Abstract

The academic research of the Catholic priest Du Erwei generated strong responses from Buddhists. Du claimed that Buddhism was descended from earlier lunar religion—and thus, implicitly, that it embodied a “primitive” stage of religious thought. As an anthropologist and scholar affiliated with National Taiwan University, Du drew from voluminous academic sources, meaning that his theory demanded a rigorous Buddhist response. This chapter discusses Yinshun's writings from the period, which aimed at showing how fundamental Buddhist beliefs transcended history and that Christianity itself was, as Du Erwei had claimed about Buddhism, historically-derived. Modern historiographical forms thus increasingly paralleled the appeal to values, showing their importance for identity formation and as a standard for religious “truth”.

Keywords: Du Erwei, lunar religion, Pure Land, Amitābha, Moses

The Buddha said to Ānanda, “You and others like you still listen to the Dharma with conditioned minds, and therefore you fail to understand its real nature. Consider this example: suppose someone is pointing to the moon to show it to another person. That other person, guided by the pointing finger, should now look at the moon. But if he looks instead at the finger, taking it to be the moon, not only does he fail to see the moon, but he is mistaken, too, about the finger.