| This dissertation is centered around a study of the Pao-tsang lun ("Treasure Store Treatise"), a Chinese Buddhist treatise influential in Ch'an literary circles in the medieval period. In the course of trying to understand this difficult text of uncertain origin, I come to question some of the assumptions and interpretative categories which condition our perception and study of the Chinese Buddhist tradition.;The study begins with questions of date, authorship, and literary provenance. The Pao-tsang lun is traditionally attributed to the Madhyamika exegete Seng-chao (374-414), but modern scholars have argued that the text was actually composed in the eight century in an environment influenced by Ch'an ideology. Chapter 1 examines the evidence for a connection between the Pao-tsang lun, the Ch'an lineage known as Niut'ou ("Ox-head" Ch'an), and the Taoist exegetical tradition known as Ch'ung-hsuan ("Twofold Mystery"). In the process, I address the nature of Buddhist-Taoist interaction in the T'ang, and the evolution of an "gentry Taoism" in competition with "gentry Buddhism".;The dissertation then turns to broader methodological issues in the study of medieval Chinese Buddhism. I argue that Chinese Buddhism has been seriously misconstrued by the uncritical use of terms such as "syncretism," and by a hermeneutically naive conception of the process of "sinification." As a result, scholars in the field have failed to appreciate the degree to which early Chinese cosmological principles such as kan-ying ("sympathetic resonance") continued to shape the Chinese apprehension of Buddhist doctrine well into the medieval period. My analysis of the complex process by which Buddhism was naturalized by the Chinese underscores the hermeneutic confusions attendant upon a "Buddhological," as opposed to a "Sinological," approach to Chinese Buddhist phenomena.;The latter half of the dissertation comprises a translation of the Pao-tsang lun, accompanied by a running commentary exemplifying the principles elucidated in the first half of the study. |
