DBQ: The Spread Of Buddhism In China

DBQ

The spread of Buddhism in China seemed to be positively looked upon, for the most part, by the people of China. The spreading of Buddhism was not a short event. In fact, Buddhist influence was brought to China by the first century C.E and continued to expand for several centuries. The Chinese had different reactions to this, some positive, some negative. The basic belief of Buddhism is that if you serve Buddha, and obey Buddhist “laws”, you will be enlightened (doc 2). As a result of a Chinese scholar saying this, many more people would want to convert to Buddhism because scholars are considered superior and wiser so this guy must know what he’s talking about. Buddhism is a feel good kind of religion. Many things are full of sorrow but the way you stop sorrow is by not wanting things (doc 1). The Buddha created this religion, Buddhism. He wanted to share with his followers how to be happy in life, that Buddhism is a positive thing. Documents 1 and 2 both explain some basic teaching of Buddhism and how it’s
not very hard to be happy, why not convert to Buddhism? There have been disputes over how Buddhism eliminates the joy of having children and wives, when it comes to monks.
But monks serve a very important purpose, that make them happy. A monk accumulates goodness and wisdom in exchange for having kids and a wife (doc 3). With Buddhism, there are people that have children, and continue the circle of life, and there are people that collect knowledge to share with their people to keep society up to date per say. There is also a negative side to this. Since so many people have converted to becoming monks and nuns, who is doing the necessary work, like working the fields, or making clothes. According to (doc 6), monks and nuns are basically a bunch of freeloaders who don’t contribute to society. Tang Emperor Wu is angry about this because money is coming from HIS pocket to pay for these “freeloaders”. Documents 3 and 6, although opposite responses, both talk about how monks and nuns affect the Chinese
society. Buddhism was also seen as “barbaric”. That people offer too much to the Buddha and would cut off an arm or leg to offer (doc 6). Han Yu feels that Buddhist followers are suffering. Him being a Confucian scholar, he says Buddha does not resemble anything of China and is barbaric. Basically, he thinks Buddhism is evil. Nonetheless, all Chinese religious leaders should be respected. They all created religions that kept an orderly society so they should each be respected (doc 5). Documents 4 and 5 contrast each other showing the views of a Confucian scholar and a Buddhist scholar. How the Buddhist scholar thinks all the religions are true and the Confucian scholar does not tolerate Buddhism one bit. In conclusion, more people than not thought saw the spread of Buddhism as a positive thing for them. The negative responses were both greedy, know it all Tang officials who had no idea what they were talking about. Additional document from common people, or peasants, would of helped a lot. It would help because we could see what the majority of the population thought instead of just scholars, which there aren’t as much. Another document that would help would be a document from a woman. First of all, women make up about half of their population, and second, we could learn how Buddhism affected the lives of the women, which is much different from the life of a man.