Recovering Buddhism in Modern China 9780231541107

Table of contents :
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I: Republican-Era Modernity
1. Buddhist Activism, Urban Space, and Ambivalent Modernity in 1920s Shanghai
2. Buddhism and the Modern Epistemic Space: Buddhist Intellectuals in the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates
3. A Revolution of Ink: Chinese Buddhist Periodicals in the Early Republic
Part II: Midcentury War and Revolution
4. Resurrecting Xuanzang: The Modern Travels of a Medieval Monk
5. Buddhist Efforts for the Reconciliation of Buddhism and Marxism in the Early Years of the People’s Republic of China
6. The Communist Dismantling of Temple and Monastic Buddhism in Suzhou
Part III: Contemporary Social Practice
7. Mapping Religious Difference: Lay Buddhist Textual Communities in the Post-Mao Period
8. “Receiving Prayer Beads”: A Lay-Buddhist Ritual Performed by Menopausal Women in Ninghua, Western Fujian
Bibliography
List of Contributors
Index

Citation preview

RECOVERING BUDDHISM IN MODERN CHINA

The Sheng Yen Series in Chinese Buddhist Studies

The Sheng Yen Series in Chinese Buddhist Studies Chün-fang Yü, series editor Following the endowment of the Sheng Yen Professorship in Chinese Buddhist Studies, the Sheng Yen Education Foundation and the Chung Hua Institute of Buddhist Studies in Taiwan jointly endowed a publication series, the Sheng Yen Series in Chinese Studies, at Columbia University Press. Its purpose is to publish monographs containing new scholarship and English translations of classical texts in Chinese Buddhism. Scholars of Chinese Buddhism have traditionally approached the subject through philology, philosophy, and history. In recent decades, however, they have increasingly adopted an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on anthropology, archaeology, art history, religious studies, and gender studies, among other disciplines. This series aims to provide a home for such pioneering studies in the eld of Chinese Buddhism. Michael J. Walsh, Sacred Economies: Buddhist Business and Religiosity in Medieval China Koichi Shinohara, Spells, Images, and 0D‫˂ؾ‬DODV7racing the Evolution of Esoteric Buddhist Rituals Beverley Foulks McGuire, /LYLQJ.DUPD7KH5HOLJLRXV3UDFWLFHVRI2X\L=KL[X (1599–1655) Paul Copp, 7KH%RG\,QFDQWDWRU\6SHOOVDQGWKH5LWXDO,PDJLQDWLRQLQ0HGLHYDO Chinese Buddhism N. Harry Rothschild, (PSHURU:X=KDRDQG+HU3DQWKHRQRI'HYLV'LYLQLWLHV DQG'\QDVWLF0RWKHUV Erik J. Hammerstrom, 7KH6FLHQFHRI&KLQHVH%XGGKLVP(DUO\7ZHQWLHWK Century Engagements Jiang Wu and Lucille Chia, editors, 6SUHDGLQJ%XGGKD·V:RUGLQ(DVW$VLD7KH )RUPDWLRQDQG7UDQVIRUPDWLRQRIWKH&KLQHVH%XGGKLVW&DQRQ

RECOVERING BUDDHISM IN MODERN CHINA EDITED BY

JAN KIELY & J. BROOKS JESSUP

CO LU M BI A U N I VERSI TY P R E S S

New York

Columbia University Press 3XEOLVKHUV6LQFH New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2016 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Recovering Buddhism in modern China / edited by Jan Kiely and J. Brooks Jessup. pages cm. — (The Sheng Yen series in Chinese Buddhist studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-231-17276-9 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-54110-7 (electronic) 1. Buddhism—China—History—20th century. I. Kiely, Jan, 1965- editor. BQ645.R43 2016 294.30951 0904—dc23 2015014709

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

© Getty / DEA / W. BUSS / Contributor Jordan Wannemacher References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

CONTENTS

$FNQRZOHGJPHQWV೉YLL

Introduction 1 .

PART I: REPUBLICAN-ERA MODERNITY

35

1. Buddhist Activism, Urban Space, and Ambivalent Modernity in 1920s Shanghai 37 .

2. Buddhism and the Modern Epistemic Space: Buddhist Intellectuals in the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates 79 .

3. A Revolution of Ink: Chinese Buddhist Periodicals in the Early Republic 111

PART II: MIDCENTURY WAR AND REVOLUTION

141

4. Resurrecting Xuanzang: The Modern Travels of a Medieval Monk 143

vi

Contents

5. Buddhist E orts for the Reconciliation of Buddhism and Marxism in the Early Years of the People’s Republic of China 177 6. The Communist Dismantling of Temple and Monastic Buddhism in Suzhou 216

PART III: CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL PRACTICE

255

7. Mapping Religious Di erence: Lay Buddhist Textual Communities in the Post-Mao Period 257 8. “Receiving Prayer Beads”: A Lay-Buddhist Ritual Performed by Menopausal Women in Ninghua, Western Fujian 291 %LEOLRJUDSK\೉ /LVWRI&RQWULEXWRUV೉ ,QGH[೉

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

W

e are grateful for the grant funding from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) and support from the Centre for East Asian Studies (renamed Centre for China Studies in November 2012) that made possible the workshop held at CUHK in May 2012 from which this book originated. We would like to thank all who participated and made important contributions to the workshop as either presenters or commentators, particularly David Faure, Amy Holmes-Tagchungdarpa, Rongdao Lai, André Laliberté, Rebecca Nedostup, Brian Nichols, David Palmer, and Erik Schicketanz. We are thankful also to the wonderful sta and graduate students of the Centre for East Asian Studies for their logistical support during the workshop, above all the principal event coordinator, Esther Yip. We would like to thank as well Vincent Goossaert, Paul Katz, John Lagerwey, and Izumi Nakayama for their helpful advice and suggestions as we worked on the manuscript. And we are grateful to our teachers, Frederic Wakeman Jr. and Wen-hsin Yeh, for supporting our initial interest in Chinese Buddhists in the modern period. Finally, we wish to express our heartfelt gratitude to the Columbia University Press series editor Chün-fang Yü, to the anonymous manuscript reviewers for their valuable comments, and to editors Christine Dunbar and Wendy Lochner and the copyeditor, Mike Ashby, for their tireless e orts and support in seeing this volume to completion.

RECOVERING BUDDHISM IN MODERN CHINA

INTRODUCTION .

B

y the opening of the twentieth century, many aspects of Buddhism had long since become deeply interwoven into the fabric of China’s social, cultural, and political traditions. As Chinese reformers and revolutionaries evaluated the cultural resources at their disposal for the construction of a modern nationstate, many began to discuss a new branch of thought they called Buddhist learning (Foxue 佛學).1 Indeed, it was primarily as a Buddhist that China’s most in uential political activist of the time, Liang Qichao 梁啓 超 (1873–1929), had been received in Japan upon taking ight there in 1898.2 During his residence abroad, Liang absorbed not only the works of John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham but also the Buddhist modernism that had begun to circulate the globe and become popular among Japanese intellectuals.3 Thus, even as Liang helped to lay the foundation for modern Chinese political culture by popularizing for the rst time among a Chinese public such imported concepts as “citizenship” and “national consciousness,” he advocated a special role for the Buddhist “religion” (Fojiao 佛教).4 Liang argued in 1902 that the achievement of progress in China would require a religious “belief ” (xinyang 信仰) and that Buddhism rather than Confucianism or Christianity would serve China best in a modern age.5 Although the new Republic born in 1912 did not, nally, establish a state religion, Buddhism and Buddhists in a diverse array of forms nevertheless played important

2

Introduction

and dynamic roles in the modern transformations of China’s twentieth century and continue to do so in the present day. Historical scholarship has until recently paid little attention to the Buddhist presence in the social, cultural, and political arenas of modern China. The tendency is not speci c to Buddhism but rather symptomatic of a general marginalization of Chinese religion by historians of the modern period that has remained remarkably persistent across successive generations of scholarship. Whether the perspective has been Western impact or China centered, modernization or revolution, civil society or hegemonic state, political ideology or everyday life, social structures or discursive shifts, most research has tended to presume a predominantly secular Chinese modernity. Such consistent marginalization of religion in the agenda for the historical study of twentieth-century China stands in particularly striking contrast to the high priority it has long held among scholars of imperial China, as well as in scholarship on other parts of Asia in the modern period. One reason for this exceptional undercurrent of historiographical secularism is undoubtedly the ideological atheism of the Communist movement that claimed victory in 1949 and the antireligious violence it unleashed less than a generation later in the Cultural Revolution. Moreover, the assault on China’s religious heritage in the second half of the twentieth century was in many ways a culmination of, rather than a departure from, earlier manifestations of modern secularism in the rst half of the century, such as the late Qing New Policy movement to convert temples into schools, the May Fourth rejection of divine authority, and the Nationalist state campaigns against superstition. In other words, historiographical secularism in scholarly research has derived its longevity in part from the apparent triumph of an empirical secularism in portions of the historical record emphasized by certain narratives in uential among both Chinese and Western scholars. Recently, however, the explosive revitalization of Chinese religious activity during the past few decades in the People’s Republic of China, as well as in Taiwan and Hong Kong, has rapidly raised the visibility of religion in the modern period as a whole. A new body of religious studies scholarship has emerged to challenge long-standing social scienti c assumptions of secular modernity.6 Recent work by such scholars

Introduction 3

as Vincent Goossaert and Xun Liu on Daoism, David Palmer and David Ownby on redemptive societies, Adam Chau and Thomas Dubois on local village religion, Lian Xi and Daniel Bays on indigenous Christianity, and others has raised new questions about how Chinese religious life has changed and adapted, rather than simply declined, under modern conditions.7 This scholarship has sought primarily to trace the transformation of religious traditions, communities, practices, and institutions under the impact of modern ideologies and social processes such as the spread of nationalism, the growth of the capitalist economy, and the rise of the secular state. Particular emphasis has been placed on the role of the state in redrawing the boundaries of legitimate religious activity according to newly imported categories of modern governance, including “religion” (zongjiao 宗教) and “superstition” (mixin 迷信).8 By bringing to light such religious phenomena as sprawling redemptive societies, urban self-cultivation markets, and refashioned temple festivals, this scholarship has begun to map out a vast and shifting religious landscape in the modern period that went virtually unrecognized until quite recently. The study of modern Chinese Buddhism, although rarely integrated with this religious studies scholarship, has also been centered primarily on the transformation and reinvention of religious traditions and has recently been spurred by their heightened visibility in China today.9 Beginning with the classic studies by Holmes Welch,10 most scholars have focused on aspects of the so-called Buddhist revival of the Republican era, in which elite monks and laypersons attempted to defend Buddhist institutions from their detractors and reform them in ways relevant to modern social conditions.11 Subsequent work by Don Pittman, as well as research by Eyal Aviv, Erik Hammerstrom, and Justin Ritzinger, among others, has taken an intellectual-history approach to this subject by examining how important Buddhist thinkers of the era reinterpreted Buddhist doctrinal traditions, often in response to modern ideologies like anarchism or scientism.12 Other scholars, including Francesca Tarocco, Jan Kiely, Gregory Scott, and Brooks Jessup, have highlighted the innovative results of Buddhist participation in mechanized printing, modern songwriting, and other new cultural and social practices that were concentrated in twentieth-century Chinese cities.13

4

Introduction

The work of Xue Yu and James Carter has emphasized that such adaptations of Buddhist traditions, whether through intellectual discourse or cultural production, were often shaped by the demands of modern nationalism, and Gray Tuttle has demonstrated that Han Buddhist nationalism found a particularly important political relevance by facilitating the incorporation of Tibet into the Chinese nation-state.14 At the same time, Raoul Birnbaum has shown Buddhist practice traditions to have had an altogether di erent kind of relevance as a source of vital authenticity for individuals to meet the existential challenges of living in modern society.15 The legacy of these Republican-era Buddhist adaptations and innovations is particularly prominent in the international Buddhist organizations of contemporary Taiwan, which have been the subject of much recent research.16 Meanwhile, we are beginning to gain a clearer understanding of the post-Mao-era Buddhist revitalization in the People’s Republic of China from the eldwork-based studies of anthropologists and sociologists like Gareth Fisher, Ji Zhe, Dan Smyer Yü, and Alison Denton Jones.17 Nevertheless, much work remains to be done throughout this burgeoning yet still nascent eld of study, particularly in exploring underresearched periods such as the War of Resistance through the Mao era; social groups, including women and non-Han minorities; and geographic areas beyond the urban centers of China proper. Future research should also shed light on connections and comparisons with non-Buddhist religious traditions in China, as well as with the global Buddhist modernisms of other parts of the world and in overseas Sinophone communities. Although the present volume contributes to redressing some of these issues, its main goal is to build on existing scholarship by pushing beyond the limitations of the religious studies framework to highlight some of the new vantage points that the study of Buddhism opens on modern Chinese history as a whole. Its contributors include specialists in religions of modern China, premodern Chinese Buddhism, and modern Chinese history, all of whom are pioneering new research to recover the dynamic and creative roles played by Buddhists and Buddhism in modern China from the early twentieth century to the present.18 Grounded in fresh archival and other primary sources, as well

Introduction 5

as ethnographic eldwork, the resulting chapters assembled here are case studies that share more than an interest in related subject matter. They clarify in detail formative processes and distinctive endeavors not just vital to the making of particular forms of modern Chinese Buddhism and Buddhist experience but also revealing of signi cant, long overlooked consequential Buddhist presences, interventions amid, and contributions to the historical development of China after 1900. While attentive to major discursive, social-economic structural shifts and political change, and indebted to the recent state-centered approach to studying the restructuring of modern religion in China, the authors take as their starting points particular individuals, institutional and social communities, and their projects, practices, expressions, and narratives. From this level of empirical grounding, they reconstruct the crucial generative signi cance adhering to the production and circulation of, investment in, and commitment to social-cultural meaning in the contexts of particular times and places.

RETHINKING BUDDHIST “REVIVALISM” Buddhism at the dawn of the twentieth century in China was not a single institutionally or conceptually uni ed, or even thoroughly coherent, entity. Rather, just as for Liang Qichao, it was a deeply historically and socially integrated array of conceptual, institutional, and customary cultural resources, some of which were ordered by various sects, ordination lineages, monastic codes, monasteries, temples, and textual traditions. Out of the voluminous Buddhist textual sources of scriptures, chants, and ritual texts came sophisticated philosophical forms of rhetoric, logic, dialectics, metaphysics, and ethics, as well as theories of universalism and transcendence. Flowing not just from texts but also through artistic and dramatic expression and ritual practice were the Buddhist concepts of cosmic cycles, karmic cause and e ect, reincarnation, and salvation. Similarly widely circulated were images and narratives of supernatural beings—Buddhas, arhats, bodhisattvas, M ra, asuras, and so forth—most of whom were popularly thought of as gods (shen 神), as well as their spiritual realms, notably the Pure Land

6

Introduction

and the Buddhist hells. Much of Buddhism was experienced through ritual practices of recitation, self-cultivation, and vegetarianism and known through a panoply of rites (especially of repentance, protection, and the “white rites” for the dead). Well known were the numerous Buddhist festival days in the annual calendar and empire-wide and regional geographies of sacred space, notably sacred mountains, to which many traveled on pilgrimage. And, during more than a millennium, Buddhism had interacted with popular cults as well as the classical Confucian tradition and organized Daoism and was also woven thoroughly into the nest and most prevalent forms of cultural production (including art, architecture, theater, and literature). Moreover, despite su ering suppression at times, it was a religious tradition (jiao 教) often supported by social elites and appropriated by the imperial state as a means of reinforcing legitimacy. In all its guises, Buddhism was present at nearly all levels of Chinese life, often as a creative, dynamic element.19 This did not abruptly cease in 1900, nor did it wither away because of the rise of foreign imperialist encroachment, the collapse of the Qing dynasty and the imperial system, the incipient formation of the modern Chinese state, the emergence of new forms of capitalism and industrialization, or the spread of secularist and materialist discourses associated with modernity. Yet the late imperial lineage society, as John Lagerwey points out in reference to the work of David Faure, “contributed mightily to the impression received by Westerners . . . that Buddhism and Daoism were degenerate and that China was ‘Confucian’ ”20 It was many of the o spring of lineage elites, often educated abroad, in Christian missionary schools and the new secondary schools and universities, who turned against both Confucian culture and the religious traditions, seeming, from a certain perspective, to be completing a march toward Chinese secular modernism. Against this backdrop, it is little wonder that the burgeoning religious activism that has been called the Buddhist revival caught the eye of Karl Ludvig Reichelt and, later, of Holmes Welch and continues to appear to scholars today as the most visible portion of twentieth-century Chinese Buddhism.21 The contributors to this volume maintain no illusions that what has often been gathered under the label “Buddhist revival” constituted a

Introduction 7

single, coherent movement, let alone was representative of all that was signi cant about Buddhism in the modern era. Still, we devote much attention to revivalist projects of clerics and laity, in large part because the social, cultural, and political dynamism evident therein has so long been ignored.22 The reconstruction era following the mid-nineteenthcentury Taiping-war cataclysm, especially in the Lower- and Mid-Yangzi regions, was accompanied by major projects of monastery and temple reconstruction and construction and Buddhist scripture recovery and reproduction. From around 1900, there began to appear a remarkable number of prominent monks and lay devotees, who led and inspired reforms of Buddhism, new religious enthusiasm, and engagement with society and politics at the moment of China’s dramatic and turbulent formation as a nation-state. Impelled and in uenced by Protestant Christian missionary activism and models of modern religion, and the example of Japanese Buddhists as well, some of the Buddhist revivalists were among the most successful religious leaders in establishing organizations, structures, and self-de nitions of organized religion in negotiation with Republican government authorities and thus succeeding in rendering Buddhism the Chinese religion most “legible” to the modern state.23 In the rst decade of the twentieth century when the imperial state abandoned the civil service examination system and began to relinquish some of its prerogatives with respect to religion, Buddhist activists launched new seminaries, charitable primary schools, and orphanages.24 Then, with the founding of the Republic in 1912 came new national-level Buddhist associations for the protection of Buddhist interests, vigorous religious movements led or inspired by clerics, a proliferation of lay-devotee associations, the rise of a modern Buddhist press, and wide-ranging philanthropic enterprises. This Buddhist activism was unquestionably central to the religious boom of the early Republic and the conceptual and organizational transformative fashioning of a prominent public Buddhism, in part negotiated with an emerging modern state incipiently seeking to reorder society. In the course of making new forms and new places for themselves as Buddhists in an emerging modern Chinese society, these Buddhists, this volume contends, contributed actively to key processes of both socialcultural and political development in the making of modern China.

