Foreign Religions in China

On my most recent trip to China, my wife and I ended up visiting a lot of religious sites by chance.  We saw Taoist and Buddhist temples in remote areas and spent a day visiting the Grand Mosque of Xi’an, among other places.  Nearly every one of these sites, I realized, was actually a foreign religious site to China, in one way or another.  When one thinks of “foreign” religions in China, usually Christianity or Islam comes to mind; but Buddhism also came to China from another country and was not always welcome.  When I was first in China, back in the early 1990’s, the school I taught at brought us to visit the Buddhist shrine at Dazu near Chongqing.  There were many intricate carvings of Buddhist idols in the walls and grottoes of the hillside.  But one panel of illustrations was particularly interesting.  It showed many scenes of how the Buddha took care of his mother and did good deeds for his parents.  They were not historical scenes, however, nor were they any part of traditional Buddhist mythology.  They were created to counter criticism from Chinese followers of Confucius, who claimed that the Buddhist practice of celibacy and isolated meditation was undermining the Confucian family-oriented values and philosophies.  Buddhism was even abolished for a time in China during the late Tang Dynasty, when the emperor banned all foreign religions and divided up the property and wealth of the Buddhist temples, redistributing them among the native Confucian and Taoist temples.

One of the important figures in the history of Chinese Buddhism is Xuanzang, a Buddhist monk who lived in the seventh century during the Tang Dynasty.  In his day, Buddhism had already spread to China from India via the Silk Road.  Its transmission, however, was erratic and by the time it had reached China, its adherents were unclear on aspects of Buddhist doctrine and its meanings.  So, the monk Xuanzang left Xi’an, the capital of the Tang Empire, and made the thousand-plus mile journey across the Taklamakan Desert around the barrier of the Himalayan Mountains to India, the land of Buddha’s birth.  Here, he collected thousands of scriptures which he brought back to China to translate.  Many of these works have been lost in India and now only exist in Chinese translation from the collections of Xuanzang.  When Xuanzang returned to Xi’an, the emperor had a huge pagoda built to house the scriptures.  Today, 1300 years later, the Big Wild Goose Pagoda still stands outside the main city walls of Xi’an.

Three Historical Betrayals: the Christian – Christianity vs. Christ, the ...

The Power of the Imposture: the Erosion of the Socio-cultural Ideal from Inside is Stronger than Attacks Upon it from Outside

The armies of the enemies can destroy religious and moral ideals (together with political and socio-cultural organism build around it). But very often the collective ideals are destroyed by much more horrifying weapon system than the ones used in wars. This lethal weapon system is an imposture – the destruction of the moral and socio-cultural ideal (MSCI) not by its obvious enemies, but by its adepts, promoters and worshippers.

Impostors are stronger than enemies. Enemies are obvious enemies while impostors are enemies whom not only nobody expects to be inside the citadel but who themselves don’t know that they are real enemies. Impostors destroy what they are sincerely dedicated to. Sincere dedication to MSCI destroys it more effectively than open animosity. How can this be? It is like sincere love in some people can do more harm to the object of love than in other people hate to the object of their hate. Impostors in relation to MSCI are like destructive lovers.

What makes this seeming paradox possible is that in the majority of people their destructive tendencies are not detected by their consciousness. These people naively embellish (sterilize and aromatize) their self-image because their mental ability to get at the truth about themselves was systematically hurt in their childhood and is drastically underdeveloped (the reason is parental and societal moralistic pressure and disciplinarian accent in the relations between parental figures and the young generation, which make children to “fake” goodness in front of authorities). Children’s moral fakery is pre-moral – it is impulsive and “sincere” and is based on mental inability to emotionally differentiate between truth and its fabrication: to save themselves from rage of the authoritarian adult is for children much more important than to be dedicated to “truth” that is for them a pure abstraction. The equivalent of children’s “sincere lie” is the “adult children’s” (adults with infantile souls) proclivity to justify their immoral or criminal behaviors through “intellectual tricks”, like, for example, the necessity to defend moral and socio-cultural ideal (MSCI) by violating its maxims.

This situation of non-differentiation between truth and lie (as a result of the infantilism of the soul and by intellectual trickery that covers it up) is very dangerous – the fake carriers of goodness create much more evil than self-conscious (dedicated) evil-doers. The moral impostors innocently create evil in the name of defending and disseminating the good.

Christianity, A Biblical, Historical, and Theological Guide for Students

The birth of Christianity, discovering what happened in the years immediately after the execution of Jesus

The historical figure of Jesus

The Emergence of Christianity, Classical Traditions in Contemporary Perspective

Christianity, An Introduction