Buddhism and Eastern religions

• 1. Introduction

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  Buddhism traces its origins to the Indian subcontinent in the 5th century BCE, later reaching East Asia by the 2nd century CE. Its teachings emerged gradually, partly as a response to brahmanical doctrine. Rather than fixing a single ritual or a set of beliefs, Buddhism centers on an ongoing examination of the self.

  In the year 592, according to Buddhist legend, the spirit of Guan Yu appeared one night before Zhiyi, the Tiantai Patriarch and founder. Guan Yu, a Taoist god of war, asked the monk to teach him the dharma. He then took refuge in the triple gems, requested the Five Precepts, and vowed to guard Buddhist temples and the dharma from then on.

  A Taoist war god turned Buddhist guardian is just one thread in a much larger pattern. Buddhism intertwined with Taoism, Confucianism, Shinto, Korean shamanism, and Hinduism, absorbing local gods, provoking sharp debate, and reshaping each tradition it touched. What did each of these encounters cost the faiths involved, and what did each side gain?

• 2. The Path Of Tao

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  The Tao ideology dates back to the seventh century BC, long before Taoists organized into a formal religious collective. Taoist philosophy grew from a blend of early mythology and folk religious practice. Both Taoism and Buddhism, at different points, sought dominant influence over the Indian subcontinent. Buddhism offered an elaborate cosmology and a detailed theory of the afterlife. Taoism met other needs instead. Its central focus was the Tao, an all-encompassing formless power that binds all things into an eternal cycle. The Tao gave followers a path to understand their own place in the world.

  Rivalry between the two faiths is credited with sparking real advances in Chinese medicine. Buddhism's arrival also pushed Taoism toward tighter organization, an answer to hard questions about existence that Buddhism had raised. Chinese translators sometimes rendered scripture using Taoist vocabulary that did not quite fit, leaving certain accounts inconsistent with one another.

  Chan Buddhism, in particular, holds much in common with Taoist philosophy. Daoist simplicity encouraged Chan to set aside formal Buddhist theory, paired with a shared Daoist habit: total absorption in the practice of a highly cultivated skill.

  The Chinese Buddhist deva and Bodhisattva Marici, for instance, is often merged with the Taoist goddess Doumu, seen as the personification of the Big Dipper and the feminine side of the cosmic God of Heaven. Chinese Esoteric Buddhism absorbed Taoism just as deeply elsewhere. The nine-fold Mandala of the Two Realms, used in Zhenyan and Shingon Buddhism, drew directly on the Taoist Lo Shu Square and the I Ching.

  Not every neighboring tradition took Buddhism in this warmly. Confucian scholars, in particular, prepared a far more hostile response.

• 3. Confucian Confrontation

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  Neo-Confucianist scholars attacked Buddhism from four distinct angles: its historical and textual claims, its cosmology, its metaphysics, and its ethics. Three philosophers led this charge: Ch'eng Hao, Ch'eng I, and Chu Hsi. They were not alone, but their arguments help explain how Neo-Confucianism eventually overpowered a Buddhist system that had once dominated Chinese thought. Confucianists viewed Buddhism as a nihilistic worldview, one they believed damaged society at large. Neo-Confucian thinkers responded by insisting on the reality and solidity of the universe and of humanity itself, directly rejecting Buddhist cosmology. Questions that Buddhists could not formally answer marked a turning point, as Buddhism's status as East Asia's leading ideology began to slip.

  During the Song Dynasty, the Song court lost the North of China to the Jin and built a thriving economy in the South instead. That shift set off a commercial and social transformation that touched both Buddhism and Confucianism, though each responded differently. Song Buddhist monks had drifted from the social engagement of earlier Chinese monks, retreating into increasingly isolated temples and monasteries. Song rulers came to see these monasteries as too costly, a drain on the royal treasury. Confucianists stepped into the space Buddhism left behind, taking up posts throughout the Imperial bureaucracy.

  Chu Hsi became known as the great synthesizer of early Neo-Confucianism, building a structured case against Buddhism that ultimately succeeded. He held an advantage his predecessors lacked: the Ch'eng brothers had already laid the groundwork of the Ch'eng Chu school.