8

Introduction

FORMATION OF SOCIAL COMMUNITIES The lack of attention and signi cance scholars have accorded to these Buddhist developments has seemingly had much to do with standpoints formed in relation to much more than a simple indi erence to religion. Not just contrasting analytical approaches but also di erences in geographic and thematic focus as well as reliance on di erent kinds of historical documents have resulted in widely varying assessments of the Buddhist revival. For instance, even though the most impressive recent studies to illuminate civic social-welfare projects in Shanghai during the rst half of the twentieth century acknowledge the involvement of Buddhist individuals and institutions, they assign them little signi cance in the larger story of civic activism.25 This contrasts sharply with the studies by some of the scholars represented in this volume, which have demonstrated that the Buddhist contribution to such civic activism in Shanghai and beyond matches, and in some cases surpasses, that of native-place, Christian, and internationally sponsored groups.26 Meanwhile, from the distinct perspective of his study of the Shanghai Daoist-modernist Chen Yingning, Xun Liu describes the same Buddhist revivalism as a “tremendous success” involved in “daring engagement with the new and modern” and attaining a “dominance of religious discourse in the public sphere.” In Liu’s Shanghai, as in Ryan Dunch’s Republican-era Fuzhou, Buddhists represent the endogenous religious tradition most fully organized and in uential in the discursive realm and in civic social-welfare and educational-enterprise activism to a level competitive with foreign-backed Christian movements.27 A remarkable generation of clerical leaders and their monastic communities has a prominent place in this story, most notably the monks Jichan, Yekai, Dixian, Yinguang, Hongyi, Taixu, Tanxu, Yuanying, Xuyun, and Juzan.28 Yet it is increasingly evident that much of the Buddhist contribution to shaping new forms of urban civic organization and social activism, print and mass media culture, social-cultural identities and forms of expression, and broader discursive and political formations came from those in the new lay associations. Elite laymen were at the forefront of Buddhist educational, philanthropic, social-welfare, and print-media projects. Representing a new means of assembling

Introduction 9

and mobilizing urban elites for social action and, in many cases, successfully negotiating with state authorities, the lay associations, many termed householder groves (jushilin 居士林), forged connections with one another across regions and throughout the nation as well as vertical linkages between coreligionists of di erent socioeconomic and educational backgrounds. At the heart of this was a project of socialcommunity formation—something for which Buddhists had long been known in China because of their monastic communities, lay devotion societies, and communities of clerics, worshippers, and patron donors formed around temples and monasteries.29 As the work of Brooks Jessup shows, where we once least suspected it in China’s most cosmopolitan, modernized city, Shanghai, the lay Buddhist elite and their associations rose to become among the most formidable forces of Chinese civic leadership in the city in the rst half of the twentieth century.30 Accounting for the social meaning invested by modern elites into this consequential project of Buddhist activism alters the historical image of Republican Shanghai. When taken together with recent work on redemptive societies and Christian and Daoist organizations, it a rms the signi cance of the religious dimension to the history of urban modernity in twentieth-century China. These urban-based Buddhist associations and communities, moreover, further constituted themselves and extended their reach through participation in wider webs of Buddhist networks linking clerics and laity of many sorts throughout the country. The common term “Buddhist circles” ( jie) aptly ts R. Keith Schoppa’s designation of such Republican-era “subcultures” as “coalescences of many networks and groups based on a variety of personal connections and usually linked to other subcultures by individuals.”31 Indeed, leading gures of the Buddhist circles, such as Wang Yiting, Xiong Xiling, and Nie Yuntai, participated in a bewildering array of di erent kinds of Buddhist and non-Buddhist networks.32 Moreover, as with nonreligious groups, early Republican Buddhist revivalists pursued their social linkages, community formation, and public expression through their own publishing enterprises. So, even as they continued a tradition in which textual reproduction was a vital act of religious ritual practice and propagation, Buddhist activists vigorously built up their own ourishing print

10

Introduction

culture centered in and adopting the technologies and stylistic forms of China’s modern mechanized publishing center of Shanghai. Along with Christian-originated ventures, Buddhist publishers and editors had a leading part in the signi cant contribution of religious groups to the formation of modern Chinese print culture in the rst half of the twentieth century.33

QUESTS FOR CULTURAL MEANING Underlying these new forms of community- and social-network formation were exercises in cultural positioning and identity construction aimed at engaging with and nding a place in the dramatic changes of the day so often associated with modernity. As much as continuities in modes of subject formation remain evident and Buddhist revivalists often reveled in “tradition,” many Shanghai lay Buddhists were among the most conspicuous of the many trying to gure out how to live meaningful Buddhist lives relevant to an emerging modern China. Even as twentieth-century Buddhist-conversion narratives often reveal long-standing tropes of inspiration, such as profound realizations brought on by reading scriptures, serious illness or other personal trauma, and dreams and visions, the assumption of Buddhist identities often had much to do with concerns born of a turbulent era of dramatic transformation. The quest for ethical values, ritual and spiritual-cultivation practices, and transcendent meaning in a chaotic world, while still living a public existence in the new urban order, often led to Buddhism. The multiple ways that a wide range of gures drew upon the thick layers of existing cultural resources to come to live various kinds of modern Buddhist lives in twentieth-century China have recently been elaborated in studies by James Carter on the northern clerical leader Master Tanxu, Raoul Birnbaum on Master Hongyi, Geremie Barmé on the prominent cartoonist and writer Feng Zikai, and Paul Katz on the Shanghai business leader, philanthropist, and painter Wang Yiting.34 These narratives reveal prominent Buddhist lives being lived at the pinnacle of Shanghai’s “golden age of the bourgeoisie,” at the heart of a

Introduction 11

signi cant source of May Fourth radicalism, and in the circles of modernist Shanghai-based cultural gures and editors.35 Some were clearly not turning to Buddhism as a refuge but rather as a rich moral-spiritual source to fuel not just social and cultural but also political activism. Indeed, in his autobiography, the well-known military o cer and political gure Chen Mingshu recalls that his turn toward Buddhism as a Guangdong Army o cer and self-identi ed revolutionary in Guangzhou and Nanjing during the spring and summer of 1922 came at a time when “studying Buddhism had become fashionable; many revolutionaries talked about and made a big deal out of Buddhism.” Chen describes radical military o cers and revolutionaries joining wellknown scholars at lectures on Buddhism by Ouyang Jian in a period when they were also much interested in the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates (discussed by Erik Hammerstrom in this volume), Marxism, and other out ows of the New Culture.36 At the other end of the political spectrum, it has long been noted that many early Republican militarists (“warlords”) claimed to support Buddhism and, especially after falling from power, sought repentance, karmic renewal, or public self-justi cation as avid lay devotees. The major militarist Duan Qirui even went so far as to refer to his fellow warlords as “reincarnated asura kings, here to ful ll the great kalpa,” suggesting that the death and destruction they wrought was integral to the cosmic Buddhist process.37 Certainly it comes as no surprise that the celebrated “righteous assassin” Shi Jianqiao, studied by Eugenia Lean, so readily planned her revenge attack in 1935 on the retired militarist Sun Chuanfang at the most reliable site of his public appearances—the Tianjin Buddhist householder grove where he performed his regular devotions. More remarkable, perhaps, is Shi Jianqiao’s subsequent conversion to Buddhism, for which she became a visible spokeswoman. Then, there was the Nationalist military internal security chief Dai Li, surely a gure fearsome beyond any warlord, who, as Frederic Wakeman has shown, befriended Buddhist clerics and privately practiced Buddhist self-cultivation.38 Meanwhile, before urban cinema audiences, just a year before her tragic suicide in 1935, the lm star Ruan Lingyu appeared in Sea of Fragrant Snow (Xiangxuehai 香 雪海) as a good young wife and mother who, keeping her vow to the

12

Introduction

Buddha for the safety of her family, leaves them to become a nun. Later recalling how he had mockingly questioned Ruan about her vegetarian meals and burning incense before Buddhas while lming on location at Putuoshan Island and at Xiyuan Monastery in Suzhou, the director Fei Mu recorded her timeless response: “Director Fei, don’t laugh at me. I know you don’t believe in Buddhas. In fact, I don’t really believe in Buddhas; this is just a way in which I place hope in something, really hope that there are gods who can protect me, make it so I can live on peacefully and happily.”39 These examples of notable variations in modern Chinese Buddhist expressions of identity and a nity leave much to be fathomed; indeed, the ground of the deeply personal, private histories of elite lives lived in Buddhist ways has only begun to be excavated.

BUDDHISM IN LOCAL SOCIETY Much more research is also needed in many more parts of China to explore the multiple forms of Buddhism among the populace after 1900, a subject that only a few chapters in this volume touch upon.40 Such studies must push beyond the common elite-nonelite division that presumes that Buddhism in local society was lost within an undi erentiated mass of syncretic religion and ceased to have any signi cant social-cultural function. Although cases of Maitreyan millenarian groups, wandering mendicant monks, hereditary local temples, lay vegetarian and recitation societies, Pu’an exorcistic rituals, Mulian opera performances, as well as common Buddhist rites and festivals may have been dismissed as anachronisms and seem little changed since late imperial times, they surely also inhabited the twentieth century and so interacted with and had a part in the dynamics of historical change in their settings. The great centers of Chinese Buddhist monasticism—Wutaishan, Emeishan, Jiuhuashan, Tiantaishan, Putuoshan—as well as regional and even county-level sites of Buddhist worship have their own histories of encountering, and surviving or not, China’s turbulent twentieth century that mattered greatly to those inhabiting and oriented toward them. When we zoom into microregions within rural counties, moreover, we often nd

Introduction 13

Buddhisms not fused indistinguishably in local religious tradition but, as in chapter 8, woven deeply into local society with distinct sacred geographies and a social presence clearly evident. For instance, in the area of Baiyangyuan (白楊源) in She county (歙縣) in southeastern Anhui studied by Wu Zhengfang and introduced by John Lagerwey and Wang Zhenzhong, the institutional and ritual roles of Buddhist temples and monasteries, Guanyin halls, periodic reconsecration ceremonies for Guanyin statues, annual Jiao ritual processions of Guanyin, and specially organized pilgrimages to distant Buddhist mountains were not merely prominent features of local life in the rst half of the twentieth century; they were central to local social-cultural political competition and relationships between lineage groups and to translineage community solidarity in the face of drought and epidemic. And they were not untouched by elite reformist winds, state ordering projects, and the vicissitudes of social and political transformations. Yet animating such religiosity, much as with the everyday urban religiosity expressed by the Shanghai starlet Ruan Lingyu, was often an amorphous desire for a sense of successful living, peace, stability, and social-personal completion captured in the idea of good fortune. As Wang Zhenzhong distills it, “What really concerned them was basic attitudes in life: a heart of compassion and a causal system of just rewards.”41 Of course, much of what obscures and shapes our attempts to perceive Buddhism in local society derives from modern state and elite reformist projects, which o cially or in public national culture delegitimized and legitimized various forms and expressions of religiosity. Much work remains to be done throughout China to disentangle the o cial account from actual conditions. Cases of reformist zealotry could, in di erent situations, re ect either moribund or dynamic local religious culture, and the successful establishment of apparently reformist organizations in localities may pose more questions than it resolves. A cautionary example, for instance, comes from earlyRepublican Daozhen county, Guizhou, where the new branch of the Buddhist association not only took little interest in reforming “superstitious” elements in local Buddhism but actually provided “Buddhist certi cates” to local folk Daoists, granting them legitimacy before the Republican state.42

14

Introduction

At the same time, it is vital to appreciate how important the critical characterization of local religion was to many twentieth-century Buddhist reformers. Such activists often de ned their new religiosity in contrast to the “hot and noisy” temple Buddhism, caricatured as vestigial historical remnants persisting in a backward rural society and, hence, categorized as “superstition” and “feudal” culture scheduled for elimination. Such new approaches to expressing a modern Buddhism, in many respects, became enmeshed with and contributed their own versions to advancing major modern discourses. In this project we have not been able to focus on the elite production of culture as artistic representation, though a signi cant volume could easily be lled with studies of Buddhism in twentieth-century Chinese literature (think of Su Manshu, Ye Gongchuo, Fei Ming, Zhou Zouren), painting (of the Shanghai school, represented by, e.g., Wang Yiting, Wu Changshuo), music (Li Shutong [Hongyi]), and lm (not least the lm Guanyin [1940]).43 Rather, we are concerned here with the Buddhist discursive interventions through expressions made, claims staked, and positions performed in published writings, preaching, and ritual and public presentation.

ENGAGEMENT WITH MODERN IDEOLOGIES Many lay Buddhist activists in Shanghai and other urban centers were engaging in projects of “tradition invention,” reproduction, and representation that were inextricable from a larger quest to make themselves relevant as Buddhists to a time and place infused with the aura of a dawning new age of the modern. This was closely related to their communal attempts to establish a legitimate social position and extend their in uence. Mistaking style for substance, the contemporary English observer John Blofeld wrote of Republican lay Buddhists that they “cling to the Chinese past more than almost any other group of educated people.”44 There was also in the same period a group of prominent self-consciously modernist Buddhists. These included progressive clerics like Taixu and his reformist followers, including those interested in advancing gender equality through new education for nuns and the socially and politically radical gures like Juzan, devoted to building a

Introduction 15

Chinese Buddhism aligned with their perception of modernity.45 Much has been made of the contention between conservatives and reformers in twentieth-century Chinese Buddhism. However, it is increasingly clear that both sides innovated and adapted a range of positions from which to engage the major discourses that took on such importance in an age of dramatic political, cultural, and social change. These were not discussions that Buddhists con ned to their own circles. Indeed, there was considerable Buddhist engagement with broader intellectual debates about modern philosophy and science. The Buddhist intellectual Ouyang Jian sought to distill a Buddhist “consciousness-only” philosophy commensurate with modern Western epistemology, while Liang Shuming, Feng Youlan, Xiong Shili, Mou Zongsan, and even virulent anti-Buddhists like Hu Shi attempted to place Buddhist thought in the newly Western-modeled discipline of Chinese philosophy and draw from a new “Buddhology” inspiration for distinctive modern Chinese philosophical departures.46 Recognizing the voices of Buddhist intellectuals in the halls of such New Culture discussions, as Erik Hammerstrom does in his chapter of this volume, should leave us wary of too easily typifying the New Culture intellectual movement as atly secular and dully materialist in all its guises, or accepting that this rising intellectual discourse was the sole product of its most lucid advocates. That Buddhists and Buddhism also had a role in advancing discourses of nationalism and “the project of nation-building” corresponds well with Prasenjit Duara’s observations about traditionalist religious “redemptive societies” and their alternative narratives of the nation.47 One impetus for this came with the quest for a new source of public morality su ciently authentic and authoritative to serve as a basis for the “national character” of a new, modern Chinese citizenry that can be traced to Liang Qichao, Zhang Taiyan, and Cai Yuanpei’s interest in Buddhism in the years just after 1900; and it remained a theme decades later for gures like the senior Nationalist o cial Dai Jitao.48 Activist monks, moreover, early on made a point of linking their progressive religious reformism with support for the project of national “awakening.” Some, like Zongyang, Qiyun, Quefei, and Tieyan, joined the revolutionary struggle against the Qing dynasty. Citizenship training and instruction in patriotism became part of the curriculum in

16

Introduction

reformist seminaries. Moreover, as Xue Yu has shown, increasing numbers of Buddhist monks during China’s long war of attrition with Japan formulated Buddhist theories to support a patriotic war of resistance.49 James Carter’s study of Master Tanxu has provided the greatest insight into a Buddhist gure whose quest for ethical and spiritual revival in an era of nationalism and the birth of the Chinese nation-state in contention with foreign imperialism made of him a “cultural patriot.” Detailing the complexities and ambiguities of Tanxu’s endeavor amid the last stage of foreign-concession imperialism and Japan’s invasion and establishment of occupation client states, Carter concludes, “Buddhism could be a component of Chinese nationalism: both categories were adaptive and exible.”50 This point holds for, among others, Juzan and even Master Yinguang and his group, whose advocacy of nationalism within the vast, universal transcendent moral vision of Buddhism theoretically produced a form of it dedicated, above all, to religious ethical and spiritual values and so not to the triumph of nation-state power as an end in itself.51 This quali ed, alternative notion of nationalism could not survive the total, multisided war of the 1930s and 1940s, let alone the Communist revolution, when, especially retrospectively, service to the nation and “the people” could be expressed only through the triumphant party-state. Moreover, in the course of events, Buddhist claims to the ethereal and transcendent often became fodder for messy, mundane politics.

ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MODERN STATE Buddhists and Buddhism can be found in all kinds of politics and, particularly as a consequence of the massive midcentury transformations of war and revolution, nally had their twentieth-century experience inextricably linked to the rise of the modern Chinese state. Even as patterns of imperial-era state-Buddhist relations were not forgotten after 1900, there were a striking number of notable Buddhists who, as scholars from Holmes Welch onward have observed, immediately arose to engage the new Republican state on the new political terms taking shape in the early twentieth century. This included the founding

Introduction 17

of national Buddhist associations as well as provincial and subprovincial Buddhist organizing in order to negotiate with government o cials primarily for the protection of Buddhist institutional properties and interests.52 At least in some parts of China, the Buddhist activists’ reforms and political interchanges with authorities produced an image of religion, as Rebecca Nedostup has put it, that was “state-legible” and so vitally rede ning of state-society relations.53 In addition, signi cant collaboration between Buddhist leaders and the state occurred in two other realms: political relations between the Chinese central government and the great Tibetan Buddhist–dominated border regions (Tibet, Qinghai, Inner Mongolia) and diplomacy with Asian nations maintaining strong Buddhist traditions. The long history of Buddhist religiously based relations between Beijing and Tibet, Gray Tuttle has shown, provided a starting point for modern Chinese-Tibetan relations evolving amid the changing contexts of newly arising categories and forms of the nation, the state, and the relationship between state and religion. In this arena as well as that of the new realm of international relations, Buddhism o ered much that was useful to the modern state in all its twentieth-century forms.54 There is much to explore in the seemingly multiple and varied forms of Buddhist and modern-state collaborations in the twentieth century. An increasing amount of evidence is revealing the numerous cases in which prominent monks, lay devotees, and government o cials from the highest to the lowest ranks in the Republican era sought one another out, formed close personal relationships, and joined together on religious, charitable social-welfare, and governmental projects. The ranks of senior o cials included fervent lay Buddhists, and many a former o cial, upon retirement, took a leading role in lay Buddhist associations and, in some cases, became monks. Even decidedly nonBuddhist Chinese political leaders often had close in uential Buddhist family members, including Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi) and Mao Zedong, both raised by Buddhist mothers.55 Jan Kiely’s account of the Buddhist movement in Zhejiang and Jiangsu prisons in the 1920s shows lay Buddhist local and provincial o cials, local elites, and the powerful Shanghai lay associations studied by Jessup cooperating to raise funds, implement a Buddhist version of rehabilitative education, and expand

18

Introduction

and extend modern penal reform in the name of social order and Buddhist salvation.56 This is hardly the only such case in which partnerships between lay Buddhist elites and the government reveal these religious elites to have been the more creative, well-organized party, exhibiting considerable social autonomy, leadership, and a capacity to raise resources and mobilize participation in large-scale, sustained enterprises. Buddhist revivalist activism was not simply reacting to an activist modern state; nor were these religious reformists seemingly much interested in resisting the state. Indeed, as long as the state did not seek to destroy their core religious practices and institutions, as had occurred initially in the early Nationalist period, Buddhist elites appear not to have been overly concerned with Buddhism’s subjection to state supervision and regulation. Moreover, advancing their own organizational and religious reformist agendas even as they supported state-building initiatives did not appear to strike them as an inconsistent or problematic stance. This experience in the Republican era, indeed, conditioned the Buddhist revivalist encounter after 1949 with the Maoist Communist state. Even left-wing clerics like Juzan expected the new Communist state to be true to its publically moderate pronouncements and invitations to participate in the construction of the “New China.” A rationally reconstructed China, these Buddhists seem to have thought, would be consistent and welcoming of a rationalized Buddhism cleansed of the historical detritus of “superstition” and “feudalism” and devoted to a moral vision of equality, justice, and service to the nation. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) seemed to be drawing upon legitimating Buddhist resources in the manner of previous regimes and inviting Buddhist leaders to partner with them. In fact, however, these Buddhists were experiencing a new mode of revolutionary governance that dealt with them in accordance with Mao’s wartime reformulation of Marxist-Leninist “united front” theory, which linked CCP alliance with “bourgeois” forces to the eventual “struggle” of, and so discipline and transformation of, these allies.57 As the chapters in this volume by Xue Yu and Jan Kiely show, while Buddhist leaders in Beijing were coopted to lead the diminishing of religion in the name of religion while a rming the ultimate truth and absolute authority of the CCP and its

Introduction 19

ideology, in local society Buddhists were brought into a party-directed program in the name of revolution that reduced the economic and social basis of institutional Buddhism. Although even this diminished and docile form of state-managed Buddhism su ered severely under the violent iconoclasm of the Cultural Revolution, it nevertheless survived to become the baseline for the party’s return to a united front approach to governing religion after the late 1970s. Therefore, even as the contemporary religious e ervescence in which various kinds of modern Chinese Buddhism have again burst forth in Chinese society has been commonly associated with the demise of the revolutionary state, the Buddhism of the long Reform Era bears the stamp of its initial reconstruction by the CCP state. It is little wonder, then, that much of the scholarship on contemporary Chinese Buddhism remains so centrally concerned with the state.58 However, with the expansion of market-economic and social forces as well as increasing openness to regional and global interchange of all kinds, on a scale beyond the grasp of even a security state as massive as the one that exists in China today, the Buddhist story is already increasingly drawing our attention, as in Gareth Fisher’s research and recent studies of Taiwan, back to the social communal level and individual experience. Nevertheless, as our perspective shifts in relation to our context, we should keep in mind, as this volume suggests, the history of how a socially vital Buddhist activist movement contributed so readily to strengthening and, eventually, collaborating with a modern state that carried out the most thorough suppression of Buddhism in Chinese history.

STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK This book is divided thematically and chronologically into three parts. Part 1 explores the Buddhist engagement with key aspects of the emerging Chinese modernity of the early twentieth century. Its three chapters show that by positioning themselves as participants in the modern city, debates about science, and the publishing industry, various types of Buddhists contributed to the production of signi cant new forms of sociocultural identities, communities, and discourses. Brooks

20

Introduction

Jessup’s chapter on the World Buddhist Householder Grove shows how early Republican urban Buddhist elites positioned themselves so deliberately and distinctively within the cosmopolitan setting of China’s most modern city. Closely examining the construction of the social space of the householder grove and the social practices pursued within it, Jessup reveals a striking motivational dynamic to this new kind of lay association that not only supported the rise of Buddhist social elite in uence in Shanghai but also became a model for numerous similar associations that proliferated in cities and towns across China. In e ect, these lay elites turned to Buddhism and collective ventures in its name inspired by an ambivalence toward the modern commercial, consumer-, and leisure-oriented aspects of Republican Shanghai society and a simultaneous strong desire to be moderns on their own terms. Their project of ethical-cultural positioning elevated probity and decorum of a distinctly modern disciplined form that, nonetheless, harbored at its core not a disguised secularism but a pulsating religiosity expressed in collective ritual and unmitigated supernaturalism. Moreover, even as they were much engaged with so many of the complexly layered sectors of Shanghai society and governance, these in uential lay elites were committed to an ethical vision inhering in their salvationist beliefs that guided their comportment and social action and so asserted their social stance in cultural-ethical (and so critical) contrast to other elites and, indeed, to much of the society that surrounded them. Set against the backdrop of broader intellectual discussions of Buddhism and Buddhist intellectual debates about modern philosophy and science, Erik Hammerstrom’s chapter examines the participation of Buddhist intellectuals in the most visible, central forums of the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates of the early 1920s that were so de ning of the main modern intellectual current owing out of the New Culture Movement. This was neither a matter of religious gures commenting on notable secular intellectual controversies within their own religious circles nor a generalized adaptation of modernist discourses; rather, Hammerstrom speci cally presents evidence of Buddhist intellectuals thoroughly adopting and promoting modern scienti c taxonomies of knowledge and pointedly valuing scienti c empiricism. Hence,

Introduction 21

in an era when science represented, perhaps above any other single term, the ideal of modernity, these Buddhist intellectuals energetically joined in the production of the prevalent discourse of science in modern China. Doing so, moreover, in ways that drew on Buddhist thought, appropriated science for Buddhist projects, and contested absolutist epistemological claims for science, Buddhists tempered, complicated, expanded, and deepened the modern Chinese discourse on science even as they advanced it. Taking us deeply into the inaugural period of the new Buddhist print culture, Gregory Scott’s chapter on the earliest modern Buddhist periodicals illuminates a founding process for a new genre critical to a range of Buddhist circles for decades, even well into the 1950s. Based on close examination of three pioneering Buddhist periodicals of the early twentieth century, Scott o ers the rst detailed account of these journals that became the models for the subsequent proliferation of Buddhist periodicals from the 1920s onward. He strikingly shows how certain Shanghai-based Buddhists embraced this new form of media in an era when such journals have so often been presumed to represent the apparent modern secularism of early Republican politics and the New Culture Movement. Each periodical, Scott demonstrates, was particularly oriented to the respective projects of internal and public constitution of Buddhist associations, communication to link up Buddhist social networks, and to communicate with and make claims before a general public. In the process, these Buddhists gained a platform from which to assert their religious identity in broader public discourse on questions of culture, tradition, and modernity. Part 2 turns to the Buddhist presence in modern politics amid the dramatic expansions of state power through war and revolution in the middle decades of the twentieth century. The three chapters demonstrate how at the levels of diplomacy, ideology, and social reform, various Buddhist objects, ideas, individuals, communities, and institutions became meaningfully implicated in modern statebuilding projects, whether as allies to be utilized or as obstacles to be dismantled. Benjamin Brose’s chapter relating the remarkable story of the Xuanzang relic discovered near wartime Nanjing takes us on a tour of midcentury state and Buddhist roles in the marshaling of

22

Introduction

the value of Buddhist religious practices for various state and Buddhist community relational cultural politics. The repeated ceremonial dividing and donating of the relic, he shows, were part of the wartime Japanese occupation and Wang Jingwei collaborationist regime politics of projecting cultural unity and paci cation as well as the postwar politics of cultural diplomacy involving the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the Republic of China (on Taiwan), Japan, and India. In moments of apparent dissonance between the secular view of the relic as valued cultural artifact and the religious view of it as a numinous object, potential tension was di used by ceremonial division of the relic. However, Brose shows that without faith in its supernatural value the relic would have been a currency too weak to support projects of interstate cultural politics. The repeated reinterpretations and deployments of the relic for political purposes thus coincided with a persistent sense of its numinous quality, revealing how the cultural and political capital of Buddhism could be both an asset and a liability to the modern secular state. Xue Yu’s chapter o ers the most detailed account to date of how the national Buddhist leaders who stayed in China in 1949 to support the revolution attempted to meet the CCP on its all-important ideological ground to identify shared values and a compatible vision of social change. Amid their highly involved and creative attempts to discuss Buddhism and Marxism together remained the shards of earlier arguments for reforming and rationalizing Buddhism, notably the e orts discussed by Hammerstrom to relate Buddhism to science. Yet the seeming true believers, like Juzan, sought primarily to establish compatibilities and commonalities with Marxism, as if to imply that Marxism was the current manifestation of the dharma in the moment. Even such willing intellectual capitulation, however, was not to be tolerated by the CCP. Hence, as Xue Yu demonstrates, the ideological discussions in the Buddhist press of the early 1950s became so constrained by the CCP that they constituted not an act of collaboration but rather a participation in the total subjugation of Buddhism to Marxism, even to the point of renouncing the core elements of the Buddhist faith. In this situation, the theoretical webs spun by Buddhist writers in statecontrolled journals calling for Marxism to “save Buddhism” appear as

Introduction 23

tragically desperate e orts to retain some space for Buddhism in Communist China that, in fact, contributed to its rapid dismantling. Jan Kiely’s chapter on Suzhou of the early PRC is the rst detailed, archivally based study to illustrate how the suppression of institutional Buddhism in the early PRC was actually carried out. As Kiely shows, the campaign records of the early 1950s reveal the persistence, despite the long years of war and revolution, of a rich Buddhist institutional culture, much of which had come to ourish, rst, after the Taiping war in the form of a neighborhood temple Buddhism deeply embedded in local society and, second, during the Republican era, as centrally part of a Pure Land revival movement with mass appeal. The vibrancy of this multilayered urban Buddhist culture is revealed by the fact that the CCP revolutionary state deemed it signi cant enough to crush. It did so primarily by undercutting the economic basis of Buddhist institutions, radically reducing them in number and form. The Buddhism that remained was sanitized and placed in the service of the party-state. It was this form of state Buddhism that was subjected to the brutal assaults of Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution and that was abruptly resuscitated by the state in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Part 3 picks up this thread of revitalization in the post-Mao era with ethnographic accounts of contemporary Buddhist practices, particularly among social groups left marginalized by the period’s economic reforms. The two chapters point to how in both urban and rural settings di erent kinds of practiced Buddhisms and diverse Buddhist values, beliefs, and rituals give shape and meaning to social communities and identities in China today. Gareth Fisher’s chapter studies the formation of textual communities among contemporary lay Buddhists. Based on ethnographic eldwork, Fisher identi es Buddhist communities oriented around texts that, if resonating in some respects with the early periodicals discussed by Scott, represent primarily propagation texts reproduced in a variety of high- and low-tech forms. The manner in which di erent communities formulate moralities of textual exchange, in particular, argues Fisher, reveals much about the di erent kinds of people drawn to each community, a division he identies as inhering in moral judgments and breaking along lines of social class often manifested in di ering educational levels. In the course of

24

Introduction

illuminating a variety of religious communities and suggesting a new approach to the sociological study of Chinese religion, Fisher introduces several representative gures involved in making for themselves distinct lived Buddhist identities in relation to their perceived moralcultural position in modern society. Thus, even as Fisher’s informants all consider themselves Buddhists, their distinctive aims, approaches, and orientations result in their engagement with di erent kinds of Chinese Buddhisms. Neky Cheung, in chapter 8, brings our attention to yet another distinctive kind of self-identi ed Buddhists through her ethnographic research in the predominantly Hakka rural communities of Ninghua county in western Fujian province. Focusing on the ritual of “receiving prayer beads” (jiezhu), a long-standing and still prevalent practice initiating older women and some men into lay Amitabha Buddha (Amituofo) recitation groups, Cheung reveals one rural variant of a grassroots local Buddhism that successfully traversed the suppressions and restrictions of the twentieth century precisely because Buddhist clerical and state authorities did not consider it part of mainstream Buddhism. That they still actively practiced the jiezhu ritual, however, shows not only the great value placed in Buddhist practice, identity, and recitation communities in this area but also how this Buddhist rite serves as a cultural resource with which women enhance their social standing and subject position in a male-dominated society. So even though the ritual appears in certain aspects to reinforce patriarchy, it has long been turned by menopausal women and their families into a therapeutic rite of passage celebrating the postreproductive-age woman, giving her an occasion to honor herself, fortifying matrilineal family ties, and establishing meaningful bonds of friendship between women “Buddhist friends.”

RECOVERING BUDDHIST CHINA As the title of this book suggests, this project to “recover Buddhist China” in the modern era is, in part, an attempt to counter the historiographical omission, obscuration, and marginalization of Buddhists

Introduction 25

and Buddhism in the dominant historical narratives of Chinese history since 1900. In this, the contributors to this volume are joining with the broader enterprise “to return,” as Vincent Goossaert and David Palmer have put it, “religion to the center of modern Chinese history.”59 Yet, while asserting Buddhist signi cance, pervasiveness, and in uence, much of which is most clearly evident in particular elite-articulated forms, this study does not take modern Chinese Buddhism to be a discrete entity de ned primarily by its most articulate elite proponents in response to modern state-ordering initiatives; nor does it consider Buddhists all to be of a single kind. There were, rather, multiple kinds of Chinese Buddhism made up of an array of cultural elements before and after 1900, none of which stood outside the dynamics of historical change. Indeed, the more we open our eyes to the range of di erent kinds of Buddhism and Buddhists that proliferated, the more the Buddhist social-cultural historical presence becomes visible. Discovering a pervasive Buddhist presence in twentieth-century China, however, should not be overstated on its own merits, nor should we be satis ed with inscribing into the historical narrative “Buddhism was here” and leaving it at that. Rather, the focus on the speci c, contextualized Buddhist presence and participation in notable historical processes in this volume o ers a lens through which we can detect a di erent timbre and even di erent dimensions of the twentieth-century Chinese historical experience. This volume points to a formative Buddhist role in the de nition, development, and expansion of the terrain of modern China’s social culture as well as its political culture and governmental regime. Moreover, close examination of these Buddhist contributions complicates and, indeed, moves us beyond rigid analytical dichotomies of statesociety and tradition-modernity to perceive richly textured and nely detailed images lled with overlapping and interchanging features. Furthermore, in considering what Buddhist social endeavor inhered in, and what inspired Buddhist imaginings and actions, these studies take seriously religiosity as a matter of producing value and meaning among the historical actors involved. Appreciating the social-historical context is vital to this, but it also means paying close attention to the particular religious cultural resources and forms adopted and situated

26

Introduction

at the center of many Buddhist lives. There is often a wariness accompanied by di dent expressions of analytical distance by scholars of religion concerned to avoid taking religious claims at face value or, worse, becoming apologists for religious agendas. Yet overly sterile assessments of religious valuing risk presenting just another variation in common social meanings, the undi erentiated e ect of which rings hollow. Therefore, although critical analysis of primary empirical evidence in speci c cases is the shared methodological standard for this volume, the contributors also identify the special kinds of knowledge formation, aesthetic and intellectual a nities, emotional connections, and commitments forged through dynamic interactions with speci cally Buddhist texts, rites, practices, and institutions. Directed at core ethical principles, personal transformation and spiritual renewal, transcendence and the metaphysical, and matters of life and death, such interactions were often invested with a deeply abiding existential meaning not easily dislodged. This is not reducible to the concept of faith, though the range of Buddhists and non-Buddhists, including many with elite, secular modern educations, who believed in karma, supernatural phenomena or whose conversions to Buddhism hinged on the perception of a spiritual experience is striking. The twentieth century is well known for the rising discourses of secularism; but in China, as in many parts of the world, it was also an age of much instability, chaos, mass destruction, and violence that led many to seek deeper meanings within themselves, in past traditions of wisdom, and beyond surface realities. We might better recognize this Buddhist pursuit of meaning as a powerful orientation that was widely recognized, trusted, and associated with authenticity in the eyes of those inside and outside their communities and that also, albeit along with other, parallel motivations, repeatedly spurred Buddhists to social action. Much remains to be done to test and examine variations of this evidence, but there are surely many indications that we have only begun to appreciate the cultural dynamism of Buddhism in China’s modern history and its continuing relevance today as a rich source of social, political, and cultural creativity.

