From its very beginnings, Chinese civilization has been preoccupied with record-keeping and history-making.¹ No other civilization on earth can match the sustained dedication to the enterprise of writing down for posterity the main events of each dynasty and reign that has transfixed China for two millennia and more. The monumental twenty-five official histories, impressive though they may be, constitute but a small part of the remarkable Chinese commitment to historiography.

By the same token, however, the perennial obsession with history has put fiction on the defensive in China. Naturally, as with all other civilizations, the Chinese have felt the impulse...

“Even if he is a Nezha [freak], bring him here at once!” Thus exclaims a glamorous lady in Cao Xueqin’s (ca. 1724–ca. 1763)Dream of the Red Chamber. Her allusion to the notorious holy terror is immediately effective, as the bashful Qinzhong is introduced to Xifeng, who finds the queer boy delightful.¹

Who is the monstrous Nezha that an eighteenth-century Chinese lady invoked as the quintessential enfant terrible? In this chapter I trace his origins over two thousand years, from late imperial China back to ancient India. For the sometimes terrifying sometimes mischievous Nezha is none other than Vaiśravaṇa’s...

Indian influence on Chinese culture is usually seen through the prism of Buddhism. For all its foreignness, Buddhism was probably one of the aspects of Indian thought and culture that was easiest to adopt by and adapt to Chinese consciousness. Indeed, as a philosophical and moral teaching, it had some obvious Chinese counterparts (and potential rivals).¹ However, as Rolf Stein and Michel Strickmann have argued, an important aspect of Buddhism’s appeal for the Chinese was its mythology, and in particular its demonology.² The latter was also its most “Indic” characteristic, although it has been largely ignored by Buddhist scholarship.

It...

This chapter is a discussion of two fairly peculiar stories found in theGuanfo sanmei hai jing, or the “Sūtra on the ocean-like samādhi of the visualization of the Buddha” (hereafterOcean Sūtra).¹ This sūtra was allegedly translated by Buddhabhadra (Fotuo batuoluo) (359–429) in the fifth century and is extant (almost exclusively) in Chinese.² It purports to teach how people can visualize the brilliant body of Śākyamuni Buddha after his demise. In fact, the methods of visualization explained in this sūtra are, although detailed and pictorial, not complete (the visualization of various parts of the Buddha’s body that starts...

Appearing in a thirteenth-century Buddhist anthology,Fozu tongji(The Complete Records of the Buddhas and Patriarchs), this passage describes the reenactment of King Aśoka’s (r. ca. 273–232 BCE) legendary building of the eighty-four thousand stūpas in the tenth century by Qian (Hong)chu (928–988; r. 947–978), the last king of Wuyue Kingdom (907–978).¹ This historic event is well documented in an array of literary sources, and modern scholars now refer to the artifact as “Gilt Stūpa” (jintu ta), or “Stūpa of the Precious Chest Mudrā” (baoqieyin ta), or even “Aśoka Stūpa”(Ayuwang ta).² In the twentieth century,...

The expansion of Indian civilization into East Asia is doubtless among the momentous events of human history. Indian culture was brought to China by the medium of the Buddhist faith, which left an indelible mark on China, even as it was deeply influenced by it. In this chapter I am concerned with the Chinese transformation of Buddhist monasticism. In order to survive in its new environment, Buddhism had been forced to adapt to the Chinese family system. The structure and the operation of the Chinese sangha had been fashioned after those of the Chinese clan, with “ancestor worship” becoming an...

What is the historical relationship between Chinese Chan and Buddhism in the rest of the first-millennium world? No one could deny that there is a deep connection over the long term, since no matter how quintessentially “Chinese” Chan may have been, it arose only as part of the massive historical event that was the propagation of Buddhism across Asia. Previous scholarship has focused on long-range connections between Indian Buddhism and Chan, suggesting continuities from Buddhist meditation practice or the doctrinal impact of the perfection of wisdom and Mādhyamika philosophy. Are such analyses sound, and are there other such continuities that...

What makes an animate thing animate? How do we know if something is sentient? Is consciousness ultimately material or immaterial? Or is it neither—perhaps an “emergent property” that cannot be reduced to or disaggregated from a physical substrate?

These are big, complex, and conceptually muddy questions about which philosophers, biologists, and ethicists have had much to say over the millennia. Recently, cognitive psychology has gotten into the act as well, producing hundreds of empirical studies on the cognitive foundations of the conceptual distinction we make between the animate and inanimate. Studies show that very young children have markedly different...

The confrontation of Daoism with Mahāyāna Buddhism, during the first centuries of the common era, led the “indigenous” religion to an identity crisis which was manifest in a pattern of simultaneous rejection and appropriation of the foreign tradition. Among the results were Daoism’s ever-increasing production of “sūtras,” the creation of its first canonical corpuses, and the development of its liturgy. Erik Zürcher, in his pioneering article “Buddhist Influence on Early Taoism,” showed through a systematic examination of Daoist sources how this influence remained, as a whole, rather superficial, since it was essentially a matter of formal and stylistic elements.¹ However,...

When I was asked to participate in the discussion that has resulted in this volume, I planned to contribute a continuation of Erik Zürcher’s influential “Buddhist Influence on Early Taoism.”¹ I wanted to rehearse, and hopefully improve on, Zürcher’s findings concerning what the Daoist Lingbao scriptures might tell us about Chinese reception of Buddhist cosmology, morality, narrative styles, and the like. The early Lingbao scriptures, composed around 400 CE in the environs of present-day Nanjing, contained, Zürcher found, the “lion’s share of Buddhist loans.”² The uses to which Lingbao Daoists put this material show the oscillation between the poles of...