Dialogues Across Civilizations

Sketches In World History From The Chinese And European Experiences

Roxann Prazniak

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429973598
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Dialogues Across Civilizations sets the histories of China and Europe alongside one another. Each chapter stands as an essay that imaginatively places historical individuals and events in proximity to one another and explores a specific topic,gender relations, rural politics, artistic renderings of nature, to name a few,through the stories of persons who reflected on similar questions but in different social and cultural settings. Through this juxtaposition, Chinese and European civilizations illuminate each other's achievements, problems, and limitations in a range of areas from urban history to religious faith.Privileging neither Europe nor China, this work offers an innovative move away from relativism and multiculturalism towards an analysis that focuses on relationships between social choices and consequences. As a result, both common and divergent perspectives on the human condition emerge for discussion. Drawing upon a rich literature of cross-societal studies, Dialogues Across Civilizations generates reflection on themes central to the study of world history as well as European and Asian history.

6
Religion in Society: Huiyuan and Saint Augustine on Human Suffering

Sin is born from a vain and perverse mind.

—Daocho, "Compendium on the Happy Land" (Buddhist Pure Land text)

And what is the origin of our evil will but pride? For "pride is the beginning of all sin." And what is pride but the craving for undue exaltation?

—Augustine, Concerning the City of God

Chinese Buddhism and Western European Christianity each evolved through major periods of adaptation in the fourth to fifth centuries. In each case religious leaders formulated priorities and orientations suitable to contemporary realities. The principles that were set forth not only spoke to current social and cultural conditions but also defined overall directions for each religion in such crucial matters as the practice of faith and the relationship of spiritual to secular authority. The characteristic vitality and appeal of these religious traditions derived in part from the work of such pivotal individuals as Huiyuan (A.D. 334-417) and Aurelius Augustinus (A.D. 354-430), later known as Saint Augustine. Huiyuan's work became the foundation of the Pure Land sect, the most widely practiced form of Buddhism in East Asia. Saint Augustine's work became the foundation of the medieval Christian Church throughout the Western European world.

Born into an impoverished scholarly family, Huiyuan was educated in the Chinese classics from age thirteen to twenty-one. He taught these subjects for a number of years, during which he became interested in the Daoist classics and developed a mastery of the Laozi and Zhuangzi texts. After hearing a lecture in 355 by the famous Buddhist monk Shi Daoan on the subject of "transcendent wisdom" (prajnaparamita), Huiyuan reportedly proclaimed, "All the other schools were but chaff compared with Buddhism."¹ He subsequently gave up his classical scholarship to become a monk. For the next twenty-five years he lived as a disciple of Daoan and devoted himself to study and preaching. After political circumstances led to Daoan's imprisonment in 379 and forced his students to disperse, Huiyuan founded the Monastery of the Eastern Forest on the slopes of Mount Lu and began the next stage of his career.

His familiarity with Daoist terms and concepts became a means by which he explained and defined Buddhist ideas for his Chinese audience. He also worked with foreign translators and sent disciples to Central Asia to collect Buddhist texts. Huiyuan took basic Buddhist ideas on human suffering and introduced innovations in both practice and doctrine, defining in the process a specifically Chinese variety of Buddhism. He taught that it was possible to reach salvation and the end of suffering through simple faith in the Amida Buddha. This principle became the basic tenet of Pure Land Buddhism. The White Lotus Fellowship, based on a vow Huiyuan and 123 of his associates took for the cultivation of Buddha recollection, continued to have widespread influence into the Tang and Song dynasties and beyond.² The centers for prayer and teaching that Huiyuan established in remote areas appealed to both lay patrons and religious devotees for support. In a treatise titled "A Monk Does Not Bow Down Before a King," Huiyuan addressed issues of the relationship between religious and secular authority. The principles Huiyuan set forth were essential to the long-term accommodation of Buddhism to Chinese society and politics during a period of early contact with these foreign ideas.

