“The Quest, for both religions, was not only motivated so as to achieve scriptural hegemony. Buddhism and Taoism were also aspiring to strengthen their respective liturgical and evangelical monopolies. To integrate one another’s favored rituals was undoubtedly viewed as the best means to consolidate the status of their clerical organizations and to attract or keep faithful followers by providing them with the most fashionable religious trends, even if this meant borrowing conspicuously from the opposite camp’s heritage” (Christine Mollier).
Encounter between a mature religion and a religion in its formative phase
In Buddhism and Taoism Face to Face (2008), Christine Mollier writes: “When Mahayana Buddhism started to prosper in Chinese society around the 4th and 5th centuries, Taoism was still … in its formative phase. The first Taoist organization, known as the Way of the Heavenly Master (Tianshi dao) was originally a local, sectarian movement, confined to the western part of Sichuan Province. After a period of diaspora provoked by political pressures, it spread throughout China so that, by the beginning of the 4th century, Taoism had expanded beyond its sectarian confines to acquire the shape and status of a religion per se, whereupon new schools and new scriptures also emerged in South China.”
So, when studying the interaction between Buddhism and Taoism, we must keep in mind that we are looking at the encounter between a mature religion, on one hand, and, on the other, a set of religious ideas and practices still in the process of evolving into an identifiable religion.
Mollier continues: “Buddhism not only deeply affected traditional Chinese religious life and mentality, but it also operated as a trigger for the native religion. Taoism owes part of the formation of its identity, as a fully structured and organized religion, to its face-to-face with Mahayana Buddhism. In response to the sophisticated eschatological and soteriological concepts imported by its foreign rival, Taoist theologians had to formulate and define their own ideas of the afterlife and human destiny, of moral precepts and ethical principles. To vie with itinerant and often zealous Buddhist teachers, skilled thaumaturgists, and miracle workers, Taoism had to organize its own clergy of physician-exorcists. Inspired by the already well-structured Buddhist canonical literature and impressed by the massive profusion of sutras, whether “original” or ‘apocryphal’, that were being diffused, Masters of the Tao also felt the urge to increase and classify their own literature … During the 5th century, the first Taoist ‘canon’ was thus created, and Taoism progressively acquired all the attributes of an institutionalized, nationwide religion.”
Late development of scholarship on Buddho-Taoism in the West
Christine Mollier’s book Buddhism and Taoism Face to Face is described as one of the best sources on the subject of the influence Buddhism had on Taoism, and vice versa, because it is clear that, from the start, the influence went in both directions. Whereas, today, this subject seems to be the object of numerous studies in academia, Mollier tells us that, in the West, it did not attract much attention before the late 1970s-early 1980s, when the work of Erik Zürcher “opened the way in the field now usually referred to as ‘Buddho-Taoism’.” Mollier describes herself as a student of Zürcher, and her book was published in 2008. She admits that “a Buddho-Taoist comparison was already well established in Japanese scholarship, notably in the monumental work of Yoshioka Yoshitoyo,” before the subject was tackled in the West.
In both East and West, scholars relied for their studies on the forty thousand manuscripts discovered by Western explorers at the beginning of the 20th century that had been “walled up not long after 1000 CE in a chamber adjoining one of the famous Thousand Buddha Caves of Dunhuang.” Specifically, among the Buddhist documents, was found “a substantial proportion (perhaps 5 to 10%) of noncanonical scriptures … conventionally referred to as ‘Buddhist apocrypha’ [that] had, in many cases, completely disappeared after having been expunged from the canons.” In addition to these, Mollier mentions that in 1990 five thousand Chinese scrolls were found in a Buddhist monastery in Japan called Nanatsu-dera, near Nagoya, “among which many unpublished apocrypha for the most part dating to the 12th century.”
Mollier writes: “For medieval Chinese Buddhist bibliographers, there mainly existed two types of sutras: the ‘authentic’, or “real’, sutras; and the ‘suspect’ ones. The first category was generally applied to sutras that were translated from an Indian or Central Asian language into Chinese. The second category comprised the ‘indigenous’ sutras, that is, the apocrypha written directly in Chinese. These were scriptures whose earliest representatives were composed, for the most part, during the 5th and 6th centuries CE, and then continued to be produced regularly, with a noticeable high peak between the 6th and the 8th centuries … these apocryphal sutras cast light on little-known, unconventional aspect of sinicized Buddhism, a Buddhism mainly meant to appeal to the faith of the Chinese laity and to respond to their needs … for the most part, the Buddhists apocrypha reframed indigenous Chinese rituals and texts.”
