The Era of Division 43
diffi cult that only monks and nuns could hope to reach enlightenment.
In Tantric Buddhism, which developed particularly in Tibet, the empha-
sis was on elaborate prayers and rituals to ward off evil spirits. In
Mahayana Buddhism, which became most popular in China, laypeople
could also hope for enlightenment, in part through faith in the power of
the Buddha and his many bodhisattva disciples. (A bodhisattva is one
who has attained suffi cient spiritual insight to reach nirvana, but who
remains in the world to help relieve the suffering of others.) Despite the
nontheistic teachings of the Buddha, some schools of Buddhism devel-
oped an array of deities that people could appeal to for protection and
assistance in this life or the next.
There were many obstacles to the growth of Buddhism in China.
Chinese thought centered very much on this world and on family obli-
gations, whereas Indian philosophy was very abstractly metaphysical,
seeing multiple worlds beyond the concrete physical world. The lan-
guages of the Buddhist texts, Sanskrit and Pali, were completely unre-
lated to Chinese, making translation of basic Buddhist concepts quite
diffi cult. The most serious contradiction between Buddhist practice and
Chinese values was that the highest level of religious devotion in Bud-
dhism was to shave one’s head and become a monk or a nun. This was
seen as a serious violation of Confucian fi lial piety, because one’s fi rst
fi lial obligation was to have children, who in turn would worship one’s
parents’ spirits after one’s own death.
Buddhist missionaries and early Chinese converts used the ideas of
reincarnation and the laws of karma to justify monastic life as a per-
formance of fi lial piety: by becoming a monk or a nun, one could win
merits for one’s ancestors in the afterlife and thereby contribute toward
one’s parents’ rebirth at a higher level of spiritual development or at a
higher socioeconomic level. Similarly, by contributing money for the
construction of Buddhist temples, monasteries, or works of art, one
could earn karmic merits for oneself and one’s family members both in
this life and the next.
Despite the many obstacles to the spread of Buddhism in China,
many other factors made China ripe for the transplanting and growth
of this Indian religion. The translation itself of Indian terms into Chi-
nese made many Buddhist concepts seem familiar to the Chinese. The
Buddhist terms for teaching (dharma), enlightenment (bodhi), and yoga
were all translated into Chinese as dao, the way, making these concepts
seem almost Chinese. The highly abstract Indian term nirvana was ren-
dered into Chinese as the familiar negative term wu, as in wuwei, or
nonaction, meaning emptiness. The Indian term for morality, sila, was