BUDDHISM IN CENTRAL ASIA AND CHINA 171a consistent explanation for the individual sufferings experienced on all levels
of society, at the same time addressing the central issue of Chinese speculative
philosophy: how the governance of society might best be brought into har-
mony with the metaphysical principles underlying nature. As for meditation
practice, Buddhism taught a system of mind training that supplemented the
techniques taught by the native shamanic Taoist tradition, giving new mean-
ing to the pursuit of Deathlessness and placing it more within reach of a wider
range of men and women.
Of these four aspects, the institutional was the most controversial. Chinese
society had operated on the assumption that all social institutions should be
subsumed under the emperor, who functioned as the mediator between
heaven and Earth. The Sangha, however, insisted on its independence from
the sociopolitical realm, a status symbolized by Buddhist monastics refusing to
kowtow to the emperor. This issue was hotly debated for several centuries,
with the Confucian defenders of traditional Chinese ways attacking the Sangha
on four grounds: moral, economic, political, and ethnocentric. The Sangha
was immoral in that the monastics practiced celibacy, which violated the tra-
ditional canons of filial piety, in which a person's prime duty to his/her ances-
tors was to produce children. Also, the monks and nuns shaved their heads
and cremated their dead, which were abominations against the body that had
been received from one's parents. The Sangha was economically detrimental
in that it siphoned off the donations of gullible believers and produced no
concrete results in the world: "They eat but do not farm, wear clothes but do
not weave," charged the Confucian bureaucrats, who themselves neither
farmed nor wove. The Sangha was a threat to social stability in that it did not
recognize the superiqrity of the state. Finally, the institution as a whole was a
foreign invention, arid therefore inherently inferior.
Buddhists had encountered the first three arguments in India and so were
generally well prepared to respond. Monks and nuns, by teaching the religion
to their parents, were repaying their filial debt in the highest possible manner
(Strong EB, sec. 8.2.1). The fruit of their practice was not to be measured in
this world, although the merit earned by supporting the Sangha helped guar-
antee economic prosperity. Their instructions in morality and the principle of
karma actually helped the emperor in his work of bringing order to society;
they deserved their independence in that the goal they sought pertained to life
after death, an area over which no emperor could claim power. As for the ar-
gument that the Sangha was foreign, some pointed out that foreign things
were not necessarily inferior. Others who were more inventive argued that
the ·Sangha had actually existed on Chinese soil since the time of King Asoka,.
thus giving the religion a fairly long Chinese pedigree.
Both sides of these arguments were repeated with little variation through-
out the period of assimilation, and for the most part an uneasy truce prevailed.
Buddhist monastics ultimately were not required to kowtow before the em-
peror, but the Sangha as a whole was placed under a government overseer
(sometimes a monk, sometimes a lay man, sometimes sympathetic, sometimes
not), with government permission required before any man or woman could
be ordained. Occasionally the truce broke down, most disastrously in 842-45,