Filial Piety in Chinese Buddhism

Acknowledgments

The research project of Filial Piety in Chinese Buddhism was started in 2005, sometime fourteen years ago. During these long years, many people have helped me in different ways. I express my deep gratitude to the late Venerable Professor Anuruddha, Venerable Professor KL Dhammajoti, Professor Y. Karunadasa, and Professor Toshiichi Endo together with his wife Mrs. Prema Endo. They were my teachers when I was studying in Sri Lanka thirty years ago, and they are still my teachers as I continue to get advice from them from time to time. They have not only inspired me in my studies but also provided me with great help and support both in academic studies and during my life in Colombo. They have also expressed a special interest and given me valuable advices during the writing of this book. They are always willing to help whenever I have some questions. My special thanks go to Professor Timothy H. Barrett for his guidance and encouragement in my studies at SOAS and for his kindness to write the foreword for this book.

In the summer of 2007, I visited Japan in order to collect some articles and books related to filial piety written by Japanese scholars. Professor Hiroshi Kanno and Professor Toru Funayama helped me in many different ways so that I could get most of the material I need for my research projects. My sincere thanks also go to Professor Kiyotaka Kimura at the International College for Postgraduate ←xi | xii→Buddhist Studies in Tokyo, who also kindly offered me with much help when I visited the college.

Most of the chapters in both English and Chinese are published in some international academic journals. I am grateful to the following journals for permission to reprint them. They include the Journal of Buddhist Ethics, the Journal of Chinese Philosophy, the Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies, the International Journal of Buddhist Thought and Culture, the Religious Studies, Studies in Humanistic Buddhism, the Foxue Yanjiu, and IBC Journal of Buddhist Studies. ←xii | xiii→However, all these chapters have been revised extensively with improved arguments and presentation as I have found some new material and ideas. Particularly, I have deleted the last section “Filial Piety in Mahāyāna Buddhism” in Chapter One, while section on “Avenging Parents versus Showing Compassion” has been added in Chapter Two, and section on “The Compassion of Emperors” has been added in Chapter Seven. Last but not least, thanks also go to the acquisition editors Li Na and Suma George of Peter Lang Publication.

Abbreviations

List of Tables

Table 1: Translation of Buddhist texts about or related to filial piety

Table 2: Zhiyi’s comparison of five precepts, five virtues, five elements, and five classics

Table 3: Ten epithets of the Buddha in the Fumu en nanbao jing

Table 4: Chinese translation of the ten epithets of the Buddha before and at the time of Kumārajīva

Table 5: Comparison of the Dunhuang version of the Fumu enzhong jing (T2887) with the quotations of the Fumu enzhong jing as found in Zongmi’s commentary to the Ullambana Sūtra (T1792)

Table 6: Comparison of the fragments of the Anyue stone carving Fumu enzhong jing and the Dunhuang version of the Fumu enzhong jing (T2887)

Table 7: The ten virtues of parents comparison of Fazhao’s “Verses in Praise of the Compassion of Parents” and in the Fumu enzhong jing

Table 8: Structure of Fumu enzhong jing (T2887) and Fumu’en nanbao jing (T684)

Table 9: The four debts in the Brahman tradition and the four kinds of compassion in Mahāyāna Buddhism

Foreword

Timothy H. Barrett

Professor Emeritus, East Asian History, SOAS, University of London

About the time that Marco Polo was in Mongol-ruled China in the late thirteenth century, the rulers there produced a version of the Classic of Filial Piety (Xiaojing) translated into their own language, most of which survives to this day.¹ It appears unlikely that the Mongols needed information on how to look after their parents: most of the peoples of the world have their own traditions of respectful care for the elderly, after all. But the Chinese discourse of filial piety occupies such an important place in the cultural and political life of Chinese speakers that all outsiders are well advised to familiarise themselves with its complex manifestations. To at least one observer today family values would seem to have always been lain at the very heart of the Chinese way of life over the centuries.² What is more, while another observer takes a very different view, starting from the role of the state, the conspicuous spending associated in times past with filial observances does get a well-deserved mention in that work too, even if only to illustrate the criticism of outsiders.³

