Mea maxima vikalpa: Repentance, meditation, and the dynamics of liberation in medieval Chinese Buddhism, 500--650 CE

This thesis investigates how repentance rituals developed from being standard rituals of purification into being soteriologically sufficient practices for the attainment of Buddhahood and why this became problematic for certain Chinese Buddhists during the late Six Dynasties period. These rituals were then integrated with meditative rituals into an overarching meditative paradigm, first in northern China and slightly later in the south. Buddhist discourses that then accepted, rejected, or modified this paradigm not only allow us to map regional varieties of Buddhist practice, but such discourses also affected the course of ritual and doctrinal debate, and even lineage formation, through the Tang, and into the Song, dynasty.; To investigate the soteriological dimension of Buddhist repentance rituals and the regional varieties of Buddhism in Medieval China new methodological approaches for the study of Buddhist discourse and practice were necessary. First, repentance rituals were investigated in terms of performance and (Austinian) performativity. Second, in order to uncover regional varieties of Buddhism and Buddhist discourse, we expand upon Antonio Gramsci's idea that discourses are constructed over a specific terrain.; By investigating the ritual and meditative use of repentance rituals in sixth century China this thesis makes significant contributions in several areas. First, the use of performance and performativity may be appropriate for investigating not only Chinese ritual texts, but also for analyzing Chinese literary and philosophical texts. Second, the use of repentance rituals allows us to differentiate different types of Buddhist practice by region. Third, by reconstructing certain regional forms of Buddhist meditative and liturgical practice we can begin to recover a lost chapter from the history of Chinese Buddhism. In northeastern China, reconstructing the practices of the Ten Stages lineage permits us to see the centrality of this lineage in the development of sixth and seventh century Buddhist practice and doctrine. It may be the missing hub that allows us to connect such movements as Yogācāra (she lun), the Three Stages teaching, and early Huayan. Finally, in sixth century northeastern China (and in the southeast as well) the practice of repentance rituals developed into soteriologically sufficient techniques for the attainment of Buddhahood; attempts to resolve this issue through the 13th century were not entirely successful.