/lit/ - Literature

>>23277184
Xi jiping wrote a treatise on Buddhism a few years ago when he lived in usa before he got swooped by the communism fad, you should look into it

>>23277184
Zhiyi and Dogen

While it is Indian, the Lotus Sutra is highly influential and beloved among East Asian Buddhists. Unfamiliarity with it would be a huge hindrance

>>23277246
Also red pine has some books like Zen baggage

>>23277184
The general idea in Chinese Buddhism is that your thoughts are illusions. The mind is from the Supreme Ultimate, and therefore naturally good. It is only through greed in the physical world that degrades it and human nature. With enough self cultivation you are able to overcome this, and purify your mind to return to this naturally 'good' state.

You have to keep in mind that in China Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism are seen as three legs of a tripod. The individual person takes what they consider to be the good aspects of each, and blend them into something that will suit their desires. You will have to read about Daoism, Confucianism, Mohism, The Logicians, and the Naturalists to properly understand Chinese Buddhism as it isn't really too separate from those other schools.

>>23277325
That seems like a problematic summary. Supreme ultimate is a neoconfucian term. Also does buddha nature mean that your mind is “naturally good” or simply that it has the potential to become enlightened. Also is mind the supreme ultimate in both the mind only school AND in Zen?

>>23277519
Tathagatagarbha is the emptiness of the mind, which provides the potential for enlightenment. It's described as a teaching for people afraid of emptiness and is identified with the alayavijnana in the Lankavatara Sutra

>>23277184
The Shobogenzo. A collection of essays on Zen Buddhism written in the 13th century by the founder of the largest Zen Buddhist sect.

Masaharu Anesaki's works are very good in general, but his History of Japanese Religion would probably be the best starting point for you.

>>23277519
Yeah I think that guy is oversimplifying it a bit, it's true all that stuff has existed alongside each other throughout China's history, as well as general Chinese folk religion, and they've all ended up influencing each other and perhaps even coalesced into the general Chinese psyche today but it's still an independent religion with independent practitioners and it has at times clashed with the others, with certain emperors persecuting Buddhism and things like that.

>>23277325
>>23277519
>>23278124
This is why you start with the 'Jeets. Even the Chinese know it goes through the monk Bodhidharma. There's really no such thing as Zen. There is a mostly Chinese-mediated recension of waves of (often conflicting) Indian Buddhist literature which arrived scattershot in bits and pieces before export to Korea and Japan. This literature itself roughly speaking comes in three groupings, which for neutrality's sake are pre-Mahayana (or more pejoratively, Hinayana), Madhyamaka (Mahahana), and Yogacara/Vijñanavada (Mahayana). No-self isn't Zen. Enlightenment just being the eradication of ignorance of reality isn't Zen. The need to discipline minds clinging to external illusions isn't Zen. These ideas were all developed already in India, being debated back and forth, at different times, but to China it was all Buddhism. Mahayana has had an open canon, scriptures are allowed to be "revealed," complete opposite of Christianity in that regard, saints were allowed to reforge the religion in the absense of anyone to say otherwise. The only way to really appreciate the surgical brevity of Zen is to know this context; China (and Japan) were attempting to consolidate the collected works of "Buddha"

just read siddhartha bro :)

>>23278447
Where did Mao come from? Legalism?

You need to read the Foundations of Buddhism by Rupert Gethin
It has very little to do with Buddism as practised in East Asia but it'll allow you to understand East Asian Buddhism when you encounter it

