242 stephan peter bumbacher
When Buddhism became widespread in China and was even to be
found at the southern courts and among in uential families, some Dao-
ists felt pressed to take counter-measures. On the one hand, they tried
to out-do their Buddhist rivals in court debates and private disputes in
which they often seem to have been beaten due to their inferior discus-
sion technique. Another way consisted in appropriating Buddhist texts,
turning them into Daoist scriptures and, presenting them as directly
revealed by the gods as corrections of the faulty Buddhist versions, thus
compromising Buddhism as being inferior to Daoism.
To be fair we have to add that Buddhists, too, appropriated Daoist
texts when producing what is now often called “apocryphal” texts
(which are Chinese Buddhist texts that are not translations of Indian
or Central Asian originals). Research into this subject is, however, only
in its incipient stage and its preliminary results could not, due to lack
of space, be included here. Other topics of mutual in uence, such as,
for example, eschatology had to be left aside here as well. Neverthe-
less, it should have become evident that the question of Buddho-Daoist
interactions is of prime importance and deserves to be investigated in a
comprehensive and systematic manner. It may be regarded as a preced-
ence of interactions between competing religions in general and thus
serve historians of religion working on other religious traditions.
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