Lost in translation? The Treatise on the Mahāyāna Awakening of Faith (Dasheng qixin lun) and its modern readings

Abstract

The Treatise on the Mahāyāna Awakening of Faith, an indigenous Chinese composition written in the guise of an Indian Buddhist treatise, is one of the most influential texts in the history of East Asian Buddhism. Its outline of the doctrines of buddha nature (foxing), buddha bodies (foshen), and one mind (yixin), among others, served from the medieval period onwards as one of the main foundations of East Asian Buddhist thought and practice. The Treatise is putatively attributed to the Indian writer Aśvaghoṣa, and its current Chinese version was traditionally conceived of as a translation from an original Sanskrit text. In the course of the twentieth century, however, many important scholars of Buddhism have called into question the textual history of the Treatise. Even if the specific circumstances of its creation are still largely unknown, the view that the Treatise is an original Chinese composition (not necessarily written by a native Chinese) is now prevalent among scholars. Meanwhile, and for more than one hundred years, the text has also become a source of knowledge of Buddhism in the West thanks to a number of English translations. After examining the early textual history of the two existing versions of the text, this article will offer some examples of its modern appropriation by a novel group of readers and interpreters, an appropriation that took place during the first decades of the twentieth century amidst efforts to re-envision Chinese and East Asian Buddhist history and the place of Buddhism in modern society.

Follow the breath: mindfulness as travelling pedagogy

“…A conceptual centrepiece for Nhat Hanh's engaged Buddhism was the distinctively East Asian Mahayana Buddhist doctrine of “Buddha-nature” – also heavily relied upon in the formulations of the aforementioned Chinese Buddhist modernisers keenly studied in Vietnam (Tarocco, 2008; DeVido, 2007). In brief, it is the premise that all people have the potential to become a Buddha (i.e.…”

Yinshun's Recovery ofShizhu Piposha Lun十住毗婆沙論: a Madhyamaka-based Pure Land practice In twentieth-century Taiwan

“…Since the end of the nineteenth century lay Buddhist scholars and intellectuals often debated the authenticity of this scripture, and whether it was only a Chinese apocrypha, while the monastic community maintained the traditional position and regarded it as authored by Aśvaghoṣa. It was probably the most debated text in China at the dawn of the twentieth century, and it came to represent the core of the East Asian tradition of Buddhism (See Richard 1907;Tarocco 2008). I read the several references that Yinshun made to this text as part of the negotiation between the Chinese tradition of Buddhism and its Indian roots that he proposed as core of the correct Buddhism for China.…”