While Daoism profited from its indigenous credentials, it would be wrong to infer that Buddhism must therefore have been handicapped by its foreign provenance. Objections would certainly be raised on this score and the superiority of Chinese culture frequently reasserted. But the sensational spread of Buddhism in the third to sixth centuries – the ‘Period of Disunion’ – utterly belies the idea of Chinese civilisation being unreceptive to extraneous ideas. If Daoism then prospered, Buddhism triumphed. China became a Buddhist country and would remain so for centuries, its Buddhist community outnumbering even India’s. Monasteries by the thousand dotted the cities; rock-cut shrines, tiered stupas (‘pagodas’) and colossal Buddha figures graced the countryside. Society and the visual arts were transformed; commercial and cultural intercourse with the rest of Asia flourished. From Xinjiang to Shandong and Guangdong wealth and manpower were lavished on devotional endowments, and wherever peace prevailed, robed monks and nuns mingled with the gowned scholars of Confucian orthodoxy. Notions of enlightenment, compassion and the sanctity of life softened learned discourse, if not political ambitions. The drone of prayer, borne on the breeze, consoled an age made frantic by the staccato clash of arms.
Yet the process of introduction and naturalisation was slow and fraught. The Buddha had lived and taught in northern India around the fifth century BC, but not until 500 years later does a recognisable reference to him surface in Chinese history. A Han prince, who had been enfeoffed as the nominal king of Chu by Han Guang Wudi, founder of the Later Han, is described in the Houhanshu (‘History of the Later Han’) as ‘fasting and performing sacrfices to the Buddha’; the year was AD 65, the place Pengcheng (Xiang Yu’s one-time capital in Jiangsu), and the prince a Daoist devotee. At the time the Buddha seems to have been revered, along with Laozi, as a co-opted member of the Daoist pantheon rather than as the embodiment of an alternative doctrinal ‘Way’. There is no mention of the enormous body of literature – devotional, metaphysical and organisational – that 500 years of Buddhism in south Asia had generated. And Pengcheng being on a trade route that leads to Luoyang not from central Asia but from the China coast, it is possible that the cult had reached the Later Han empire by sea. Buddhist communities were already established in south-east Asia; and the Buddhist symbols (lotus flowers, elephants, etc.) found among the second-century relief carvings at Kongwangshan on the seaboard of Jiangsu appear to substantiate this routing.
Half a century later a travelling official, who was also a noted poet, described an evening of revelry at Chang’an, the erstwhile Han capital. It included a performance by some gorgeously attired dancing girls who quite bewitched the assembled company. ‘One look at them would make one surrender a city,’ raved the poet-official; you couldn’t help but be captivated; not even someone ‘as upright as a Buddhist Sramana’, he wrote, could be immune.15 A sramana being a resident of an asrama (ashram), this seems to be one of the first references to Buddhist monasticism in China. By the beginning of the second century Buddhism was evidently recognised in China as a distinct and somewhat other-worldly religion; a few key terms, such as sramana, had made the transition from their original Sanskritic language into Chinese; and in Chang’an, and probably Luoyang and other cities, Buddhist communities were already established.
By the end of the second century, worship of the Buddha at richly endowed provincial centres is attested – and a clue to the popularity of the new cult afforded – by a reference in the Standard History of the Three Kingdoms period. There it appears that in c. 193 a man called Zhai Rong was put in charge of grain shipments in central Jiangsu, and instead of remitting the revenues from this lucrative assignment, appropriated them to set up a Buddhist community. He may have been a sincere seeker of enlightenment, but from the embarrassed disclaimers of later times it seems more likely that he belonged in such disreputable company as contemporaries like Ox-Horn Yang and Poison Yu. A vast ‘temple’ – which from mention of its layered ‘umbrella’ finial may have been a stupa – was erected, monastic buildings capable of accommodating 3,000 monks were attached, and a gilded statue of the Buddha was arrayed in silks and brocades and occasionally given a ritual bath. Buddhist adherents from far and wide were summoned to the site; others were simply drawn there by Zhai Rong’s offer of exemption from corvée in return for attendance.