Introduction 27

NOTES 1. Some notable examples include Zhang Taiyan, Liang Qichao, Tan Sitong, Xia Zengyou, and Di Baoxian. See Sin-wai Chan, Buddhism in Late Ch’ing Political Thought (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1985); Viren Murthy, The Political Philosophy of Zhang Taiyan: The Resistance of Consciousness (Leiden: Brill, 2011). 2. Noriko Mori, “Liang Qichao, Late-Qing Buddhism, and Modern Japan,” in The Role of Japan in Liang Qichao’s Introduction of Modern Western Civilization to China, ed. Joshua A. Fogel, 222–46 (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, 2004). 3. Ibid. For representative studies of global Buddhist modernism, see David L. McMahan, The Making of Buddhist Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Donald S. Lopez Jr., ed., A Modern Buddhist Bible: Essential Readings from East and West (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002); Donald S. Lopez Jr., ed., Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism Under Colonialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). For Buddhist modernism in Meiji Japan, see James Edward Ketelaar, Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan: Buddhism and Its Persecution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Judith Snodgrass, Presenting Japanese Buddhism to the West: Orientalism, Occidentalism, and the Columbia Exposition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Kathleen M. Staggs, “ ‘Defend the Nation and Love the Truth’: Inoue Enry and the Revival of Meiji Buddhism,” Monumenta Nipponica, 38, no. 3 (1983): 251–81. 4. On Liang Qichao and the concept of national citizenship, see Joshua A. Fogel and Peter G. Zarrow, eds., Imagining the People: Chinese Intellectuals and the Concept of Citizenship, 1890–1920 (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1997). 5. Liang Qichao 梁啓超, “Lun Fojiao yu qunzhi zhi guanxi” 論佛教與群治之關係 [On the relationship between Buddhism and governing society], in Yinbingshi heji 飲冰室合集 [Collected works from the Yinbing Studio], 10:45–52 (Taipei: Zonghua shuju, 1960). 6. Vincent Goossaert and David A. Palmer, The Religious Question in Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Mayfair Mei-hui Yang, ed., &KLQHVH5HOLJLRVLWLHV$ϵLFWLRQVRI0RGHUQLW\DQG6WDWH)RUPDWLRQ (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Yoshiko Ashiwa and David L. Wank, eds., Making Religion, Making the State: The Politics of Religion in Modern China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009); Adam Yuet Chau, ed., Religion in Contemporary China: Revitalization and Innovation (London: Routledge, 2011); Paul R. Katz, Religion in China and Its Modern Fate (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2014). 7. Vincent Goossaert, The Daoists of Peking, 1800–1949: A Social History of Urban Clerics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2007); Xun Liu, Daoist Modern: Innovation, Lay Practice, and the Community of Inner Alchemy in

28

8.

9. 10.

11.

Introduction

Republican Shanghai (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009); David A. Palmer and Xun Liu, eds., Daoism in the Twentieth Century: Between Eternity and Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); David A. Palmer, Qigong Fever: Body, Science, and Utopia in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); David Ownby, Falun Gong and the Future of China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); David A. Palmer, Paul R. Katz, and Wang Chien-chuan, “Introduction: Redemptive Societies in Cultural and Historical Contexts,” Minsu quyi 173 (September 2011): 1–12; Adam Yuet Chau, Miraculous Response: Doing Popular Religion in Contemporary China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005); Thomas David Dubois, The Sacred Village: Social Change and Religious Life in Rural North China (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 2005); Lian Xi, Redeemed by Fire: The Rise of Popular Christianity in Modern China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); Daniel H. Bays, ed., Christianity in China: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); Ryan Dunch, Fuzhou Protestants and the Making of a Modern China, 1857–1927 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001). Rebecca Nedostup, Superstitious Regimes: Religion and the Politics of Chinese Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2010); ShukWah Poon, Negotiating Religion in Modern China: State and Common People in Guangzhou, 1900–1937 (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2011); Prasenjit Duara, “Knowledge and Power in the Discourse of Modernity: The Campaigns against Popular Religion in Early Twentieth-Century China,” Journal of Asian Studies 50, no. 1 (February 1991): 67–83. For example, see Hung-yok Ip, ed., Buddhist Activism and Chinese Modernity, special issue, Journal of Global Buddhism 10 (2009). Holmes Welch, The Practice of Chinese Buddhism, 1900–1950 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967); Welch, The Buddhist Revival in China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968); Welch, Buddhism under Mao (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972). Welch’s scholarly contributions to the eld are currently being reassessed by the collaborative project Revisiting the Revival: Holmes Welch and the Study of Buddhism in Twentieth-Century China. This has been the focus of research by Chinese scholars as well. For example, see Chen Bing 陳兵 and Deng Zimei 鄧子美, Ershi shiji Zhongguo Fojiao 二 十世紀中國佛教 [Twentieth-century Chinese Buddhism] (Beijing: Minzu chubanshe, 2000); Deng Zimei 邓子美, Zhongguo jindaihua yu chuantong Fojiao 中國近代化與傳統佛教 [Chinese modernization and traditional Buddhism] (Nanjing: Huadong shifan daxue chubanshe, 1994); Gao Zhennong 高振農, Fojiao wenhua yu jindai Zhongguo 佛教文化與近代中國 [Buddhist culture and modern China] (Shanghai: Shanghai shehui kexue chubanshe, 1992); Q. Edward Wang, ed., Buddhism in Modern China, special issue, Chinese Studies in History 46, no. 3 (spring 2013).

Introduction 29 12. Don A. Pittman, Toward a Modern Chinese Buddhism: Taixu’s Reforms (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 2001); Chan, Buddhism in Late Ch’ing Political Thought; Erik J. Hammerstrom, “Buddhists Discuss Science in Modern China (1895–1949)” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 2010); Justin Ritzinger, “Anarchy in the Pure Land: Tradition, Modernity, and the Reinvention of the Cult of Maitreya in Republican China” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2010); Eyal Aviv, “Di erentiating the Pearl from the Fish Eye: Ouyang Jingwu (1871–1943) and the Revival of Scholastic Buddhism” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2008); Murthy, Political Philosophy of Zhang Taiyan; L. Rongdao Lai, “To Revitalize Buddhism and Save the Nation: Buddhist Education in Republican China” (PhD diss., McGill University, 2013). 13. Francesca Tarocco, The Cultural Practices of Modern Chinese Buddhism: Attuning the Dharma (London: Routledge, 2007); Jan Kiely, “Spreading the Dharma with the Mechanized Press: New Buddhist Print Cultures in the Modern Chinese Print Revolution, 1865–1949,” in From Woodblocks to the Internet: Chinese Publishing and Print Culture in Transition, circa 1800 to 2008, ed. Cynthia Brokaw and Christopher A. Reed, 185–210 (Leiden: Brill, 2010); Gregory Adam Scott, “Conversion by the Book: Buddhist Print Culture in Early Republican China,” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2013); James Brooks Jessup, “The Householder Elite: Buddhist Activism in Shanghai, 1920–1956” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2010). 14. Xue Yu, Buddhism, War, and Nationalism: Chinese Monks in the Struggle against Japanese Aggressions, 1931–1945 (New York: Routledge, 2005); James Carter, Heart of Buddha, Heart of China: The Life of Tanxu, a Twentieth-Century Monk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Gray Tuttle, Tibetan Buddhists and the Making of Modern China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 15. Raoul Birnbaum, “Master Hongyi Looks Back: A Modern Man Becomes a Monk in Twentieth-Century China,” in Buddhism in the Modern World: Adaptations of an Ancient Tradition, ed. Steve Heine and Charles S. Prebish, 75–124 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Raoul Birnbaum, “Buddhist China at the Century’s Turn,” China Quarterly, no. 174 (June 2003): 428–50. 16. Charles Brewer Jones, Buddhism in Taiwan: Religion and the State, 1660–1990 (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 1999); Richard Madsen, Democracy’s Dharma: Religious Renaissance and Political Development in Taiwan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); André Laliberté, The Politics of Buddhist Organizations in Taiwan, 1989–2003: Safeguarding the Faith, Building a Pure Land, Helping the Poor (New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004); Julia Huang, Charisma and Compassion: Cheng-Yen and the Buddhist Tzu Chi Movement (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009); Stuart Chandler, Establishing a Pure Land on Earth: The Foguang Buddhist Perspective on Modernization and Globalization (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 2004); Elise Anne DeVido, Taiwan’s Buddhist Nuns (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010).

30

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17. Gareth Fisher, From Comrades to Bodhisattvas: Moral Dimensions of Lay Buddhist Practice in Contemporary China (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 2014); Dan Smyer Yü, The Spread of Tibetan Buddhism in China: Charisma, Money, Enlightenment (London: Routledge, 2012); Ji Zhe, “Buddhism in the Reform Era: A Secularized Revival,” in Chau, Religion in Contemporary China, 37–38; Alison Denton Jones, “A Modern Religion? The State, the People, and the Remaking of Buddhism in Urban China Today” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2010). 18. The volume originated from the Buddhists and Buddhism in the History of Twentieth-Century China workshop held at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, May 30–31, 2012. 19. John Lagerwey, China, a Religious State (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010), 10–13, 30; see also Cheu Hock-Tong, ed., Buddhism in Chinese Culture (Selangor, My.: Pelanduk, 2000). 20. Lagerwey, China, 51. 21. Karl Ludvig Reichelt, The Transformed Abbot, trans. G. M. Reichelt and A. P. Rose (London: Lutterworth, 1954); Karl Ludvig Reichelt, Religion in Chinese Garment, trans. Joseph Tetlie (London: Lutterworth, 1951). 22. On Buddhist activist “vitality,” see Hung-yok Ip, “Buddhist Activism and Chinese Modernity,” special issue, Journal of Global Buddhism 10 (2009): 145–92. 23. Goossaert and Palmer, Religious Question, 56, 79–83; Pittman, Toward a Modern Chinese Buddhism, 44–45; Ketelaar, Of Heretics and Martyrs, 167; see also Welch, Buddhist Revival; Chen and Deng, Ershi shiji Zhongguo Fojiao; Birnbaum, “Master Hongyi Looks Back”; Nedostup, Superstitious Regimes. 24. Chen and Deng, Ershi shiji Zhongguo Fojiao, 36, 479–80. 25. Nara Dillon, “The Politics of Philanthropy: Social Networks and Refugee Relief in Shanghai, 1932–1949,” in At the Crossroads of Empires: Middlemen, Social Networks, and State-Building in Republican Shanghai, ed. Nara Dillon and Jean C. Oi, 179–205 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008); Janet Y. Chen, Guilty of Indigence: The Urban Poor in China, 1900–1953 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). See also Zhou Qiuguang 周秋光, Jindai Zhongguo cishan lungao 近 代中国慈善论稿 [Essays on modern Chinese philanthropy] (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 2010). 26. Brian J. Nichols, “Resourceful Compassion: Buddhist Monks, a Transnational Network, and an Orphanage” (paper presented at the Buddhists and Buddhism in the History of Twentieth-Century China workshop, Chinese University of Hong Kong, May 30–31, 2012); Xue, Buddhism, 30; Jan Kiely, “For Whom the Bells Ring and the Drums Beat: Pure Land Buddhist Refugee Relief Activism in Wartime Shanghai, 1937–1945” (paper presented at the Conference in Honor of Frederic Wakeman Jr., University of California at Berkeley, May 6, 2006); Jan Kiely, The Compelling Ideal: Thought Reform and the Prison, 1901–1956 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 51–52, 123–60, 184–85; Jessup, “Householder Elite.” 27. Liu, Daoist Modern, 55, 246–47; Dunch, Fuzhou Protestants, 190.

Introduction 31 28. Birnbaum, “Master Hongyi Looks Back”; Birnbaum, “Buddhist China”; Pittman, Toward a Modern Chinese Buddhism; Xue, Buddhism; Carter, Heart of Buddha. 29. Susan Naquin, Peking, Temples, and City Life, 1400–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), xxxi, 90; see also Chun-fang Yü, The Renewal of Buddhism in China: Chu-hong and the Late Ming Synthesis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981); Timothy Brook, Praying for Power: Buddhism and the Formation of Gentry Society in Late Ming China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 1994) 30. Jessup, “Householder Elite.” 31. R. Keith Schoppa, Blood Road: The Mystery of Shen Dingyi in Revolutionary China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 23. 32. Kuiyi Shen, “Wang Yiting in the Social Networks of 1910s–1930s Shanghai,” in Dillon and Oi, At the Crossroads, 45–64; Zhou, Jindai Zhongguo cishan lungao; Zhou Qiuguang, Xiong Xiling yu cishan jiaoyu shiye 熊希齡與慈善教育事業 [Xiong Xiling and philanthropic educational enterprises] (Changsha: Hunan jiaoyu chubanshe, 1991). 33. Kiely, “Spreading the Dharma.” 34. Carter, Heart of Buddha; Birnbaum, “Master Hongyi Looks Back”; Geremie Barmé, An Artistic Exile: A Life of Feng Zikai (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Kang Bao [Paul R. Katz] 康豹, “Yige zhuming Shanghai shangren yu cishan jia de zongjiao shenghuo—Wang Yiting” 一個著名上海商人與慈善家 的宗教生活—王一亭 [The religious life of a renowned Shanghai businessman and philanthropist: Wang Yiting], in Cong chengshi kan Zhongguo de xiandaixing 從城市看中國的現代性 [An urban perspective on Chinese modernity], ed. Wu Renshu 巫仁恕, Lin Meili 林美莉, and Kang Bao 康豹 [Paul R. Katz], 275– 96 (Nankang: Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, 2010). 35. On the “golden age of the bourgeoisie,” see Marie-Claire Bergère, The Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie, 1911–1937, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); see also, on the Zhejiang First Normal School, Wen-hsin Yeh, Provincial Passages: Culture, Space, and the Origins of Chinese Communism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 36. Chen Mingshu 陈铭枢, Chen Mingshu huiyilu 陈铭枢回忆录 [Memoirs of Chen Mingshu], ed. Zhu Zongzhen 朱宗震 (Beijing: Zhongguo wenshi chubanshe, 1997), 26–27. 37. Liu Shanwei 刘善伟, “Junfa mianmianguan” 军阀面面观 [Perspectives on warlords], Wenshi yuekan 12 (2009): 33; we are grateful to Kum-Hoon Ng for this reference. See Kum-Hoon Ng, “The Emergence of a New Demonic: The Case of 7KH8QRϲFLDO+LVWRU\RIWKH)HPDOH7UDQVFHQGHQW” (research seminar paper, Chinese University of Hong Kong, May 17, 2013), 46. On warlord Buddhists, see J. B. Pratt, The Pilgrimage of Buddhism (New York: Macmillan, 1928), 380. 38. Eugenia Lean, Public Passions: The Trial of Shi Jianqiao and the Rise of Popular Sympathy in Republican China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007);

32

39. 40. 41.

42.

43.

44. 45.

46.

47.

Introduction

Frederic Wakeman Jr., Spymaster: Dai Li and the Chinese Secret Service (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 9. Shen Ji 沈寂, Yidai yingxing Ruan Lingyu 一代影星阮玲玉 [First-generation lm star Ruan Lingyu] (Shanghai: Shanghai shudian chubanshe, 1999), 167. See chapters 6, 7, and 8. John Lagerwey, “Ethnographic Introduction,” and Wang Zhenzhong, “Historical Introduction,” trans. John Lagerwey, in Baiyangyuan: Huizhou chuantong cunluo shehui 白杨源： 徽州传统村落社会 [Baiyangyuan: Huizhou traditional village society], by Wu Zhengfang 吴正芳 (Shanghai: Fudan daxue chubanshe, 2011), 8–12, 19, 31. On grassroots Buddhism, see Tam Wai Lun, “Exorcism and the Pu’an Buddhist Ritual Specialists in Rural China,” in Exorcism in Religious Daoism: A Berlin Symposium, ed. Florian C. Reiter, 137–50 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2011). Huang Jianxing, “Research on Shijiao: The Ritual Traditions of Fashi in South China” (PhD diss., Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2013), 43, and Hu Jianguo 胡建国, Wunuo yu wushu 巫傩与巫术 [Witchcraft and sorcery] (Hainan: Hainan chubanshe, 1993), 238. On the question of o cial and elite perceptions of local Buddhists, see chapter 8 in this volume. Susan Daruvala, Zhou Zouren and an Alternative Chinese Response to Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2000), 47–48; Shen, “Wang Yiting in the Social Networks”; Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen, A Century in Crisis: Modernity and Tradition in the Art of Twentieth-Century China (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1998); Tarocco, Cultural Practices; Walter B. Davis, “Wang Yiting and the Art of Sino-Japanese Exchange” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 2008). John Blofeld, The Jewel in the Lotus: An Outline of Present Day Buddhism in China (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1948), 59. Pittman, Toward a Modern Chinese Buddhism; Yuan Yuan, “Chinese Buddhist Nuns in the Twentieth Century: A Case Study in Wuhan,” Journal of Global Buddhism 10 (2009): 375–412. Thierry Meynard, The Religious Philosophy of Liang Shuming: The Hidden Buddhist (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 26; Guy S. Alitto, The Last Confucian: Liang Shu-ming and the Chinese Dilemma of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); Fung Yu-lan, A History of Chinese Philosophy, trans. Derk Bodde (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953); Jason Clower, The Unlikely Buddhologist: Tiantai Buddhism in Mou Zongsan’s New Confucianism (Leiden: Brill, 2010); Aviv, “Di erentiating the Pearl.” Prasenjit Duara, “Religion and Citizenship in China and the Diaspora,” in Yang, Chinese Religiosities, 53–54; Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 221–22; Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Little eld, 2003).

