The Lidai Fabao: Memory, Lineage, and the Living Dharma

“When the monk Simha transmitted the Dharma and traveled to Kashmir, the king... refused to support the Buddha-dharma. He destroyed stupas and monasteries, slaughtered sentient beings, and honored two heretics: Mumani (Mani, the founder of Manichaeism) and Mishia (Messiah, Jesus the Christ).”

This passage jumps out from a translation of the eighth-century *Lidai Fabao*.

The *Lidai Fabao* presents itself as an authentic record of the Indian Dharma’s direct transmission, tracing a lineage of masters from Shakyamuni Buddha through Bodhidharma to the Chan (Zen) tradition of the Bao Tang school in Sichuan.

It is also a deeply sectarian text, acting as a defensive manifesto for the Bao Tang’s legitimacy against the rival groups—Buddhist and otherwise—that filled the Tang Dynasty sky like stars.

Beyond the inherent charm of a vanished text from a forgotten school, rediscovered in the early 20th century in a hidden cave at the edge of the Gobi Desert, the *Fabao* is a vital Buddhist time capsule. It preserves a moment before Chan orthodoxy crystallized into its familiar form during the Song Dynasty around 1000 CE.

During this period, the Chan tradition was an embryonic crucible of rival schools, competing theories on the phenomenology of awakening, and conflicting claims over the authentic—and paradoxically anti-textual—process of transmitting the Dharma.

The Bao Tang school and its leader, Wuzhu, represented one of the most radical interpretations of practice in early Chan. They advocated for a near-total detachment from all methods, texts, rituals, and formal practices, at times even questioning the very utility of mental cultivation or spiritual grace.

These radical tendencies, along with the relatively liberal status the school accorded to women, may have actually undermined the *Fabao*’s primary goal: anchoring the group’s religious and political legitimacy against its competitors. Yet these same qualities helped shape the ethos that would eventually define the later Zen tradition.

This ethos—which cast the teacher as a virtuoso of intuitive, often eccentric means—favored direct experience over textual authority and maintained a healthy suspicion of religious formalism. It reinforced the ancient Chinese skepticism regarding the limits of language in capturing absolute truth. It also solidified the tension that haunts many Chinese Buddhist groups to this day: a deep longing for tradition and transmission on one hand, and a persistent drive for liberation from all cognitive frameworks on the other.

In this light, the unusual mentions of Mani and Jesus in the Kashmiri narrative should not be read as reliable history for Central Asian Christianity or Manichaeism. Rather, they serve as evidence of how Tang-era Buddhists perceived foreign rivals as they all jockeyed for influence at the heart of the political order.

The authors of the *Fabao* integrated their religious competitors into a universal, even cosmological history. In their eyes, the opposition to the Dharma by those mired in error and ignorance was simply a recurring phenomenon across the generations.

The appearance of Jesus and Mani in a Chinese Buddhist text is hardly surprising given the cosmopolitan nature of the Tang Dynasty. To Buddhists and Daoists alike, these figures represented new immigrant religions equipped with organized scriptures, structured institutions, and competing claims to the truth.

These overlapping circles vied for influence in the multi-religious landscape of the time, a reminder that doctrines of liberation are rarely separate from the political sphere—and often, the reverse is just as true.