• 4. Kami And Buddha

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  Prince Shotoku made Buddhism the national religion of Japan, overriding fierce opposition to its arrival in the country. Once that integration took hold, Japan blended Buddhism with its native religion, Shinto, producing a form of Buddhism found nowhere else. Shinto gods were given a position comparable to that of Hindu gods within Buddhism. Because the Buddha Vairochana's symbol was the sun, many people equated the sun goddess Amaterasu with an earlier incarnation of that bodhisattva.

  According to the scholar Helen Hardacre, a theory called wakō dōjin, written 和光同塵, had emerged by the Heian period. Under this idea, the Buddha and the kami took on a new form as saviors of humanity. In Hardacre's account, they 'dim their light and mingle with the dust of the world.' The phrasing marked both a connection between the two faiths and a real difference in their relative status at that time.

  The Tokugawa Shogunate era later brought a revival of Shinto. Some scholars during this period argued that Buddhas were earlier incarnations of Shinto gods, reversing the traditional order. Shinto and Buddhism were officially separated during the Meiji Restoration, followed by the brief but socially transformative rise of State Shinto. In postwar Japan, most families now identify with both religions, despite that official separation.

  The Sui were the first Chinese dynasty to make contact with Japan's newly centralizing state. That contact meant Buddhism's role as an officially sanctioned religion offered a political model the Japanese could observe firsthand. Philosophers of the time described the kami as transformations of the Buddha, manifested in Japan to save all sentient beings. Buddhism also helped legitimize Japanese emperors through its ties to Shinto. The term tennō, written 天皇, was officially adopted for the Japanese emperor in the latter part of the 7th century. It came as a direct result of these exchanges between Buddhism and Shinto.

  In Korea, Buddhism would find a different kind of local rival waiting at the mountainside.

• 5. The Mountain Spirit

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  When Buddhism reached Korea, its temples were built on or near shrines devoted to mountain spirits kept by native shamans. Many of these Buddhist sites still include shrines to the mountain spirit Sansin, written 산신 in Korean. Most Buddhist temples in Korea now include a Sansin-gak, usually a small shrine room set behind and to the side of the main buildings. The name is written 산신각. It commonly sits at a higher elevation than the other shrine rooms, echoing the way the mountain itself rises above the temple complex.

  A Sansin-gak can be a traditional wooden structure topped with a tile roof, or in simpler, less wealthy temples, a plain utilitarian room. Inside sits a waist-height shrine holding a statue and a mural, or sometimes just a mural alone. Offerings of candles, incense, water, and fruit are often joined by alcoholic drinks, particularly Korea's rustic rice wine, makgeolli.

  A monk's cushion and a moktak are frequently found on the floor of this small shrine room. They are evidence of regular Buddhist ceremonies held there, despite Sansin's non-Buddhist origins. Sansin is not always given a separate shrine. Sometimes the spirit is housed in a Samseonggak, or within the Buddha hall itself, off to one side of the main shrine. Sansin shrines also exist entirely independent of Buddhist temples.

  Not every meeting between Buddhism and a local tradition ended in coexistence. In India, the encounter with Hinduism turned into open philosophical combat.

• 6. Debating The Self

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  Hinduism and Buddhism share the same country of origin, India, and the two faiths have influenced, and argued with, each other across centuries. Buddhist notions of sunyata and anatta became the central targets of criticism from Hindu schools such as Nyaya, Mimamsa, and especially Vedanta. Vedanta places heavy emphasis on the doctrine of atman.

  The Advaita Vedanta scholar Vidyaranya laid out the irreconcilable differences between the two systems in his celebrated work, the Panchadashi. 'The Atman knows everything that can be known,' he wrote. 'There is no other knower than the Atman. That Atman which is of the nature of consciousness is distinct from the known and unknown.'

  Vidyaranya's Panchadashi presses further: 'Persons who perceive things and yet complain that they do not experience them are merely lumps of clay in human form. How can scriptures teach such persons?' He adds that one's own existence cannot be treated as a matter for dispute. 'If one begins to have doubts on one's own existence who can be the disputant?'

  The Panchadashi closes on that same point. Unless someone is deluded, Vidyaranya writes, no one would seriously argue that they themselves do not exist. The Vedas, in his telling, rule out any claim that the self is unreal.