Introduction 33 48. Rebecca Nedostup, “Ritual Competition and the Modernizing NationState,” in Yang, Chinese Religiosities, 106; Gregory Adam Scott, “The Buddhist Nationalism of Dai Jitao,” Journal of Chinese Religions 39 (2011): 55–81; Tuttle, Tibetan Buddhists. 49. Chen and Deng, Ershi shiji Zhongguo Fojiao, 476–81; Pittman, Toward a Modern Chinese Buddhism, 73; Xue, Buddhism; L. Rongdao Lai, “The Rise of Citizenship Consciousness among China’s Student-Monks, 1911–1949” (paper presented at the Buddhists and Buddhism in the History of Twentieth-Century China workshop, Chinese University of Hong Kong, May 30–31, 2012). 50. Carter, Heart of Buddha, 193; 54, 62, 83, 86, 108; see also James Carter, “Buddhism, Resistance, and Collaboration in Manchuria,” Journal of Global Buddhism 10 (2009): 193–216 51. Jan Kiely, “The Charismatic Monk and Chanting Masses: Master Yinguang and His Pure Land Revival Movement,” in The Making of Saints in Modern and &RQWHPSRUDU\&KLQD3URϮOHVLQ5HOLJLRXV/HDGHUVKLS, ed. David Ownby, Ji Zhe, and Vincent Goossaert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming). 52. Vincent Goossaert, “Republican Church Engineering: The National Religious Associations in 1912 China,” in Yang, Chinese Religiosities, 215–17; Xue, Buddhism, 28–29; Welch, Buddhist Revival; Nedostup, Superstitious Regimes. 53. Nedostup, Superstitious Regimes, 124–26. 54. Carter, Heart of Buddha, 121; Tuttle, Tibetan Buddhists; José Ignacio Cabezón, “State Control of Tibetan Buddhist Monasticism in the People’s Republic of China,” in Yang, Chinese Religiosities, 261–91; Amy Holmes-Tagchungdarpa, “Imagining Borderland Tibetan Buddhism in Republican China: Zhang Xuebuen’s Tibetan Photographs, Travel Logs and Ethnographic Writings as Transmitters of Cultural Contact from the Western Frontier” (paper presented at the Buddhists and Buddhism in the History of Twentieth-Century China workshop, Chinese University of Hong Kong, May 30–31, 2012); Goossaert and Palmer, Religious Question, 155. 55. Carter, Heart of Buddha, 70–71, 109, 115, 147; Xue, Buddhism, 114; Huang Xianian 黃夏年, ed., Taixu ji 太虚集 [The collected works of Taixu] (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1995), 60, 331–32; Nedostup, Superstitious Regimes. 56. Kiely, Compelling Ideal, chap. 4. 57. David E. Apter and Tony Saich, Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 209. 58. David L. Wank, “Institutionalizing Modern ‘Religion’ in China’s Buddhism: Political Phases of a Local Revival,” in Ashiwa and Wank, Making Religion, 126– 50; Yoshiko Ashiwa, “Positioning Religion in Modernity: State and Buddhism in China,” ibid., 43–73; Ji Zhe, “Secularization as Religious Restructuring: Statist Institutionalization of Chinese Buddhism and Its Paradoxes,” in Yang, Chinese Religiosities, 233–60. 59. Goossaert and Palmer, Religious Question, 5.

PART I REPUBLICAN-ERA MODERNITY

1 BUDDHIST ACTIVISM, URBAN SPACE, AND AMBIVALENT MODERNITY IN 1920 S SHANGHAI .

I still remember this great ten-mile-foreign-place [Shanghai] as it was a decade ago, with its unending ood of horses and cars and its rampant competition for ostentatious display. There was no evil it did not possess, no curiosity it did not have. Deceitful and dishonest, demolishing principle and damaging ethics, it was truly a den of worldly evils. It was a most imposing site in the landscape of humanity, a socalled living hell before one’s very eyes. At that time, where was there such a sancti ed ritual space [daochang 道場] for buddhacization? With hardly anyone who could recognize, understand, or believe in even the character for “Buddha,” how could the Buddha’s radiance be expected to bestow its protection? Suddenly, from amid this jungle of ten thousand evils, numerous householders [jushi 居士] appeared, riding their vows as they came. In this place where the lthiest elements of society gather, they have broadly promoted buddhacization, and everywhere invigorated the lotus school.

—

I

1

n the early twentieth century, an impressive cross-section of urban elites in Shanghai turned to Buddhism. They were drawn from the ranks of the most prominent and wealthy gures in China’s premier modern metropolis: bankers, doctors, lawyers,

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judges, government o cials, intellectuals, educators, and, above all, capitalists. Over the course of the Republican era (1912–1949), this burgeoning community of Buddhist elites established an array of new organizations for the collective practice and promotion of the faith in Shanghai, extended their in uence throughout the country and abroad through the creation of a modern Buddhist publishing industry, and played a central role in the national movement to protect Buddhist temples from state secularization programs and win recognition for Buddhism as the very model of legitimate Chinese religion in the twentieth century.2 These urban elites identi ed themselves as “householders” (jushi 居士). Although the term “householder” had a long history of usage in the Chinese lexicon as a general appellation for a lay Buddhist,3 it took on new meanings when used by modern elites as a marker of identity in the speci c context of early twentiethcentury Shanghai. Shanghai during the Republican era was China’s largest and most dazzlingly modern metropolis. Ever since the mid-nineteenth century, when it acquired its status as a premier treaty port with sizable British and French foreign settlements, the city had been transformed by Western in uence and international commerce. To the many Chinese who either ed to the safety of the city from disturbances in nearby provinces or were attracted by its business opportunities, treaty-port Shanghai confronted them as a strange, almost foreign, place. A new urban elite had emerged as Chinese entrepreneurs acquired vast fortunes through trade and industry and often adopted not only the business techniques but also the cultural styles of their Western counterparts. The city’s transformation was re ected perhaps most saliently in the urban landscape and infrastructure of the foreign settlements, which boasted neoclassical Western architecture, broad French-style tree-lined avenues, electricity, running water, automobiles, trams, and other such amenities of modern life. This became the setting for the proliferation of such new urban spaces as co ee shops, dance halls, department stores, amusement parks, and movie theaters, in which Chinese residents could engage in new types of sociability and cultural activity. Early twentieth-century Shanghai’s urban culture became known above all for its opportunities for novel cosmopolitan forms of

Buddhist Activism, Urban Space, and Ambivalent Modernity 39

leisure, entertainment, and conspicuous consumption.4 However, such urban cultural trends were by no means universally celebrated. Indeed, there was a pervasive ambivalence expressed toward Shanghai’s cosmopolitan commercial culture, particularly among the residents of the city itself. Hanchao Lu has pointed to two general views of the city as “a symbol of economic opportunities to be seized, or . . . a trap of moral degeneration . . . to be shunned and condemned.”5 As the “dystopic” quote at the beginning of this chapter suggests, it was this deep, pervasive ambivalence toward the moral e ects of Shanghai’s cosmopolitan commercial culture that red urban elite engagement with Buddhism as “householders” in a modern metropolis.6 This chapter explores how urban elites gave meaning to their identity as householders by constructing new urban religious spaces in Shanghai’s physical and cultural landscape. I focus here on one particular space, the World Buddhist Householder Grove (WBHG, shijie Fojiao jushilin 世界佛教居士林). Along with Enlightenment Garden and the Merit Grove vegetarian restaurant,7 the WBHG was one of three newly constructed sites in the mid-1920s that became the primary spaces within which the city’s householder community would carry out its social practices throughout the remainder of the Republican era and beyond.8 On the one hand, these practices unmistakably associated each of the three sites with particular aspects of Shanghai’s self-consciously “modern” urban culture—voluntary associations for collective representation and activism, public parks for leisure and assembly, and fashionable restaurants for entertainment and social events, respectively. Therefore, these newly constructed religious spaces were not, in either fact or presentation, merely anachronistic remnants of the city’s past holding on as isolated pockets of tradition in the modern metropolis. On the other, however, householder spaces were also unmistakably differentiated from other modern voluntary associations, public parks, and restaurants by a distinctive moral orientation derived from the shared Buddhist soteriology to which the householders committed themselves as a community. The morally infused social practices carried out in these spaces went beyond merely marking householder spaces as distinctive alternatives to their competitors in the urban cultural marketplace; they proclaimed an ethical, and thus political,

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critique of those competitors. It was therefore through the unique combination of cultural associations and distinctions established by their social practices in newly constructed spaces that urban elites gave meaning to their identity as householders in the speci c context of Republican Shanghai. There are two reasons that the spatial construction of householder identity in Shanghai deserves our attention, both of which I will return to in the conclusion. First, the WBHG, Enlightenment Garden, and the Merit Grove vegetarian restaurant were each a new type of urban religious space that, after rst appearing in Shanghai, was replicated in numerous other cities across China throughout the Republican era and to the present day. Therefore, simply by virtue of being a xture of Chinese urban culture since the 1920s, householder spaces and identity are deserving of our attention. The second reason is both broader and more historiographical. Householder Buddhist activism was closely linked to many other “traditional” cultural activities popular among urban elites in Republican China. Although often overlooked by historians searching for modern China, when taken together these activities constituted a vast and signi cant eld of urban elite cultural production, much of which was centered in the modern metropolis of Shanghai. In the conclusion, I suggest that the spatial construction of householder identity in Shanghai exhibited a fundamental structure of cultural positioning that was shared throughout this larger eld of urban cultural pursuits. Recognition of the widespread simultaneous ambivalence of urban elites toward constructions of both foreignderived modernity and native Chinese tradition entails a fundamental revision of received understandings of urban modernity in twentiethcentury China.

MAKING SPACE FOR THE HOUSEHOLDER The rst step in the construction of a householder community and a new brand of Buddhist activism in Republican Shanghai came in 1920 with the founding of the Shanghai Buddhist Householder Grove (SBHG, Shanghai Fojiao jushilin 上海佛教居士林). The SBHG was the brainchild

Buddhist Activism, Urban Space, and Ambivalent Modernity 41

of Wang Yuji 王與楫 (b. 1883), a modern-educated Hunanese industrial entrepreneur, newspaper reporter, and revolutionary veteran who arrived in Shanghai from Beijing in 1917 with an established reputation as an energetic Buddhist lay preacher.9 In rented quarters at the Wuxi native-place association (Xijin gongsuo 錫金公所) on Haining Road in Shanghai’s International Settlement, Wang created a new type of Buddhist organization, the householder grove, that would eventually be replicated in cities across China and spread overseas through the Chinese diaspora. Unlike previous Buddhist lay associations that focused on a particular type of religious activity or practice, the organizing principle of Wang’s householder grove was simply the identity of its members as householders.10 The householder grove therefore placed no limitations on sect or school and integrated the full range of activities and practices in which an urban householder might want to engage. During the years when the SBHG was in operation, from 1920 to 1922, this included regular preaching, study courses, scripture reading, nianfo recitation, releasing life, charity, and woodblock printing.11 However, by 1922 Wang Yuji had become increasingly distracted by other new projects for Buddhist activism, and the SBHG leadership decided to split the original organization into the WBHG and the Shanghai Buddhist Pure Karma Society.12 From the borrowed quarters at the Wuxi native-place association, the reorganized WBHG built upon the original framework of the SBHG. New departments, groups, and activities were added, such as a meditation hall, research society, prayer society, and an editorial o ce for the WBHG’s new periodical, the World Buddhist Householder Grove Journal (Shijie Fojiao jushilin linkan).13 The new designation “world” in its name signaled less an actual internationalization of the membership than a deliberate association with the growing global movement to establish Buddhism as a world or universal religion.14 In contemporary discourse, this decidedly cosmopolitan positioning distinguished the WBHG and its householders from local superstition (mixin 迷信), which had become the shame of China’s progressive elites ever since the disastrous Boxer Uprising of 1900.15 Throughout the mid-1920s, the WBHG attracted increasing numbers from the upper ranks of Shanghai’s urban populace, among them some of the most prominent

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notables in the city. As membership numbers grew from 170 in 1922 to 957 by the end of 1925,16 new-member records show that the majority of the incoming rank and le listed their occupations in the categories of merchant (shang 商), intellectual (xue 學), and o cial (zheng 政). For example, recruitment numbers for the middle of 1924 list percentages in these categories at 55, 11, and 11, respectively.17 In 1922 the membership elected as its rst president the silk manufacturing magnate Zhou Shunqing 周舜卿 (1851–1923),18 who was also the founder and president of the WBHG’s host institution, the Wuxi native-place association. After Zhou passed away the following year, the second president selected (in 1924) was Shi Xingzhi 施省之 (1865–1945), a Hangzhou native who had served the Qing dynasty as consul general to the United States before returning to take up o cial posts in the new Republic, including director general of the Shanghai–Nanjing Railroad.19 Shi’s vice presidents were Zhou Shunqing’s younger brother and Wang Yiting 王一亭 (1867–1938), a former shipping comprador and revolutionary leader who had risen to become one of Shanghai’s most powerful capitalists and a recognized municipal leader.20 In social character, then, the WBHG was not a mass organization but rather an assembly of middle-class urbanites and wealthy elites. By 1925, the WBHG had outgrown its quarters at the Wuxi nativeplace association and was duly informed that it had outstayed its welcome. After some debate, the executive council determined to take the bold and expensive step of constructing an entirely new compound that could provide a solid basis for the organization’s long-term development. To oversee every stage of this critical project, the council formed a special construction committee led by two of its most dedicated o cers, Zhu Shiseng 朱石僧 (1887–1942),21 the station manager at the Shanghai (North) Railroad Station and WBHG external communications manager, and Li Jingwei 李經緯,22 an electrical engineer employed as a central dispatcher for the Shanghai–Nanjing Railroad then also serving as head of the WBHG’s Central A airs Department. The construction committee purchased a 2.6 mu (roughly half an acre) plot of land on Xinmin Road at its intersection with Guoqing Road. Unlike its former location within the International Settlement, this new plot was located two blocks north of the settlement border, in the

Grove

1.1 Portraits of successive presidents of the World Buddhist Householder

Shijie Fojiao jushilin chengji baogaoshu 世界佛教居士林成績報告書 [World Buddhist Householder Grove achievement report] (Shanghai: Shanghai Foxue shuju, 1933)

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Chinese-administered Zhabei district, just a short walk to the railway station. Householder Li Jingwei himself drew up the initial design for the compound to be erected at the new location and then used his connections to bring in professional architects on a volunteer basis for the nal blueprints. Unlike much of Zhabei at this time, the WBHG compound was to have modern amenities such as electricity and running water. Once construction began on October 3, 1925, Li reportedly visited the site every day to personally supervise the progress through to completion in March of the following year; “no aspect of the arrangements within the compound—down to every wall, column, altar, table, plaque, and painting—escaped his master craftsmanship and superb management.”23 Despite the success of a major fund-raising campaign orchestrated by Zhu Shiseng in the spring of 1925 that brought in over 40,000 yuan (more than seven times the organization’s annual income from the previous year), the total cost of the project still left the WBHG with a bank debt of 30,000 yuan.24 Nevertheless, the heightened activism of the campaign had helped to nearly double the duespaying membership to over 1,700 and thereby established the broad social support that would ensure the WBHG on Xinmin Road a stable and in uential position in Shanghai’s urban landscape for more than a decade to come.25 The WBHG scheduled the grand-opening ceremony of its new compound for May 16, 1926, three days prior to the annual celebration of the Buddha’s birthday. In the nal weeks leading up to the ceremony, Sun Chuanfang, the militarist who controlled the administration of Shanghai’s Chinese districts, publicly declared his support for the organization, and media attention was drawn to the nal preparations under way on Xinmin Road.26 A palpable excitement spread among the city’s householders in anticipation of what they sensed was a momentous event in the history of their community. Perhaps the most dramatic expression of this emotional atmosphere occurred on May 5, the day construction was completed, when Householder Wang Zhengkun cut o his arm and transferred the merit for this holy act of self-in icted violence to the future development and growth of the WBHG.27 On the day of the opening ceremony, reportedly over one thousand guests arrived at the intersection of Xinmin and Guoqing Roads in the

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early afternoon. As many were coming from the International Settlement, arrangements had been made in advance with the border police to allow their automobiles to cross into Zhabei without a Chinese license.28 To aid the guests in recognizing their destination, a large yellow banner was suspended across Xinmin Road displaying the words “World Buddhist Householder Grove.” Because the main outer door had yet to be installed, the otherwise unremarkable street entrance was also draped with yellow cloth and guarded by two policemen. Passing inside, the guests entered a sizable courtyard facing a ve-bay, three-story, Western-style building with a large clock prominently visible at its center. Here they were attended by WBHG o cers and tea servers wearing yellow badges for ready identi cation, who led them into a large room occupying the three central bays on the rst oor of the building. This was the Great Hall (dadian 大殿), at one end of which was an altar with incense and ower o erings to large statues of Amit bha, kyamuni, and Maitreya, the “Tath gatas of the Three Times” (sanshi rulai 三世如來). The walls of the Great Hall were decorated with commemorative verses composed by prominent individuals in honor of the occasion. The guests were then led to their speci ed seating areas: special seating was set up to the left of the altar for government o cials and WBHG board members, and to the right for robed monks. The rest of the guests were seated in rows in front of the altar, with men separated to the left and women to the right.29 At precisely two o’clock, a bell was struck to signal the start of the ceremony. The guests joined their voices in singing a hymn that had been composed by the head of the WBHG’s Pure Karma Department, Householder Huang Haishan 黃海山: A jade palace rises up to the sky, and the vows of the multitude are ful lled; Carrying out Buddhist a airs to repay compassionate blessings, the great earth gives allegiance; Universally transforming the ethical norms of society, in peaceful cultivation [we] joyfully ascend together. Praise to the bodhisattva-mah sattvas that gather like the clouds! (Three times)

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At the end of the singing, everyone joined their palms and bowed their heads. President Shi Xingzhi then welcomed the guests and delivered a speech on the history of the WBHG, the construction of its new compound, and the direction for its future development. The former New York consul general explained to his audience, Shanghai is a place of ostentatious luxury and sensational tumult. If one wishes to practice pure karma, unfortunately there is no pure place [to do so]. Although there are ancient temples here, if we wish to use them as sites for the serious practice of householders there are many ways in which [these temples] are unsuitable. This is the reason for which the World Buddhist Householder Grove was established.

