Chinese views on sin
The concept of sin, in the sense of violating a universal moral code, was unknown in Chinese philosophy and folk religion until around the second century CE, when Buddhism arrived from India and religious Daoism originated. While English lexically differentiates theological sin from legal crime, the Chinese language uses one word zui 罪 meaning "crime; guilt; misconduct; sin; fault; blame."
Terminology
In Chinese, there are two words that can be used to describe "sin": zui and guo. According to the German sociologist Wolfram Eberhard, author of Guilt and Sin in Traditional China, zui can mean "crime, punishment of a crime, and sin", and guo can be used to describe unintentionally committed crimes or sins.Apart from crime and sin, Zui can also be used to describe suffering, hardships and blame. Some zui compounds are ambiguous between "crime" and "sin". For example, youzui 有罪 which means guilty. In contrast, some are unequivocal, such as fanzui 犯罪 which means to commit a crime or yuanzui 原罪 which refers to original sin.
The Chinese character 罪 for zui combines wang 罒 or 网 "net" over fei 非 "wrong", ideographically depicting, "A 网 net used to capture the criminal who has done 非 wrong". Zui was used to translate Chinese Buddhist terminology, for instance, zuizhang 罪障 "sin" and zuiye 罪業 "sinful karma".
Zui 罪 "crime; guilt; punishment" had an archaic variant Chinese character zui 辠, written with zi 自 "nose" and xin 辛 "painful" — emphasizing the "punishment" aspect of zui. For instance, under traditional Chinese law, the excruciating Five Punishments included yi 劓 "cutting off the nose". The Shuowen Jiezi dictionary defined the original meanings of these homophonous zui characters as罪 "fish trap" and 辠 "crime; punishment" and noted Qin dynasty imperial naming taboo made 辠 obsolete. The first Qin emperor Qin Shi Huang 秦始皇 forbid using zui 辠 "crime", which graphically resembled huang 皇 "emperor" in his name, and replaced it with zui 罪. In Modern Standard Chinese character usage, zui 罪 is common and zui 辠 is rare.
Guo nominally means "fault; mistake; error; excess" and verbally "pass by; go past; surpass; cross; exceed". The specialized sense of "sin" is usually limited to Daoist usage, except for the Chinese "synonym compound" zuiguo 罪過 "fault; wicked act; sin; offense", which is a humble expression for "guilty conscience; this is really more than I deserve."
Words meaning "sin; violation of religious law" are not a linguistic universal. For instance, the anthropologist Verrier Elwin, who studied the Gondi language, said, "There are no words in Gondi for sin or virtue: a man may be ruined, here and hereafter, for a breach of a taboo, but the notion of retribution for sinners is an alien importation". The Gondi language word pap "sin" is a loanword from the Marathi language. Fürer-Haimendorf explains that Christian missionaries discovered sin was not a universally shared concept across cultures. This raised questions about whether they believed some behaviour was deemed undesirable for the collective and if it influenced their relationship with the supernatural.
Historical origins
The word zui 辠 or 罪 "crime; guilt" occurred in Chinese classics and bronze inscriptions from the Zhou dynasty. Eberhard concluded that "sin" was unknown prior to the Han dynasty.If we apply our definition of "sin" – a violation of a divine code – Chinese folk religion before the Han period seems not to have had the concept of sin, although it recognized a great number of supernatural beings. People who offended the deities, spirits, or other supernatural beings by not honoring them or by failing to sacrifice in the right way or at the right time might make them angry. The deities then could or would punish such people. An event of this kind was more or less like any offense against a human superior, with the only difference that deities were believed to be superior to humans; they formed, if this expression be permitted, a social class above the upper class in human society. This class of supernatural beings was structured: some deities had more, others less, power, but the structure was more like a class structure than like a bureaucratic one although one god was vaguely recognized as the highest of all.
The Chinese historian Yu Ying-shih disagreed with Eberhard's conclusion that early Chinese religions disregarded "sin" because our understanding of ancient Chinese religion is still developing. For instance, in the Analects Confucius “sin” might suggest a violation against divine law.
However, none of the English Analects translations renders zui as "sin". This context quotes Confucius explaining a rhymed adage about sacrificing to either the Kitchen God or ancestral spirits.