The huahu debate around the Sutra for the Conversion of the Barbarians (Hua jing)
While Taoists were eager to learn from the newly introduced Buddhist teachings, they were also keen to “reinforce the prestige of their own tradition.” Mollier tells us that the competition between the two religions was played out in the form of “polemical confrontations over the legend of the ‘conversion of the barbarians’ (huahu), which lasted for about a thousand years … The huahu debates took shape in a critical historical and political context, at the beginning of the 4th century CE, with the compilation of the Sutra for the Conversion of the Barbarians (Hua jing) … The legend on which this literature is based was probably first created with the sole goal of explaining the rise of the foreign but nonetheless familiar Buddhist religion in China. An early 5th century Taoist text entitled the Inner Explanations of the Three Heavens, found in the actual Taoist Canon, conveys a complementary vision. The text explains how the Taoist sage and divinity, Laozi, left China in the 9th century BCE, riding his blue ox, reached the frontier, where he met Yin Xi (the Guardian of the Pass). Laozi revealed to him the famous Daode Jing. Then, with Yin Xi, he proceeded toward the West, where he converted the king of Kashmir and his people by transmitting holy scriptures he composed for them. Laozi and his companion then continued farther west to the kingdom of India, where the Taoist deity was reborn as the Buddha. In other words, Sakyamuni and Buddhism are originally Taoist.”
What we would have expected to be a Taoist opposition to the Buddhist “reframing” of their indigenous Chinese rituals and texts, and a reaffirmation of their own versions of these rituals and texts, was de facto replaced by its very opposite: Sakyamuni was the reborn form of Laozi, so Buddhism was Taoism under another guise.
Some Taoists, however, did not go along with this interpretation. Mollier explains: “They pretended that Laozi undertook his western journey with the aim of converting the ‘barbarians’ of Central Asia and the Indian subcontinent. If he transformed himself into Sakyamuni, it was to impose the strict rules of Buddhism, which could bring to heel the savage and immoral nature of the inhabitants of these regions. The newly composed versions of the Huahu jing were determined to prove the antecedence and the supremacy of the autochthonous tradition, while treating Buddhism as a by-product of Taoism. The Buddha’s teaching was food only for taming and humanizing miscreant foreigners. During the following centuries, and above all, during the Tang, the debates pro- and contra-huahu continued to nurse the quarrels between the two great religious traditions. The Huahu jing was often reworked and developed, with Buddhist and Taoist apocrypha striving to reduce, as the case may have been, Laozi or Buddha to decals of one another.”
To this restriction of the use of Buddhist teachings to a way of “taming” foreigners, the Buddhists who had, at first seen them as a “means to introduce their doctrine as a sister of Taoism,” turned around to denounce the tales about the Buddha being a reincarnation of Laozi. In addition, “imperial officialdom took a jaundiced view of these huahu controversies and sometimes intervened in order to halt their escalation.” Buddhists, then, went beyond a mere denunciation of these tales, and courter-attacked with their own tales of the relationship between Laozi and the Buddha: the Buddha was not a reincarnation of Laozi and therefore not a Taoist. Instead, “the Buddhists claimed that Laozi was nothing but the Buddha’s disciple who came to China in order to convert people to Buddhism by preaching an alternative religion – that is, Taoism. For instance: the Sutra of the Pure Practice of the Dharma, Preached by the Buddha – from the 5th or 6th century. In this sutra, we find Laozi described as a bodhisattva who – together with two other famous “bodhisattvas,” Confucius and his cherished disciple Yan Hui – is sent by the Buddha to China to teach the Dharma. After accomplishing his mission, Laozi leaves for the West, which, in this case, means that he goes back to his Indian homeland.” Doesn’t it look like, behind the obvious contrast between the two stories in terms of which, of Buddhism and Taoism, is on top in the competition between the two religions, lurks an odd feeling that both sides failed to see any significant difference between their teachings? In fact it is explicitly said that preaching Taoism was a way of converting people to Buddhism!
Beyond the ideological polemics, there was an amazing competition for hegemony between the two communities.
At this point, Mollier finds it necessary to delineate her approach to the Buddho-Taoist interaction. She says: “Far from these ideological polemics, the investigation that I propose in this volume adds a new dimension to the study of Buddho-Taoist relationship and turns on their concrete and practical aspects. For during mid- and late medieval times (from the end of the Six Dynasties through the Tang and Five Dynasties periods, religious life was far more confrontational than the considerable interpenetration of the two religions might at first have us suppose. An amazing competition was taking place between the two communities, a fight for hegemony in the domains of scripture and ritual.”