Shi’s speech was followed by a talk on karmic retribution and the path of practice by Master Yinguang, the famed Pure Land patriarch, who had agreed to serve as the WBHG’s “honored guiding teacher.”30 Yinguang concluded his talk by making full-body prostrations before the Buddha statues on the altar. Next, Zhang Taiyan, the famous revolutionary intellectual who served as a WBHG board member, and Shen Siqi, the secretary of the Jiangsu provincial government, recited verses they had composed for the occasion.31 The nal speaker was WBHG vice president Wang Yiting, who, on behalf of the organization, expressed gratitude to its supporters. When Wang had nished, the ceremony concluded with another hymn by Huang Haishan: The Householder Grove is a great sancti ed ritual space [daochang], and its digni ed temple buildings stand majestically; This achievement has relied entirely on the compassionate radiance of the Buddha, [whose] vow to protect sentient beings must be repaid; As a model for the many nations across the ve continents, [we strive to] transform the great earth into purity; [We] pledge to promote the wondrous dharma of the Tath gata, [so that] the Way of the Buddha will forever prosper far and wide; Collectively extolling the sacred name of Amit bha, together [we will be] reborn in his kingdom of paradise.

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The ceremony ended with another ringing of the bell, followed by refreshments and group photographs as the guests dispersed.32 As a choreographed public presentation of a new space that the householders had specially designed themselves, the opening ceremony positioned the WBHG, and the householder identity it represented, in Shanghai’s speci c cultural context in ways that would have been clear to those in attendance. President Shi’s speech, which had in fact been jointly written with Wang Yiting and other WBHG leaders,33 pointed directly to the fundamental set of associations and distinctions that established this cultural position. At rst glance, the speech reveals two things that the WBHG was to be distinguished from: the “ostentatious luxury and sensational tumult” of Shanghai’s commercial culture and the “unsuitable” environment of the city’s “ancient temples.” However, particularly when read against the built space in which this speech was delivered and heard—and which it was intended to explain—it becomes apparent that these were also precisely the two things that the WBHG was to be associated with. In other words, the WBHG was distinct from commercial culture because of its association with the “pure” space of temples, and it was distinct from temples because of its association with the “cosmopolitanism” of commercial culture. These two sets of association and distinction, mirror opposites of each other, were inscribed into the very design and function of space at the WBHG’s newly constructed compound.

THE HOUSEHOLDER AS COSMOPOLITAN ELITE The WBHG’s distinction from Shanghai’s familiar temples was readily apparent in its building’s spatial design. Viewed from the street, there was little to suggest that the new compound was a sacred space. Barred windows, a brick facade, streetlamps, and an iron door hardly marked the location o from its surroundings. As noted, upon entering the compound, the visitor was immediately confronted by a Western-style building with straight roofs and stone columns that clearly evoked the neoclassical buildings of the International Settlement and its novel shopping centers, banks, and hotels ( gure 1.2). This choice

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1.2 Diagram of the Great Hall and side buildings of the World Buddhist Householder Grove compound Shijie Fojiao jushilin chengji baogaoshu世界佛教居士林成績報告書 [World Buddhist Householder Grove achievement report] (Shanghai: Shanghai Foxue shuju, 1933)

of architectural design for the WBHG paralleled a wider trend observable in the city’s proliferating urban voluntary associations during the 1920s. In her work on Shanghai’s powerful native-place associations, of which the WBHG’s original host institution was one, Bryna Goodman observes that, whereas older native-place associations were often designed in the cultural style of the group’s home province or city, the new native-place associations of the 1920s chose Western-style buildings to express their “modern spirit.”34 Another prominent design feature, also readily observable upon entry, that distinguished the WBHG structure from “ancient temples” was the large clock mounted directly above the entrance to the Great Hall, from which it commanded a panoptic view of the compound. In her study of Shanghai’s middle class, Wen-hsin Yeh has pointed out

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that the mechanized clock, although originally only a foreign curiosity, had become, by the early twentieth century, a de ning feature of Shanghai’s modern commercial culture. Far from unique to the WBHG compound, the prominent placement of similar clocks could also be found at Shanghai’s factories, o ce buildings, department stores, and train stations. As Yeh observes, “Modern Shanghai business organizations delineated their singular corporate space with the synchronizing power of the organizational clock. For the ordinary urbanites who made their living as white-collar employees in Republican Shanghai, mechanical clocks created the temporal frame in which their everyday life was to be lived.”35 The “organizational clock” mounted over the Great Hall at the WBHG synchronized the WBHG’s activities with the urban lifestyle of Shanghai’s cosmopolitan commercial culture. It ensured that the WBHG was running according to the same public time as that for the banker, factory manager, and o ce clerk. Unlike the monk living in a monastery, always within earshot of the temple bell, these urbanite working householders relied on the synchronization of clocks to participate in the WBHG’s activities. The timing of all its activities, including even the solemn rituals announced by the bell, conformed to the discipline of the clock by following a schedule divided into standard hours and minutes as precisely as that for the trains that could probably be heard on their way to and from the station located less than a mile away. In addition to its design, its spatial function also distinguished the WBHG compound from traditional temples. A primary function of the new space was to house the WBHG organization, one so clearly unlike that represented by a temple. Its participants were voluntary members (linyuan, linyou, 林員, 林友), from whom it derived its income through dues and donations (linfei 林費), and its management (lishihui 理事會) was elected by members. Administration was handled by a Central A airs Department (zongwubu 總務部), Funds and Property O ce (kuanchanchu 款產處), Accounting O ce (kuaijichu 會計處), and other o ces similarly named using the modern terminology of rational administrative management.36 All these important organizational features clearly marked the WBHG as a twentieth-century urban voluntary association. Although voluntary associations had long existed

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in Chinese cities, the years following the establishment of the Republic, with its constitutionally guaranteed right of association, saw an explosive proliferation of such groups employing new democratic rhetoric and organizational principles. This was particularly true in Shanghai, where newly emerging social groups formed dizzying numbers of associations to represent themselves.37 These included not only new-style native-place associations but also, among others, individual associations for bankers, lawyers, and artists. Such urban groups were typically middle-class and elite phenomena, and indeed the leading householders at the WBHG were often simultaneously involved in many of them. Although these early twentieth-century voluntary associations di ered in membership and content, their organizational features were largely consistent with those adopted by the WBHG, down to the very terminology used for administrative divisions and o ces. Appropriating the urban voluntary association model gave Shanghai urbanites a familiar interface through which to become involved in Buddhist a airs. At monastic temples, they could never be more than external supporters or peripheral participants.38 At a Buddhist voluntary association like the WBHG, however, the householders ran their own a airs and became insiders who determined their own level of participation. In the words of President Shi, the WBHG was a much better “site for the serious practice of householders” than an “unsuitable” temple. Another important way in which the use of space at the WBHG di ered from that at Shanghai’s temples was the householders’ careful attention to ceremonial decorum. This attention to decorum was readily apparent at the opening ceremony, the scheduling of which, whether intentionally or not, set up a revealing contrast with the celebration of the Buddha’s birthday at Jing’an Temple three days later. Although bad weather dampened the festivities this particular year, Jing’an was famous among Shanghai residents for hosting the most lively annual celebrations in the city.39 The Shenbao newspaper covered these celebrations as a matter of course and year after year printed largely repetitive reports expressing unveiled scorn for the “hot and noisy” (renao 熱鬧) scene they created:

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Yesterday [the Buddha’s birthday], Jing’an Temple in western Shanghai held a great Buddha festival. Average superstitious [mixin] men and women all went to burn incense and pray for blessings, and it became extremely crowded. The constable of the Jing’an police station worried that bad characters would mix in and cause trouble, so he specially sent many Chinese and Western agents into and around the temple to look after peoples’ welfare.40

This scene smacked of the temple festivals put on in villages across the countryside, which were shunned by urban elites as, in the discourse of the day, the “superstition” of the untutored masses. By contrast, what the urban householders of the WBHG valued in a religious ceremony was not “hot and noisy” but rather “solemn decorum” (zhuangyan 莊嚴). We have already seen a demonstration of this at the opening of the new compound: badged WBHG attendants ushered the guests to their arranged seating while policemen stood guard at the main entrance to keep out the uncouth. However, the WBHG took the principle of solemn decorum beyond special ceremonial occasions, writing it into the very regulations that governed the everyday use of space within their compound. The regulations for the Great Hall were set as follows: 1. The Great Hall is [a place of] solemn decorum. Those who enter must be completely respectful in order to avoid profane behavior. 2. When daily practice is taking place in the hall, visitors are welcome to join in the chanting if they wish. 3. Wandering monks and people improperly attired will not be accepted. 4. Visitors who participate in the chanting must do so according to the method of the assembly and may not use some special style or chant strange sounds. 5. If it is not a time set for daily practice, there is to be no loud chanting of sutras, mantras, or Buddha names in the hall. 6. The assemblies of men and women are to be divided into east and west and may not mix together.

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7. When daily practice is taking place, there will be many attendants specially designated for the task of attending [to visitors], and they will each be wearing a yellow badge with the words “Great Hall Attendant” written on it so that they can be recognized. 8. If visitors have a matter to inquire about, they may nd an attendant wearing a badge and freely consult with them. 9. Visitors who participate in chanting must follow the instructions of the attendants in such matters as seating position; visitors will please respect order and not just make a decision [on such matters] as they please. 10. The following things are prohibited in the hall: a. b. c. d. e. f. g. h.

Fund-raising Distributing pamphlets Using tobacco products Talking or laughing loudly Striking the ritual implements Young children crying Spitting Littering41

These regulations may have been inspired by similar rules at strict “public” Buddhist monasteries, but such monasteries were rare and usually located intentionally in areas remote from human tra c. In the urban environment of a densely populated city like Shanghai, the emphasis on solemn decorum distinguished the WBHG from crowded urban temples and accorded with the more cosmopolitan sensibilities of the urban elite. By participating in religious activities at the WBHG, such elites would not run the risk of associating themselves with the “superstitious” and “hot and noisy” gatherings at places like Jing’an Temple.

THE URBAN ELITE AS PIOUS DEVOTEE Alongside the design and functional features distinguishing the WBHG from Shanghai’s temples and associating it with the city’s commercial

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culture, there coexisted other features that created the exact reverse set of distinctions and associations. Commercial culture in early twentieth-century Shanghai showed clear signs of becoming increasingly secularized. This trend was evident among the very voluntary associations with which the WBHG shared an organizational kinship. Bryna Goodman writes that, whereas Shanghai’s original native-place communities of the Qing had “established their associations as religious corporations . . . to collectively worship local or patron gods,” the new-style native-place associations of the 1920s “moved toward a more secular and national public-spiritedness” by “spurning the religious and oligarchic rituals . . . [and] rejecting the traditional architecture with its central altar, stage and courtyard.”42 Even with its Christian roots, Shanghai’s Chinese YMCA—itself a prime example of a successful urban voluntary association patronized by urbanites of the same social strata as the WBHG—accepted nonreligious members and had become much more a social club than a religious organization.43 Moreover, similar secularizing trends were also evident among the dazzling displays of conspicuous consumption and leisured entertainment represented most famously by the department stores and pleasure palaces along Nanjing Road, an urban space that more than any other symbolized Shanghai’s modern commercial culture to its residents, admirers, and detractors alike. As Sherman Cochrane writes in his introduction to Inventing Nanjing Road, “Unlike high culture, commercial culture is thoroughly secular; it lacks strong moral and religious overtones.”44 The ethical implications of Nanjing Road’s “ostentatious luxury and sensational tumult,” as President Shi put it, were deeply troubling to the middle-class and elite urbanites who identi ed themselves as householders and joined the WBHG. The householders distinguished themselves from such secularizing trends by imbuing the design and function of the space in their new compound with features associating it with the sanctity and numinous power of the Buddhist temple. Just behind the Western-style stone columns on the ground level of the main building, a visitor to the WBHG compound would notice a stretch of wooden doorways in the style commonly seen marking the entrances to temple worship halls. Indeed, beyond these doorways was the Great Hall, traditionally a central feature of any

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Buddhist temple or monastery. As the WBHG’s main ritual space, the Great Hall was oriented toward a large altar with the usual tripartite arrangement of Buddha statues ( gure 1.3). The altar had once been inspected by a visiting householder with the supernatural power known as the dharma eye (法眼),45 who had con rmed that “the dharma altar is sancti ed beyond compare, and a great many dharma-protecting spirits are gathered around it.”46 The hall also contained a “ghost bell” (youming zhong 幽冥鐘) specially empowered to produce a numinous ringing that would save the “orphaned souls” (guhun 孤魂) of soldiers who had died during the wars of the Northern Expedition (1926–1928).47 The regular ringing of the bell marked the rhythm of the WBHG’s daily ritual schedule and its annual cycle of religious ceremonies following the lunar calendar. The ghost bell thus represented the coexistence at the WBHG of a second, sacred

1.3 Scriptural lecture in the Great Hall, World Buddhist Householder Grove compound, 1933 Liang Xiaozhong 梁孝忠, Yuanying fashi honghua jiniance 圓瑛法師弘化紀年冊 [Master Yuanying’s propagation commemorative volume] (Shanghai: Yuanming jiangtang, 1949)

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conception of time integrated with that kept by the mechanical clock. In addition to the Great Hall, also dispersed throughout the threeoor building were rooms that similarly paralleled what was typically found in a temple, such as a Meditation Hall (chanding shi 禪定室), Buddha-Recitation Hall (nianfo tang 念佛堂), Canon Room (zangjing shi 藏經室), and Reliquary Room (sheli shi 舍利室). Among these various temple features of the compound it was the Reliquary Room that held pride of place as the jewel of the WBHG’s spatial achievement. It was a required stop on any tour of the compound, such as when the twenty-two-member Japanese Buddhist Inspection Delegation visited in December 1926.48 The Reliquary Room represented the profound numinous e ect that the built space at the WBHG was intended to generate for any individual blessed with the karmic a nities to set foot inside its premises. Conceptualized and designed by Li Jingwei, the room was located on the top oor of the building, square in shape, and windowless. Its four walls were made entirely of mirrors, and numerous electric lights were suspended from the ceiling. Placed in the center of the oor, rising about halfway to the ceiling, there was a small ornately crafted treasure stupa (linglong baota 玲瓏寶塔).49 The room was designed to have a profound optical e ect on anyone who entered to “ritually view” (zhanli 瞻禮) the stupa. The viewer was confronted not only by the one stupa in the middle of the room but by countless stupas interspersed with innumerable oating lights, all in nitely re ected in the mirror walls. This optical e ect, which was considered so powerful that people with mental illnesses were expressly forbidden to enter, had a doctrinal basis and a soteriological purpose. The room was intended to conjure in front of the ritual viewer the “Lotus-Store World [huazang shijie 華藏世界] [in which] one penetrates all and all penetrates one.”50 As Householder Tang Dayuan explained, the viewer was surrounded by in nite manifestations not only of the stupa but also of the viewer’s own self, such that it became impossible to determine which of the manifestations were “real”: “[The viewer] realizes that stupa and self are both empty . . . the ten directions of the dharma world and all dharmas are empty. Because of this kind of empty viewing [kongguan 空觀], [the viewer] is able to view the true relics.”51

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As Householder Tang suggested, the soteriological e ect of the room did not derive from optics alone but from the numinous power of the special relics (sheli 舍利, Skt. ߓDUҸUD) housed in the treasure stupa and for which the room was named.52 The “empty viewing” produced by the room’s optical e ect unlocked this true power of the relics for the viewer. These particular relics—there were three of them—had been obtained by Grand Master Baipuren 白普仁, a Mongolian monk of the Buddhist esoteric tradition believed to wield incredible supernatural powers, directly after experiencing a vision of the bodhisattva Ma ju r at Mount Wutai.53 Simply by virtue of being in the presence of such numinous relics in this specially designed room, the ritual viewer was temporarily elevated to a higher realm (jingjie 境界) of attainment on the path to awakening and liberation. One householder described his experience in words that suggested rebirth in the Western Paradise: “All thoughts of craving, all thoughts of anger, all thoughts of ignorance [i.e., the three poisons], all killing, stealing, sex, deceit, and every sort of evil karma were simultaneously extinguished. At this instant, the hells were suddenly emptied, the triple world was transcended, and the Pure Land appeared before me.” Even after this householder departed the Reliquary Room, his elevated state of mind lasted for seven wondrous days.54 The WBHG also had numerous spatial functions that quite speci cally associated it with a temple. As at any proper Buddhist temple or monastery, the WBHG operated a daily ritual schedule (table 1.1). This schedule was punctuated, as at a temple, by morning and evening practice. A small contingent of monks, including a rector (weina 維那) and a hall master (tangzhu 堂主), were housed on-site to orchestrate these daily ritual programs. The WBHG maintained an elaborate schedule dictating the speci c curriculum for morning and evening practice for each day of the year. For example, the curriculum for morning practice (zaoke) on the rst day of the rst month of the lunar year was set as follows: At six o’clock the assembly enters the Great Hall; Ringing of the stone chimes, followed by the drum; Three prostrations, one ritual salutation, then [members] face one another;

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Intone the “Baoding Hymn”; Chant the ߭ࡃUDؐJDPDGKčUD‫ؾ‬Ҹ, 0DKčNDUX‫ؾ‬LNDGKčUD‫ؾ‬Ҹ, the Ten Short GKčUD‫ؾ‬Ҹ, and the Heart Sutra; Sing the 0DKč-SUDMxčSčUDPLWč; Sing the Maitreya hymn three times, followed by the Maitreya gčWKč; Circumambulate the Buddha; Chant “Praise to Maitreya Buddha who will descend”; Strike the dang and the he [instruments], return to seats; Put palms together, kneel, and chant three times each: “Praise to the Medicine Buddha who extinguishes calamity and extends life,” “Praise to the bodhisattva who perceives the sounds of the world,” “Praise to the bodhisattva who possesses great energy,” “Praise to the bodhisattva of the pure great ocean assembly”; Sing “Strong Republic”; Sing “Three Refuges”; Chant “Praise to the bodhisattva Fragrant Cloud Canopy” three times; Intone the Weituo hymn three times; Make three prostrations facing the front; Sound the great stone chime once; Enter the patriarchs [hall] and make three prostrations; Each person takes one stick of incense, goes outside, makes a request facing west, does one ritual salutation, takes the incense and places it in the incense burner; Everyone returns to their own rooms; The above [curriculum] should take about one hour and fteen minutes.55

Such an elaborate daily ritual schedule, resembling that of a large public monastery, signaled that being a householder at the WBHG required a discipline comparable to that of an ordained monk.56 The di erence was that for householders, who maintained families and careers, participation was voluntary. Householders with busy schedules often installed altars in their homes, where they could carry out

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1.1 Daily ritual schedule of the World Buddhist Householder Grove Mar.–Aug.

