ZenExperience-obooko-rel0025

These emigres were disillusioned with the social ideas of
Confucianism and ready for a solace of the spirit. Thus they
turned for comfort to Buddhist ideas, but using Neo-Taoist
terminology and often treating Buddhism more as a subject for
salon speculations than as a religion. By translating Buddhism
into a Neo-Taoist framework, these southern intellectuals
effectively avoided having to grapple with the new ideas in
Buddhist metaphysics.
In North China, the Buddhists took advantage of the new
absence of competing Confucianists to move into ruling circles
and assume the role of the literate class. They preached a simple
form of Buddhism, often shamelessly dwelling on magic and
incantations to arouse interest among the greatest number of
followers. The common people were drawn to Buddhism, since it
provided for the first time in China a religion that seemed to care
for people's suffering, their personal growth, their salvation in an
afterlife. Thus Buddhism took hold in North China mainly because
it provided hope and magic for the masses and a political firewall
against Confucianism for the new rulers. As late as the beginning
of the fifth century, therefore, Buddhism was misunderstood and
encouraged for the wrong reasons in both north and south.
Kumarajiva, who would change all this, was born in Kucha to
an Indian father of the Brahmin caste and a mother of noble
blood. When he was seven he and his mother traveled to Kashmir
to enter Buddhist orders together. After several years of studying
the Theravada sutras, he moved on to Kashgar, where he turned
his attention to Mahayana philosophy. At age twenty we find him
back in Kucha, being ordained in the king's palace and
sharpening his understanding of the Mahayana scriptures. He
also, we are told, sharpened his non-Buddhist amorous skills,
perhaps finding consolation in the illusory world of the senses for
the hollow emptiness of sunyata.
In the year 382 or 383, he was taken captive and removed to
a remote area in northeastern China, where he was held prisoner
for almost two decades, much to the dismay of the rulers in
Ch'ang-an, who wanted nothing more than to have this teacher
(who was by then a famous Buddhist scholar) for their own. After
seventeen years their patience ran out and they sent an army to
defeat his recalcitrant captors and bring him back. He arrived in
Ch'ang-an in the year 401 and immediately began a project
crucial to the future of Chinese Buddhism. A modern scholar of
Chinese religion tells what happened next.