With these and other such borrowings from India entering through land and sea routes, there arrived myriad beliefs and practices that became part of the Chinese cultural life. These practices in effect had, in the author’s view, a stagnating influence on the normal growth of Chinese society. They included ‘the ideas of the world as unreal, of life as painful and empty, of sex as unclean, of the family as an impediment to spiritual attainment, of celibacy and mendicancy as necessary to the Buddhist order, of alms giving as a supreme form of merit, of love extended to all sentient beings, of vegetarianism, of the most severe forms of asceticism, of words and spells as having miraculous power—these are only a few drops in that vast flux of Indian religious and cultural invasion’ (1936: 225/672).
Buddhism, even before it came to China, had already developed into a powerful popular religion and begun to gradually permeate among the people in spite of very little imperial patronage until the second century. For Hu, this was the reason for Buddhism growing in China mostly as ‘a popular religion of the poor and the lowly’.
In the absence of early significant efforts to make it amenable to Chinese conditions, it was accepted in the Mahayana form in which it entered China and permeated Chinese society. It hardly raised any controversy at the local level as it had already proven itself elsewhere. In their religious enthusiasm, Hu writes, ‘the Chinese people soon came to look to India as “the land of the Buddha”, and even as “the Western Heaven” from which nothing but the great truths could come. Everything that came from the “Western Heaven” must have a reason and commanded acceptance’ (1936: 226/673). China thus experienced exceptional religious fervour and fanaticism. This negated any rational discussion or thinking from the Chinese perspective.
Buddhism thus finally became so strongly rooted in China that it could not be removed even by periodic persecution. It totally permeated Chinese life and society and continued to Indianise Chinese life, thought and institutions even after it had become extinct in its mother country, India. Until the encounter with European civilisation, it was the only significant source of cultural borrowing in China, and through China, in Korea and Japan. Such an overwhelming influence of Buddhism accounted for the inability of China to rise up to the contemporary challenges of modernity, Hu felt.
Yet, how did a ‘barbarian country’ conquer an ancient civilisation in spite of so many fundamental differences? Hu Shih notes five major differences between the Indian Buddhist and Chinese Confucian beliefs. First, the Buddhist negation of life, leading sometimes to self-destruction or immolation in its extreme fanatic expression of supreme sacrifice for a better afterlife, was contrary to the Chinese Confucian exaltation of life and to the highest value and respect accorded to the existing physical form of the human body.7 Second, the practice of celibacy that witnessed a phenomenal rise in the number of monks and nuns was directly opposed to Confucian emphasis on family relations and posterity. Third, the alms-mendicancy practised by the Buddhist was considered ‘parasitic’ and unacceptable by the Chinese-Confucians who emphasised self-reliance and independence. Monks and nuns amassing enormous wealth for their monastic order in fact were like the ‘merchant class’, loathed by the Confucians for not doing any ‘productive labour work’. Next, the ‘other-worldly’ outlook of the Buddhists not only negated the worth of one’s current life, but also directed the individual to focus on attaining enough merit through meditation and other prescribed activities to be free of the cycle of life and death altogether. This was totally alien to the Chinese ethos because of its emphasis only on the self and the individual as against family and society. Finally, Hu Shih finds the unbridled, mysterious and latent Indian imaginative power ‘too much for the Chinese mind’ that emphatically believed in ‘veracity and certainty’ (1936: 230/677).