In general, I’m finding that Buddhist legends in Japan and China are very low quality. They are too praiseworthy of their saints, and the resolutions to story crises are too hand-waivy. In the story below1, the monk reveals that a human is actually a were-fox. There’s nothing particularly wise in the story, other than a Buddhist monk having the ability to discern these things.
I think two things are going on in Buddhist myths like these. First, Buddhism is a foreign import, coming from Sanskrit, and many adherents in China and Japan didn’t even know what the original chants meant. All kinds of nonsense results, with claims that the “vibrations” of the chants alone cure diseases, or that their transliterated characters contain magical properties, etc. But in essence, Buddhism faced a major linguistic hurdle going from India to China, and an even greater one going to Japan (where the stories are even lower quality). I think that is one reason for the low quality, at least insofar as I’ve read them.
(Contrast this with the quality of the Biblical text, which generally succeeds in fooling everyone into thinking Abraham was part of the same patrilocal kinship system as post-exilic Israel. It’s possible that originally Abraham intermarried with Egypt, but this is retconned as a genius bait-and-switch to get him double inheritance in Genesis 12. Isaac is then mashed in there as some weird carbon copy of Abraham just to link him with Jacob, who is a vestige from Israel’s matrilocal past, but ultimately this is all linked back to Egypt, where Isreal really begins with the Exodus, headed by Moses. What’s so genius about the Biblical retcon is that Ezra left in all his stitch marks, making it very easy to see what’s old and what’s new. After the retcon was done, the Torah had painted the Levites beautifully as coming from Moses in the basket, but the Aaronides coming his seemingly half-wit brother who couldn’t comprehend how a golden calf could magically come out of an oven. But the Judeans get some of the worst treatment since they come from Judah, whose sons die from “spilling seed,” forcing Judah to sleep with his daughter-in-law who’s dressed like a whore. Whether this was an intentional means to knock the Judean political authority, or the J doc simply wasn’t as good as the P doc, we may never know, until those document fragments show up. But ultimately, I would ascribe the longevity of the Bible to the fact that Ezra knew ancient Hebrew well enough to tie all the documents together and present them as a constitution to the Persian government and secure the funds to build the Second Temple. The Buddhist scribes in China and Japan seemed to lack in this ability.)
Second, Buddhism seems hellbent on explaining therianthropy (werewolves, were-foxes, animals turning into humans and back again, also known as “metampsychosis” or more recently as “reincarnation”) as though it’s just some moral or demonic issue that can be Buddha’d away. Buddhism thereby acquired a kind of rationality behind its vegetarianism (fear of eating humans since cannibalism is an ancient taboo).
But I think the more important function of Buddhism is its ability to undermine animal totemism wherever it’s adopted. Why would a government want to do this? Because animal totemism is matrilocal and therefore undermines the ability of a monarchy to 1) spread its monolithic religion (since matrilocal marriage/MLM mixes totem beliefs and creates vast horoscopes), 2) universalize its language (since MLM mixes dialects, and Mandarin could not become the universal language in a totem system) and 3) build cities (since MLM disincentivizes men from building cities since they can’t be transferred to their heirs, who are their sisters’ children back in their home town).
Buddhism undermines these matrilocal totem clans by employing a class of scribes that write lots of (seemingly shoddy) stories about all these clan totems (fox/Hu, bear, etc.) being basically illegitimate power markers. They’re kinda just animals now.
The reincarnation myth produces an ethic that allows one to trudge through various crises, especially famine and war. Curiously enough this was one aspect of Buddhism the Chinese Confucians seemed to hate, since the emperors are always railing against lazy Buddhists who won’t plow, won’t fight, etc. Buddhism in China just didn’t seem to fit into the court.
In Japan, Buddhism secured a stronger hold. Gyogi, leader of Hosso Buddhist sect, received a vision that influenced the Emperor in 742 AD who declared that the Shinto goddess, the Sun, and Buddha were one and the same. Buddhism syncretized with Shinto, and Buddhist priests slowly took over Shinto shrines, and the empress in 765 declared that the Shinto first fruits festival should be in dedication to Buddha. Soon Buddhist priests held tons of land and were wealthier than all other classes in Japan, all aided of course by its tax-exempt status2.
If we think of religion, language, and politics like operating systems, Buddhism is a major plug-in or .dll file that a monarchy can use to squash surrounding totem groups (non-Han minorities in China, Ainu in Japan, various minorities in India), bring legitimacy to the throne, and consolidate the regime. The price: tax-exempt status and the funneling of cash to Buddhist temple cities.
Christian monasteries basically functioned the same way. By outlawing divorce, cross-cousin marriage, polygamy, and the levirate, and denouncing adoption and remarriage, they 1) falsely claimed they were following the Bible (the Torah allowed all these) and 2) redirected inheritance to holy lands3.
This confirms my ROBA Hypothesis, which states that reciprocal, object-based aggression (ROBA), being exclusive to humans, threatens to eradicate our species. Since ROBA carries an exchange property, it must be exchanged with cultural modalities such as kinship, language, and religion. All deferral requires a transaction with ROBA. The brokers tend to be more on the schizoid end of the personality spectrum, while the technicians tend to be autistic, who convert ROBA into artifacts, known generally as technics. These spread wildly and carpenter the entire earth with handaxes, cities, steam engines, cars, etc., and they take on a kind of mind of their own which doesn’t bother autistics but really bothers schizoids, who continue trying to broker exchanges to bring humans back into the dialectic, while autistics continue in carpentry.
Technics are on the one hand deferential and peaceful, and on the other hand can all be co-opted by ROBA in a flash. I detail this in my book If These Fists Could Talk: A Stuntman’s Unflinching Take on Violence, which you can buy on Amazon.
Kinship is one of many smart coding systems that the human OS naturally spins up to defer ROBA. I believe it’s also the oldest, and all other cultural artifacts are produced downstream from it4.