This paper examines the ancient Buddhist investigations into the nature of mortality found within the corpus of Xuanzang (ca. 602–664 CE), the prolific Buddhist scholar-monk of the Tang Dynasty. Upon his celebrated return to his native China in 645 CE, Xuanzang produced a voluminous body of work including retranslations and translations made available in Chinese for the first time, as well as original exegesis of numerous Indic Abhidharma and Yogācāra Buddhist treatises that develop the fundamental tenet of “no-self.” The Buddhist tenet of no-self holds that an individual sentient being is not distinguished by an unchanging “self,” soul, or essence that deserts the body at the time of biological death, traverses the afterlife, and becomes reincarnated in association with a new gross physical body. The tenet of no-self, however, raises thorny questions regarding the nature of survival and mortality: What accounts for the survivability of an individual sentient being? What is death? This paper presents the argumentation put forth in Xuanzang’s corpus in support of the Buddhist doctrine that neither survivability nor dying and death involves a soul or a self. The Abhidharma and Yogācāra works translated into Chinese by Xuanzang propose that death occurs with the terminal disintegration of the “faculties,” the embodied mental and physical powers that sustain “sentient life” (Skt. sattva; Ch. youqing 有情) in conjunction with a body, rather than with the disembodiment of a self, soul, or spiritual substance. Developments in the Buddhist theory of faculties presented not only in his translation of Indic works, but also in his original compilation, the Cheng weishi lun, advance innovative accounts of the survivability and mortality of a sentient being that are harmonious with the core Buddhist tenet of no-self.
目次
Abstract 18 Introduction 19 Survival: "Faculties" (Indriyā i) and Corresponding Aggregates Sustain All Sentient Life 22 On the Etymology of the Word Indriya 27 Mortality: The Deterioration of the Faculties Results in Dying and Death 35 Conclusion 41 Abbreviations 53 References 53
