Chapter 2. Six lines of external causation¶

This chapter records, one by one, the external variables that the first two volumes deliberately set aside. There are six lines. For each, it states three things: what it is, how it acts on doctrine, and how it is most readily misused.

1. Royal power and patronage. Aśoka established the standard relationship between Buddhism and political power. A Dharma-protecting king supports the monastic community with land, tax exemptions, and certification of orthodoxy; the community repays royal power with merit, legitimacy, and moral instruction. This structure of exchange subsequently traveled with Buddhism throughout Asia. Only the currency changed: Kuṣāṇa image-making, Gupta estates supporting learning, ordination certificates under the Sui and Tang, imperial sanction under the Tibetan Empire, and household registration under the Tokugawa. Royal power acts on doctrine chiefly in three ways. It adjudicates orthodoxy: a royal command ended the Samyé debate. It allocates resources: scholarly monks are costly to support, and whoever pays decides what kinds of people Buddhism sustains. And it suppresses Buddhism: purges such as those of the three Wu emperors and one Zong emperor each select among doctrines; schools that depend on monastic property and libraries perish, while simple practices survive.

The possible misuse must also be placed on record. Royal preferences are the line most often overestimated. An emperor's conversion usually only acknowledges a social fact that has already taken place. Attributing every rise and fall to the emperor mistakes approval for impetus. Volume 1 has in fact already recorded this line at scattered points: Aśoka and the establishment of conciliar orthodoxy (Volume 1, Essay 2), the Huichang persecution and the rise and fall of schools (Volume 1, Essay 10), and shifts in dynastic patronage and the end of Indian Buddhism (Volume 1, Essay 8). There the points were noted in passing as the narrative unfolded. This chapter makes them a standing line of inquiry.

2. Competing religions. Buddhism has never taught in a vacuum. Almost every major argument it makes has something on the other side: the Brahmanical self, Jain asceticism, Nyāya logic, Hindu devotion and esoteric rites, Laozi and Zhuangzi and Confucian social ethics in China, Neo-Confucianism from the Song onward, Shintō in Japan, Christianity and scientism in modern times, and psychology and the market today. The effect of competitors lies in agendas, not victories and defeats. Opponents determine which questions count as important (Essay 5); what rivals offer determines what one offers oneself (Essays 6 and 7). The cleverest competition displaces by absorbing: incorporate what is most central to you into my framework, then declare that you are no longer needed. The Buddha is absorbed as an avatar of Viṣṇu; Neo-Confucianism absorbs theories of mind and nature.

3. Trade and exchange between civilizations. The history of Buddhism's spread almost coincides with trade routes. The Silk Road and the sea routes that monks traveled were first made by merchants. The merchant class has been Buddhism's most faithful long-term patron, and this is no coincidence. A religion that does not ask about birth status, values trustworthiness, and promises that karmic results never fail suits mobile merchants best of all. This line also includes media: palm leaves, paper, woodblock printing, movable type, and the internet. Every change of medium changes who can produce and reproduce doctrine: Mahāyāna in Essay 4, printing in Essay 11. Translation is the weightiest link. At every language barrier, doctrine pays a tax on being translated anew. "Matching meanings" (格义, geyi) is its most conspicuous instance (Essay 9).

4. The monastic economy. How the monastic community feeds itself determines what Buddhism is like. In the age of alms, the community is light, dispersed, and quick; in the age of estates, heavy, concentrated, and slow. The monastic economy determines three things. What kinds of people are supported: only great estates can afford scholarly monks of the Nālandā kind. What events are feared: the greater the wealth, the greater the fear of a change of dynasty, the basket of eggs described in Essay 8, Chapter 2. And where friction with the state arises: land, tax exemptions, and labor. The Huichang purge touched all three. The Bureau of Sacrifices (祠部) conducted the census of monasteries and monks; monastic registers were then transferred to the Bureau of Receptions (主客); and the proceeds of demolition went to the treasury, with fertile land, laicized monks and nuns, and enslaved people entering the two-tax rolls and copper images going to the Salt and Iron Commissioner for minting (Essay 11, Chapter 1).¹

5. The composition of the population. Who enters monastic life, who gives support, who listens to the Dharma? The monastic community has never been homogeneous. There are aristocratic and commoner monks, scholarly monks, meditation monks, and monks who perform recitation and repentance rites, forest dwellers and urban dwellers. On the supporting side are royal houses, merchants, elite families, and village communities. Population composition determines what kind of doctrine people need. Literacy limits how far a textual religion can go: Pure Land's victory was first a victory of population structure (Essay 10). The mix of motives for entering monastic life determines the community's ethos. The relative proportions of those evading compulsory service and those seeking the path are rarely stated directly in the sources, yet leave traces everywhere. The two-tier structure of elites and the masses determines whether a tradition can offer both philosophy and efficacious wonders. If it cannot, it will divide into separate schools.

6. War, disorder, and calamity. War, dynastic collapse, epidemics, famine. General histories treat these as a backdrop; this volume makes them a separate line because their mechanism does not coincide with any of the first five. Suppression of Buddhism along the line of royal power is policy. It destroys the monastic side: temple property is gone, but believers remain where they were. Troubled times rewrite the believers' side as well. The society supporting Buddhism is itself disintegrating. Population composition asks who believes; this line asks what circumstances believers are living through.

It acts on doctrine chiefly in three ways. First, it rewrites demand. Collective suffering reduces the feasibility of "long practice and personal realization in this life" and raises the weight of salvation through other power and guarantees for a future life. The active periods of the Pure Land masters coincide closely with the chronology of disasters. The Pure Land essay in Volume 2 recorded the masters of troubled times; Essays 9 and 10 of this volume will develop the account. Second, it destroys institutions. Scholarly Buddhism depends on academies, libraries, and lines of transmission; once these are broken by war, they cannot rise again. Nālandā needs to burn only once. The practices that survive disaster are usually the simple ones. That Chan and recollection of the Buddha can withstand disaster is the result of selection through successive disasters (Essays 10 and 13). Third, it supplies a sense of the age. The final age of the Dharma is not a calendar but a mood. Troubled times furnish evidence for "the decline of the true Dharma" that can be pointed to everywhere. Once awareness of the final age takes hold, the narrowing logic of "only this teaching at this time" has its grounds. Kamakura is the fullest example (Essay 13).

The usual warning against misuse must be placed on record. Troubled times can be made to explain anything. Whenever this line is used, two questions must be answered. Why, in the same troubled times, did one tradition decline while another flourished? Why did neighboring places undergoing the same disorder take different directions? An explanation by troubled times that supplies no comparison group is as unacceptable as an imputation of motives that supplies no way it could be refuted.

The six lines are a checklist, not a theory. This volume does not predetermine which line is decisive at which juncture. It establishes only two rules for their use. First, every explanation along a single line is suspect. Whenever one line makes a juncture appear fully explained, first suspect that apparent completeness. Second, every judgment of relative weight must be marked as conjecture. The ranking faintly suggested at the beginning of this chapter (economics and population weigh most, and royal power is most often overestimated) is likewise a conjecture, not a conclusion. The next chapter supplies the detailed rules.

“External” means external to doctrinal texts, including pressures within the monastic community. In the first line, “define orthodoxy” means adjudicate what counts as orthodox. In the fifth line, “who ordains” means who enters monastic life, “who gives” means who provides support, and “who listens” means who hears the teaching.

(This chapter establishes a methodological record. Notes on the historical details of each line will be supplied as the individual essays unfold. For overview references, see the corresponding chapters in Volume 1.)