Sept.–Feb.

Morning bell (3 times)

4:30 . .

5 . .

Morning practice (zaoke 早課)

5:30 . .

6 . .

Porridge breakfast

6:30 . .

7 . .

Vegetarian lunch

12 noon

12 noon

Evening practice bell

4:45 . .

4:15 . .

5 . .

4:30 . .

6:30 . .

6 . .

Evening practice (wanke 晚課) Vegetarian dinner

Shijie Fojiao jushilin kecheng guiyue 世界佛教居士林課程規約 [World Buddhist Householder Grove schedule and regulations] (Shanghai: Foxue shuju, undated), 2–3, reprinted in Minguo Fojiao qikan wenxian jicheng 民國佛教期刊文獻集成 [Collection of Republican-era Buddhist periodical documents], ed. Huang Xianian 黃夏年, 209 vols. (Beijing: Quanguo tushuguan wenxian suowei fuzhi zhongxin, 2006), 129:239–40.

morning and evening practice when unable to participate communally at the WBHG. On weekends, when more working householders could participate, the basic schedule outlined in the preceding was expanded to include an extra hour in the morning of chanting in the BuddhaRecitation Hall, an hour and a half in the afternoon of recitation and singing in the Great Hall, and two more hours of Buddha recitation in the evening. Thus on Saturdays alone there was a total of seven hours of scheduled ritual recitation and singing carried on throughout the day in the WBHG compound. Moreover, for any householder who had the ability to take at least one month of time away from family and work, the WBHG made available so-called purity dormitories (qingjing sushe 清淨宿舍) so that householders might live entirely according to the full discipline of the householder ideal.57 Just as it was the discipline of the monks that separated them and their monasteries from secular

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society, so too was it the daily discipline of the householders and their compound that di erentiated them from the increasingly secularized voluntary associations as well as the “cathedrals of material culture” on Nanjing Road in 1920s Shanghai. Aside from its daily ritual schedule, the WBHG also resembled a temple in its function as a daochang 道場, or sancti ed ritual space, that observed the full annual cycle of Buddhist ceremonies according to the lunar calendar. These ceremonies included celebrations for the birthdays of twelve Buddhas and bodhisattvas; fourteen “o ering ceremonies,” such as the Ullambana o ering for hungry ghosts and deceased ancestors (yulanpen gong 盂蘭盆供); four seasonal seven-day recitation retreats (foqi 佛七); and at least one “releasing-life ceremony” (fangsheng hui 放生會) every other month.58 Beyond this set schedule, other ceremonies were often held when a special need or request arose, such as funerary rites for a recently deceased WBHG member. Members could even have “extending-life karma tablets” (yansheng yuanwei 延 生緣位), for themselves, and “soul-saving lotus tablets” (jianwang lianwei 薦亡蓮位), for their ancestors, installed in the Buddha-Recitation Hall, where the tablets would receive o erings regularly throughout the ceremonial cycle.59 Ordinarily, a householder wishing to partake of such ceremonies and services would have had to visit a temple and make generous donations to the monks there. According to traditional Buddhist regulations, householders were not granted the authority to o ciate at ceremonies themselves, and in fact this became a particularly contentious issue in the wider Buddhist community during the Republican era, as some householders overstepped the restriction. However, at the WBHG, monks were brought in expressly to o ciate at ceremonies as well as to lecture on the scriptures, two activities that were often held in tandem. In addition to the small contingent of in-house clerics mentioned previously, the WBHG also established a “permanent lecturer” (changzhu jiangshi 常駐講師) and an “honored guiding teacher” (shangzuo daoshi 上座導師), as well as inviting “honorary lecturers” (mingyu jiangshi 名譽講師) to perform speci c ceremonies. The monks who served in these positions were invariably among the most eminent masters of the era, including Yinguang and Dixian, both of whom accepted the title of honored guiding teacher.

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With such famously accomplished clerics o ciating and the carefully maintained solemn decorum of the daochang, the ceremonies performed at the WBHG compound could be at least as ritually e cacious for householders, if not more so, than those held at any of Shanghai’s ancient temples. This space created by an urban voluntary association was thus designed to be more a proper “temple” in its function as a daochang than many of the monastically run temples that the urban environment had to o er. A nal feature of the use of space at the WBHG compound that established it as an e ective urban religious center, and further distinguished it from the secularizing trends in commercial culture, was the wide range of activities or “enterprises” (shiye 事業) that it housed. By the late 1920s, these enterprises were categorized and administered under four departments (excluding the General A airs Department). The Culture Department (wenhuabu 文化部) managed educational enterprises such as a vocational night school and free elementary school; a library with four complete editions of the Buddhist canon and hundreds of extracanonical Buddhist texts; a preaching o ce; and a publishing o ce for editing and printing periodicals and texts. The Charity Department (cishanbu 慈善部) operated a free medical clinic; a co n-donation o ce; a releasing-life society; a disaster-relief association; and eventually a public Buddhist cemetery. The Religious Study Department (xuejiaobu 學教部) administered a scripture-reading o ce and a canon room; a research society; and a propagation society for organizing lectures. Finally, the Religious Practice Department (xiuchibu 修持部) oversaw a lay ordination and precept society, a lotus society, and a meditation hall.60 In addition to these basic enterprises, members could and did propose to the Executive Council their own ideas for groups and societies to be added to the list; the WBHG had an open organizational structure that developed according to the growth and interests of its membership. Among the most well attended of the activities held at the WBHG were the Saturday and Sunday afternoon lectures, which could be either profound scriptural expositions or topical discourses delivered in accessible vernacular language. Frequently arranged as a series that could stretch over weeks and even months for longer sutras, the lectures were delivered by many of the most

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famous monastic masters of the time, such as Taixu and Yuanying, and by their well-known householder counterparts, such as Ding Fubao, Fan Gunong, and Zhang Taiyan ( gure 1.3). The weekend lecture colloquia were followed by textual-study seminars in which householders intensively read and discussed a set schedule of scriptural materials, again under the guidance of learned monks and accomplished householders.61 Steeped in Buddhist knowledge, the WBHG householders also took to the streets with the WBHG Preaching Brigade (xuanjiangtuan 宣講團), which was managed by the Culture Department. The Preaching Brigade was one of the vehicles through which the WBHG compound functioned as a central space for launching householders out beyond its walls and across Shanghai’s urban landscape. Such public preaching was an activity approached with both enthusiasm and prudence. Brigade members rst had to be knowledgeable and presentable enough to be approved by the Executive Council. They were instructed in preaching strategy and formulas, how to respond to challenges and ridicule, what sorts of language and metaphors to employ, how to hold their posture in public, and even what to wear: “Clothing colors and designs close to secular [styles] are not worn by disciples of the Buddha. . . . [You] may not wear Western suits because this will detract from [your] solemn decorum and arouse people’s criticisms.”62 The brigade preached every evening for three hours from Monday through Friday within the supportive environment of the WBHG’s own Lecture Hall. Once per weekend, on either Saturday or Sunday, brigade members gathered at the compound for an outing to an “extemporaneously” determined destination (suidi xuanjiang 隨地宣講), usually a temple, factory, hospital, jail, refugee shelter, or other similar public place. For example, on one occasion, the brigade met on the day after the Qingming Festival: On that morning, when the bell struck 9:00 . ., Brigade Manager Zhang Xingren and members Du Jingzhai, Zhu Jinhua, Zhang Shilin, and other householders assembled at the WBHG and set out. They took the electric tram from Haining Road and got o at Xujiahui, [from where they] walked to Longhua Temple [i.e., the largest Buddhist temple in Shanghai]. Seeing crowds of people o ering incense

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and tourists, [the brigade] energetically advanced to take advantage of the opportunity. Householder Zhang Xingren visited the temple’s abbot, explained the mission of the WBHG, and received both encouragement and permission. They then selected an empty space in front of the second hall, raised a ag, and [prepared to] start preaching. The time was 10:30 . . That day the weather was cool and comfortable, and the audience reached about three hundred people. Before the householders began preaching, they heard the people o ering incense and tourists yell that they did not want to hear the sounds of Christianity [yesusheng 耶穌聲]. Upon learning that Buddhism was to be preached, they were happily surprised. They had never seen Buddhism preached extemporaneously before. Then the two householders Zhang Xingren and Zhu Jinhua took turns preaching. Their main message was to urge the audience that if they cut o their worldly a ictions and chanted the Buddha’s name without interruption, they would be able to extinguish all their karmic obstacles and be reborn in the Western Paradise, [where] they could be liberated from the samsaric cycle of birth and death. They preached until 12:30, ate the temple’s vegetarian lunch, and resumed preaching at 1:30. At 2:30 they took the road back to the WBHG, and it was 3:30 [by the time they returned].63

The householders of the brigade did not only intentionally distinguish themselves from secular urbanites dressed in the Western fashions of Shanghai’s commercial culture, whom they undoubtedly encountered while crossing the city in a crowded electric tram car. As the account emphasizes, they also stuck out even among the Buddhist worshippers and monks at Longhua Temple. Indeed, they were mistaken for Chinese Christians and, perhaps with some secret relish, observed the spontaneous scorn expressed for their Westernized religious competitors. However, the Chinese Christians that the WBHG Preaching Brigade was mistaken for could not have been the Western-suited Christians of the Shanghai YMCA, which functioned more as a social club than a religious mission. For all the socializing and

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networking that took place in the various groups, societies, and other activities at the WBHG, the overt purpose of its enterprises was derived from Buddhist soteriology. The householders of the WBHG presented themselves as working tirelessly to “extol the teachings of the Buddha, spread the Buddhist religion, save oneself and save others, and adorn the dharma world.”64 Activities like the brigade’s extemporaneous preaching brought into focus the WBHG’s complex set of cultural associations and distinctions by propelling householders out into the urban landscape, where their householder identity was put to the test through direct social interactions and con icts.

RECEPTION OF HOUSEHOLDER IDENTITY As President Shi’s speech at the opening ceremony had made evident to the WBHG’s members and supporters on that momentous occasion in the history of the Shanghai householder community, the cultural position of the WBHG was structured as a pair of di ering associations and distinctions. On the one hand, the WBHG was to be distinguished from the “hot and noisy” environment of ancient temples by associating its new compound with the cosmopolitanism of commercial society. On the other, the WBHG was also to be distinguished from the disturbing secularizing trends of commercial society through its association with the religious discipline and numinous power of the Buddhist monastic community and its temples. This set of associations and distinctions was constructed by means of a range of social practices related to the design and function of space. The WBHG compound was spatially distinguished from temples by its Westernized architecture and mechanical clock, which associated it with commercial society. Functionally, this cultural position was reinforced by the compound’s housing of a modern urban voluntary association and careful attention to ceremonial decorum. The reverse cultural position, that of distinction from commercial society and association with temples, was established spatially by the inclusion of precisely the types of architecturally recognizable halls and facilities that were essential to the constitution of any temple, as well as by the deliberate investment of these

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halls and facilities with awe-inspiring numinous power. This second cultural position was also reinforced functionally by the WBHG’s daily ritual schedule, annual ceremonial cycle, and array of soteriologically signi cant activities and enterprises. As was perhaps most apparent when householders moved outside the WBHG compound and across the urban landscape, it was this complex pair of cultural distinctions and associations that gave the householder identity meaning in the speci c context of early twentieth-century Shanghai. In a word, the spatial practices of the WBHG constructed householders as cosmopolitan religious devotees. The clarity of this meaning and its attraction for Shanghai’s urban elite are evident in another account of the WBHG householders and their newly constructed space. Unlike the accounts analyzed in the foregoing, this account narrates the experience of an outsider and allows us to see how the cultural meanings of the WBHG were received through the eyes of an una liated, external observer. “Taste of the Dharma” (Fawei 法味) is an essay written by the celebrated cartoon artist and writer Feng Zikai 豐子愷 (1898–1975) in August 1926, less than three months after the WBHG’s opening ceremony.65 At the time, Feng was living in Shanghai and in the early phase of his career when he received a letter from his former art teacher, Li Shutong, whom he had not seen for the six intervening years since he had initially gone o to study in Japan. As Feng knew from former classmates and friends, Li Shutong had left his teaching career behind, been ordained as a monk, taken the dharma name Hongyi 弘一, and become a renowned Buddhist master of Vinaya practice (i.e., the practice of the monastic disciplinary code).66 Curious about the dramatic transformation of his former mentor, Feng met with Master Hongyi in Hangzhou and then joined him to tour Shanghai for a few days in the summer of 1926. On the nal day of their time together, the two were eating lunch at a vegetarian restaurant near the city god temple when Master Hongyi spoke of a certain householder called You Xiyin at the WBHG, whom he described as a pious believer who loved to do good works in society. Since nothing was planned for the afternoon before Master Hongyi’s scheduled departure back to Hangzhou, they decided to visit Householder You at the WBHG.

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In his essay recounting these events, Feng describes in detail his experience at the WBHG: The World Buddhist Householder Grove is a four-story67 Westernstyle building, extremely solemn [zhuangyan] and magni cent. The rst oor is an expansive Buddha hall within which were highquality seats and worship cushions, and the facilities were richly endowed. There were many pious men and women there worshipping the Buddha. Having been told that Householder You lived on the third oor, we went up the stairs. Here it was very quiet and everywhere on the walls were hung yellow signs that read “Walk slowly and keep your voice down,” which made one even more solemn upon seeing them. The third oor was all individual rooms. Master Hongyi recognized Householder You through a window and quietly knocked on the windowpane a few times. I then saw an elderly man of about fty years in age open the door and come out. He did full prostrations at the master’s feet, as if he were almost going to embrace them. Master Hongyi gave a short bow, and I stood behind, stunned. When the elder man stood up and led me into the room, I nally regained my senses. I nally remembered that he [may have been] a lay disciple of Master Hongyi’s. Originally from Wuxi, Householder You has done many charitable works in Shanghai and is quite a famous person. Even someone like me, who does not pay much attention to current events, had long heard his name. His demeanor, clothing, and all signs of lifestyle in his room were highly frugal, with little di erence from those of Master Hongyi, who had “left home” [i.e., been ordained]. I now realized that householders are the most powerful propagators of Buddhism. Monks are oriented internally [within the Buddhist community], while householders are oriented externally. Householders are actually monks who have manifested themselves deeply in secular society to preach the dharma. When I rst saw the extravagance of this Householder Grove’s architecture and facilities, I thought it was far o from the ascetic practice of a monk. Now seeing Householder You, I nally realized this [extravagance] is probably just an expedient means for secular [society].68

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Upon arriving at the WBHG compound, Feng immediately noticed the spatial aspects that associated it with cosmopolitan commercial culture. These included the solemn decorum of the place as well as its Western architecture and lavish facilities. In fact, these “extravagant” features associated with Shanghai’s commercial culture initially led Feng to distinguish the WBHG from the sort of Buddhism practiced by his monastic companion, and roused in him a certain cynicism. This reaction might have turned him away had he not gone further to also recognize the other side of the WBHG’s cultural positioning. This occurred through his observation of Householder You. Feng immediately recognized the elite social status of this Shanghai notable, having seen his name prominently in the media. Yet what impressed Feng—himself a young member of Shanghai’s cultural elite—about You was precisely the obvious ways in which he di ered from other elite urbanites and social celebrities: his frugal appearance, demeanor, and lifestyle. All this connected Householder You in Feng’s mind to the monastic master of disciplinary practice with whom he was traveling. It was only after realizing this second side of the householder cultural positioning that Feng came to a new understanding of the rst: those extravagant aspects of the WBHG that associated it with commercial culture were precisely what made householders even more e ective propagators of Buddhism than monks in the particular secularizing environment of Shanghai’s urban landscape. Feng continued, Householder You then guided us to ritually view the Reliquary Room. The Reliquary Room is a room for housing relics that is about twenty feet square. It has no window, the four walls are entirely inlaid with mirrors, and four electric lamps hang from the ceiling. In the middle is installed an ornate and brilliant red-lacquered and gold-decorated small stupa. On each of the four sides [around the stupa] are four worship cushions. From the bottom corners of the stupa are hung many small electric lights; in its upper portion a ball made of crystal has been installed, and in the ball it is said that there are relics. What kind of things are relics? Because I didn’t quite understand, they themselves didn’t elicit any feeling in me. But upon entering the room, I saw my-

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self immediately transformed into millions of bodies—everywhere I looked there were millions of stupas, millions of electric lights, and I faced myself on every side. I felt dizzy and my heart palpitated; I was entirely pressed down into a mood of terror and willing submission. After Master Hongyi and Householder You had both made obeisance, we led out of the room. We toured the Buddha-Recitation Hall and the Canon Room, then parted with Householder You and left. . . . This day I saw Chengnan Caotang [i.e., another site in Shanghai] and experienced heartfelt compassion for the impermanence of human life and the unfathomableness of the law of karma. In the Reliquary Room, I again tasted a bit of vivid craving for Buddhism. These two days were very exciting, serious, and I also could not drink alcohol. As soon as I got home, I immediately called for someone to pour me a drink.69

Despite the characteristic humorous quip with which Feng concludes his account, he formally became a householder himself the following year in a ceremony o ciated by Master Hongyi. A few years later he famously promoted Buddhist ethics through his widely popular publication Collected Drawings to Protect Life (Husheng huaji 護生畫集). Feng Zikai’s account of his visit to the WBHG, and the role it apparently played in his own conversion, demonstrates not only the successful communication of the compound’s cultural positioning of householder identity but also the strong attraction that identity held for Shanghai’s urban elite. The opportunity to become a cosmopolitan religious devotee possessed considerable appeal in a society that was deeply ambivalent about its own brand of modernity.

