On the history and the history-making of the early Yogācāra Buddhism in China

ABSTRACT For decades, modern scholars depicted early Yogācāra Buddhism in China by categorizing it into three discrete scholastic groups, namely the Northern Dilun faction, the Southern Dilun faction, and the Shelun faction. Supposedly, each faction represents an idiosyncratic understanding of Yogācāra Buddhism, and there were many doctrinal conflicts between these factions for contending with orthodoxy. In this article, I will re-examine this schist narrative and highlight some of its unstable presuppositions. I argue these designations of early Yogācāra factions are prejudiced outsiders’ projections that do not reflect any accurate historical circumstance. The modern constructed history of the Dilun-Shelun schism only exists under the modern history-making enterprise as a compromised sectarian narrative of the Chinese Buddhist past. In the end, I suggest we shall abandon the ‘factional discourse’ and focus on discursive studies of Buddhist historiographies.