老子化胡經

Lǎozǐ huàhú jīng 老子化胡經

The Sūtra of Lǎo-zǐ Converting the Barbarians anonymous (Daoist apocryphal text, preserved in fragmentary Dunhuang manuscript)

About the work

A two-juan Daoist apocryphal text, anomalously preserved in the Buddhist canon’s gǔyì bù 古逸部 at T54 no. 2139 from Dunhuang manuscript witnesses. The work is one of the principal documents of the centuries-long Buddhist-Daoist polemic in pre-modern China: it claims that Lǎozǐ 老子 (the legendary founder of Daoism) traveled west after his departure from Zhōu through the Hángǔ pass, journeyed to the Western Regions and India, and there became the Buddha — making Buddhism a derivative form of Daoism and the Buddha himself a transformation of Lǎozǐ. This claim, the so-called huàhú 化胡 (“converting the barbarians”) doctrine, was central to the Daoist polemical position against Buddhism from the third century onward, and was formally proscribed and ordered burned by imperial decree in 1281 under the Yuán dynasty after a final court-debate in 1258.

Prefaces

The text has no preserved auto-preface. It opens with extensive lacunae (manuscript damage indicated by □) and proceeds through fragmentary passages. The substantive content includes claims that:

• After 900 years of dwelling in Zhōu (as the imperial archivist zhùshǐ 柱史), Lǎozǐ’s “golden body” departed the West.
• He took on a silver-tooth (yínchǐ 銀齒) form, etc.
• He converted the hú (Western “barbarian”) peoples to the True Way.
• He was identical with or the cause of the Buddha’s incarnation.

Abstract

Authorship and date: anonymous. The huàhú legend itself is documented in early Chinese sources from the late-Hàn period onwards — the earliest formal text-form attribution is conventionally to Wáng Fú 王浮 of the Western Jìn (late 3rd c.), whose Lǎozǐ huàhú jīng in one juan is mentioned in the Hòu Hàn shū annotations and the Chū sānzàng jì jí. The text underwent multiple expansions through the Six Dynasties and Tang periods, eventually reaching ten juan (now lost). The present preserved fragmentary text in the Dunhuang manuscripts is a witness to one (or more) of these stages of the multi-stage textual tradition.

The complete Tang-period text was famously proscribed and ordered destroyed by the Yuán court in 1281 (after final court-debates in 1255 and 1258), making this Dunhuang manuscript one of the principal direct witnesses to the otherwise nearly-completely-lost text. notBefore = 280 (the earliest plausible date for the original Wáng Fú composition); notAfter = 1000 (the standard Dunhuang manuscript bracket; the cave was sealed ca. 1006). Catalog dynasty 唐 (here following the Buddhist canonical convention of including all pre-Sòng canonical material under “Tang”, though the textual tradition is much older and continued to develop into the Tang).

The work is one of the single most consequential pre-modern Chinese Buddhist-Daoist polemical documents — its claims defined the centuries-long Daoist anti-Buddhist polemical position and provoked extensive Buddhist refutation literature (cf. Fǎlín’s 法琳 Biàzhènglùn 辨正論, Shì Yánzōng’s 釋彥琮 Biàhuòlùn 辨惑論, etc.). Its inclusion in the Buddhist canon (rather than in the Daoist canon) is itself anomalous — the Buddhist editors evidently included it as a target-text for refutation rather than as canonical Buddhist material.

The Dunhuang manuscript witnesses to the Huàhú jīng are one of the major recovery-treasures of modern Sinology — providing the most direct surviving access to a textual tradition that the Yuán proscription nearly succeeded in erasing.

Translations and research

• Anna Seidel, Christine Mollier, Stephen R. Bokenkamp, and the modern Daoist-studies tradition — extensive treatment of the Huà-hú polemic.
• Erik Zürcher, The Buddhist Conquest of China (Brill, 1959; 3rd ed. 2007) — context for early Buddhist-Daoist polemic.
• E. H. Schafer and the early Daoist-studies tradition.
• Christine Mollier, Buddhism and Taoism Face to Face (Hawai’i, 2008) — the standard recent treatment.
• Liú Yì 劉屹, Dūn-huáng dào-jīng yǔ zhōng-gǔ dào-jiào 敦煌道經與中古道教 (Gān-sù Jiào-yù Chū-bǎn-shè, 2002) — Dunhuang Daoist-manuscript scholarship.

Other points of interest

The classification of the Huà-hú jīng in the Buddhist canon’s shì-lèi (KR6s) section — specifically as a comparative non-Buddhist text — reflects the Chinese-canonical convention of preserving polemical-target works alongside the corpus that engages with them. This convention is the same as that which preserves the Sāṃkhya-kārikā (KR6s0072) and the Vaiśeṣika Daśapadārtha-śāstra (KR6s0073) within the Buddhist canon — they are not Buddhist texts but they are texts that Buddhist scholastics engaged with, and so the canon preserved them.

Links

• DILA authority: (no preserved authority entry)
• CBETA: T54n2139
• Foundational legend: Lǎozǐ 老子 + the huàhú doctrinal claim
• Original (lost) attribution: Wáng Fú 王浮 (Western Jìn, late 3rd c.)
• Imperial proscription: Yuán dynasty edict of 1281, after court-debates of 1255 and 1258
• Companion non-Buddhist works in the Buddhist canon: KR6s0072 Sāṃkhya-kārikā, KR6s0073 Vaiśeṣika Daśapadārtha-śāstra