Born in a small town fifty miles inland from Hippo on the coast of North Africa, Augustine was educated in the classics of Greece and Rome. His father, a man of moderate financial means, owned the family's house and a few acres of land. Although Augustine's father was pagan in religious outlook, his mother was a devout Christian. A wealthy townsman recognized young Augustine's intellectual talents and provided funds so that the young man could continue his education in the cosmopolitan center of Carthage. On successful completion of his studies, Augustine began a career as professor of rhetoric at Carthage and went on to teach in Rome and Milan. While in Milan he began to learn more about Christianity through association with a Christian intellectual community headed by Bishop, later Saint, Ambrois. The process that led to Augustine's conversion in 387 is described in his work The Confessions. Augustine was preoccupied with why God would accept someone like himself, whose lifestyle of womanizing and drinking up to that point was certainly not material for a model Christian, rather than automatically damn him to eternal suffering. As he struggled with this dilemma, Augustine, while pacing in a garden, reached a moment of insight when he heard a voice tell him to "take up and read" the Scriptures. At this moment he realized that God simply wanted him to have faith. The Confessions established the primacy of faith over reason to Christian conversion and by extension to Christian life and views on suffering. His faith declared, Augustine returned to Hippo to serve as bishop. There he settled into a life of church work, including the promotion of monasticism as a way to advance Christianity. For these efforts Augustine became known as the father of Western monasticism. He also devoted much time to writing. The decline of Rome, with its classical/pagan culture, was the setting for his most famous work, Concerning the City of God Against the Pagans, written between 413 and 426. Exploring the question of why Rome had fallen, Augustine argued in The City of God that continued worship of pagan gods and failure to accept the Christian God were the primary causes. Central to his analysis was a discussion of the proper relationship between church and state authority. Recognized for his philosophical insights in support of early Christian institutions, Augustine soon became known throughout the world of the Western church as the "second founder of the ancient faith," a title bestowed on him by Saint Jerome.

Although Hui-yuan's move toward Buddhism certainly involved introspection, his moment of insight came while listening to a teacher lecture rather than from intense self-reflection on his relationship to God, as characterized the garden scene of Augustine's conversion. Huiyuan also did not have to forgo his Daoist and classical beliefs to enter on the Buddhist path. In fact, Daoism became a bridge for introducing foreign concepts to a Chinese audience. Through the use of analogous expressions the concept of emptiness, for example, so central to Buddhist teachings and rendered in Sanskrit as sunyata, could be understood through discussion of the Daoist term wu.³ Buddhism became a higher truth. Spiritual focus shifted levels of complexity; it did not jump tracks.

Augustine's conversion signified a sharp separation from his past. Even though Augustine himself continued to admire much of pagan classical learning, and at the popular level of conversion pagan stories were often used to explain or embellish Christian beliefs, in the final analysis a person could not be both pagan and Christian. The tenets of Christianity ran counter to the animism and polytheism of pagan spirituality, underlining conflict and ambivalence between the two religious views from the start. Knowledge acquired from the classical traditions could now be useful only if it was divorced from pagan faith and turned in defense of the new faith.

Social Origins: Matters of Suffering and Justice

The adaptations of Buddhism that Huiyuan effected and those of Christianity to which Augustine drew attention had their origins in the conceptual foundations of their respective spiritual heritages. The starting point for the Buddhist and Christian renderings of the human condition was the problem of suffering, its causes, and possible means of relief. Historically, the originating circumstances of each religion defined an approach to spiritual questions that Huiyuan and Augustine each inherited through their own education. The necessities of restatement that motivated each of them grew out of the interaction between this inheritance and the social realities they encountered.

The historical Buddha, known as Siddhartha and later named the Gautama Buddha, lived from 563 to 483 B.C. He was born into an aristocratic family in a small state in the foothills of the Himalayas, in present-day Nepal. Legend has it that he led a life of comfort, sheltered from the misfortunes of the world, until his twenty-ninth year, when he ventured beyond the walls of his palace home and encountered the conditions of human misery. Deeply troubled by the suffering and misery that plagued so many ordinary people's lives, Siddhartha began to ask questions to which he could find no answers. Why did one man through no fault of his own suffer blindness and deprivation, while his neighbor prospered? Why did a child who had done no wrong fall ill and die, while another lived? Siddhartha decided to leave the sheltered and comfortable confines of his home to seek answers to these and other questions. He led an ascetic life, practicing extreme self-deprivation and wandering from place to place living off alms. He studied Brahmin beliefs, the principal religious culture of northern India in the sixth to fifth centuries B.C., and later the foundation of Hinduism, but he found no satisfactory answers in this philosophy, which emphasized fatalism in human suffering and the importance of the Brahmin priesthood in personal spiritual practices. Siddhartha continued his search for many years. According to legend, one day when he was fully discouraged, Siddhartha sat down beneath a Bodhi tree and resolved not to move until he attained enlightenment. When he did, he realized the truths that resolved his questions, conflicts, and doubts and brought him a sense of deep inner calm and peace. His realizations were later labeled the Four Noble Truths.⁴

Unable to dislodge the already highly developed and politically well established Brahmin priesthood in the South Asian principalities, Buddhism eventually became only a minor religion in the land of its origins. At first, however, the Indian King Ashoka (269-232 B.C.) promoted Buddhist missionary activity throughout the Subcontinent. The Ganges River valley became a Buddhist center in northern India, where monks who had memorized the Buddha's sermons transmitted the tradition through sacred scriptures known as the Tripitaka. Buddhism established a strong presence in Southeast Asia, where it retained many of its original features. It had a major impact in China and from there spread throughout East Asia. By the first century a.D. travelers along the Silk Road trade routes were carrying news of Buddhism into northern Chinese society. But not until the third century, after the fall of the Han dynasty and during a period of political fragmentation and social instability, did Buddhism gain a firm foothold among the Chinese elite. Carried to China by Indian missionaries and Chinese students, Buddhist ideas merged with the developing traditions of classical philosophy, including the words of Kong Zi and Daoist beliefs. Huiyuan played a critical role in this adaptive stage, adjusting an ascetic foreign religion to a family-oriented Chinese society. During the Tang dynasty the central government of China effectively supported the spread of Buddhism throughout the empire. China became known as the Land of the Buddha as well as the Land of Chinese Scholarship (rujia), and the eighth century in world history became the Age of Buddhism, with the majority of the world's population adherents to the Buddhist faith.

