The e-Journal of East and Central Asian Religions

Examples of Buddho–Daoist interaction: conceptions of the afterlife in early medieval epigraphic sources

2014-01-01T19:26:33+00:00

This paper is based on a larger study of conceptions of the afterlife in the engraved texts of 496 entombed epigraphs (muzhi 墓誌) and 494 votive stele inscriptions (zaoxiangji 造像記) from northern China from the fifth and sixth century CE, using the database of Wei Jin Nanbeichao Stone inscriptions 魏晉南北朝石刻語料庫, part of the larger database of excavated documents from the Wei Jin Nanbeichao 魏晉南北朝實物語料庫 at the Center for the Study and Application of Chinese Characters at ECNU Shanghai.

Buddhist Traces in Song Daoism: A Case From Thunder-Rite (Leifa) Daoism

2014-01-01T19:17:00+00:00

After the turn of the first millennium the Chinese religious landscape had developed to a degree that the production of hybrid Buddho-Daoist ritual texts was a widespread phenomenon. With the rise of a Daoist trend referred to as Thunder Rites (leifa 雷法), which matured during the mid- to late-Song 宋 Dynasty (960–1279) and did not solely pertain to any particular branch of Daoism, a new type of (often Buddho-Daoist) ritual practice had emerged, largely exorcistic in nature, that would eventually be incorporated into classical Daoist traditions. Practitioners of Thunder Rites were either members of the established Daoist orthodoxy or itinerant thaumaturges, referred to as ritual masters (fashi 法師). Buddhist Esoteric knowledge in the Song Dynasty was so wide-spread that it did not only find its way from “court to country”, but even back to court again—namely through Thunder Rite ritual masters like Wang Wenqing, who acted as the imperial preceptor of Emperor Huizong and in whose hybrid Buddho-Daoist productions of ritual texts the Buddhist traces had become almost invisible.

Looting the Pantheon: On the Daoist Appropriation of Buddhist Divinities and Saints

2014-01-01T19:17:00+00:00

Scholars working on different Christian cults in medieval Europe are wont to deal with the rather commonplace, although highly interesting, cases of relic thefts and the associated co-option of particular saints and their cults. Such cases reinforce our perception of the period as a dynamic and creative one in regard to the transfer and proliferation of Christian cultic practices to new areas and social contexts beyond their original locales. However, in the cases I shall discuss in the following, you will not be treated to cases of intra-religious take-overs or the simple borrowing or copying of relics within a single religious tradition, but you will be presented with cases in which one religion appropriated entire cults, divinities and saints from another religion.
What we shall see here concerns gods and saints in what we may term ``inter-religious transit" and their ultimate adoption and inclusion into different—and as I hope to demonstrate—entirely new spiritual contexts. This paper will deal with a major aspect of the religious exchange between Buddhism and Daoism in medieval China, namely that of Daoist appropriation of Buddhist divinities and saints.
The related and highly important issue concerning the typological copying of deities for similar, functional purposes that we see in both the Buddhist and Daoist material will not be dealt with here for practical reasons. Although it is of equal importance for our understanding of the inter-religious appropriations that took place in the meeting and co-existence in the same cultural space of the two religions, that issue is so extensive that it would require a separate discussion in its own right.

Buddhist Master Wuguang's (1918–2000) Taiwanese Web of the Colonial, Exilic and Han

2014-01-01T19:17:00+00:00

The Mantra School Bright Lineage 真言宗光明流 is a modern Taiwanese Buddhist movement whose orthopraxy was formed by an intermingling of Chinese, Tibetan, Japanese and Western elements. These elements converged as a result of Japanese Colonialism and the Chinese Civil War, and first coalesced within the crisis of faith of the movement's founder, the Chan monk Master Wuguang 悟光上師. Finding his practice unfulfilling, Wuguang began first exploring Tibetan Buddhism but then turned his attention to Shingon. In 1971 he travelled to Japan, where he was initiated as a Shingon priest. He established the Bright Lineage the following year in Taiwan based on the various traditions he had studied. This article explores the sect's roots by first tracing the intersection of these elements with Wuguang's monastic career and then offering examples of their combination. I also highlight and analyze Wuguang's impact on the evolution of modern Taiwanese Buddhism. Data has been gathered through field-work conducted since 2011, and historical and textual research.

Holy vows and realpolitik: Preliminary notes on Kōyasan's early medieval kishōmon

2014-01-01T19:17:00+00:00

This article concerns the written vows made at the Shingon Buddhist temple Kōyasan 高野山 in the early medieval period (1185–1392). The temple complex at Kōyasan is situated in the mountainous interior of modern Wakayama prefecture, Japan, which in the pre-modern era corresponded to the province of Kii 紀伊. In the early medieval period, Kōyasan was developing a system of local rule centred on control of private estates (shōen 荘園) in the area surrounding the temple. This was an era of decentralization, in which national authority and systems of rule were losing their potency in the face of rising localization and the increasingly central role of the warrior class. With warriors taking an ever greater share of estate revenue and assuming greater administrative control within shōen, estate proprietors such as Kōyasan were faced with diminishing income, leading to centrally-located temples and aristocratic families effectively losing all control over distant estates. Located in the mountains of Kii and overlooking the estates along the Ki river, Kōyasan by contrast was close to its land and was strongly involved in warrior society. A major facet of this relationship with warrior estate managers was the kishōmon 起請文, or written vow, signed at the temple as both a performative act of submission to its spiritual authority and as a contract and code of conduct between proprietor and estate manager (shōkan 荘官).

Buddho–Daoism in medieval and early pre-modern China: A report on recent findings concerning influences and shared religious practices

2014-01-02T12:23:06+00:00

This comprises a report on a project conducted at the Ruhr University, Bochum, on the interrelationship and exchanges between China's two major religious traditions, Buddhism and Daoism, during the medieval and early pre-modern periods. While the departure for the research was primarily concerned with the mutual exchanges of ritual techniques and technology, i.e.~ritual practices in general, concepts of ritual, ritual implements, ritual language, rituals in specific cultic contexts etc., I gradually expanded my interest to include a wider range of topics relating to the exchanges between Buddhism and Daoism in China including the appropriation of divinities and saints, integrated beliefs and practices involving elements from both religions, apocryphal writings, conceptualizations concerning specific religious themes in which ideas and beliefs from both Buddhism and Daoism were brought together. Among other issues dealt with is the manner in which such concepts of “secrecy” and “the netherworld” were formulated and constructed in the Buddho–Daoist exchanges.