it is well
attested in the Daoicisation of local exorcist traditions.145
Our evidence clearly indicates that we can in no meaningful
way speak of Buddhist religion as a socio-religious phenomenon
distinct from Daoist or popular religion. Not only did people of
all social and educational backgrounds share in the Buddhist
option, but they also made use of the other options. Admittedly,
the same protagonist rarely features in more than one type of
evidence, but even within single accounts the openness of religious choices and the non-exclusiveness of the different options
clearly come through. In terms of actual religious life at all social
and educational levels, the pyramids of Buddhist, Daoist and
popular religious culture simply do not exist (in the way that was
suggested by Patricia Ebrey and Peter Gregory, using a metaphor
first proposed by Erik Zürcher). 146 Only when we confine our
gaze to the normative religious culture(s) of written doctrine and
codified ritual (i.e. the liturgical manuals) may the so-called
“tops” of the pyramids seem separate to us. Even at this level, in
fact, mutual influence and close interaction were the order of the
day.
Many anecdotes and other materials, including Pudu’s polemics against local interpretations and epigraphical sources, indicate
that people did go beyond unreflecting practice to consider the
content of what they were doing, and why. Many people must
have entertained notions about what kind of religious option
would be good for what kind of problem. Some certainly knew
144
Furthermore, Bernard Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy, pp. 96-131, describes both the early importance of thaumaturgy in early Chan, its initial replacement by the trickster figure, and then its late-Tang and Song domestication
through the Bodhisattva ideal.
145
On which see Judith Boltz, “Not by the Seal of Office Alone”, pp. 241-305,
and Paul Katz, Demon Hordes and Burning Boats, pp. 32-38.
146
See Ebrey and Gregory, Religion and Society in T’ang and Sung China.
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more about the content of certain rituals, enough to catch priests
making mistakes. People thought extensively about issues such as
the likelihood of rebirth in the Pure Land, the notions of merit
and karmic debt, and the proper maintenance of dietary rules.
Still, the primary form of rationalizing one’s selection of a particular option was its purported efficacy.
Local people in the Lower Yangzi region during the period
1100-1340 were relatively free in their selection of religious options. Only some activities were virtually obligatory, such as a
minimal form of ancestor worship and participation in communal
rituals and festivals. Buddhist-inspired religious options were an
important part of the overall spectrum, but the more intensified
lifestyle that rejected liquor and meat was highly problematic.
Due to excellent transportation facilities and considerable local
wealth, the inhabitants of the Lower Yangzi region probably had
at their disposal the broadest spectrum of religious options available in any region at that time. Much research is still needed to
elucidate how the Buddhist option was used in comparison with
other options, and what the situation was in other regions in
comparison with the Lower Yangzi. What is abundantly clear,
however, is the viability and immense variety of Buddhist options
in our period among all the layers of the population. We may
wonder about how many “Buddhists” there really were, but the
Buddhist option itself certainly flourished.