6.6: Buddhism in Diplomacy

Across East Asia, and not only in Japan where scholars talk about Shinto, many gods and demons were quite local. A famous scholar, Motoori Norinaga (1730-1801), explained kami:

Speaking in general… kami signifies, in the first place, the deities of heaven and earth that appear in the ancient records and also the spirits of the shrines where they are worshipped. It is hardly necessary to say that it includes human beings. It also includes such objects as birds, beasts, trees, plants, seas, mountains, and so forth. In ancient usage, anything whatsoever that was outside the ordinary, that possessed superior power, or that was awe-inspiring was called kami. Eminence here does not refer merely to the superiority of nobility, goodness, or meritorious deeds. Evil and mysterious things, if they are extraordinary and dreadful, are called kami. It is needless to say that among the human beings who are called kami the successive generations of sacred emperors are all included… In lesser degree we find, in the present as well as in ancient times, human beings who are kami. Although they may not be accepted throughout the whole country, yet in each province, each village, and each family there are human beings who are kami, each one according to his own proper position…³⁰

Daoism incorporated many gods, and demons, while elite families also practiced Confucianism. But Buddhism offered centralizing kings new, universal, ways to patronize, build, and pray.

The Buddha, an Indian prince named Siddhartha, had lived in the northern subcontinent some time between 623 and 383 BC. His teachings (read Kenneth Chen, “Background” in his Buddhism in China for the basic ideas) were written down in Sri Lanka after 100 BC, centuries after he lived and a thousand miles away. The Indian King Ashoka (r. 268-239 BC) was an early sponsor: he inherited an empire and fought to expand it, but then regretted the bloodshed, converted to Buddhism, and used his vast power to promulgate the faith, engraving its tenets on pillars of stone in all the languages of his empire. The Kushan Empire (AD 50-250) in Northern India and Central Asia also sponsored Buddhism, increasing the Buddhist repertoire of art, architecture, doctrine, and practice. Merchants, missionary monks, and diplomats brought the faith and its repertoire to East Asia piecemeal, by sea and by land, including precious objects, intriguing stories, body practices, and architectural techniques. Buddhism also offered powerful assistance in worldly and spiritual matters through Bodhisattvas: enlightened beings who had vowed not to dissipate in nirvana at death, but to remain in the world to help others. The statues of Bodhisattvas and other Buddhist beings were lifelike, awesome human figures based on Greek sculpture that had been brought to the Kushan area of Gandhara by Alexander the Great. All these factors contributed to the appeal of Buddhism for East Asia.

The early stages of the transmission are obscure. The first recorded believer, a Han royal prince who received imperial permission to worship the Buddha in AD 65, probably just thought of it as a kind of Daoism, and the two were mingled throughout Han times. Missionary monks formed a small community in Loyang, translating and teaching, by about AD 150.³¹ In their wildest dreams, did they hope for the success Buddhism eventually attained in East Asia? For as it absorbed and changed all kinds of demons, gods, and ideas, it became the most widely-shared substrate of life across the region.

After the fall of Han, East Asian rulers one after another modelled themselves on King Ashoka, the čakravartin king who “turned the wheel of the Buddhist law” with his patronage. Well-attuned to diplomacy and domination through prestige goods, they appreciated how Ashoka had spread the Buddhist faith while assuring his own prestige and reputation. For only a virtuous king would wish, and only a great king could afford, to build vast temples; endow them with large estates to feed monks and nuns while they prayed, held masses, translated and copied scriptures (sutras), lectured to the public, and meditated; carve huge cave complexes filled with stone statues; and support artisans to create beautiful, gilded bronze and wooden images. Such patronage displayed and symbolized royal great control over land and labor, and elevated the king above the aristocracy.

