China is the most consequential thing that ever happened to Buddhism. It was the first major civilisation the tradition entered that already possessed a literate high culture, a centralised bureaucratic state, an ancient historical self-consciousness, and philosophical traditions of its own. The encounter took roughly six centuries to resolve, and what came out of it was substantially new.

Almost everything most Westerners recognise as Buddhist practice outside the Theravada world — Zen, Pure Land, the Heart Sutra as a chanted text, the bodhisattva Guanyin — reached them through China.

Arrival #

The traditional account has Emperor Ming of the Han dreaming of a golden figure, sending emissaries west, and receiving the first monks and texts in 68 CE, with the White Horse Temple at Luoyang founded to house them. The story is a later construction, but the first century is about right as a date for the arrival of Buddhism in China with merchants and settlers from Central Asia.

For its first two centuries Buddhism in China was largely a foreigners’ religion, practised in merchant communities, and often perceived as a variant of Daoist longevity practice. The earliest Chinese accounts pair the Buddha with Laozi, and one persistent early theory — the huahu or “conversion of the barbarians” doctrine — held that Laozi had travelled west and become the Buddha, making Buddhism a foreign and inferior derivative of Daoism. It was still being argued about, and officially condemned, a thousand years later.

The translation problem #

Everything turned on translation, and the difficulties were acute.

Sanskrit is inflected, polysyllabic, and comfortable with abstraction and multi-clause subordination. Classical Chinese is uninflected, terse, and rich in concrete imagery. There was no existing Chinese vocabulary for dharma, nirvana, karma, sunyata, or samsara, no tradition of the kind of analytic psychology the Abhidharma assumes, and no cultural familiarity with rebirth.

The first solution was geyi, “matching concepts”: rendering Buddhist terms with existing Daoist ones. Nirvana became wuwei, “non-action.” Dharma became dao, “the Way.” Sunyata, emptiness, became wu, “nothingness” — a term with a long history in the Laozi and in the “Dark Learning” (xuanxue) philosophy then fashionable among the elite.

This made the texts readable and made them mean something slightly different. The resonance between Buddhist emptiness and Daoist nothingness is real but partial, and the Chinese tradition spent centuries working out where it failed. The tendency of Chinese Buddhism towards the immediate, the concrete, the naturalistic, and the sudden — as against Indian Buddhism’s taste for the analytic, the systematic, and the gradual — owes a good deal to the frame this early vocabulary established.

Translation improved dramatically with Kumarajiva (344–413), working at Chang’an with a state-funded bureau; his versions were fluent, idiomatic, and became canonical. Xuanzang (602–664), who travelled to India, studied at Nalanda for years, and returned in 645 with hundreds of manuscripts, translated with far greater precision and was largely unread in comparison. Kumarajiva’s Heart Sutra and Diamond Sutra are still chanted daily; Xuanzang’s technically superior renderings are consulted by scholars. It is a clean illustration of what determines a translation’s afterlife.

Xuanzang’s journey, incidentally, became the basis of the sixteenth-century novel Journey to the West, in which the historical pilgrim is accompanied by a monkey with a magic staff.

The Chinese schools #

By the Sui and Tang dynasties (581–907), Chinese Buddhism had produced schools that were genuinely its own — responses to a specifically Chinese problem, which was what to do with a canon containing thousands of texts that contradicted one another and all claimed to be the word of the Buddha.

The Indian tradition had not faced this in the same form; the Chinese had received centuries of Indian literature more or less simultaneously, out of order. The characteristic Chinese solution was panjiao, doctrinal classification: a scheme ranking the teachings as stages in the Buddha’s pedagogical career, with one’s own school’s text at the summit.

Tiantai, founded by Zhiyi (538–597), organised the canon into five periods and made the Lotus Sutra the final and complete teaching. Its “threefold truth” and its doctrine of the mutual inclusion of all realms in every moment of thought are among the most sophisticated products of Chinese Buddhist thought.

Huayan, systematised by Fazang (643–712), took the Avatamsaka Sutra as supreme and developed the doctrine of the interpenetration of all phenomena, illustrated by Indra’s net — an infinite net with a jewel at each node, each reflecting all the others. Fazang is said to have demonstrated it to Empress Wu with a room of mirrors and a candle. See Tiantai and Huayan.

Chan rejected the entire scholastic enterprise in principle — “a special transmission outside the scriptures, not depending on words and letters, pointing directly at the human mind” — while producing an enormous literature in practice. See Chan Buddhism in China.

Pure Land offered devotion to Amitabha and rebirth in his western paradise, accessible to anyone able to recite his name. It became, and remains, the most widely practised form. See Pure Land Buddhism Explained.

The Confucian objection #

Buddhism faced sustained criticism from Confucian officials on grounds that were social and political rather than metaphysical.

Monastic celibacy was a violation of filial duty: failing to produce descendants left the ancestors without sacrifices. Shaving the head mutilated the body received from one’s parents. Monks did not bow to the emperor, claimed exemption from taxation and corvée labour, and withdrew land and manpower from the state. The tradition’s foreignness was itself an objection in a culture that took its own antiquity seriously.

Buddhist apologists answered on each point — the monk’s merit benefits his ancestors more than sons could; leaving the household serves a higher filiality — and the tradition accommodated substantially, developing ancestral rites, ghost festivals, and merit transfer for the dead that made it functionally compatible with Chinese family religion. Chinese Buddhism’s strong association with funerary and ancestral ritual dates from this accommodation.

