동아시아 불교사상사 연구의 한 반성 - 개념의 이미지와 역사적 현실 사이의 간극 -

Abstract

In this paper, I clarified how thoroughly existing research of the history of Buddhist thoughts in East Asia have explicated their relation with the historical reality. Studying the history of Buddhist thoughts, we cannot always find the representative ideas or the period images represented by the idea out of the specific time coincident with the historical reality. I focused my examination on two examples in this paper. The first example is the image of Buddhist ‘filial duty’ emphasized in many different ways in the history of Chinese Buddhism. The idea of Buddhist filial duty is generally thought and described to be coincident with the Chinese traditional idea of filial duty. However, we feel the image of the Chinese idea is the base for ruling idea and social order. So, I pointed out that the idea of Buddhist filial duty, different from the Chinese traditional, was accepted as the ethical, universal, and individual idea. For the second illustration, I examined if the idea of Buddha Nature and Tathāgatagarbha, or representative thoughts in the Period of Northern and Southern Dynasties, were accepted as their original idea of equality in those days. Unfortunately, it was the late time of the Period of Northern and Southern Dynasties that these thoughts began to be understood as their original ideas of equality, and it must be the late 7th century to find them spread to the whole society of China. In conclusion, I explicated that the images of major ideas and the historical images of the ideas described by the research of the history of thoughts do not always coincide with the historical reality, and thus, that many things about the study of the history of thoughts and the descriptions through the research need to be re-examined.