Whenever the bathing of the Buddha was to be performed, [Zhai Rong] always had great quantities of wine and food set out, and mats were spread along the road for a distance of [several kilometres]. To enjoy the spectacle and the fare, some ten thousand came and the expense ran to millions [of cash].16
All of which, while ostensibly admirable (if ill informed about Buddhist strictures on alcohol), had the desired effect. Zhai Rong acquired a large and devoted following that, stiffened with troops, would support his subsequent and mercifully brief career as a murderous warlord. ‘For obvious reasons,’ writes Erik Zurcher, author of the seminal work on the Buddhist ‘conquest’ of China, ‘Zhai Rong never became the ideal prototype of the liberal donor . . . [and] in Buddhist sources he is practically never referred to.’17
Meanwhile a trickle of Buddhist texts had begun appearing in Chinese translation. The challenge of translating abstract and often esoteric terms from an alphabetic, grammatically complex and highly inflected language like Sanskrit into the letter-less, uninflected and starkly concise written language of China posed almost insuperable problems. Christian missionaries would encounter something similar when trying to convey to Chinese catechumens the mysteries of, say, the Trinity or transubstantiation. Key ideas like ‘dharma’ and ‘nirvana’, which the Indic world took for granted, were hard for the Chinese to fathom, though Daoism sometimes provided a solution, albeit at some damage to the original. Thus wuwei, for instance, was used for ‘nirvana’, and dao not only for ‘enlightenment’ but also for ‘dharma’ and even ‘yoga’. Other ideas, such as monastic celibacy and reincarnation, were simply offensive to a society in which procreation was seen as a moral duty and ancestors were cherished as spirits immune from the hazard of rebirth. While Confucianism harped on the individual’s duty to family and state, Buddhism signposted a path to salvation that neatly bypassed both.
Additionally the first texts to reach China were not necessarily the most revealing; nor were the missionaries who endeavoured to expound them always any better equipped intellectually than they were linguistically. That the main missionary drive came overland from India and the central Asian states by way of the silk routes is certain. Trade with the west had not been diminished by the Later Han’s retraction from the Western Regions. Moreover archaeology is positively eloquent in the matter, with a long trail of Buddhist sites, inscriptions, sculptures, documentational hoards and paintings extending from north-west India round or through the western Himalaya and then from Parthia, Afghanistan and Sogdiana (Samarkand) to Xinjiang, Gansu and Luoyang. In the second half of the second century, the ten missionaries known to have been operating in the Jin capital at Luoyang comprised two Parthians, two Sogdians, three Indians and three Yuezhi (from Afghanistan and what is now Pakistan, where the Yuezhi were known as Kushans).
Buddhism and long-distance commerce went hand in hand. In India merchants had derived encouragement from the Buddhist disregard of caste strictures on the freedom of movement; in China the Confucian contempt for traders and commerce in general disposed the mercantile classes towards Buddhism as a respectable alternative. In both countries, the merchant community reciprocated, proving generous benefactors as well as extending hospitality and protection to missionaries. Zhai Rong’s stupa-cum-monastery in Jiangsu sounds remarkably like the slightly older complex at Sanchi (near Bhopal in Madhya Pradesh), whose inscriptions actually record the names of its merchant donors. More certainly the remarkable fourth-century cave paintings at Kizil (near Kuqa in Xinjiang) mimic those of Ajanta (in Maharashtra on the road to India’s west coast) and include a telling scene of the Buddha lighting the way for a one-man caravan. Produced by the same quasi-fresco technique and probably contemporary, the narrative scenes and interlocking designs at Kizil and Ajanta, though half a continent apart, are thought to be the work of artists who were either from the same school or in possession of a common crib.18
Buddhism, with its itinerant imagery (‘the Wheel’ of dharma, the ‘Eightfold Path’, the Middle ‘Way’), was on the march again. During the first to third centuries – and especially under the patronage of the Yuezhi/Kushan rulers whose empire extended from India and Afghanistan to Khotan in southern Xinjiang – the proselytising impetus of Ashoka’s age resumed. Ashoka had convened the First Buddhist Council in the third century BC; some time in the second century AD the Kushan emperor Kanishka convened the fourth; and it was in the course of its deliberations that doctrinal differences led to the schism between what would become known as the Mahayana and Theravada (or Hinayana) schools.