The most famous statement of the objection is Han Yu’s memorial of 819 against the ceremonial reception of a finger-bone relic of the Buddha, which got him exiled.

The Tang high point and the 845 persecution #

The Tang was the golden age: imperial patronage, vast monastic estates, the great translation projects, the mature schools, and Buddhist influence throughout elite culture. Empress Wu Zetian, the only woman to rule China in her own name, used Buddhist ideology — including a prophecy identifying her with Maitreya — to legitimate her position.

Wealth attracted attention. By the ninth century the monasteries held enormous tax-exempt land, and the ordained population was large enough to be an economic problem. In 845, Emperor Wuzong, a Daoist sympathiser, ordered a general suppression: by the official figures, some 4,600 monasteries destroyed, 40,000 shrines demolished, and 260,000 monks and nuns returned to lay life, with monastic land confiscated.

The persecution lasted under two years and was reversed by Wuzong’s successor, but the effect was permanent. The scholastic schools, dependent on libraries, endowments, and large teaching institutions, never fully recovered. Chan and Pure Land did — Chan because it was decentralised, rural, and did not depend on libraries; Pure Land because it required nothing but recitation. From the late Tang onward these two dominate, and they progressively merged: the “dual practice” of Chan and Pure Land together became standard.

Song to Qing #

Under the Song (960–1279), Chan consolidated its institutional position, produced the great koan collections — the Blue Cliff Record, the Gateless Gate — and formalised its lineage charts. Buddhism was increasingly integrated into a syncretic religious landscape summarised in the phrase “the three teachings are one”: Confucianism for social order, Daoism for the body and nature, Buddhism for death and the afterlife.

The Yuan dynasty, Mongol and Tibetan Buddhist in orientation, elevated Tibetan clergy at court. The Ming saw a revival associated with figures such as Hanshan Deqing and Zhuhong, and the further merging of Chan and Pure Land. The Qing continued imperial patronage of Tibetan Buddhism for reasons of Inner Asian statecraft.

The modern period #

The twentieth century was brutal. The Republican era brought reform movements — Taixu (1890–1947) argued for a “Buddhism for human life,” modernised education, and engagement with society, an idea that became the “Humanistic Buddhism” now dominant in Taiwan. The Japanese occupation, the civil war, and then the People’s Republic each took their toll.

Under the PRC, religious institutions were brought under state control; during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) temples were closed, damaged, or destroyed, monastics were forcibly returned to lay life, and religious practice was effectively prohibited.

Since 1979 there has been a substantial revival. Temples have been rebuilt, ordinations resumed, and Buddhist practice has grown rapidly, within a framework of state regulation through the Buddhist Association of China. Estimates of the number of Buddhists in China vary enormously — from under a hundred million to several hundred million — because Chinese religious identity is not exclusive and most practitioners would not describe themselves as belonging to a religion.

Taiwan, meanwhile, has developed one of the most institutionally vigorous Buddhist cultures anywhere, with large organisations such as Foguangshan, Dharma Drum Mountain, and the Tzu Chi Foundation, whose disaster-relief operations are international in scope. Taiwan is also the place where full ordination for women has been most thoroughly restored, with nuns substantially outnumbering monks.

Common questions #

Is Chinese Buddhism Mahayana? Yes, overwhelmingly, though the Chinese canon also contains the Agamas — the counterparts of the Pali discourses — and Abhidharma literature from the early schools. The ordination lineage is the Dharmaguptaka Vinaya.

Did Buddhism change Chinese culture or did China change Buddhism? Both, extensively. China gained a vocabulary for interiority, a monastic institution, printing (developed substantially to reproduce scripture), vegetarian cuisine, and much of its imaginative literature about the afterlife. Buddhism gained an emphasis on sudden awakening, a suspicion of scholasticism, an aesthetic of nature, and a permanent entanglement with ancestral ritual.

Why is Guanyin female in China? Avalokiteshvara is male in Indian sources and in Tibetan iconography. In China the bodhisattva was progressively feminised from around the Tang, becoming by the Ming the white-robed Guanyin, a maternal figure associated with mercy, childbirth, and protection. The process involved absorption of local goddess cults and the Lotus Sutra’s statement that the bodhisattva takes whatever form is useful.

Is Buddhism legal in China today? Yes, as one of five state-recognised religions, practised through officially registered institutions under the Buddhist Association of China. Unregistered activity and Tibetan Buddhism in particular are subject to considerably tighter control.

Sources & further reading #

Erik Zürcher, The Buddhist Conquest of China (Brill, 3rd ed. 2007) — the classic study of the first phase. Kenneth Ch’en, Buddhism in China: A Historical Survey (Princeton, 1964) — still the standard single-volume history. Peter N. Gregory & Daniel A. Getz (eds.), Buddhism in the Sung (University of Hawai’i Press, 1999) — on the period after the persecution. John Kieschnick, The Impact of Buddhism on Chinese Material Culture (Princeton, 2003) — on tea, bridges, printing, chairs, and much else. Holmes Welch, The Practice of Chinese Buddhism, 1900–1950 (Harvard, 1967) — an unmatched account of the modern monastic institution before the revolution.