東晉「沙門袒服」論所反映儒、佛身體觀的順逆之辨及其文化意涵='Obeying' and 'Opposing' in Confucian and Buddhist Conceptions of the Body as Reflected in the Eastern Jin Debate over Buddhists"Baring the Right Shoulder"
作者單位：國立中山大學中國文學系助理教授=Assistant Professor, Department of Chinese Literature, National Sun Yat-sen University, Kaohsiung.
關鍵詞
慧遠= Huiyuan; 何無忌= He Wuji; 身體觀= conception of the body; 東晉= Eastern Jin; 沙門袒服= baring the right shoulder; 儒佛交涉= interplay between Confucianism and Buddhism
During the Eastern Jin, ”the controversy over baring the right shoulder” was a significant debate in the history of interplay between Confucianism and Buddhism, reflecting the challenge to common propriety that the monastic dress code brought with it. This was due to the fact that wearing robes carried certain symbolic meanings that were at that time still to be appropriately defined in China. For this reason, the related controversy can be seen as indecision and introspection on the part of the Iwo schools during what was ultimately an interpretative process. This debate forms the focus of this research, which aims to observe differences between the two schools of thought in their understanding of the significance of the practice of baring the right shoulder from the perspective of conceptualizations of the body.This research find s that both Confucianism and Buddhism drew upon traditional concepts set down in classical literature, each taking these to serve as their source domain for their interpretations of what the act of baring the right shoulder signified. Baring right or left shoulder was each thereby assigned metaphors of value judgment to indicate auspiciousness or inauspiciousness in terms of positional (left/right) distinction and formal significance. When Confucian and Buddhist thinkers Interpreted the terms shun (順obeying) and ni (逆opposing) when applied to the act of baring the right shoulder, they arrived at different conclusions. Huiyuan 慧遠, representing the Buddhist side of the debate, elevated the matter to a religious question, a question of the principles of Dharma practice as a whole; his position was that ni should be interpreted as opposing karma, and was thus in fact shun in respect of obeying Buddhist principles and practice. This interpretation endowed the practice of baring the right shoulder with connotations of improving a monastic's ethical and Dharma practice; in other words, Huiyuan believed that baring the right shoulder implied motivation for deconstructing the web of karma, and as such transcended such concepts of worldly propriety as auspiciousness and inauspiciousness. Confucian critics such as He Wuji 何無忌 challenged Huiyuan's interpretation of the right hand side as inauspicious and the act of baring the right shoulder as oppositional, as being contrary to the distinction between right and left in traditional ritual customs. This paper compares such differences to observe how, under the intervention and influence of religious ideology, traditional Confucian ethics and Buddhism manipulated interpretations of bodily conceptions implied by the act of baring the right shoulder. Finally, this study concludes with an evaluation of the meaning of baring the right shoulder in the interplay of Chinese and Indian culture.
