Page 182 - The Encyclopedia of Taoism v1_A-L

THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF TAOISM VOL. I

By "available" is indicated the fact that Taoism always tended to absorb what
elements of Buddhism became common currency in Chinese religion; it is im-
portant to note, however, that Buddhism found itself equally under pressure to
deal in the common currency too. Thus it has been demonstrated that a Chinese
Buddhist apocryphal text, the Hu shenmingjing ~:5.r $ ~,~ (Sutra on Protecting
Life; T. 2866), shows an awareness of the Lingbao reformulation of Buddhism;
but a later Buddhist apocryphon on the same theme seems in turn to be re-
flected in a further generation of Buddhist-inspired Taoist literature of the Tang.
That literature, too, despite its quite extensive incorporation of lightly altered
Buddhist materials, was also able to inspire Buddhist responses which, as Robert
Sharf (2002) has shown, should not be underrated for their religious value.
Nor should the accusations of plagiarism voiced by the Buddhists obscure
the fact that this trading in a common currency took place at a number of
different levels, of which the interchange of blocs of textual material was
perhaps only the most obvious. Sometimes titles were traded, with a partial
or complete replacement of content, as with the Ch an use of the Taoist al-
chemical title Cantong qi ~ Ii'll ~ (Token for the Agreement of the Three; see
*Cantong qi and *Zhouyi cantong qi); sometimes terminology was traded, picking
up new nuances on the way, as perhaps with the term *chongxuan (Twofold
Mystery) whose philosophical overtones in seventh century Taoism may
have been affected by Buddhist use. Indeed, the pioneering work of Kamata
Shigeo demonstrates elegantly how a study of this interaction may allow us
to separate what was common currency from what was not: the notion of
"emptiness" (kong :2:), for example, was quite clearly intelligible to Taoists,
even if in the long run they preferred a metaphysics based on * qi, while the
new Yogacara philosophy imported in the seventh century was not.
But even where concepts did become common currency, tensions were not I
thereby eliminated. The notion of karma, for example, appeared already in the
Buddhist sources for the Lingbao scriptures, and became in time a component
of Taoist ethical thinking. Yet from the time of *Lu Xiujing (406-77) until at
least the end of the Tang a protracted debate seems to have been carried out
between Buddhists and Taoists over whether the notions of causality (yinyuan
~~) could be reconciled with spontaneity (*ziran). Were Taoist gods, and
indeed the Taoist universe, in some sense "immoral," in that they appeared
at the dawn of time "spontaneously," rather than as the result of the aeons
of moral effort needed to perfect Buddhahood?
In part such debates, notably over the notorious *Huahu jing (Scripture
of the Conversion of Barbarians), which encapsulated in polemical form
the notion that Laozi was a the author of Buddhism, emerge as the result
of competition for patronage which was itself the product of the establish-
ment of both religions as partners of the state in the fifth century. The role