Rethinking the Taxonomic Category “Sect/School” (<i>Zong</i> 宗) in the Construction of Modern Buddhism in China—Focusing on Hešeri Rushan’s <i>Eight Schools and Two Practices</i> (“<i>Ba-Zong-Er-Xing</i> 八宗二行”)

This paper explores the origin and role of the Buddhist taxonomic category “<i>zong</i> 宗” (“sect” or “school”) in the formation of modern Buddhism in China. It does so by examining a highly significant late-Qing Buddhist text titled <i>Ba-zong-er-xing</i> 八宗二行 (<i>Eight Schools and Two Practices</i>), which the author discovered recently in Japan. Authored by the 19th-century Manchu bannerman official Hešeri Rushan 赫舍裏如山, <i>Eight Schools and Two Practices</i> had a direct influence on the prominent Chinese lay Buddhist Yang Wenhui (1837–1911)’s <i>Shi-zong-lue-shuo</i> 十宗略说 (<i>Brief Outline of the Ten Schools</i>) (1913), which subsequently became the most important narrative model, known as the ten-school model, for describing Chinese Buddhist history in modern times. Historians have long recognized that Yang Wenhui’s <i>Brief Outline of the Ten Schools</i> (1913) was influenced by the medieval Japanese text <i>hasshū kōyō</i> 八宗綱要 (<i>Essentials of the Eight Schools</i>) composed by the 13th-century Japanese monk Gyōnen. Identifying, in detail, Hešeri Rushan’s influence on Yang Wenhui sheds light on how a narrative model for Buddhism in its national form grew out of trans-national intellectual sharing and interactions, and how Chinese Buddhism emerged from the interactive and mutually enabling Sino-Japanese discursive field of the 19th century. Gyōnen, Rushan, and Yang Wenhui all used the category <i>zong</i>, referring to both doctrine and school/sect, to organize narratives of Buddhist history. Their uses were, however, different. Gyōnen’s conception of <i>zong</i> (<i>shū</i> in Japanese) was fixed and exclusive, whereas <i>zong</i> for Rushan and Yang meant more of a mobile, nonexclusive identity. Without knowledge of Japanese Buddhism, Rushan made creative use of <i>zong</i> for describing the history and current condition of Chinese Buddhism, thereby superseding the traditional framework of lineage, doctrine, and precept, or <i>zong</i> 宗, <i>jiao</i> 教, <i>lu</i> 律. Rushan’s <i>zong</i> provided the necessary prerequisite knowledge for Yang Wenhui to understand Gyōnen’s theories, which he studied for constructing his own historical narrative and vision for modern Buddhism.