Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
at this time was rough and entailed much suffering. Buddhism had
great appeal in both northern and southern China, among the elite
and commoners alike. The rulers of the barbarian conquest dynasties
in northern China found the religion attractive precisely because it
was not Chinese and because it had come from another great and
ancient civilization. But the elite of the native Chinese dynasties in
southern China also found Buddhism acceptable because of its art,
its more advanced teachings, and its message of possible surcease
from suffering. Commoners in both northern and southern China
accepted Buddhism because of its message and the beautiful and
colorful art the Buddhist missionaries used to explain the fundamen-
tals of the religion. By the 500s, China had been thoroughly converted
to Buddhism.
Some Chinese Buddhists were so interested in the religion that they
became monks and traveled all the way to India, the land of Bud-
dhism's origins. There some of them even mastered the extremely dif-
ficult Sanskrit language in which Buddhist sutras (religious writings)
were written and translated them into Chinese. Eventually, Buddhism
in China took its own peculiar doctrinal turns. The Chan (“Zen” in
Japanese) school of the religion became the most well known of these.
During the first wave of Buddhism's entry into China, the Buddhist
missionaries and early Chinese converts used Taoist terminology to
translate Buddhist terms. This, however, led to conceptual confusion
and created misunderstandings. Most Buddhists in China eventually
decided to transliterate, rather than translate, Buddhist terms in their
full foreignness. That is, they decided not to translate the terms at all,
but more or less to spell them out exactly as they sounded in Sanskrit.
Many Buddhist terms thus had a very foreign ring to Chinese ears, but
this actually added to their mystery and reinforced the point that they
were indeed different from Taoist ideas and concepts.
Buddhism fit nicely into the Confucianist-Taoist duo and trans-
formed it into a religious and philosophical trio. The Chinese during
this time concluded that Confucianism was applicable to governmen-
tal affairs, while Buddhism and Taoism pertained more to an individ-
ual's private, inner religious life. But Confucianism during this time
seemed somewhat irrelevant because there was no effective central
government in China that could seek to apply it. Buddhism and
Taoism gave people much more solace and comfort in their lives, and
most Chinese, and even many Chinese emperors, more or less pre-
ferred them over Confucianism. The Period of Division and the Sui
and Tang dynasties that followed it were the heyday of Buddhism in
Chinese history. Toward the late 800s and the end of the Tang dynasty,
