Since Buddhism is self oriented and Chinese are family oriented , how did overcome the obstacle family oriented customs ?
What's that? Edit: I had to look that up. It's Buddha's mother. It would be a mistake to deify Buddha or his mom, but unfortunately in many places, that's what kinda happened. Call it a legacy of previously existing theism. Tibetan Buddhism also incorporated some animist traditions. Buddhism is a flexible religion.
Buddhism seems to have first appeared in China during the latter Han dynasty, in the first century CE. That's roughly contemporary with the height of the Roman empire, way off to the west. The earliest Buddhism was probably practiced by expatriot communities of foreign traders in northwest China and perhaps in the southern Chinese ports. The varieties of Buddhism practiced followed Indian Buddhism very closely and represented the same schools. Apparently the Chinese themselves at first confused Buddhism with their own Daoism, believing that Buddhism was Daoism that had been established in foreign countries by Lao Tsu after he rode off into the west according to tradition. So early Chinese understanding of Buddhism employed lots of Daoist concepts. That's colored Chinese Buddhism down to the present time. (Ch'an/Zen is an example.) It appears that this Daoist/Buddhist hybridism may have been more prevalent in southern China than in the North, which was often ruled by foreign dynasties during the disunity following the fall of the Han dynasty, and where the foreign dynasties patronized a more Indian derived style of Buddhism as their court religion (as opposed to the Confucianism of the native Chinese). This was a period of translation, in which Indian Buddhist texts were translated into Chinese. Since the Chinese language didn't possess exact equivalents of many of the Indian Sanskrit terms, a whole new vocabulary had to be invented. Many of the translators doing this work were Central Asians from places like Khotan and Kucha. Many of the works translated were Mahayana sutras and these tended to circulate individually, not as part of an abundant Buddhist literature as in India. So early Chinese-speaking Buddhists often had only one Mahayana sutra as their scriptural authority, so they tended to invent Buddhist schools based around particular sutras and the ideas they contained. By the early Tang, these schools had proliferated and were very influential all over China. Buddhist scholarship flourished and this was the great period of the flowering of uniquely Chinese schools of Buddhism. Thousands of Buddhist monasteries existed and they received a great deal of government patronage. This generated a lot of hostility among the Confucians, who persuaded one of the Tang emperors to launch a huge persecution of the Buddhists in the 800's. That persecution and the loss of government patronage it represented transformed Chinese Buddhism forever. Scholarly types flocked back to Confucianism which blossomed into Neoconfucianism during the Sung period, adopting many Buddhist ideas in the process. Generally speaking, Chinese Buddhism became more of a popular religion, often recruiting from the poorer classes, settling into the form it would have for a thousand years, conducting funerals while mixing Pure-Land devotionalism with Ch'an meditation. There were later periods of government favor and patronage of Ch'an during the Sung and later dynasties, which though they never reproduced the intellectual excitement of Tang dynasty Buddhism, did produce an extremely sophisticated and impressive flowering of Ch'an influenced art. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Buddhism
That was one of the biggest criticisms that the Confucians directed at Buddhism. Spidergoat is right that it's only monastics that are expected to be celibate and to leave their families. But during the early Tang, Buddhist monasticism was attracting so many young people from upper class homes that a great deal of opposition to Buddhism developed among the more prominent families, leading to the great persecution of 845 in which thousands of monasteries were closed by soldiers. (The current communist regime in China launched a similar but even more thorough persecution in the second half of the 20th century, which can be expected to dramatically change Chinese Buddhism once again.)
Again I read some time ago at some point a queen of heaven was introduced by buddhists and it become more acceptable for the Chinese society .
Are you thinking about Guanyin? Guanyin is the Chinese transformation of the Mahayana boddhisattva Avalokitavara, who features prominently in the Lotus sutra as the bodhisattva of mercy. In India Avalokitavara was a male demigod figure, imagined as occupying a heaven and willing to reach down in his great compassion to aid anyone who calls upon his name. When this myth traveled to China, Avalokitavara inexplicably underwent a sex-change and was imagined as the female demigoddess Guanyin. She retains her attributes as a goddess of mercy, answering anyone who sincerely calls for assistance. Since Mahayana Buddhists supposed that the heavenly sort of boddhisattvas could manifest on Earth in any form they choose, the sex change has never been a big issue for Buddhists. Why this transformation happened is unknown. Perhaps many of Avalokitavara's earliest devotees in China were female and they may have felt more comfortable calling upon a female form regarding female problems. And many scholars hypothesize that Avalokitavara may have become syncretized and identified with an existing Chinese goddess worshipped in Chinese folk religion. In Pure Land Buddhism, Avalokitavara/Guanyin is widely believed to ensure out of his/her limitless mercy and compassion that those who call upon him/her will be reborn in the Sukhavati heaven, the 'pure land of the west', a supernatural paradise from which eventual enlightenment is assured. This helps explain how Buddhism in China became identified with funerals and ensuring an auspicious afterlife. Early European visitors to China were struck by how similar the role Guanyin plays in China is to the role the Virgin Mary plays in Catholicism, as a figure of limitless mercy and compassion and as an intercessor for those who call on her name. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guanyin
In other words buddhism is also fragmented like christianity . Buddhism is not the lo called self controlled, but a religion . U have seen temples in China and they seem to me parallel to Catholic worship but different imagens .
There is religious Buddhism for laypeople, and there there is the actual experience of the Buddha, which few have experienced or understand. I guess Buddhists figure this situation is OK, as long as it gets people on the path. Historically, the true drivers of Buddhist thought were often outsiders to the temple like the 6th patriarch, Hui Neng, who was a worker in the kitchen, and not a monk at all.
That is what I have seen in China, Monks selling candles incense and other . worshipers burning candles laying down flowers and so on . Not all Christian burn candles or incense or put offering , but there some who do like Catholics . So here we have some parallel practice.
In my most gracious of moods, I think Jesus may have done a similar thing. He could have had an enlightening experience, and interpreted it in the terms he was familiar with- Judaism. And in the course of imperfect transmission to others (inevitable really), it was perverted into the religion we see today.
It seems that Zarathustra, Jesus, and Gautama Buddha all took the religions they grew up in and refined them into another. Accurate?
Yes, I'd say so. The Buddha went forth and joined the preexisting 'sramana' tradition of forest ascetics, studied meditation with a couple of prominent meditation teachers of his time, and then incorporated all of that into his new teaching. In my opinion, one of the ways to figure out what the Buddha's own innovations were is to look for differences between what the early Buddhists and other similar groups of the time were doing and saying. It's reasonable to assume that very early Buddhism's unique features were due to its teacher, the Buddha. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Śramaṇa
In the famous Dona sutta, the Buddha may have denied that he was a god. (Reading the Pali as present tense. Or perhaps he speaking future tense and saying that he wouldn't be reborn as a god.) Interestingly, he denied at the same time that he was a man (or would be reborn as a man). Instead he was a Buddha, an entirely different category. A simple and basic translation is here: http://www.accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/an/an04/an04.036.than.html And a more scholarly analysis is here: http://dharmafarer.org/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/36.13-Pada-Dona-S-a4.36-piya.pdf
Thank you for the info It is interesting. I see a Buddhist teacher in prison once per month we exchange some our views from time to time.
