East Asian Buddhism reflects the genius of the peoples among whom it developed. Equally, it emerges from the main stream of the tradition. It is important to validate this dimension. This may be more challenging that might at first appear.

In a world of nation-states, it is of course common to assume that each nation’s traditions are unique. Moreover:

• Those who work on Buddhism in China, Korea or Japan, whether from within in those countries or from elsewhere, tend to have a background in Chinese, Korean or Japanese Studies rather than in Buddhist Studies. So, their theoretical framework has tended to be that Buddhism was thoroughly sinicised, koreanised or japanised.
• Those who work in Buddhist Studies as such generally start in Indian languages and history. This is an enormous field. For those absorbed in it, the transition to studying the tradition in other cultural contexts is challenging. That is true even for Tibet or South-East Asia, though the links with Indian doctrine and practice are particularly prominent and obvious here. East Asian Buddhism is a step further.

Accordingly, East Asian Buddhism may appear as something of an epiphenomenon:

• It exhibits features that can be seen as a development out of the pre-existing East Asian cultures. This tends to make it seem less distinctively Buddhist in its own right. Thus:
  • What is characteristic of e.g. Chinese Buddhism may be considered as purely Chinese. Thus, the dedication of donations in favour of parents has long been understood in exclusively Confucian terms.
  • Buddhist schools are often organised under national categories. Zen may be taken as specifically Japanese, Soen as uniquely Korean, Ch’an as purely Chinese.
  • Only high-cultural phenomena may be seen as Buddhist; what ordinary people do is ‘folk religion’.
• Similarly, there is occasionally a tendency to treat East Asian developments as peripheral to the Buddhist tradition as a whole:
  • Few general accounts of Buddhism give much weight to East Asia. What happened to the tradition in China and beyond can be presented as saying at least as much about Confucianism, Daoism, Shintoism etc as about Buddhism.
  • Implicitly, Buddhism may be understood to have assumed a definitive, effectively almost a fixed form before it arrived in this region, and then to have reconstituted itself here in ways that are more or less aberrant, or at least irrelevant for an understanding of the tradition as such.