How Buddhism Acquired a Soul on the Way to China tells the story of the
spread of Buddhist religious thinking and practice from India to China
and how, along the way, a religion was changed. While Indian Buddhists
had constructed their ideas of self by means of empiricism,
anti-Brahmanism and analytic reasoning, Chinese Buddhists did so by
means of non-analytic insights, utilising pre-established epistemology
and cosmogony. Furthermore, many specific Buddhist ideas were
transformed when exchanged from an Indian to a Chinese context, often
through the work of translators concept-matching Buddhist and Daoist
terms. One of the key changes was the Chinese reinterpretation of the
concept of shen - originally an agent of thought which died with the
body - into an eternal essence of human spirit, a soul. Though the
notion of an imperishable soul was later disputed by Chinese Buddhist
scholars the idea of a permanent agent of perception flourished in
China. This historical analysis of the concept of self as it developed
between Indian and Chinese Buddhism will be of interest to readers of
Buddhist Philosophy as well as the History of Ideas.