Chapter 1. Why Buddhism kept changing¶
A tradition founded on "all formations are impermanent" often changes its tone when recounting its own history. The standard narrative within Buddhism is one of unfolding: the Buddha's teachings over his lifetime, the five periods and eight teachings, the classification into three periods, different teachings given because sentient beings have different capacities. All later changes are the successive unfolding of that perfect source, like a seed growing into a tree on which not a single leaf is accidental. Opposed to this is the narrative of decline, told by fundamentalists and some scholars. From purity to mixture, substance to ornament, mountain forests to temple estates, Buddhist history becomes a downward road away from the original concern. The two narratives confront one another, yet share the same fault. Both treat doctrine as something that moves by itself. In the narrative of unfolding, doctrines grow automatically according to an internal logic; in the narrative of decline, they deteriorate of their own accord. Neither side needs external forces: no money or grain, no royal court, no opponents in debate, no patrons. It is as though intellectual history took place in a vacuum.
This volume's working hypothesis differs from both. Doctrine does not move itself; it is pushed. A tradition rewrites itself at a particular juncture because some pressure has built up there to a certain point: an opponent's agenda, a shift in patronage, the composition of believers, what competing religions offer, the monastic community's own livelihood, war and famine. Rewriting is the solution; pressure is the problem. From this follows a testable working hypothesis. For every major doctrinal concession, a specific pressure that it relieves can be found; concessions for which no pressure can be found should be rare. This hypothesis can be refuted case by case. Wherever the pressure at a juncture cannot be inferred, this volume will say so accurately.
One clarification must follow at once to prevent a misreading. Being pushed does not mean being pushed only from outside the religious community. Pressures within the monastic community are pressures too: disputes over strict or lenient discipline, competition between scholastic lineages, and the differing situations of elders and the wider community, forest dwellers and urban dwellers, scholarly monks and monks performing recitation and repentance rites. By "external causes," this volume means causes outside doctrinal texts, not causes outside the monastic community. The community itself has never been monolithic. Most external pressures act on doctrine precisely by passing through divisions within it.
These pressures are external to doctrinal texts; they can arise within the monastic community, as Chapter 1 explains. The source label translated as “War and calamity” refers here to the ravages of war (兵燹). The decline narrative concerns departure from the original concern (本怀).
The first two volumes have prepared the way for asking the question like this. Volume 1 supplies chronology and doctrines: what became what, and when. Volume 2 supplies judgments and a trajectory. Change does not wander at random. Across two thousand years, a line runs in a consistent direction: self-power decreases, guarantees increase, and verification retreats until no one can check. Drift in a consistent direction requires a push in a consistent direction. This line is the principal phenomenon this volume must explain. If transformation were merely a random walk, the different junctures should point every which way. Instead, they form a row. What kind of force can keep the same direction across two thousand years and three great civilizational spheres? Volume 2 supplied part of an answer by identifying the shape of attachment in each tradition. But even the structural half of the answer is incomplete. What produces the attachment, what produces the fear, and why each tradition takes that particular shape are questions Volume 2 only touches on. The historical half, who is pushing and with what, is left wholly open. This volume must fill both gaps.
This volume therefore settles on four questions, to be applied at each juncture: What changed? What force was pushing? Who benefited? Who bore the cost? The first two belong to history; the third begins to cross its boundary; the fourth returns to the classification of the teachings. Beyond these four questions, one boundary must be declared at the outset. This volume is not a textbook of the sociology of religion and does not seek a complete explanatory model. Nor is the density of historical evidence remotely even. It is thin for India and thick for East Asia, so the density of conjecture must vary inversely with the density of evidence. Where conjecture is thickest, the rules established in the next chapter are most needed.
(This chapter sets out the overall framework. For sources of the historical facts mentioned, see the corresponding chapters in Volume 1; for the argument establishing the trajectory, see Volume 2, Essay 7. No separate notes are supplied.)