Song Dynasty Research Paper

Chinese Buddhism was more than eight centuries old by the time the Song Dynasty began in 960. The bustling towns and cities that developed during the Song Dynasty was full of nuns and monks who were a part of the street scene, all over the Chinese heartland the landscape was full of pagodas and monasteries, domesticating Buddhism. The Buddhism that came about during the Song Dynasty was considerably unlike that of the Tang dynasty. New developments of Song Buddhism that became well known was the dominant form of elite monastic Buddhism during the Song period, which was the growth of Chan Buddhism and in the twentieth century there was a dispute between Caodong and Linji traditions of Chan that competed on approaches to the enlightenment and

“Huizong reiterates the Chan school’s version of the enlightenment of the Buddha and the story of how the Buddha transmitted the eye storehouse of the true dharma (zhengfa yanzang) to his disciple mahākāśyapa (d.u.).” Huizong instituted the first persecution of Buddhism during the Song dynasty due to his fascination of Daoism. Huizong was not the first emperor to write the transmission that explained the Chan schools worldview because emperor Renzong wrote one in 1036. The very first transmission history written in the Song dynasty was the Chuandeng lu and would be the most significant. By the late eleventh century Chan Buddhism was integrated into elite culture. Well known to the Song literati, Huizong felt it was unnecessary to spell out the early history of the Chan school’s because the literati had their own version. Huizong’s transmission history of the Chan school was divided into five traditions and he would say that the two that dominated the world was the traditions of Linji and Yunmen. The Chan linage would reach its final form when it would go from Buddha Sakuamuni to twenty-eight Indian patriarchs and then to Bodhidharma who would take the transmission to China. After the transmission arrived in China it would pass through five different

Taizu would end the destruction of monasteries that Latter Zhou ordered before Taizu; even though, during the Song there was a ban on building new monasteries, this ban was ignored and very rarely enforced. The Song dynasty’s policies were characterized by Taizu’s early decrees on Buddhism. In various ways the Song court saw Buddhism as a threat to their state so they limited its power but they also encouraged Buddhist institutions and clergy in order to gain benefits of Buddhism. “While most Song emperors sought to distance themselves from the Buddhist establishment, it is also clear that on a personal level a number of them, like so many members of the educated elite, found Buddhism to offer tantalizing, even satisfying, religious and philosophical ideas and practices.” In a number of different ways the imperial government would involve itself with Buddhist monasteries because of the powerful benefits that Buddhism was said to possess. The government would give money or grants of goods and land to famous monasteries. Other ways that the government involved themselves was by inviting monks to court where they would be honored with names and purple robes. When it came to the translation of Buddhist scripture the state was actively involved that included the Buddhist canon. When it came to imperial tombs, Buddhist monasteries took care of it, and