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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. |