Encyclopedia of India–China Cultural Contacts v1.c7.65

v1.c7.65

At the same time, as Jiang Weqiao has written, influenced by Western and Japanese studies, the Chinese scholarly world believed that ”the history of Buddhism could now for the first time be systematically investigated through the use of the scientific methods of Western scholars and could gradually be sorted out. Japanese scholars continued this. Our Buddhists were previously also influenced by India. When they unknowingly had to pay attention to history, they occasionally wrote about it and they just limited themselves to biographies and records and to the year of composition. If one looks for a systematic general history of Buddhism in ancient books, it is absolutely not there, much to the regret of scholars.” Gong Jun has written that, “Buddhism was finally not a product of the Chinese soil but it originated as a creation of Indian civilisation. Traditional expositions of Chinese religious history for the most part consider Chinese Buddhism as central. But as a brief comment on Indian religious history, in the spread of contemporary intellectual historical concepts, an important inspiration shows up in the writings about a general history of Buddhism, namely that, when dealing with Chinese Buddhist history, one has to be able to understand Indian religious history to the extent that only through the investigation of the history of Indian thought and culture (Indology) one can obtain true understanding.” In the context of the above, the Chinese intellectual and the Buddhist world pay great attention to investigation and research of the Indian Buddhist history and Indian Buddhist philosophy. Wang Enyang put forward that “because Buddha’s law began in India, Indian Buddhism is fundamental to the study of Buddhism.” Research scholars like Gong Jun paid considerable attention to the source, thinking that “the prevalent awareness of general history cannot only orderly present the development of the whole of Buddhism in this style of compositions but it can help us see in them the rules of rise and decline of Buddha’s law, letting us benefit from the history.” Under the influence of this trend, the Buddhist world has offered important points for study and research in the history and philosophy of Indian Buddhism. Master Taixu also thought that “in the research of principles in China, looking over the texts, there just has never been a system. Every school or sub-school of venerables just succeeded one another since ancient times. Now, in the light of research about the methods of the history of world religions, it is not the same as before.” And so, against this background, all books writing about Buddhist history go back to India. They pay particular attention to the theories of two great schools in Indian Buddhism: *Zhongguan* (Madhyamaka) and *Weishi* (*Vijñānavāda*). The study of Buddhist philosophy, which had almost discontinued in the past in India, revived with the input from Chinese language materials on Buddhism. This is one of the greatest contributions to Indian Buddhism brought by the studies of the Chinese Buddhist world and by its academia in the recent past.