She continues with her description of texts she refers to as “doppelgängers”: “In the past few years I have drawn attention to scriptures of various genres that occur in both Taoist and Buddhist guises … also apocryphal sutras and Taoist “revealed” scriptures. What we find in these examples is not mere hybridization or passive borrowing, but a unique type of scriptural production, whereby the two traditions mirrored one another. One and the same body of material is set in both Buddhist and Taoist frames. Not only are some Buddhist sutras strongly impregnated with Taoist elements, but indeed we find that they have precise Taoist counterparts. In such instances the sutra follows, of course, the usual device used by authors of apocrypha, whereby it is said to have been preached by the Buddha to such and such bodhisattva, while the Taoist parallel is held to have been revealed by Lord Lao (Laozi). The ascription of divine authorship to these texts provides them with the “appellation contrôlée,” effectively guaranteeing, in the eyes of the practitioners, their authenticity and authority. Sealed with Sakyamuni or Laozi’s hallowed name, such a sutra could aspire to canonization.”
The first two of the five texts she presents in her book are apocryphal sutras which are “calqued” on Taoist scriptures: the Sutra of the Three Kitchens (Sanchu jing) and the Sutra to Increase the Account (Yisuan jing). “Classified as ‘suspect’ and as ‘human fabrications’ by Buddhist catalogues since the mid-Tang period, these two sutras prove to have been directly copied – in fact, calqued – on the basis of contemporaneous Taoist writings. It would be no exaggeration in these cases to speak of flagrant piracy.”
“The first of these two apocrypha, the Sutra of the Three Kitchens … was already denounced as a Buddhist plagiarism in the 10th century by the renowned court Taoist Du Guangting (850-933). Du accused a fraudulent Buddhist monk of stealing the well-established Taoist text entitled the Scripture of the Five Kitchens, changing its title to the Sutra of the Three Kitchens, Preached by the Buddha, and adding a few Buddhist elements in order to create a credible sutra.” Twelve copies of this apocryphal text, dated end of 7th or beginning 8th century, were found in Dunhuang, and two manuscript copies of the 11th and 13th centuries were found in the famous headquarters of the Shingon sect on Mount Koya in Japan. “The Taoist version, The Scripture of the Five Kitchens, Revealed by Laozi, which was edited in the Ming Taoist Canon with a Tang-period commentary by the Taoist Master Yin Jin, seems also to date from the same period but was certainly derived from an older tradition. Both versions concern a method of meditation based on the recitation of a Taoist poem involving incantations of the Five Agents, which aims at salvation through complete abstinence from food.”
The second apocryphal sutra is “the Sutra of the Divine Talismans of the Seven Thousand Buddhas to Increase the Account, Preached by the Buddha, of which several versions were also discovered among the Dunhuang manuscripts. The work has been labelled as a Buddhist apocryphon since the end of the 7th century, but in fact the Sutra to Increase the Account should be more appropriately qualified as a Buddhist replica of a Taoist scripture. The latter, once more, may be found in the Taoist Canon. It bears the title Marvelous Scripture for Prolonging Life and for Increasing the Account, Revealed by the Most High Lord Lao. The two texts are centered around the same incantations and the same two sets of talismans for the exorcism of demons. The aim of these ritual implements is to guarantee full protection to the faithful so that they can achieve the optimal term of longevity, a span of 120 years.”
Meanwhile, the Taoists produced what came to be called “Taoist sutras” by appropriating Buddhist texts, a practice duly condemned by the Buddhists in a text titled Plagiarizing Buddhist Sutras for Taoist Scriptures. Under the Sui and at the beginning of the Tang, more than ever, the many ‘Taoist sutras’ being produced are directly inspired by Buddhist works – indeed, literally copied from them. This phenomenon, however, was by no means unilateral, for the Buddhists, during the same period, also threw themselves into the fabrication of sutras, the famous apocrypha that were presented as the genuine words of the Buddha. No more scrupulous than their rivals, the Buddhists showed no hesitation about trolling through Taoist collections and falsifying the writings they found there. For better or for worse, both parties thus attempted to conceal the origins of their pickings, in the interest of appropriating and integrating them on behalf of their respective literary patrimonies … The Tang emperors appear to have opted for an unstable compromise between the maintenance of Buddhism, which was powerfully implanted and prospered at all levels of society, and the obligatory patronage extended to the ‘autochthonous’ Taoist tradition in virtue of the legendary ancestral affiliation of the ruling house with Laozi.”
The third text studied by Mollier is a Taoist apocryphal anti-sorcery scripture: The Scripture for Unbinding Curses, Revealed by the Most High Lord Lao. It is said to have been transmitted by Laozi to the Pass guardian Yin Xi in the kingdom of Khotan in Central Asia, offers a radical solution to the problem of witchcraft, deemed a major symptom of pre-apocalyptic times as well as a perversion derived from the West, that is, from the people of Southern and Central Asia. As in other ‘conversion of the barbarians’ (huahu) accounts, when he delivers this sutra, Laozi is on his way to India to propagate the True Doctrine. In this case, however, his apparently pragmatic concern to provide a shield against curses is in fact a pretext for a higher missionary program: to save the western populations from the eschatological torments of the end of the kalpa by converting them to Taoism.” Mollier adds: “The text might well be a Tang response to the earlier Buddhist Sutra for the Conjuration of Bewitchments, Preached by the Buddha, an apocryphon dating from the end of the 5th or beginning of the 6th century.”
