당대(唐代) 경교(景敎) 일신(一神) 개념의 중국적 변용(變容) 연원(淵源) 고찰

Abstract

The Chinese Nestorian gained the official approval from Tang Dynasty at AD 635 and conducted positively their missionary works. However, their activities had been maintained only for 200 years and since then they disappeared in China. Chinese Nestorian tried to plant their christology to China by utilizing some important concepts of the Chinese Buddhism that already succeeded in adaptation in China. The reason that they made use of the Chinese Buddhist ideas is thought that they found the similarity between the concepts of Maitreya and Amitabha Buddha and their own concept of ‘One God(一神)’. However, the concepts of Maitreya and Amitabha Buddha cannot be the main Buddhist concepts in terms of the Early Indian Buddhism that is based on the theory of anātman, because those concepts were developed later in central Asia where the Zoroastrian sense of God had been strongly believed in for a long time and might give a great influence on the religious Buddhism. Besides the Early Chinese Buddhists embraced the idea of Maitreya and Amitabha Buddha as an absolute being, established newly the Buddhist ‘doctrine of the immortality of the soul(神不滅論)’, which is thought to root in the central Asian’s shamanistic belief in the soul. They explained those concepts mentioned above by utilizing the Neo-Taoist simple reductionism or the Taoist’s affirmation of paradox. This paper discloses that the Chinese Nestorian exposed some serious problems when they explained their christology to Chinese people which was similar to what the early Chinese Buddhists did, because they could not have a deep understanding of Chinese Buddhism. This resulted in their failing to deliver Nestorian christology properly to Chinese people. In other words, they could not expect the problems occurred by following the Chinese Buddhist way of explanation on Maitreya and Amitabha Buddha when describing the concept of ‘One God(一神)’.