Just as Buddhism emerged out of contemplation of the sources of human suffering and a general revolt against some of the hierarchical ideas and injustices of Brahmin society, so Christianity grew out of conflicts within the social and religious worlds of Judea and Rome. The difficult plight of the Jewish peasantry and the unchecked decadence of Jewish and Roman leaders were the makings of the Jesus movement. Commenting on the influence that Greco-Roman philosophical schools, particularly Cynicism, with its emphasis on social criticism, might have had on Jesus's general social awareness, theologian John Dominic Crossan wrote, "No matter how important the Great Tradition of the aristocracy may be both for itself and even for the Little Tradition of the peasantry, it is that latter matrix that is the most direct, immediate, and primary background for a peasant farmer or artisan like Jesus of Nazareth."⁵

Jewish prophets around the second century B.c. had begun to speak of an immanent final day of judgment. The Book of Daniel (12:2) in the Hebrew Bible declared, "And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt." An earlier prophetic tradition within Judaism contained similar images of final transformation, but these were cast in less apocalyptic terms and emphasized instead the radical transformation of social attitudes and institutions in this life on earth rather than in the spiritual realm beyond physical death. While very much aware of these traditions, Jesus drew his direction and support from the poor who made their living from the earth, the farmers and villagers of lower Galilee. From the few historical facts we have about the life of Jesus, we know that he gathered a following among citizens of Judea who, like himself, were critical of the luxury and ceremony, along with the insensitivity to poverty and suffering, that had become commonplace among the Roman and Jewish elites. Jesus and his followers taught and practiced egalitarianism through free healing and access to adequate food.

Like the historical Buddha, the stories of Jesus' life became paradigmatic for the social and personal attitudes deemed necessary for a more humane society.⁶ For the most part they were perverted by the political matrixes in which they evolved. Through his activist teachings for the formation of an alternative community based on humility and sharing, Jesus became visible as an leader who was a potential threat both to Roman governance of the area and circles of conservative rabbis. "The Jesus movement as a counterculture stands in contrast to later Christian tradition even as it stood out in its own social world."⁷ Charged with posing as "king of the Jews," he was executed by crucifixion under Roman law and with the consent of leading figures of the status quo among the Jewish population.

Both Huiyuan and Augustine lived in chaotic political times. Born near Mount Wu-tai in present day northeast Shanxi Province and educated in Henan Province, Huiyuan experienced the confusion and sufferings of war during an era when non-Han peoples repeatedly invaded and sometimes ruled Han-dominated regions on the North China Plain and in the Yangzi River valley.⁸ It was during a period of intense warfare between forces in the north and south that Huiyuan was forced to change travel plans and happened to enter Daoan's monastery while he was lecturing on the prajnaparamita Scriptures. The Rome and northern Italy to which Augustine traveled from 383 to 386 was already in internal decline, and Germanic peoples from the north and northeast threatened Roman rule. In 410 Alaric and the Goths conquered Rome. By 429 Roman leaders in Africa were fighting a losing battle with the Vandals, who laid siege to the city of Hippo in 430, the year of Bishop Augustine's death. Germanic invasions continued until 476, when the last Roman emperor retreated. Both Huiyuan and Augustine were faced with the problems of social identity, human suffering, and justice in an era of foreign ideologies and conquerors.

Responding from his position within the church to the realities of his times, Augustine accepted a modified version of the subversive elements in Jesus' message on poverty and suffering. The views that Augustine reinforced and extended held that true justice and the end of suffering could be found only in the afterlife and were a matter of God's judgment, not human action. Augustine did not emphasize the establishment of lay communities devoted to the alleviation of suffering, which might also become a challenge to the status quo. This does not mean, however, that Augustine ignored questions of suffering in this world. In The City of God he argued that secular rulers were obligated to maintain stability for their subjects, minimizing suffering and injustice so that Christians could attend to their spiritual lives in preparation for the etern...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Photographs
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Opening the European and Chinese Experiences
• Society and the Individual
• Social Change and Conflict
• History and Cosmology
• Conclusions and Epilogue: The Chinese and European Experiences in Contemporary Contexts
• Notes
• Bibliography
• About the Book and Author
• Index