Cross-cultural Understanding

According to the Nihon shoki, an ancient Japanese chronicle compiled by imperial order in 720 CE, Buddhism came to Japan in 538 CE during the reign of Kinmei-Tenno, the twenty-ninth emperor of Japan. Syong-Myong, the king of the Korean state of Paikche, sent a mission to Japan seeking alliance against hostile neighbours. Among the gifts sent to the Japanese emperor were a gold-plated bronze image of Buddha, several volumes of Buddhist sutras, and a letter in which Syong-Myong praised the merits of spcreading the new religion. Emperor Kinmei-Tenno sought the opinion of his ministers on adopting the new religion. The conservative Nakatomi and Mononobe families firmly opposed such a move as they felt worship of a foreign kami, deity, would bring the wrath of the indigenous kami on the empire. However, on the advice of Iname no Sukune of the powerful Soga family in charge of foreign relations with Korea, the emperor decided to accept the scriptures and regard the image ‘tentatively’ as an object of worship. For this purpose, Iname no Sukune’s house was turned into a temple.

Unfortunately, no sooner had this new temple been established than an epidemic erupted in the country and continued to worsen till the emperor was forced to have the new Buddha image thrown into a canal and the temple burnt down. Nevertheless, within a year’s time, a camphor log was found floating on the ocean accompanied by miraculous voices singing Buddhist chants, and the emperor had two Buddhist images made out of the log.

If this miracle was not enough to convince Kinmei-Tenno of the power of the new religion, there were also other forces aiding this acceptance. The Soga clan was ‘strongly in favour of a policy of rapidly absorbing Chinese knowledge and ideas, since the Japanese state then emerging lagged far behind its mighty continental neighbour in culture and political organization’. And Buddhism had become an important part of Chinese culture—spiritually, economically, and politically—by the sixth century.

The entry of Buddhism into China was itself marked by significant cross-cultural tensions. Buddhism reached Han China along the silk routes from Central Asia in the first century. It had earlier been taken from India to Central Asia by monks and merchants. That it received a fairly friendly reception in Central Asia was probably due to the cosmopolitan nature of this area—it was the meeting place of Kushana, Parthian, Indo-Scythian, Sogdian, Chinese, and Indian elements. But Han China was different: ‘A colossal empire and a millenarian civilization, dominated by very clearly defined political and social ideas and norms that had taken shape in the course of centuries. It was ruled by an educated elite in which the feelings of cultural identity and superiority were very strongly developed, and it was based on an ideal of total political and social order that left little room for the propagation of a doctrine of individual salvation.’ And to top it all, for the proud Hans, Buddhism was of ‘barbaric’ origin.

As luck would have it, the Han Empire soon disintegrated. Following the ‘barbarian’ conquest of the north, China fell into disunion and political chaos for over three hundred years, and this very period saw the marked spread of Buddhism across China. Buddhism now provided a complement, if not an alternative, to the official Confucian ideology that had apparently failed the state.
Non-Chinese rulers also patronized Buddhism as a counter to indigenous ideologies and as a means to ‘prosperity and military victories by means of prayers and spells’.

Confucianism was not the sole challenge to Buddhism in China. There was also Taoism, ‘which was, in a more individualistic way, directed towards tangible goals: the acquisition of bodily immortality, and harmony with the concrete forces of nature’. From the Tao viewpoint ‘the Buddhist rejection of all existence, and especially the Mahayana doctrine of the utter unreality of all phenomena was easily regarded as a kind of morbid nihilism and identified with yin, the principle of darkness and death’. Ideas of karma, rebirth, and nirvana, ‘which in India had
been universally accepted [as] parts of religious culture, in China became bizarre novelties, fundamentally different from, and not seldom incompatible with, well-established Chinese notions’.

But there were also Taoist elements that were akin to Buddhist concepts and served as channels for the easy comprehension and spread of Buddhist ideas. There were Taoist deities thought to guide believers from their supernal dwellings, and many Taoist terms were used by early translators to render Buddhist ideas into Chinese. According to a Han source, Buddha was soon seen as an incarnation of Lao-tzu: ‘Lao-tzu after his departure to the west (an old legendary theme) went to the “barbarians” and manifested himself there as the Buddha, in order to convert them to a primitive doctrine of his own making, a kind of “Taoism made easy”, adapted to the low intellectual level of Indian savages’!

These snippets provide valuable insights into the diverse forces that characterize all cross-cultural interaction. If the Chinese notion of Indians as ‘barbarians’ was only a reflection of their ignorance of contemporary Indian culture, we still remain largely unfamiliar with cultures and religions other than our own, even though we live on a globe that is supposed to be shrinking daily with the inflation
of knowledge and connectivity. Worse still, we are often uninformed about our own religion and culture. To understand religious behaviour we need to be familiar with traditions. A range of Islamic practices, for instance, are simply a respectful imitation of Sunna, Prophet Muhammad’s actions. As Akbar S Ahmed writes: ‘Across the world his followers would imitate the Prophet with affection in every kind of activity—abstaining from alcohol and pig’s meat, colouring a man’s beard with henna, using green for clothes and flags, enjoying honey, talking softly, eating moderately and sleeping little.’

The cultural contexts in which religious figures and their teachings are set are repeatedly re-appropriated by succeeding generations. Daniel- Rops’ Jesus and His Times argues: ‘Pious usage and the historic sense alike agree that we represent Jesus in the surroundings which were familiar to him. … There is value in every detail of the visible world which surrounded the corporeal being of the familiar presence which is, in so many aspects, indissolubly woven into the most secret places of our being.’

Understanding these cultural contexts can also be profoundly educative. Remarking on the wealth of detail in the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, Aldous Huxley observes: ‘To Western readers, it is true, this fidelity and this wealth of detail are sometimes a trifle disconcerting; for the social, religious and intellectual frames of reference within which Sri Ramakrishna did his thinking and expressed his feelings were entirely Indian. But after the first few surprises and bewilderments, we begin to find something peculiarly stimulating and instructive about the very strangeness and, to our eyes, the eccentricity of the man revealed to us in “M’s” narrative. What a scholastic philosopher would call the “accidents” of Ramakrishna’s life were intensely Hindu and therefore, so far as we in the West are concerned, unfamiliar and hard to understand; its “essence”, however, was intensely mystical and therefore universal. To read through these conversations in which mystical doctrine alternates with an unfamiliar kind of humour, and where discussions of the oddest aspects of Hindu mythology give place to the most profound and subtle utterances about the nature of Ultimate Reality, is in itself a liberal education in humility, tolerance and suspense of judgement.’ These last-mentioned qualities are also fundamental requisites for genuine cross-cultural understanding.