>>23278506
Kind of a retarded question, it's like asking "Where did Stalin come from? Communism?"
All these ideologies of course influence modern day Chinese like how Christianity/ Marxism/ Liberalism etc. influence western politicians today but they're not dictated by it in a 1:1 way, it would also be ridiculous to suggest Mao wasn't influenced by Western ideologies as well, of course like Communism even if it was arguably in a piecemeal way, kind of like how Buddhism was haphazardly adopted by the Chinese as >>23278461 says.
In fact thinking about it this haphazard adoption of foreign ideologies is a pretty unique and defining trait of China, you can also see it in the White Lotus rebellion how one guy read a translation of the Bible and completely warped it for his own ends. I've thought about this before and I think it has a lot to do with how ridiculously different the Chinese language is to the rest of the Western world, like in the West you have a language continuam stretching from Europe as far east as India, where they're part of the same language family and also had a (closer) constant cultural exchange throughout history with guys like Alexander the Great and other empires and conquests, insuring constant waves of information disseminated between them. China has always been this big, insular behemoth on the periphery of that, with a language totally unlike the others and features like the tonal system which means sentences flow completely differently and individual words become extremely hard to even say for travellers if they don't have a good sense of pitch.
Admittedly Japanese people also have an incredibly unique language and are located on the periphery but were able to incorporate Western thinking during the Meiji restoration, I suppose they managed it because they didn't have the over-inflated ego of the Chinese and because it was such a laboured, conscious effort. Even then I think they still belong to their own weird, insular culture like the Chinese do. Also Japanese at least doesn't have tones.

>>23278562
Nice post desu

>>23278758
Thanks, I like throwing out abstract arguments like this
Also on the point of Chinese language being such a barrier to deeper cultural exchange, their writing system ensures a very insular, self-referential thinking that doesn't incorporate foreign loan words very well, if a foreign word is absolutely needed you can chop and change some Chinese characters with similar sounds in them to make it but it's not as intuitive as character based scripts where it's easier to figure out how it sounds, and can incorporate sounds that don't exist in a native language more easily by using unconventional spelling, or even modified letters. They also had to repurpose old characters to express modern concepts, like using an old character for lightning in relation to electricity and electronics (I think this might have even been borrowed from the Japanese since they do the same thing).
It's also this unusual insularity and abstractness of Chinese writing with underpins Daoism, which is pretty much based on a piece of vague ramblings (Dao De Jing) that lacks literal meaning, perhaps it's the legacy of Daoism and its emphasis on insular, abstract thinking that encourages resistance of direct foreign understanding and translation.
It's interesting again to compare this to Japan which did develop a phonetic script alongside characters and I think again this is what helped them take on Western cultural knowledge so much more easily then China, even if this phonetic script was only ever a necessary step to fit the Chinese writing system to Japanese language.
I know Taiwan has developed some phonetic scripts for Chinese but I think they're used more as an input/ typing system rather than used alongside Chinese characters like Japanese, I don't even know if they're relevant anymore since most Chinese people seem to know how to input characters with pinyin.

>>23278958
Japan's phonetic script was, according to them, actually developed by the Buddhist scholar-monk Kūkai, because Chinese was awful for transcribing... Buddhist spells. How are you supposed to render abra kadabra buddhakazam in Chinese? If you try to preserve it phonetically, which you should because it is esotericism 101 to incant properly, it will get really weird in Chinese because the ideograms will have no relation to the meaning of the word, and then you will be extremely confused if you only know Chinese or Japanese, and not Sanskrit, as to what the words originally meant, let alone how accurate they are being pronounced. (And to this day, Japan basically reads its Chinese characters with a medieval southern accent, so who has the correct Chinese pronunciation really, is it actually Japan, or is modern China right about how to pronounce Chinese by merit of being Chinese? The Qing dynasty I think went with "Mandarin" because Beijing is right below Manchuria, where they are from, and quite far from the population centers of the south). So with kana there is basically no ambiguity how to pronounce anything, there's like 80 possible sounds and thats it and even foreign loanwords get slotted into this framework, and working from the Indiam Siddham script directly instead of Chinese characters means both a more accurate transliteration and translation

