Humanistic Pure Land; bodhisattva Dharmākara; Wei Yuan; Shen Shandeng; Chinese Pure Land Buddhism
摘要
In its contemporary usage, the concept of “humanistic Pure Land” (renjian jingtu 人間淨土) broadly encapsulates a new approach to the Pure Land tradition associated with the name of Taixu (太虛, 1890-1947) and other prominent Buddhist modernists of the 20th century. To wit, a “humanistic” interpretation of Pure Land scriptures defines their central themes in a way that justifies Buddhist practice focused on the benefit of society (fellow humans). In this respect, it is at least implicitly contrasted with the more traditional readings which tend to emphasize one’s own individual attainment – be it post-mortem rebirth in the Western Pure Land or a gnostic insight into the “Pure Land of Mind-only”
The emergence of thus defined “humanistic” understanding of the Pure Land in the early 20th century China has usually been analysed from two complementary perspectives: on the one hand, as a response of Buddhist modernists to the influx of missionary Christianity and secular modernity; on the other hand, as an attempt to rethink Chinese Pure Land tradition in the light of general principles of Mahāyāna Buddhism, especially the ideal of a bodhisattva. These observations may be taken to suggest that the ideal of a bodhisattva –understood as a personal role model of compassion and altruism – had been neglected by the earlier exegetes of Pure Land scriptures and began to gain new traction only in the wake of “Western impact”. However, such a conclusion does not do justice to the complex and dynamic developments that directly preceded the modernist wave of the Republican period.
As discussed in my paper, already in the last decades of Imperial China some educated lay Buddhists, such as Wei Yuan (魏源, 1794-1857) or Shen Shandeng (沈善登, 1830 - 1902), began to reassess the canonical story about bodhisattva Dharmākara (Fazang pusa 法藏菩薩) – the creator of the Western Pure Land according to the Sūtra of Immeasurable Life –from the broader perspective of various Mahāyāna sūtras and treatises. As I would like to argue, these lay scholars’ interest in the figure of Dharmākara reflected their critical engagement with the Pure Land tradition inherited from the early modern period. By highlighting the concept of bodhisattvahood, they sought to broaden doctrinal basis for their Pure Land practice and to disassociate it from the supposedly “inward-looking” model of gnosis associated with the stereotyped tradition of Chan. In this way, they could hope to legitimize Pure Land Buddhism within a worldview shaped by the contemporaneous Confucian thought. Whereas late Qing interpretations of Dharmākara story may not evince a full-fledged “humanistic” approach in the contemporary sense, their possible impact on the subsequent modernist readings of the Pure Land deserves more scrutiny in the light of a broader corpus of the early 20th century sources.