Such patronage made sense to many East Asian rulers. For instance, Silla monarch sponsored and oversaw Buddhist clergy using methods learned from the Northern Wei, Zhou, and Qi dynasties. In 551 a refugee monk from Koguryŏ, Hyeryang, was the first state supervisor of Silla’s monks and nuns. Chajang, a Silla aristocrat who returned from Tang in 643 to serve under Queen Sŏndŏk and her successors, also played this role. Silla also appointed provincial overseers of clergy, including some from former Koguryŏ and Paekche, in around 685, as inscriptions on pillars and bells show, and from 785 there was also an office to advise the monarch on managing Buddhist building projects, wealth, land, and personnel.³²

Buddhist international style included rock-cut temples as well as soaring wooden towers and huge wooden halls on a scale East Asians had not known how to build before. Northern mainland rulers built cave complexes and huge temples in which enormous Buddha figures symbolized the ruler; one northern monk went so far as to say that the Wei ruler was the Buddha. Diplomatic missions to mainland courts were taken on tours of the impressive sites, thus showing off to the public that visitors had come from afar to honor the ruler. Paekche’s pagodas (Buddhist towers) were particularly admired, the most famous being the Nine-Story Stupa that Abiji, a Paekche architect, built for Queen Sǒndǒk of Silla (r. 632-647), to fulfill the advice of a mainland dharma dragon who told monk Chajang that it would protect his country. Rulers adopted Buddhist display to claim brotherhood with other rulers and to exalt themselves above their subjects.

In southern mainland regimes, royal control over Buddhism was far less complete. Both rulers and aristocratic clans patronized Buddhism as part of their pursuit, creation, and display of beauty, education, and high culture – they had beautiful images made for them, studied complicated Buddhist texts, and wrote out sutras in beautiful calligraphy. Aristocratic monks of the southern dynasties included Huiyuan (334-416), who corresponded with Kumārajīva, a great translator of sutras, sent for more scriptures from India, put together a translation team, and built his own temple. Huiyan gathered followers by teaching that faith in Amitabha Buddha alone, and chanting his name, could earn spiritual merit, even if one could not read scripture. Monks and nuns from aristocratic families north and south lectured to thousands of people – a non-official form of public influence. Huiyuan argued in a famous essay that monks and nuns should not bow before kings: not from a lack of reverence, but because they followed different rules from ordinary people to signal their higher calling.

Emperor Wu of the Liang dynasty (r. 502-549) wrote a commentary on a Buddhist scripture, as well as forcing his family and officials to convert. He fed thousands of monks, and spent lavishly on temples and scriptures. But Bodhidharma, the founder of Chan or Zen Buddhism, told Emperor Wu of the Liang that all the money and effort he had spent for Buddhism did nothing for him. Only meditation moved anyone closer to enlightenment, whether it worked gradually, as Northern Chan taught, or suddenly, as in Southern Chan, which used paradoxes called “cases” (gong an or in Japanese ko’an) to stimulate the realization that the whole world (including all those good deeds) was illusory. Meditation could be carried out while working at tasks like sweeping. (This school became very popular later in Japan with samurai, because although one ought not to kill, since all is illusion if one kills in a state of understanding that all is illusion, no sin has been committed so no karma results.)³³

Figure 6.12. Northern Qi or Sui figure of a monk, gilt-bronze, piece-mold cast, sixth century. Source: Metropolitan Museum. Public Domain

Figure 6.13. Northern Wei stone Buddhist triad with flying apsaras, 62” high, dated 534, with inscription on the back praising the majesty of the Buddha and attendant bodhisattvas carved by a skillful hand, and praying that the merit earned by paying for the figure will benefit the emperor and the two hundred monks who contributed to gain their dead kin entry into the Western Paradise, make the living happy, and allow all beings to hear the Buddhist teachings. Metropolitan Museum, Public Domain.

As well as sharing an architectural style, East Asian kings gave each other Buddhist texts, images, ritual objects, and monks. In 372, a mainland regime sent icons and texts, and monk Sŏndo, to Koguryŏ as a diplomatic gesture (Koguryŏ preferred Daoism). In 384 Eastern Jin sent a Central Asian monk, Malanda, to Paekche; King Chimnyu gave him a truly royal welcome, built him a temple and assigned ten men to serve as monks. In 541, Paekche King Sŏng flattered the Southern Liang Emperor Wu by requesting the sutra he had commented on.³⁴ Eleven years later, King Sŏng sent a mission to Yamato with gifts of Buddhist ritual banners and canopies of silk, and a gilt-bronze statue of the Buddha (probably a foot or so high). Impressive buildings wordlessly signaled the resources the patron controlled. Objects, including texts (which few people could read initially), worked in the same way as other prestige objects to link monarchs.

