Mouzi Lihuolun
牟子理惑論 (Treatise of Master Mou Resolving Doubts)
Buddhism does not contradict Confucian filial piety or Daoist naturalness properly understood; each apparent conflict, a monk's shaved head, celibacy, or foreign origin, dissolves once judged by its actual effect on virtue rather than by superficial custom, so a cultivated Chinese person can adopt Buddhism without betraying native tradition.
- earliest sustained Chinese defense of Buddhism
- reconciliation of Buddhist practice with Confucian filial piety
- structured as 37 answered objections
- traditional 2nd century date disputed by modern scholarship
A dialogue in which a fictionalized 'Master Mou,' a Confucian scholar who fled south to Jiaozhi, near modern Hanoi, amid the disorder at the end of the Han and there took up Buddhism, fields 37 objections, that monks defy filial piety by leaving their families, that Buddhism is a foreign and therefore illegitimate teaching, that celibacy interrupts the ancestral line, answering each with quotations from the Confucian classics and the Daodejing to argue Buddhism's deeper compatibility with native Chinese values. Its traditional date around AD 195 is doubted by many modern scholars, who see internal evidence of significantly later composition or compilation, making the text less a contemporary record than a later argument dressed as an early one; either way it is the earliest sustained Chinese apologia for Buddhism.
Commentary
Readers' notes on this work. No account needed - be scholarly, or at least civil.
Loading commentary…