Abstract
As is well known, a group of Christians from the Church of the East arrived in Chang’an, the capital city of Tang China, in 635. This was a turning point not only for medieval Chinese religious history, but also for the study of cultural exchange between China and her neighbors. The Chinese Christian manuscripts from Dunhuang and the Christian stele in Xi’an have long served as crucial sources for contemporary scholars. Later, the discovery of fragments of a stone pillar with inscribed Christian text in Luoyang in 2006 and a number of Chinese Christian texts that were published in 2011 as part of Tonkō hikyū Vol. 5 in the Kyōu Shooku Library collection have both provided fresh impetus to the study of the Church of the East in Tang China.
When the Christian priests in the Tang elaborated upon their own ideas and beliefs in their translation and propagation efforts, they borrowed and paraphrased many terms and practices from the Confucian, Taoist, and particularly Buddhist doctrines. They did this to make the ideas in the original Christian texts fit with the Chinese concepts, and to make their translations easier to understand. This paper focuses on how the Tang Christians made use of Buddhist texts and rituals, with an emphasis on the Sanwei mengdu zan (Gloria in Excelsis Deo), Zun jing, and Xuanyuan zhiben jing, showing how the Christian scriptures assimilated to the Buddhist rituals and liturgical texts.
Keywords
the Church of the East/Nestorian Christianity, Sanwei mengdu zan (Gloria in Excelsis Deo), Zun jing, Xuanyuan zhiben jing, Buddhist liturgical texts
Cite
Citations are generated automatically from bibliographic data as a convenience, and may not be complete or accurate.
