Pas de boissons alcoolisées, pas de viande : une particularité du bouddhisme chinois vue à travers les manuscrits de Dunhuang

摘要

While the prohibition of alcohol is an important feature of the teaching of the Buddha, the interdict relating to meat has a more complex history and is not put into practice by all the schools of Buddhism. But in China, the two prohibitions were linked together, at least since the beginning of the VIth century. As this process was properly Chinese, an attempt to justify it was made by the composition of new texts. The purpose of this article is to examine some of the apocrypha thus written in order to see how they differ from the expositions of the vinaya in their definition of the faults that are to be avoided and how they relied on certain Chinese values, like the wuchang, to diffuse elementary principles of Chinese morality among the Chinese population. This study will focus on one text, the Dafang guang Huayan shi'e pin jing, which was discovered among the Dunhuang manuscripts and has been partly engraved and illustrated in Dazu, Sichuan. But other apocrypha like for example the false Sūtra of Angulimāla, Yangjue mo jing, the Sūtra of the Teaching on the immeasurable great Compassion, Foshuo wuliang daci jiao jing, will be also discussed.