Saving Practice from Textualism: Using Epitaphs to Shed New Light on Esoteric Buddhist Practices (jiao 教) in Early Ming (1368-1424) China

• In Event: Commemorating Death: Uncovering Buddhist History through Attention to the Genre of Epitaphs

Abstract

When Buddhism was reclassified by the state in the early Ming, esoteric Buddhist practices, which promoted the offering of liturgical services for the dead, were singled out to replace the vinaya (lü 律) as part of the long-established tripartite system comprised of meditation (chan 禪) and exposition (jiang 講). Subsequently, these services received enthusiastic support from emperors and officials for their effectiveness in encouraging the masses to act morally, and gained extraordinary importance within the saṃgha – by the late nineteenth century, sixty percent of the monk population had became liturgical specialists. But such a disproportional monastic emphasis led modern reformers like Taixu 太虛 (1890-1947) to criticize Chinese Buddhism as the “religion of the dead.”
Despite their popularity and significance, these liturgical practices have only recently attracted attention from scholars like Chen Yunü 陳玉女 and Hou Cong 侯沖. In Yunnan, families like the Yang 楊 and the Dong 董 served, generation after generation, as liturgical specialists known as Acarya (Azhali 阿吒力). Based on recently discovered epitaphs that fully illustrate their work, this paper will trace the history of this esoteric Buddhist practice and examine its evolution and exercise in early Ming China. This paper argues that the predominance of funerary ritual practices reveals the importance of Buddhist ritual over textual practice to early Ming Chinese society as a whole and further questions previous scholarly assessments that ritual emphasis signaled a decline of the Buddhist tradition.

Author

• Dewei Zhang, University of Macau