Chinese Buddhist Historiography and Orality
by Tanya Storch
Probably the most common motif seen throughout all early biographies of Chinese Buddhists is the search for Buddhist texts. In fact, this motif is so common that nobody bothers to inquire what compelled the Chinese to look so vigorously for authoritative written texts while receiving their doctrine from the West? Two major conclusions may be drawn by closely considering this phenomenon:
- The process of transmission was overwhelmingly oral;
- The Chinese were strongly disappointed with it.
If so, the next question arises: why would they be disappointed? Possibly because they already had an idea of how true doctrine should be transmitted, and oral it was not. If we look at the earliest extant catalogue of Chinese classics, Hanshu "Yiwenzhi", we see an orientation towards written text as the best means for insuring the accuracy and fidelity of the highest wisdom in the process of its formulation. On the one hand we are still able to see clear evidence of many classics having been transmitted orally, but on the other hand we can observe the idealization of their written versions already having been made, especially because Confucius himself appropriated the written text for the expression of his teaching.
The above statement gains evidence from another angle -- the documents of the polemics between pro-Buddhists and anti-Buddhists collected in Hongming ji....