But what Guang Xing’s thoroughly researched monograph reconsidering the meaning of filial piety from the perspective of Buddhism achieves is to explain how important discourse in this area was at every level. It was not just a solely domestic matter, nor was it an empty rhetoric current only amongst educated polemicists, divorced from real concerns. Indeed, the knitting together of domestic observance ←xix | xx→and state ideology through the promotion of the Classic of Filial Piety seems to have been one of the most characteristic features of imperial China, going back to its foundations under the Han dynasty, well before Buddhism found its own place in Chinese society.⁴ In his seventh chapter Guang Xing, drawing on the research of Hou Xudong and others, shows how in China, Buddhists adapted to this ideological dimension in the practice of filial piety even before the Tang period, though it was during that dynasty that scholars first noticed how prevalent this feature of practice was.⁵ The state, as it happened, especially when under the control of non-Chinese speakers, made the practice of filial piety a matter of explicit concern right to the end of the imperial period.⁶

Yet the Buddhists plainly did not submit to wholesale Sinification: as the recent work of Shayne Clarke has shown, the celibate Buddhist clergy of India show a remarkable familiarity with family life, and the opening chapters of Guang Xing’s study document in some detail how much learning concerning filial piety they brought to China with them.⁷ References in Indian texts translated by the Chinese word for “filial piety” may be found even in the earliest translations.⁸ The importation of fresh materials to enlarge the discussion was not solely confined to discourse, either: the entire conception of filial piety in China was imaginatively enriched by new literary examples as well. Thus one could point, for instance, to Ajātaśatru as a new Indian model of less than filial conduct.⁹ The Buddha’s filial conduct towards his mother might also be adduced.¹⁰ What is more, Chinese Buddhists responded imaginatively themselves, with new literary creations concerning figures like Mulian and Miaoshan, so Guang Xing devotes much attention to these materials in the forms in which they emerged in China. It is worth pointing out, too, that their impact extended much further than the linguistic world in which they were first composed, to other Buddhists speaking other languages beyond the Sinophone world. In this way the story of Mulian has been known in Tibetan for over one thousand years; for several centuries Miaoshan has been an important figure in Vietnam.¹¹

So Guang Xing’s solid work can form the basis for many further explorations of this important aspect of Chinese culture in relation to other ways of life, from India onward. Particularly impressive is the way in which just as was the case with the Mongol translators of Marco Polo’s time, a very carefully translated Chinese source forms the crowning achievement of this enterprise. The eleventh-century essay by Qisong giving a considered account of filial piety after almost a millennium of the encounter between Chinese Buddhists and their critics is a document of great value, but to produce a version in English has been no easy matter. Qisong was a great stylist in an age when prose style was a matter of intense ←xx | xxi→debate, so rendering his complex arguments into another language demands both skill and knowledge. We are all very much in Guang Xing’s debt for the findings presented in the following pages.

Introduction

When Buddhism was first introduced into China in the Han Dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), it faced strong challenges from existing elements in the local Chinese culture, particularly Confucianism. This was because Confucianism had become the dominant ideology in Chinese society with the support of Emperor Wu of Western Han Dynasty (206 BCE–9 CE). The idea of “ruling the state by using filial piety” was conceived of and implemented in this dynasty, and continued until the end of the imperial rule at the beginning of twentieth century, as loyalty to the emperor was also considered part of filial practice in Confucian thought. Thus, the criticisms of Buddhism by Confucian scholars were mainly on ethical grounds, particularly from the perspective of filial piety. This is because filial piety is an important moral teaching in Confucianism, and it “has shaped nearly every aspect of Chinese social life” as demonstrated by Keith N. Knapp in his study.

Not taking the filial piety stories seriously is a mistake because from AD 100 straight to the 1949 Communist takeover of China, they were immensely popular among all social classes. Their enduring popularity was due to the effectiveness with which they illustrated the paramount cultural value of xiao (filial piety), which has shaped nearly every aspect of Chinese social life: attitudes toward authority, patterns of residence, conceptions of self, marriage practices, gender preferences, emotional life, religious worship, and social relations. In fact, during the imperial ←1 | 2→age, Chinese largely defined good behavior in terms of whether or not one was a good son or daughter. Xiao has had such an extraordinary impact on Chinese social life that Chinese and Japanese scholars have claimed that it is the basis of Chinese culture. One student of Confucianism has even claimed that xiao was and still is the basis of East Asian religiosity.¹

On the other hand, the Buddhist way of life primarily focuses on liberation through inner transformation and moral perfection. This is very different from Confucianism, which chiefly focuses on relationships between people (family, ruler) and society. One clear example of this difference is the life of Buddhist monks, who were required to be celibate, shave their heads, and leave their homes and families. This was incompatible to the Confucian practice of filial piety as found in the Xiaojing (Book of Filial Piety). This attitude is reflected in the Mouzi Lihuolun (Mouzi’s Resolve to Chinese Doubts), a book written in the second century CE to refute such criticisms.²