Mollier’s fourth text is “the Buddhist appropriation of a Taoist ritual in the talismanic tradition of the Great Dipper. In this case, however, the process of adaptation went through different phases in the course of the Middle Ages and reached its culmination much later, during the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368), with the fabrication of a very influential work: the Sutra on Prolonging Life through Worship of the Seven Stars of the Northern Dipper, Preached by the Buddha. This Buddhist apocryphon, which is better known as the Great Dipper Sutra, has intrigued researchers for a century, including not only specialists of Chinese religion, but also historians of Central Asia. The destiny of this modest work is indeed quite unusual, for besides the Chinese version, it exists in Tibetan, Mongolian, and Uighur recensions, as well as in a late Korean edition … It was not until 1990, with the publication of an article devoted to it by Herbert Franke, that the true nature of the Great Dipper Sutra was revealed. The work, according to Franke, is in effect a “pseudo-sutra,” a Buddhist apocryphon dating to the end of the 13th or the beginning of the 14th century that was redacted in China following a Taoist model composed some two or three centuries earlier, and it had a decisive role in the consolidation of Yuan imperial ideology …” Antecedents of this cult can even be detected in Taoist sources dating to the Six Dynasties.”
Mollier’s fifth text concerns “the creation of a ‘new’ deity inspired by a Buddhist model long after it had been introduced into China. One of the most prestigious deities of the Taoist Canon, the Heavenly Venerable Savior from Suffering (Jiuku tianzun) was modeled on the figure of the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara (Guanyin), drawing on his personality, function, titles, and image. Not just inspired by the charismatic persona of Guanyin, the Taoists went so far as to compose, at some point during the Tang dynasty, a kind of literary transposition of the celebrated 25th chapter of the Lotus Sutra, the “The Universal Gateway of Guanshiyin in order to promote their deity to the great bodhisattva’s level.”
I see little in these five texts that challenges the conclusion that the Buddhist and Taoist communities competed with each other through borrowing from each other, rather than affirming their differences, and the end result was a sort of syncretic mishmash including bits of both correctly labeled “Buddho-Taoism. This is how things worked out, not only for a short period after the introduction of Buddhism in China, but in one case, up to 14th century. There was indeed a competition at the institutional level, but there was no serious disagreement at the spiritual level.
Mollier assesses the modus operandi of “competition” between Taoism and Buddhism as follows: “The Quest, for both religions, was not only motivated so as to achieve scriptural hegemony. Buddhism and Taoism were also aspiring to strengthen their respective liturgical and evangelical monopolies. To integrate one another’s favored rituals was undoubtedly viewed as the best means to consolidate the status of their clerical organizations and to attract or keep faithful followers by providing them with the most fashionable religious trends, even if this meant borrowing conspicuously from the opposite camp’s heritage.”
Everyone of the texts above had a goal in that it provided a tool, in some cases, a “weapon,” to help practitioners deal with a specific issue: gaining salvation through abstinence from food, protecting oneself from sorcery, prolonging one’s life or creating a new deity. Rituals were routinely involved, and these needed to be scrupulously performed. Mollier writes: “Dharanis, incantations, and talismans, despite the repackaging procedure to which they were thus subjected, were maintained in their pristine, unaltered forms and, accompanied by identical prescriptions, fulfilled the same salutary purpose for both Buddhists and Taoists within their respective fields of action. Their transmission and modus operandi had to be rigorously observed and did not tolerate the slightest misstep, the smallest departure from the rules.” Priests in both religions were seen as “technicians of the sacred” rather than teachers of the Dharma. Competition consisted in convincing potential users that one was the best at delivering the desired results.
Nowhere in the book is there any mention of the Tao Te Ching or the Zhuang Zhou, or any of the concepts we usually associate with Taoism, such as wu-wei or tzu-jan (spontaneity). It seems that Mollier approached Taoism as a religion (daojiao) as opposed to Taoism as a philosophy (daojia), as such distinction was still the view of French scholars of Taoism at the time she was doing her research. Today’s scholars have, by and large, abandoned the distinction between daojiao and daojia. So, her book leaves us with more questions than it answers. We have, however, learned one important fact. Now that we know how often Buddhists and Taoists indulged in the creation of apocryphal texts, we can understand why the Platform Sutra is called a sutra. I remember a scholar stating that it was called a “sutra” because it was considered particularly precious! Well, the Platform Sutra was just another apocryphal sutra, wasn’t it? It was probably not a copy of a Taoist text. But since it was not written by Bodhidharma, the supposed founder of Chan, who would have brought it from India, it is clearly a product of Chinese thought.
Source:
Christine Mollier – Buddhism and Taoism Face to Face (2008)
