Text: excerpts from the second in a series of six articles on religions in Life Magazine, reprinted in Doctrines of Buddhism (Vol. 1); edited, expanded, and updated by WQ.
A model presents a creation inspired by the court dress of ancient China's Tang Dynasty (618-907 A.C.E.), during a show at the 2009 Qingdao Fashion Week in Qingdao, a coastal city in east China's Shandong province, 6/15/09 (Xinhua/Li Ziheng). From the islands of Sri Lanka to Japan and throughout large sections of the Asian mainland, hundreds of millions of people -- perhaps as many as half a billion (in the 1950's) -- believe in a gentle and peaceable religion called Buddhism.
Many Western thinkers, who have come to know its yellow-robed monastics and have investigated the vast libraries of their quiet nunneries and monasteries, consider it one of the noblest edifices of thought ever erected by the human spirit. It is, as a whole, one of the most rational of the world's great religions [along with Christianity, which has striking parallels to Mahayana Buddhism, and Islam], for the system of human conduct that it preaches relies very little on the supernatural.
In its history, which stretches back for 2,500 years, Buddhism has bee one of the greatest civilizing forces the Far East has ever known, stimulating art and contributing profound ideas to the great Tang Dynasty culture of China in the 7th to 10th Centuries, A.C.E., and bringing civilization to Japan.
Today it is the state religion of Thailand, Tibet, Burma, Cambodia, and Laos, the dominant religion of China, Taiwan, and Sri Lanka, and a faith to which vast numbers of non-religious Chinese and Japanese turn for spiritual purpose....
Stripped of the accretions of poetic Oriental legend with which centuries of Asian imagination have surrounded it, the life of Siddhartha Gautama, or the Buddha as he was later called, is one of the great and elegant biographies of religious literature.
Mahayana Buddhism
For a while Buddhism was dominant over Hinduism. In time travelers from northern Asia, following the mountain trade routes across the Himalayas, learned something about the new religion of enlightenment and brought back reports to the cities of China.
About 65 A.C.E. a Chinese emperor, according to a legend, dreamed that a golden image of the Buddha appeared from out of the west and dispatched messengers beyond the Himalayas to find out about the mysterious source of this dream.
Indian Buddhist wandering-monks gradually made their way northward across the mountain passes as missionaries, and Chinese pilgrims traveled in the opposite direction seeking information and opportunities to worship at the shrines where Gautama had lived and taught. Two of these pilgrims became as spectacular figures in the annals of travel as Marco Polo. One of them, Fa-Hsien, left China in 399 A.C.E. and after incredible hardships in central Asia spent 15 years in India compiling an eyewitness account of that country, which is still studied by historians.
The other traveling monk, Hsuan-Tsang, left China in 629 A.C.E., crossed the Gobi desert, Sinkiang and what is now Afghanistan, spent 16 years in India and returned laden with books and manuscripts. Hsuan-Tsang subsequently translated Buddhist literature so extensively that what is ascribed to him and his pupils in Chinese amounts to more than a thousand volumes.
The court of the great Tang Dynasty, during which he lived, became filled with converts to Buddhism. Some of the greatest artists in Chinese history were devoting themselves to Buddhist subjects, and in the streets of the old Tang capital of Changan (modern Sian), Buddhist scholars could be found discussing their doctrines with Confucianists, Taoists, Zoroastrians, Manichaeans, and even Nestorian Christian missionaries from the Near East. Buddhism itself proved to be one of the hardiest of them all, and its teaching ramified into many different sects, some of which exist down to the present day.
Tang in Japan
Meanwhile, in the 7th Century, A.C.E. the great Japanese Prince Shotoku Taishi became converted to Buddhism, which had reached Japan through the sea routes from Korea, and established it as a national religion. The Japanese, who had heretofore been largely a nation of illiterate and primitive fishermen and farmers, accepted the new doctrines along with the whole culture of Tang Dynasty China.
Tantrism in Tibet
Shortly afterward, about 750 A.C.E., an Indian Buddhism monk named
Padma-Sambhava crossed the mountains into Tibet, where Buddhism had already existed in scattered monasteries, and preached there a different and peculiar form of the doctrine known as Tantrism. Tantrism was a mixture of Mahayana Buddhism and certain magical and mystical doctrines derived from Hinduism. This together with the age-old sorcery and demonolatry practiced in Tibet made up Tibetan Lamaism. In its popular aspects it involved prayers, ritual dances, and the exorcism of devils. Out of it, in Tibet, grew a theocratic state dominated by the Dalai and Panchen Lamas, who are believed to be the living incarnations of Buddhist holy beings of the past.
Buddhist Art
Wherever it penetrated, Buddhism brought with it high ethical concepts such as:
tolerance
nonviolence
respect for the individual
love of animals and nature
a fundamental belief in spiritual equality.
It also stimulated most of the great art Asia has known. The superlative art of India (Gupta period) was predominantly Buddhist in inspiration. So was the art of the Tang Dynasty, the golden age of Chinese civilization, and much of the tradition of literature and art that Japan learned front he Chinese and finally made part of its own culture. In the south of Asia, helped by vigorous Indian trade, these concepts of ethics and art spread to Indonesia and to what are now Burma and Thailand. In the two latter countries Buddhism became so firmly rooted that these can be described today as, along with Sri Lanka, Tibet, and Cambodia, probably the most devout of all the Buddhist nations of the world.
Then after having helped spread its high culture to eastern Asia, Buddhism was displaced in India, the country of its origin. The brahmins, proprietors of the ancient and orthodox Vedic religions now collectively and loosely called "Hinduism," which Gautama had broken away from, succeeded in absorbing it. Then Muslim conquest wiped out its last vestiges in successive crusades in the north of India down to Buddhist [present-day] Bangladesh, leaving the Himalayan Buddhist kingdoms of Nepal, Tibet, Bhutan, and Sikkim largely Buddhist and isolated. Curiously, India, which gave Buddhism to the world, has contained relatively few Buddhists since the 12th Century A.C.E.
From early times the type of Buddhism practiced in China, Japan, and Tibet differed from that o f the south Asian Buddhists. This difference was due to some extent to variations in national temperament, but it can be traced back to about 100 years after Gautama's passing, when a group of disciples disagreed on the interpretation of his teaching and preached a doctrine which was less rigours and more easily adapted to the needs of the ordinary person.
.jpg)
Along with the Mogao Caves and Yungang Grottoes, the Longmen Grottoes are one of the three most famous ancient sculptural sites in China. They are 12 km south of present-day Luoyang City in Henan, China. There are 2,345 caves and niches, 2,800 inscriptions, 43 pagodas, and over 100,000 Buddhist images at the site. Thirty percent of the caves date from the Northern Wei Dynasty, 60 percent from the Tang Dynasty, and 10 percent of the caves are from other periods. Fengxian Temple (Fengxiansi), 672-675 AD, is the largest and most extravagant cave in Longmen, featuring the impressive Vairocana Buddha and various other bodhisattvas. It was built during the golden age of the Tang Dynasty and is often considered the pinnacle of Chinese Buddhist art.
