Chinese Encounters with Other Civilizations

This article is a comparison of two cases of introducing foreign faiths in China. One case is that of Buddhism being brought from Central Asia and then directly from India. This Indian faith was adopted by commoners and then gradually accepted by the elite throughout a period of three centuries. The scholasticism developed in the Confucian orthodoxy created an intellectual vacuum for Buddhism to fill. It took Buddhism a full 1000 years to be sinicized as finally Zen-Buddhism and Pure-land become popular in China. Another case is that of the Catholic missionary activities in the Ming-Ching (Ming-Qing) period. The Jesuits made efforts to convert Chinese intellectual and members of the ruling class to accept Christianity. They adopted Chinese vocabularies to explain Christianity to the Chinese. The great Controversy of Rituals in the 17th century between the Ching court and the Catholic Church caused restriction of missionary activities in China. In the Ming period, Confucianism of the Wang Yan-ming school was in full strength and Catholics did not have an intellectual vacancy to exploit.