How Buddhism Acquired a Soul on the Way to China (Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies Monographs)

How Buddhism Acquired a Soul on the Way to China tells the story of the spread of Buddhist religious thinking and practice from India to China and how, along the way, a religion was changed. While Indian Buddhists had constructed their ideas of self by means of empiricism, anti-Brahmanism and analytic reasoning, Chinese Buddhists did so by means of non-analytic insights, utilising pre-established epistemology and cosmogony. Furthermore, many specific Buddhist ideas were transformed when exchanged from an Indian to a Chinese context, often through the work of translators concept-matching Buddhist and Daoist terms. One of the key changes was the Chinese reinterpretation of the concept of shen - originally an agent of thought which died with the body - into an eternal essence of human spirit, a soul. Though the notion of an imperishable soul was later disputed by Chinese Buddhist scholars the idea of a permanent agent of perception flourished in China. This historical analysis of the concept of self as it developed between Indian and Chinese Buddhism will be of interest to readers of Buddhist Philosophy as well as the History of Ideas. Chinese Buddhist Translation In Its Cultural Context -- The Development Of The Indian Buddhist Concept Of Self -- The Development Of The Chinese Buddhist Concept Of Self. Jungnok Park. Based On His University Of Oxford D.phil. Thesis, The Translation And Transformation Of The Buddhist Concept Of Self Between India And China, Completed In March 2008. Edited For Publication After The Author's Death By Richard Gombrich, One Of His Thesis Supervisors. Includes Bibliographical References (p. [232]-240) And Index. The book examines how the Chinese made use of raw material imported from India and added some seasoningsA" peculiar to China and developed their own recipesA" about how to construct the ideas of Buddhism.