What is the most powerful weapon of China and how to tackle it?

Charles Paine
3 min readAug 19, 2022
The three great theological teachers

The lousy monk fight on Vietnam social media recently reminded me to note down some critical points about Chinese Buddhism as the most powerful weapon of cultural invasion in East Asia from the 7th century till now.

  1. Xuanzang (Huyền Trang) founded Chinese Buddhism after his long journey to India inthe 7th century. All later dynasties utilized this weapon to augment their domination and influence domestically and abroad. We can imagine that Indian Buddhism is a good intellectual design so the copying practice of China has been implemented very early in their history, not like the belief that their copying practice of Western design became common in 20th century.
  2. Journey to the West (西遊記 Xī Yóu Jì / Tây Du Ký), a novel published in the 16th century during the Ming dynasty and attributed to Wu Cheng’en (Ngô Thừa Ân), is a magnificently beautiful tool of propaganda, a hidden curriculum of Chinese Buddhism implying that Chinese Buddhism combines Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism to become the mainstream of Chinese culture. We can see many deities (thần) in Taoism tradition turned out to be Buddhism bodhisattva (bồ tát) in this novel.
  3. Chinese Buddhism is not Indian Buddhism. The Chinese Buddha accepts the existence of the Jade Emperor (Yuhuang / Ngọc Hoàng) as the ruler of Heaven while the original version of Buddha from India has no idea about this figure that was later imported from the folk culture of the ancient peoples living around Huang He region (lưu vực sông Hoàng Hà) and inserted intentionally into the belief system of local buddhists.
  4. Leaders of nations around the Chinese had well aware of this dangerous weapon, so they attempted to neutralize this system of belief. For example, Đạo Mẫu, the worship of mother goddesses in Vietnam, is a great successful effort of defense, that was initially established by the Tran dynasty in the 12th century and is still in development at present. Similar phenomenons of theological defense can be found in Xinjiang, Japan, and Korea in the efforts to neutralize the impact of such a distorted system of belief built on Buddhism. East Asian people, through their defense, have successfully educated themselves to identify the real identity and the fake identity of China. That is also why the Xinjian Uyghur people became hatred in the eye of the Chinese government, like all other neighbors who always have something in their eyes mocking the Chinese mainstream culture of copying practice, and the self-lying worship about the fake historical identity.
  5. So, with the spreading of true information, the fast growth of technology, and more improvement in education, the people of Chinese will soon realize the construct of their culture, their history, and belief system. Whenever people can deconstruct and reconstruct their own beliefs to respect other beings, we can say that the basic education system of that society has fulfilled its function.

As Einstein said that we cannot solve a problem from the same level of consciousness that created it, just position ourselves in the different levels of epistemology so the sophisticated weapon can be neutralized effectively without violence.

--

--