- "He who offends against Heaven has none to whom he can pray"
- "He who has put himself in the wrong with Heaven has no means of expiation left"
- "If you incur blame with Heaven, you have nowhere to turn for forgiveness"
- "If you offend Heaven, there is no one you can pray to"
Chinese Buddhism
The history of Chinese Buddhism began circa the 1st or 2nd century CE when Silk Road Buddhist missionaries arrived in China.Defining "folk Buddhism" as "a simplified form which even the uneducated could understand," folk Buddhism rapidly brought notions of sins and their punishments to China, with texts from the second century CE noting out various punishments experienced in various hells. This belief acted to address the perennial concern of the good lives granted to so many immoral people, a question that had been resigned to the mystery of fate in pre-Buddhist ethics.
Ming 命 "life; fate; destiny; command" was personified in the Siming 司命, who arbitrated human destiny.
When Buddhist missionaries, such as An Shigao, began translating sūtras into Chinese, they used zui 罪 "crime; guilt" for Sanskrit pāpa or pāpá पाप "evil, misfortune, bad luck, trouble, mischief, harm; sin, vice, crime, guilt." Pāpa arises from intentions and actions that are akuśala "evil; inauspicious; unwholesome", which is translated as Chinese e 惡 "evil" or bushan 不善 "not good; unholy; bad; evil". Damien Keown explains, "Essentially, pāpa is that which leads one away from nirvāṇa, and is closer to the concept of error than an offence against divine authority or a condition innate in human nature such as original sin."
Buddhist monks and nuns practice pāpa-deśanā "confession of sins/infringements ", which Chinese transliterates as chanhui 懺悔 "repent; confess". The alternate term xiangbihui 向彼悔 "repent sins to others" emphasizes publicly confessing to the monastic sangha "community". Buddhist confession is not considered an appeal for divine absolution, but an aid to spiritual progress and clearing karmic obstacles.
In the 5th century, Chinese Buddhists used wei 穢 "dirty; vile; abominable; ugly" to denote "sin", and correspondingly, "the Buddhist 'paradise,' the place in which there is no sin" is called jingtu 淨土 "clean land; pure land".
The Buddhist notion of "sin", translated as Chinese zui, was explained in terms of karma and reincarnation. Thus, in the understanding of folk Buddhism, sin was not seen as a transgression against a deity, but instead a transgression against a universal moral code, to which even the deities were held to. This moral code transcended questions of legal recourse, irrespective of one being dealt with societal punishment, one would still be punished for their action on a karmic level. Furthermore, the "divine ministries and divine red tape" of modern Chinese folk religion acted as "a system of bureaucratic constitutional monarchy".
Buddhism opposes pāpa "sin; demerit" with punya "merit; meritorious action", referring to karmic merit gained from actions like giving alms, reciting sutras, and performing puja devotions. The Chinese translation of punya is gong 功 " achievement; result; skill; meritorious service", compounded in gong-guo 功過 "achievements and errors; merits and sins".
The ethnologist Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf described the importance of karmic "merit" in Chinese spiritual thought,
… as Buddhism spread into China from the first century A.D. onwards the idea of sin and the punishment of sins gained wide currency. Indeed, the systematisation of such punishments in numerous minutely described hells reflects the Chinese genius for classification. These supernatural punishments for violations of an impersonal moral code were independent of the mechanism of human justice. There was a strong emphasis on the feeling of guilt. Even if sinful actions remained undetected by society, the sinner knew that they were recorded by supernatural powers, and that punishment would inevitably follow after death. But like Tibetan Buddhists the Chinese believed that sins could be outweighed by meritorious actions. Hence feelings of guilt stimulated the giving of alms and support for monks and religious institutions.
The Buddhist scholar Alfred Bloom refuted the common Western belief that Chinese and Japanese religions have no sense of "sin" or "guilt".
Sin and guilt are generally viewed from a Christian perspective in which sin is rebellion against the will of God, and consequent guilt is the feeling of rejection by the divine. Such sin and guilt is, of course, not experienced in the Buddhist context. However, it may be possible to employ the terms, or similar terms such as "depravity" or "defiled" to depict man's involvement in the passions and bondage to the world which prevents him from attaining the high Buddhist ideals revealed in Sakyamuni and his early disciples. Such people realize that they fall short of the potentialities of the human nature symbolized in Buddha. Their guilt is derived not from a feeling of rejection by deity, but by a self-rejection as they become aware of the gulf which separates them from the ideals of the Buddha.
Some Buddhist Schools, such as Pure Land, teach that we are currently in the degenerate and immoral Mappō "Latter Day of the Dharma", and can find salvation from sin through faith in Amitābha.