Buddhism ”··“…···········································“

Then we have the l ast of the philosophies or reli gions, Bu ddhism . Buddhism, when it came to China was often seen as just a reincarnated

Lao Zi.

That was the early way that they acknowledged Bu ddhism, that i t’s just

Lao Zi

reincarnated . Buddhism, when it came to China, became transformed . There are many schools of Buddhism, just as there are many schools of

Daoism,

just as there are many schools of Confucianism.

Buddhism, in terms of the medical history, is very important because it’ s due to Bu ddhism that you have the development o f hospital s, hospices and orphanages. This is because it is the idea of relieving suffering for the masses. That is not to deny that the first hospital in China was developed already in the

Han

Dynasty, prior to the influence of Buddhism. But, with Buddhism, you have a lot more hospitals developing in China. (Actually a lot of that declined by the

Qing

Dynasty. So by the time foreign countries came into China, they were kind of amazed why China did not really have many hospitals . It is because by the

Qing

Dynasty, hospitals were no longer under the control of the government. Hospi tals became a private entities, under private ownership . So they did not have the support of the government and as a result a lot of hospitals closed down by the

Qing

Dynasty.)

If you were to visit China, if you di d time travel and you went back during the time when Buddhism is at i ts height, which is in the

Tang

Dynasty, you would see that there were a lot of hospitals under the patronage of the Imperial courts. In fact, because the

Tang

Dynasty, which is in the 7th Century A.CE., i s often seen as the height of Buddhism in China, this is when Zen Buddhism developed in China . Zen Buddhi sm or

Cha n

Buddhism in China developed during the

Ta ng

Dynasty . Again, the Chinese were exposed to Buddhism by the time you get into the 3rd and 4th Century A.CE., but Buddhism reaches its height in the 7th Century. This is also where

Xuan Zang

went to India to start gathering books from the Buddhist writings and bringing it back to China. His exploit has been romanticized into the Journey to the West, the Mo时也y King. That’s the Journey to the West. And the monk that is in that story is

Xuan Zang,

and he is an actual person who lived in the 7th Century, who made the pilgrimage to India to collect Buddhist su tras, writings, and brought them back to China.

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I do have to say that there was one period of time during the

Ta n g

Dynasty when Buddhist and

Daoist

monks and nuns were forbidden to practice medi cine. The reason why is because during this period of time, there was already the beginning of the controversy between the

Ling Pai

S争 派 and the Ru

Pai 儒 派

. L i n g Pai

means the Bell School or the Group of Bell people, because what they would be essentially were monks who would go from village to vill age and they would have a stick that they would carry with a bell that would ring. When the bell rings, you know that these monks were in town and a lot of these were healers. So you would go out and get healed by these Buddhist or

Daois t

nuns or priests and so forth. And we mentioned earlier that there was the establishment of medical schools. They are not really major schools. They are very small schools. It’s only really in the

Song

Dynasty that v,re have the big Imperial School, but there was already some establishment of medical schools taking place, especially during the

Sui

Dynasty in the 5th Centutry

A.CE.

The existence of a medical school means that now what you have are people that are li terates. And the literary practitioners are refered to as

R

u

Pai.

The

Ru Pai

儒 派 are the school of practitioners that are trained in schools. So

they are the scholars, Confucian schol ars, and what they are basically going to do is they are going to tell the Emperor that members of the

Ling Pai

are illiterates. These are illiterates, these monks, these nuns. Remember, in the old days, why would you go to a temple and become a nun or a monk? It’s usually considered in a Confuci an society that when you

Zhu f ia,

when you leave home, which means you become a monk, and that’s what the word means in Chinese, that usually means that you must be disenchanted with life, that means you must have been so severely disappointed. If not, you must have been an orphan that you would go to temples. So to them, these people that are entering temples are usually people that really see life as a very negative thing and they are 廿ying to change by going into spirituality, or they are orphaned . So they usually don’t have very much edu cation. So consequently, when you have these medical school s developing, they are going to say that medicine should be practiced primarily by the Ru

Pai

and not by the

Ling

钟 ， which means again Bell,

Pai

派 ， the Bell School .

Of course, that doesn’t l ast too long because while the Emperor has the ears of these Confuci an scholars, remember, Buddhism still dominates. And then later on they will change that Imperial order so the monks are allowed to practice medicine again . But, in the

Song

Dynasty, you will see that that is definitely going to take place, where more and more they are going to get rid of apprenticeships, or downgrade apprenticeships, and 出at you have to really go to an Imperi al school to learn. What this means is that once you go to school, school, as you all know, if you go to NESA, if you go to any school, they are going to have mandated curriculum . Everyone has to learn something that everyone agrees on. That keeps you in the community. And that mandated curriculum that takes place in the

Song

Dynasty, means that everyone believes the same thing .

As

you do that, you have fewer and fewer traditions, because everyone believes the same thing, then you have to stay more and more in that

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style, as we know it in the West, we call it the ICM tradition. That’s a mandated curriculum .

In document Jeffrey_Yuen_-_Early_Chinese_Medicine.pdf (Page 49-51)