The dispute intrigued China’s Buddhist scholars, and both schools were initially represented there. But throughout the regions north of the Himalayas it was the more accessible Mahayanist teachings which eventually prevailed. Mahayanists offered better odds on achieving Enlightenment; even the laity stood a chance. Additionally they laid great stress on devotional aids, including depictions of the Buddha and scenes from his life-story; often executed in stone and influenced by Hellenistic models, these typified the Indo-Asian style known as Gandhara that inspired China’s Buddhist iconography. And crucially, Mahayanists deified not only the Buddha himself but a host of other Enlightened Ones, known as Bodhisattva (in Chinese busa), who included Amitabha (‘the Buddha of the Western Paradise’ to the Chinese), Avaloketiswara (who changed sex to become the female ‘Guanyin’ in China) and Maitreya (the Chinese ‘Miluo’, or ‘Future Buddha’). All such Bodhisattva having postponed their nirvana, they were available to help the seeker along the Way; the teachings and mythologies attributed to them – penances undertaken, powers obtained and wonders worked – formed a substantial part of both the textual corpus and the missionary’s arsenal; and the ceremonies and rituals appropriate to their worship served as a focus of popular devotion.
By the year 311, when the Jin fled Luoyang before a Xiongnu onslaught, there and in Chang’an some 180 Buddhist establishments were reportedly flourishing and there were nearly four thousand monks. Early communities in the provinces, such as Zhai Rong’s in Jiangsu, had been joined by others as far afield as Vietnam, where the overland Buddhist acharya (disciple) from north India and central Asia met the seaborne apostolate coming from peninsular India and Sri Lanka via south-east Asia. In the Yangzi region, under the patronage of Sun Quan and his successor in the ‘Three Kingdoms’ state of Wu, Indian and Yuezhi missions had won both scholarly acceptance and aristocratic attention. At the Wu, and then Eastern Jin, capital of Jiankang (later Nanjing) silk exports and an inward trade in the exotic produce of south-east Asia sustained a lavish lifestyle and a hothouse intellectual climate. The city would retain its fame as a centre of the loftiest and most speculative Buddhist and Daoist debate throughout the ‘Six (southern) Dynasties’ period.
Everywhere the quality of translations had greatly improved. This was thanks in large part to the labours of Dharmaraksha (c. 230–307). The son of a Yuezhi merchant domiciled in Dunhuang (Gansu), Dharmaraksha had received a Chinese education and, proving a consummate linguist, had undertaken the translation of over 150 Buddhist texts; according to his biographer, ‘he contributed more than anyone else to the conversion of China to Buddhism’.19 Chinese scholars were now alert to a literary and speculative tradition that for its richness and prolixity rivalled their own.
Following a brief reassertion of suzerainty over the rulers of Xinjiang by the first (Western) Jin emperor, religious traffic on the Silk Road had become a two-way affair with Chinese Buddhists – Dharmaraksha among them – heading for Khotan, Kashmir and beyond in search of texts, relics and spiritual guidance. Meanwhile the stupa – originally a reliquary mound that had become Buddhism’s most characteristic monument and which in India was typically a hemispherical dome atop a low pedestal – had in China begun to shoot upwards, incorporating the tiled eaves and multiple storeys of the indigenous architectural tradition to assume the tiered and tapered profile of the classic ‘pagoda’.
By the fourth century, then, Buddhism had cast its slender shadow across the land. But it had yet to overlay every rural fortress and hilltop hermitage. The ‘Way’ of the Laozi and the ‘Eightfold Path’ of the Buddha were not yet so nearly indistinguishable as to raise the question of which had ‘conquered’ which. And Buddhism had still to forge a relationship with the secular power that would elevate it into, if not a state religion, then a religion of state. For that, it would be indebted to other waves of alien ‘conquest’, as inarticulate and confrontational as the acharya’s were literate and accommodating.