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The First Chinese Buddhism (4) |
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Bruce Brooks, University
of Massachusetts at Amhers) Abridged Paper (4) The Early Analects The date of the Buddha's death, and with it the chronology of early Buddhism, are greatly disputed at the present time, without hope of resolution from Indian sources alone. It would be convenient if, just as the dates of Mauryan India are given by Greek inscriptions, so the date of early Buddhism could be somehow pinned down by Chinese ones. I here offer some possible Chinese text evidence. It consists in seeming echoes of early Buddhism in the portion of the Analects where we have already found the traces of Indian type breath control to be uneffaceable. The earliest of the Analects chapters is LY 4, the core of the tex, which was in all probability written directly after Confucius's death in 0479. Confucius's death never figures in that chapter, and the sayings which it records seem to have been spoken in one or another real life situation. In LY 5 (c0470) we hear for the first time of the doings of disciples, and it is here that we first meet the meditational Yen Hwei. On present suppositions, we have here a contact with Indian meditation, but nothing that suggests a specifically Buddhist origin for that technique. The same holds for LY 6 (c0460). The World of LY 7 In LY 7 (c0450) the preceding situation drastically changes, and we find ourselves in a different world, a world to which the Analects never subsequently returns. Confucius as portrayed in that chapter is not a ranking resident of the Lu capital, but a teacher wandering from town to town. He does not advise or reprove the sons of the elite who aspire to court position, as in LY 5-6, but seeks instead to talk to persons of no discernible rank. He describes himself as an indefatigable teacher, and will accept any comers as his pupils. Some persons who approach him with proper respect and are accepted as pupils are evidently, in their own social context, somewhat disreputable persons. The idea of sagely knowledge is introduced, and nominally rejected; this is the first appearance of the word and concept "sage" in the text. Whereas character was the backbone of the stalwart Confucius of LY 4, here supernatural forces and destinies intervene. And whereas the text up to now has paid not the slightest attention to the death of Confucius, LY 7 is structured as a full-length portrait of Confucius, and concludes with a narratively well-realized scene of his death. In that scene, Confucius is made to renounce the assurances and devices of conventional religion, and rely instead on his own personal sort of prayer to secure him in the next world, in very rough parallel to the way the Buddha abandoned conventional modes of asceticism and sought his own way of reconciliation with the ultimate. These general features of LY 7, all of them without precedent in earlier chapters, and nearly all of them not further developed in later chapters, suggest some sort of temporary deflection from what we otherwise find to be the course of the Analects. An infusion of ideas based on the way the Buddha was treated in early Buddhist tradition is one possible source of these features. The Pattern of LY 7 The features just noted are somewhat suggestive. We further have the suggestive way that some of them are distributed within the text. LY 7, likes its predecessors, is structured as a set of four topical groups of sayings of Confucius, the sayings being paired within each group, and groups sometimes (in LY 7, always) ending in an unpaired envoi or retrospective summary saying. Within that established form, the motifs which most suggest a Buddhist origin, and which indeed occur (sometimes with quite different content) in what it is for other reasons analytically attractive to think of as the first or second layers of the Maha-Parinibbana Sutta (MpN), are distributed not at random, but as the first and last sayings in each of the four groups, as though to highlight them within the larger formal pattern. In abstract terms, those motifs (printed in red) occur within the chapter synopsis roughly as follows, each group making a separate paragraph as here arranged (based on the conspectus in TOA p215):
Academic persons are trained to reproduce texts with utmost fidelity. To their possible objections to the comparison of LY 7:5 (the Jou-gung dream) with the MpN apparation of Mara (to take the most outrageous case), I reply that I do not consider that the former is an attempted transcript of the latter. I suggest instead that it is distantly and motivically inspired by the latter, that the Mara episode has suggested that Confucius too have an episode of supernatural contact, even if that episode ends by echoing Confucius's sense of personal failure in 4:7. The Confucius known from earlier chapters is sometimes startlingly changed in LY 7, but sometimes remains the same, merely with somewhat striking and unprecedented literary and motivic embellishments. The LY 7 Confucius strikes me as an effort to preserve the previously envisioned Confucius, but to enhance that image with a new biographical sense and a new recognition of the solemn importance of his last words before dying, and to transpose it at some points into an almost Buddhistic itinerant teacher of wisdom to all and sundry. With those qualifications, I suggest that the overall pattern of new motifs in LY 7 shows knowledge of MpN, and specifically of the state of MpN that consisted of its core plus its first layer of narrative development. It shows Confucius confronting the model of the sage represented by the Buddha, and either adapting to it or constructively defining itself against it.
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