Chinese Buddhism中国佛教

    Indian Buddhism, through the efforts of non-Chinese Buddhist missionaries（传教士）, first entered China in the first century A.D. Initially, the introduction of Buddhist thinking and Buddhist concepts was made through a “method of analogy” to Taoist thinking and many of the Taoist concepts. This is not only because Taoism places more emphasis on escapism(逃避现实) and transcendentalism（超验主义）, which was popular among intellectuals of that time, but also because there are indeed some affinities(密切关系) between the two schools of thought. Lao Tzu’s notion of non-being（wu）or Zhuangzi’s notion of forgetting the self, for example, were appealed to in an attempt to explicate the Buddhist’s notion of emptiness(kong) and selflessness. But this method of analogy has the danger of focusing on apparent similarities while neglecting the widely different underlying assumptions.  

    In contrast to the prevalent realism among ancient Chinese philosophers, the Buddha Shakyamuni (释迦摩尼)，the founder of Buddhism，teaches that the world we live in and its objects are not “real”. Because of this teaching, Buddhism can be characterized as the thesis of Emptiness. Everything we perceive around us is empty, hence unreal. We live in a dream-like state in which we believe that things are real. Once we wake up from this dream, we will realize that nothing, and no one, is what we take it to be. We will then terminate our attachment, our discernment (观察力), our perception, our conception, and enter the realm of Emptiness. However, the denial of the perceived world is not a result of skepticism. Buddhism is not based on an epistemological（认识论的）concern for whether or how we can know the Truth. It is, on the contrary, based on a dogmatic conviction that only the “Enlightened Ones” (the Buddhas) know the Truth, and that the Truth is simply not what we as sentiment beings come to believe as true through our sense perception and our cognition. 

    To teach the thesis of emptiness, the Buddha’s philosophy begins by emphasizing that the essence of life is suffering. It is not to say that nothing in life can give us pleasure; rather, the point is that nothing in life can give us permanent pleasure. The nature of pleasure is that it is transient. We can perhaps say that pleasure derives from suffering since it merely is the temporary cessation（休止）of suffering. 

    Another important teaching of the Buddha is that there is no “self.” By “no self,” the Buddha is denouncing not only the phenomenal self, but also the assumed immortal substance (soul) that goes through the transmigration（轮回）of life—reincarnation(转世说). Existence is conceived as an endless cycle of different beings from birth to birth and from life to life, with no permanent joy obtainable while each life is burdened with all kinds of suffering. A person’s recent life conditions are affected by what deeds he committed in the previous life. To better one’s condition, therefore, one needs to perform the right deeds in order to enter a higher level of existence in the next life. 

    However, in the Buddha’s view, birth itself is the root of suffering. Once one is born, the whole process of aging, sickness, and death becomes inevitable. One has to go again through the whole process of dealing with sufferings such as pains, resentments, or the loss of the loved ones. Therefore, to be reborn is not something joyful. The ultimate goal of salvation（拯救）is to end the cycle of life and death, and never to enter this world again, which can not be achieved unless one is totally free of desires. In particular, one should not desire life itself, nor should one desire death. Once one has reached the state of enlightenment through realizing that nothing in life, including life itself, is desirable, one can be free of sorrow and enter the realm of nirvana(极乐世界)－the extinction of sorrow, and the state of complete quietude and tranquility（安宁）。

Abridged and revised from

Liu JeeLoo, An Introduction to Chinese Philosophy: from ancient philosophy to Chinese Buddhism , Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2006.