Figure 6.14. Koguryŏ gilt-bronze Budda with inscription on the back of the halo. Similar in style to mainland Northern Wei Buddhas. The inscription gives a date (probably 539) and says “Seungyeon—who is the abbot of Dongsa Temple in Nangnang of the Goguryeo Kingdom, as well as a reverent disciple of Buddha—and forty Buddhists together produced and distributed 1000 Buddhas. This statue is the twentyninth Buddha donated by Beobyeong, a Buddhist nun.” Source: National Museum of Korea. Korea Open Government License permits use, unchanged, regardless of commercial use without fee.

Monks were more even directly useful. Kings trying to increase their power vis-à-vis that of other aristocrats needed advisors. Monks from abroad had no kin to distort their loyalty to the ruler. Highly-educated and widely-travelled, they understood politics and often spoke several languages and knew the Classics, histories, literature, and so on. They modelled the ritualized polite behavior so central to court life, showing new kings and aristocrats how to behave. Their practice of prayer, chant, and meditation brought them an apparent calm, and since they were not supposed to crave riches, it was difficult to bribe them. And because of the high level of organization required for unrelated men or women to live together in large monasteries and nunneries, Buddhism had a tradition of creating systems that ran by rules and regulations. Organization by rules is precisely what a centralizing regime needs.

For all these reasons, monks advised kings across East Asia even before most people practiced Buddhism. In Koguryŏ and Paekche, monks from the Vinaya (Rules) school of Buddhism were playing this role by 500. Precisely because monks made good advisors, they were a meaningful gift from one ruler to another: a way to help an ally to centralize his power, increasing his ability to tax and field armies. The dates for official acceptance of Buddhism (Koguryŏ in 372, Paekche in 384, Silla two centuries later in 535) signal those regimes’ openness to learning from mainland traditions generally, rather than total conversion to the faith.

But royal faith was often genuine. Like Emperor Wu of Liang, Paekche King Sŏng’s son wanted to become a monk. Courtiers convinced him to take the throne as Widok. He spread the faith through diplomacy with the Yamato court, sending missions between 555 and 577 that included two monks and a nun, a number of Buddhist texts, and two artisans who specialized in making Buddhist ritual items. King Widok welcomed nuns from Yamato to study in Paekche, and he sent a mission to Northern China, to the Northern Qi (550-577), most Buddhist of the northern regimes. Buddhism worked as a diplomatic language through both display and shared faith, strengthening kings.

Buddhism also changed daily life for everyone. Along with the new faith, which revolutionized conceptions of the cosmos, came Indian mathematics including the zero; new knowledge in astronomy, astrology, divination, and medicine; business practices such as loans on security, joint-stock associations to pool capital, auctions, and lotteries; chairs; tea, sugar, and the industrial processes required to make sugar (Tang Taizong sent a delegation to India specifically to learn how). The need to translate Buddhist scriptures into Classical Chinese for East Asian audiences contributed to scholarship on linguistics. The most characteristic form of Tang poetry, with four or eight lines of five or seven syllables apiece, developed out of a Sanskrit ode of praise. Buddhist tales chanted and sung by monks and laypeople developed into both long fiction and drama, which had not existed in the great tradition before.

Buddhism offered both men and women a way to live outside the family, as monks and nuns; the rules that were developed to manage large communities of unrelated people were later adopted by Confucian academies. Buddhist charity and proselytization gave even ordinary men and women a role in public life, as donors and lay leaders.³⁵ At the same time, however, the idea that past deeds earned present status legitimated the firmly aristocratic mentality of the next several centuries. Finally since creating wealth and making donations to monasteries earned donors good karma, Buddhism forward commercialization and exploitation of nature.³⁶

East Asians did change Buddhism in significant ways (the fear of eating a reincarnated ancestor, for instance, leading to the introduction of vegetarianism, which Buddha had not preached). Kings were the first to benefit. But over time, East Asian culture, knowledge, society, language, literature, economy, and daily life were all revolutionized by this imported religion.