>>23279084
Interesting, I didn't know it was mainly to pronounce foreign incantations. I thought Japanese basically needs kana for grammar as well though right? I've never seen sentences exclusively written in kanji so I assume the kana is there to make grammatical sense.
>it will get really weird in Chinese because the ideograms will have no relation to the meaning of the word
Well most Chinese characters do have a meaning and sound component, I think like 80% or 90% of characters follow the formula of a meaning radical and sound, usually on the left/ bottom and right/ top respectively, the problem is the meaning part is broad and vague as fuck and the sound component will only get you in the ballpark of how it's pronounced, you'll still need someone to explain it to you, which like you say isn't conducive towards exact pronunciation.
Also I think the Qing/ CCP went with Mandarin more because the north of China is a a vast plain where most people already spoke a form of Mandarin, meanwhile the south has a very fragmented, mountainous landscape that encouraged the development of different regional dialects, so you had Cantonese, Shanghainese, Hakka and a bunch of other languages, each exclusive to their provinces and not having a major mass of speakers. It made sense to go with the northern dialect since it already had such a large mass of speakers, rather than either choosing one of the southern dialects which had a minority of speakers or creating some hybrid southern standard that nobody spoke.

>>23279126
>I didn't know it was mainly to pronounce foreign incantations.
That's the original inspiration so the story goes, and even if you look at western scripts the innovators are either merchants or monks, people who have to do lots of record keeping and transcribing of things in other languages.
>I thought Japanese basically needs kana for grammar as well though right? I've never seen sentences exclusively written in kanji
They used to just write in Chinese so I would imagine it was similar to the Romans not having punctuation and upper/lowercase in their writing system—if you were literate you were educated and if you were educated you were literate so nobody alive had a problem with it at the time being close peers.

>>23277184
Here's an important one.

>>23277184
>I’m interested in Buddhism as it is practiced in East Asia, particularly China and Japan.
That's impossible. Buddhism is not practiced in Chine, let alone Japan.
The best you can find is this:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2nNbRVWBb62TTwdmvfwBew

Vihara Buddha Gotama is a 15-acres forest monastery founded by Ven. Dhammavuddho Mahathera in 1998 mainly for the study, teaching, and practice of the Buddha's discourses (suttas), monastic discipline (vinaya), and meditation, according to the original teachings of the Buddha.

乔达摩佛寺是占地15 英亩的修行林, 为达摩悟陀长老 (Ven. Dhammavuddho Mahathera) 于1998 年所建立。此佛寺开拓了一个依据原始佛法的丛林传统修行因缘, 并着重于学习佛教之佛法(经典)及戒律(比丘戒律);而其修禅法门则以佛陀最为原始的教导方式为准绳。寂静的丛林环境是比丘、美棋及在家居士们寻求宁静和独处的理想修行环境。

>>23279608
I’m in Japan right now and I’ve literally been to Buddhist temples

>>23279608
Dude there's tons of temples in china and japan

>>23277184
Check out the tiantai/tendai school

>>23277184
Dunno if nepal is "east enough" but Lamas Shamans and Ancestors by Anna Balikci goes over this stuff. There's basically 2 religions: Buddhism (practiced by the ruling class of monks and those in their immediate periphery) and local religious customs. There's a bit of tension like monks outlawing animal sacrifice, but also syncretism where local shamans revere buddhist gods and monks officiate non-buddhist ceremonies and stuff

>>23279084
>How are you supposed to render abra kadabra buddhakazam in Chinese?
Mantras in Shingon are written in the siddham script

>>23278461
Good points, but what you describe is then what ‘Zen’ is or became (even if you’re using its historical and cultural origins and strong language to make the thought-provoking point that, ‘Really there is no Zen, it all came from former teachings.’). Zen is still that. It’s the instantaneous-teaching version of Mahayana Buddhist teachings. You can’t tell a Zen practitioner in a zendō there’s no Zen. Or, maybe you can, and they’ll agree with the claim as it’s an encapsulation of the teaching of voidness (sunyata).

I want to convert to zen buddhism. How do I proceed?

Anyone have recs for Japanese fiction that captures Shinto-Buddhist ways of thinking without referring to them specifically?
For example, you can see those influences in some of Yasunari Kawabata's work