How Master Mou Removes Our Doubts

·期刊原文

How Master Mou Removes Our Doubts: A Reader-Response Study
and Translation of the Mou-tzu Li-huo lun

By John P. Keenan

Philosophy East & West

V. 46 (July 1996) pp. 426-427

Copyright 1996 by University of Hawaii Press

p.426

The Mou-tzu Li-huo lun purports to be a dialogue between a Chinese convert to Buddhism, Master Mou, and one or more unnamed critics. Mou, who has taken up residence in Chiao-chou (modern Hanoi) during the chaos that has accompanied the dissolution of Han China following the death of the Emperor Ling in 189 C.E., is presented, in the preface to the thirty-seven articles of the dialogue, as a gentleman-scholar well-versed in the Chinese classics. Modern scholars have classified the text as Buddhist apologetics and have disputed over the historicity of Mou

p.427

and the date of the text. In the study that accompanies his translation, How Master Mou Removes Our Doubts, John P. Keenan proposes to set aside questions of historical validity and adopts instead "a Reader-Response approach," which asks how the text was designed to influence its readers.

With this question in mind, the modern reader is forced to confront the fact that Mou offers no defense of specifically Buddhist doctrines -- dependent co-arising, the Four Noble Truths, and the way of the bodhisattvas. Apart from legends about the life of the Buddha, Mou draws exclusively on Chinese sources, the Confucian and Taoist canons, to meet objections to certain beliefs (the necessity of death and the doctrine of rebirth) and practices (shaving the head, celibacy, and renunciation of wealth) of Buddhists. No effort is made to establish the truth of Buddhist doctrines.

The aim, Keenan concludes, is to show Chinese how they can be Buddhists and remain Chinese -- how indeed they can read their own classics "in the light of the Buddha Path." The text "is a hermeneutical essay and not an apologetic tract" (pp. 24-25). Accordingly, Keenan offers, along with a translation of each article, a section spelling out the "source codes" (the items of the Chinese literary tradition to which Mou alludes) and a section offering "reader-response criticism," in which the argument of the article is analyzed to determine how it was supposed to influence its reader.

A consequence of his approach, Keenan suggests, is to cast "doubt on the widely shared notion that early Chinese Buddhists simply misunderstood Buddhism because of the cultural filters they possessed" (p. 8). This conclusion, however, rests in part on one of those questions of historical authenticity that Keenan proposed to set aside. Keenan is content (p. 57) with the possibility that Mou-tzu is a fictional character (created by the now unknown author of the text), but he clearly favors the view that the text was written not long after the time in which it is set and endeavors at several points to neutralize evidence which suggests that the text was written at a much later date. If, however, the text was written well after the introduction of Buddhism into China -- the first reference to it in another source is nearly three centuries after the time in which it is set -- then the text does not offer a window on the early reception of Buddhism in China.