A short history of Buddhism men, and that was the fact that before they wrote their books their minds had been remoulded and disciplined by many years of meditation on traditional lines. China was the first large country to be penetrated by Buddhist thought. As in Japan and Tibet later on, Buddhism went through five stages, which will act as our guides for the arrangement of our material. 1. There was first a period of consolidation, marked by translations of the basic texts. 2. This was followed by a preliminary attempt at coming to terms with the material. Buddhism did not move into a spiritual vacuum, but everywhere it encountered people formed by some previous tradition - by Taoism and Confucianism in China, Shinto in Japan, Bon in Tibet. 3. After this, the next, or third phase, is marked by a more mature assimilation of the doctrine, but still largely in dependence on Indian models. In China, for instance, this took the form of either numerous, generally brief, commentaries, or of original doctrinal treatises which were passed off as translations from the Sanskrit. Two of these are very well known. The one is the famous “Awakening of Faith”, wrongly attributed to Asvaghosa, and the other the so-called Surangama Sutra, said to have been brought from Nālandā, but actually written in China by Fang Jong. 4. We now come to the fourth phase, which is perhaps the most important of all and normally took 600 years to 2
Thường được biết với tên là Đại thừa khởi tín luận, được cho là do Bồ Tát Mã Minh soạn, và do ngài Chân Đế dịch sang Hán văn vào đời nhà Lương. Nguyên bản Phạn ngữ đã bị thất lạc vào thời ngài Huyền Trang, và được ngài khôi phục từ bản dịch chữ Hán. Có lẽ do điều này mà tác giả đưa ra nhận xét này. 3 Không hiểu tác giả đề cập đến bản văn nào, nhưng chắc chắn không phải là bản kinh Thủ Lăng Nghiêm đang lưu hành hiện nay, vì bản này do ngài Bát-thích-mật-đế dịch từ Phạn ngữ vào đời nhà Đường.
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