Chou Pokan
National Taiwan University (Taiwan)
This paper concerns the Shijiapu, or the Vaṃsa of Śākyas, the first Chinese Buddhist historiographical work on the life and lineage of Śākyamuni, by a Vinaya monk Sengyou (445-518) in the early sixth century. Sengyou selected Buddhist legends from 55 translated Buddhist texts to create a book documenting Buddhist history. The book describes how Śākyamuni’s family was consanguineously linked with cakravattīns who brought world peace and order, his forefather’s study with a Brahmanin to have the lineage acquire religious sacredness, episodes in the life of Śākyamuni, the formation of the four assemblies initiating a new Śākyas’ lineage in Buddhism, the resurrection of the Dharma through Aśoka’s restoration of the Buddha’s relics, and the decline of the Dharma in India. At the end of the book, Sengyou rejects the view of his contemporary colleagues, who believed that the Dharma was about to decline in China.
A close examination of his optimistic conviction reveals that such confidence was founded upon the following doctrines: (1) the One Vehicle (ekayāna) described in the Lotus Sūtra, in which all of the Buddha’s teachings are in Oneness, and their differentiations, if labeled doctrinally as one of the Three Vehicles, are merely expedient, enabling conveyance of teachings to people with various learning capacities and for particular salvific visions; (2) Docetism, reflected in the Buddhist tales cited from various texts as evidence of the trans-spatiotemporal omnipresence of the Buddha’s numinous manifestations; (3) pietism, according to which the stupa was regarded as a sacred container for the Buddha’s relics and a focal point of the Dharma; and (4) the emphasis on kingship – Dharma symbiosis maintained in the Mahāparinirvaņa Sūtra.
Sengyou’s work not only systematized accounts of Śākyamuni’s life and lineage from Buddhist texts in the Northern Tradition, but also initiated a new Buddhist historiographical narration in the Chinese world. The Shijiapu is distinct from the current narration of Buddhist history initially constructed by British Orientalists on the basis of Pāli materials.
(Presented in the International Conference on Buddhist Studies: Buddha's Biography – Buddhist Legends, 18-19 July 2015, Le Meridien Bangkok Hotel, Bangkok, organized by Department of Thai, Faculty of Arts, The Pali and Sanskrit Section, Department of Eastern Languages, Faculty of Arts and Institute of Thai Studies, Chulalongkorn University)