How Buddhism Acquired a Soul on the Way to China

摘要

This is yet another book among many which deal with what came to be called the doctrine of non-self (anatta/anatman) and is regarded as characteristic of Buddhism, in antithesis of the doctrine of atman, which, in the author's words, "posits a permanent agent going through samsara". This, the author explains, is the stance in the Hindu tradition, in which the popular criterion for distinguishing between orthodox and heterodox movements has been whether or not they acknowledge the existence of atman and brahman". The gist of the author's thesis is to show, as the title of the book indicates, how, through interpolations and shifting of meaning of words in translations of Buddhist texts into Chinese, a notion of a permanent agent passing through successive deaths and births emerged and came to be widely accepted and how, in the process of assimilating Indian Buddhism, the Chinese created their own form of Buddhism.