The undiscovered country

 

So I recently read a very scholarly text on Pure Land Buddhism…again. Pure Land Buddhism is a form of Mahayana centered on worship of Amitabha, the buddha of infinite light. The goal is to attain rebirth in the Pure Land in the West, Amitabha´s paradise-world. Once there, enlightenment is said to be extremely easy. Apart from this exoteric understanding, there is another in which the Pure Land is identified with the practitioner´s pure mind. Pure Land practices then becomes aides in meditation.

The text in question is “On Pure Land Buddhism and Chan/Pure Land Syncretism in Medieval China” by Robert Sharf. It was published in 2002. All standard textbooks on Chinese Buddhism apparently depict Pure Land Buddhism as a separate “school” alongside Tien-tai, Hua-yen and Chan (better known in the West under its Japanese designation Zen). This creates the problem of later Chan-Pure Land syncretism, as the Chan Buddhists incorporated Pure Land practices. Sharf argues that this is a chimaera (even apart from the term “syncretism” being problematic in itself) and reflects sectarian Japanese concerns. There, Zen and Pure Land Buddhism are indeed separate and attempt to be “pure”.

Sharf argues that a detailed study of the sources shows that no distinct school or lineage of Pure Land existed in China, nor were there any Pure Land patriarchs. Pure Land practices (known as nien-fo in Chinese) were present in Chan Buddhism already from the start – including in the monasteries - and hence didn´t need to be “syncretized”. Indeed, the practice of reciting names of bodhisattvas to attain rebirth in a pure land or buddha-field comes from Mahayana sutras written in India. The “White Lotus societies” which began to proliferate during the high medieval Sung dynasty are often depicted as lay Pure Land associations, but according to Sharf, even this doesn´t prove the existence of a separate school. Many of the Lotus societies were associated with Tien-tai or Chan monasteries, and some didn´t worship Amitabha at all.

The author also emphasizes that nien-fo was popular among all Chinese Buddhists regardless of school. Some of the putative “patriarchs” of the Pure Land school were really Chan or Tien-tai prominents. The entire concept of a Pure Land patriarchate seems to have been an ideological innovation of the Tien-tai school, who claimed that such a thing has existed for centuries as a way of arguing for strict clerical control of the Lotus societies. The lists of patriarchs are contradictory and frequently make no sense (with century-long gaps between patriarchs of a supposedly unbroken lineage).  

Might I guess that there could be some “sectarian” rivalry between Buddhologists specializing in China, and those more into Japan? As already noted, Sharf dislikes the “long lens of Japanese Buddhist sectarian history” and defends Chan against its Zen detractors, suggesting that the Japanese Buddhists themselves might have some axes to grind, not just the scholars. He believes that the concept of Esoteric or Tantric Buddhism is similar to the idea of a separate Pure Land school. Once again, later Japanese sectarianism (in this case Shingon) has been projected back onto the Chinese mainland. In reality, Chinese Tantrism wasn´t a separate “school”, there is no evidence that its supposed patriarchs saw themselves as such, and so on. Or so the author believes.

Next up: my man Sharf takes on mindfulness!