CHINESE URBAN CULTURE AND AMBIVALENT MODERNITY The particular meanings of householder identity in 1920s Shanghai were undeniably shaped by the city’s speci c cultural environment. Urban elites constructed these meanings in space through social practices that drew associations and distinctions with the salient features

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of an urban landscape that had been transformed by the cosmopolitan commercialism of China’s premier treaty port. This process was exhibited in the WBHG’s complex relationship to urban voluntary associations such as new-style native-place associations and the YMCA, and it can similarly be observed at Enlightenment Garden and the Merit Grove in their relationships to the new public parks and fashionable restaurants opening up across the cityscape. The prominent presence of such competitors representing cosmopolitan commercial culture in the urban environment provided householders with both the inspiration for their innovations in spatial practices and the motivation for their contentious cultural activism against the morally disconcerting trends of secularization and rampant consumerism. At the same time, it was the crowded urban conditions of China’s most populous city that set the basic conditions under which householders labored to nd for themselves a meaningful communal religious lifestyle. The urban temples dotting Shanghai’s cityscape were qualitatively di erent from the famous remote monasteries that provided the model for Buddhist ideals of sanctity and discipline. Urban temples like Jing’an and Longhua smacked of the “hot and noisy” local “superstition” that the urbanite might imagine nding in the most parochial of villages. For these and other reasons, the urban temples were deemed unsuitable spaces for elites to construct their identity as householders. Yet such temples simultaneously represented the idea, however much they fell short of it, of establishing pure and numinous religious space in the heart of the crowded urban environment. In all these ways, then, the spatial construction of householder identity in Shanghai was profoundly shaped by the particular urban culture of China’s leading treaty port and largest metropolis in the 1920s. This localized study also has implications beyond 1920s Shanghai for modern Chinese urban culture in general. In tandem with the spread of modern Buddhist periodicals and print culture described in chapter 3 in this volume, Shanghai’s householder spaces were replicated in cities across China throughout the Republican era. From the original founding of the WBHG as the SBHG in 1920 to the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, as many as one hundred eighty identi able householder groves had sprung up in nearly

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every province of the country.70 The fact that these were overwhelmingly located in cities, and the largest were in treaty ports, suggests that the householder grove as a new type of organization was fundamentally suited to urban settings sharing many of the key cultural features common to Shanghai: foreign in uence, modern commercialism, and a crowded urban environment. Although the meanings of householder identity in each of these geographically dispersed spaces of the Republican era undoubtedly derived from their own particular urban environments, there is evidence that the WBHG of Shanghai served as their predominant model for communal construction.71 Moreover, this model became a durable and adaptable xture of Chinese urban culture that continues to thrive today. In mainland China, householder groves were temporarily expunged from the urban landscape during the Mao era (1949–1976) as part of the Communist Party’s wider assault on Buddhist institutions and ideology (discussed in chapters 5 and 6). However, since the 1980s many householder groves have been revived or built anew, alongside and sometimes in connection with the contemporary surge of less-elite forms of lay Buddhism (taken up in chapters 7 and 8).72 Outside the mainland, householder groves have spread internationally along with the Chinese diaspora, producing such prominent contemporary examples as the Kuching Buddhist Society (Gujin Fojiao jushilin 古晉佛教居士林) in Malaysia, the Singapore Buddhist Lodge (Xinjiapo Fojiao jushilin 新加坡佛教居士林), and the Ming Ya Buddhist Foundation (Mingyue jushilin 明月居士林) with branches in Oakland and Los Angeles, California. Shanghai’s householder community of the 1920s thus made a lasting contribution to Chinese urban culture that even to this day continues to contest and stand as counterevidence to secularizing trends in Sinophone urban communities throughout the modern world. The spatial construction of householder identity in Shanghai also has broader historiographical implications for the study of Chinese modernity, evident in part in its connections to a wide range of other “traditional” cultural activities popular among urban elites in Republican China such as Daoist inner alchemy, morality or redemptive societies, the martial arts, and Chinese medicine.73 Householder Buddhism was part of a vast eld of cultural production based in Chinese

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“traditions”—alchemical practices, spirit writing, moral cultivation, Chinese gymnastics, dietary regimens, breathing techniques—that shared a deep grounding in the world of late imperial Chinese religion. Moreover, these cultural activities were also connected at the social level through overlaps in leadership and adherents. Just to cite one notable example, Wang Yiting not only served as president of the WBHG from 1927 to 1937, he was also cochairman of the Shanghai Martial Arts Association and a member of the spirit-writing redemptive society known as the China Rescuing Life Association.74 Although it is rarely acknowledged in historical scholarship, Shanghai’s urban elite served as a central social matrix for the national promotion of traditional cultural activities throughout the Republican era. In the context of this cosmopolitan sector of Chinese society, however, these traditions became associated with aspects of foreign-de ned modernity—modern voluntary associations, biological notions of the body, scienti c hygiene, competitive sports, and so forth. Such associations implied a di erent worldview derived from the West and entailed critiques of the very traditions upon which these cultural pursuits were based, often phrased in terms of divesting them of their “superstitious” elements. Some scholars have taken this as evidence that the urban elite, moved by nationalist sentiment, were merely assimilating these traditional Chinese cultural activities into a foreign-de ned modernity by thoroughly “scientizing,” or disenchanting, them.75 However, such an interpretation surely underestimates the strong resonance that the world of Chinese religion continued to hold for even the most cosmopolitan members of Chinese society. As we have seen at the WBHG (and further exempli ed by the Buddhist engagement with science discussed in chapter 2), the traditional cultural activities of Republican-era urban elites also critiqued the very aspects of foreign-de ned modernity with which they were newly associated, often for being so materialist and competitive as to overlook the spiritual and ethical dimensions of human life. Shanghai’s Buddhist householders gave pride of place precisely to the numinous aspects of their compound, such as the Reliquary Room, and based their disciplined lifestyle on soteriologically derived ethics, leading to rebirth in the Western Paradise and nal liberation from the samsaric

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world of birth and death. Indeed, such enchanted elements were central to the appeal of householder identity. Feng Zikai did not write that he enjoyed the “taste of the dharma” because it was Chinese, scienti c, or modern; rather, for him, the appeal lay in the respect he held for the householder’s ethical discipline amid a world of materialistic luxury, as well as in the inexplicable visceral e ect that he experienced in the Reliquary Room. In other words, traditional cultural activities like householder Buddhism embraced diametrically opposed cultural associations without resolving the contradictions between them. The modernity represented by these activities was therefore structured by a fundamental ambivalence. This ambivalent modernity allowed a Chinese medical professional to simultaneously popularize Western germ theory and promote Chinese religious techniques for health and healing; it allowed the most vocal advocates of Western physical education regimens to simultaneously call for training all of China’s children in the traditional martial arts; and it allowed Shanghai’s biggest capitalists, like the Nanyang Brothers Tobacco Company founders Jian Zhaonan and Jian Yujie, to make a fortune revolutionizing Chinese commercial marketing through their ubiquitous cigarette advertisements while simultaneously claiming spiritual transcendence as Buddhist householders over the conspicuous consumption and pro teering of Shanghai’s commercial culture. Far from a state of indecision or weakness, “ambivalence” thus signals the remarkable ability of Shanghai’s urban elites to straddle both sides of cultural fault lines, accruing the strengths of both and the de ciencies of neither. Contrary to the conventional one-sided image of China’s urban elite as wholeheartedly embracing foreign-de ned discourses under the irresistible pressures of semi- or hypercolonialism,76 householder identity suggests that Chinese urban modernity in early twentieth-century Shanghai was structured by a deep ambivalence that could simultaneously wield secular power in one hand and numinous power in the other.

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NOTES

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

I am grateful for the comments given on the workshop draft of this chapter by the discussants, David Faure and Gareth Fisher, as well as by members of the audience. I would also like to thank Jan Kiely for his suggestions for revision. The chapter was written with the generous support of a Residential Faculty Research Grant at the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley. Grand Master Yansheng 演乘大法師, “Fojiao jingyeshe shiming” 佛教淨業 社釋名 [Explanation of the name of the Buddhist Pure Karma Society], Jingye yuekan (Shanghai) 5 (August 1926), reprinted in Minguo Fojiao qikan wenxian jicheng bubian 民國佛教期刊文獻集成補編 [Supplement to the collection of Republican Buddhist periodical documents], ed. Huang Xianian 黃夏年, 83 vols. (Beijing: Zhongguo shudian, 2008) (hereafter MFQB), 17:5–16. J. Brooks Jessup, “The Householder Elite: Buddhist Activism in Shanghai, 1920–1956” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2010). On Republican-era Buddhist publishing, see chapter 3 in this volume; see also Jan Kiely, “Spreading the Dharma with the Mechanized Press: New Buddhist Print Cultures in the Modern Chinese Print Revolution, 1866–1949,” in From Woodblocks to the Internet: Chinese Publishing and Print Culture in Transition, circa 1800 to 2008, ed. Cynthia Brokaw and Christopher A. Reed, 185–210 (Leiden: Brill, 2010). On the etymology of jushi, see Pan Guiming 潘桂明, Zhongguo jushi Fojiaoshi 中 國居士佛教史 [A history of Chinese householder Buddhism], 2 vols. (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 2000), 1:1–4. For representative studies of Shanghai’s urban culture, see Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930–1945 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999); Wen-hsin Yeh, Shanghai Splendor: Economic Sentiments and the Making of Modern China, 1843–1949 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Catherine Vance Yeh, Shanghai Love: Courtesans, Intellectuals, and Entertainment Culture, 1850–1910 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006); Sherman Cochran, ed., Inventing Nanjing Road: Commercial Culture in Shanghai, 1900–1945 (Ithaca: Cornell University East Asia Program, 1999); Wu Renshu 巫仁恕, Lin Meili 林美莉, and Kang Bao康豹 [Paul R. Katz], eds., Cong chengshi kan Zhongguo de xiandaixing 從城市看中囯 的現代性 [An urban perspective on Chinese modernity] (Nankang: Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, 2010). Hanchao Lu, Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 11. For other recent studies that point to a pervasive ambivalence toward Shanghai’s modern cultural trends, see Jan Kiely, “Shanghai Public Moralist Nie Qijie and Morality

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6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12. 13.

Book Publication Projects in Republican China,” Twentieth-Century China 36, no. 1 (2011): 4–22; Mark Swislocki, Culinary Nostalgia: Regional Food Culture and the Urban Experience in Shanghai (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). Although criticisms of urban moral decay were not unprecedented in early periods of Chinese history, in the context of semicolonial Shanghai, they mixed with similar dystopic images of the modern city that had circulated globally since the turn of the twentieth century. See Gyan Prakash, ed., Noir Urbanisms: Dystopic Images of the Modern City (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). The Merit Grove Vegetarian Restaurant (gongdelin shushichu 功德林蔬食處) became a popular meeting place for Shanghai householders after opening in 1922, and Enlightenment Garden (jueyuan 覺園) became their public-event space of choice after its founding in 1926 to house the Shanghai Buddhist Pure Karma Society (Shanghai Fojiao jingyeshe 上海佛教淨業社); see Jessup, “Householder Elite.” I understand any purposive activity carried out in a public communal setting to be a “social practice”; this includes banquets, meetings, and speeches but also religious rituals and even the design and construction of space itself. “Zhina dajue jingshe shezhang Wang Yuji” 支那大覺精舍舍長王與楫 [China Great Awakening Vih ra president Wang Yuji], Haichaoyin 7, no. 4 (May 31, 1926), reprinted in Minguo Fojiao qikan wenxian jicheng 民國佛教期刊文獻集 成 [Collection of Republican-era Buddhist periodical documents], ed. Huang Xianian 黃夏年, 209 vols. (Beijing: Quanguo tushuguan wenxian suowei fuzhi zhongxin, 2006) (hereafter MFQ), 165:121; “Ji bentang jiaowu lianhehui kaihui shi” 紀本堂教務聯合會開會事 [An account of a meeting of the Shangxiantang alliance], Shangxiantang jishi 8, no. 12 (December 1917): 38–40. On lay Buddhist associations in the Song and Ming dynasties, respectively, see Daniel A. Getz Jr., “T’ien-t’ai Pure Land Societies and the Creation of the Pure Land Patriarchate,” in Buddhism in the Sung, ed. Peter N. Gregory and Daniel A. Getz Jr., 477–523 (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 1999); Timothy Brook, Praying for Power: Buddhism and the Formation of Gentry Society in Late Ming China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 1994), 103–7. “Shanghai Fojiao jushilin zanxing guiyue”上海佛教居士林暫行規約 [Shanghai Buddhist Householder Grove provisional regulations], Haichaoyin 1, no. 5 (July 10, 1920), reprinted in MFQ, 148:127–28. Nianfo 念佛 refers to the practice of reciting the Buddha’s name (see also chapter 8), and releasing life (fangsheng 放生) refers to the practice of liberating animals from captivity. For a more detailed analysis of the SBHG and more information on the Pure Karma Society (jingye she 凈業社), see Jessup, “Householder Elite.” “Shijie Fojiao jushilin gangyao” 世界佛教居士林綱要 [World Buddhist Householder Grove outline], Shijie Fojiao jushilin linkan (Shanghai) (hereafter

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16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

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LK) 1 (March 1923): 2–6; “Benlin gexiang zuzhi gangyao (chongding)” 本林各 項組織綱要(重訂) [Articles of the grove organizational outline (revised)], LK 13 (August 1926), reprinted in MFQ, 15:119–23. The World Buddhist Householder Grove Journal is an example of what Gregory Scott analyzes as a “society publication” in chapter 3 in this volume. On Buddhism as a world religion, see Linda Learman, ed., Buddhist Missionaries in the Era of Globalization (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 2005). For a study of the discourse on superstition (mixin 迷信), see Rebecca Nedostup, Superstitious Regimes: Religion and the Politics of Chinese Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2010). Shijie Fojiao jushilin chengji baogaoshu 世界佛教居士林成績報告書 [World Buddhist Householder Grove achievement report] (Shanghai: Shanghai Foxue shuju, 1933) (hereafter BGS), 88. “Linyou lu xulu” 林友錄續錄 [Member records continued], LK 6 (August 1924), reprinted in MFQB, 8:168–70. Other occupational categories listed included foreign goods, banking, medicine, the military, and railroads. Li Jingwei 李經緯, “Benlin Zhou qianlinzhang Mingjue jushi zhuanzan” 本林周前林長明覺居士傳讚 [Eulogy of former grove president Zhou, Householder Mingjue], LK 3 (October 1923), reprinted in MFQ, 141:210–11; Chen Yutang 陳玉堂, Zhongguo jinxiandai renwu minghao dacidian 中國近現 代人物名號大辭典 [Large biographical name dictionary of modern China] (Hangzhou: Zhejiang guji chubanshe, 2005) (hereafter ZJD), 259. Yu Lingbo 於凌波, Xiandai Fojiao renwu cidian 現代佛教人物辭典 [Biographical dictionary of modern Buddhism], 2 vols. (Taipei: Foguang wenhua shiye, 2004), 1:758–59; ZJD, 930; Wu Chengping 吳成平, ed., Shanghai mingren cidian 1840–1998 上海名人辭典 1840–1998 [Biographical dictionary of famous people in Shanghai, 1840–1998] (Shanghai: Shanghai cishu chubanshe, 2001), 378–79. Chen Zu’en 陳祖恩 and Li Huaxing 李華興, Wang Yiting zhuan 王一亭傳 [Biography of Wang Yiting] (Shanghai: Shanghai cishu chubanshe, 2007); He Xinchang 賀鑫昌, “Haishang wenren: Wang Yiting” 海上聞人: 王一亭 [Shanghai celebrity: Wang Yiting], Dang’an yu lishi 6 (1996): 54–60; Kang Bao 康豹 [Paul R. Katz], “Yige zhuming Shanghai shangren yu cishan de zongjiao shenghuo—Wang Yiting” 一個著名上海商人與慈善家的宗教生活—王一亭 [The religious life of a renowned Shanghai businessman and philanthropist: Wang Yiting], in Wu, Lin, and Kang, Cong chengshi kan Zhongguo de xiandaixing, 275–96; Kuiyi Shen, “Wang Yiting in the Social Networks of 1910s–1930s Shanghai,” in At the Crossroads of Empires: Middlemen, Social Networks, and State-Building in Republican Shanghai, ed. Nara Dillon and Jean C. Oi (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 45–64. Yang Xinlian 楊欣蓮, “Zhu Shiseng jushi shengxi” 朱石僧居士生西 [Account of Zhu Shiseng’s rebirth in the Western Paradise], Honghua yuekan 21 (1943), reprinted in MFQB, 69:105.

Buddhist Activism, Urban Space, and Ambivalent Modernity 75 22. “Zuijin cizhi zhi Li Jingwei jun zailu shilue” 最近辭職之李經緯君在路事略 [Biographical sketch of recently retired Mr. Li Jingwei’s career at the railroad], Jinghu Huhangyong tielu rikan 1307 (June 17, 1935): 111. 23. “Linsuo zhi jianshe” 林所之建設 [Construction of the grove compound], in BGS, 21. 24. Zhang Xingren 張性人, “Diyici linsuo jijin zhi quanmu” 第一次林所基金之 勸募 [First raising of funds for the grove compound], in BGS, 7–13; “Benlin diyici linyou dahui baogao” 本林第一次林友大會報告 [Report on the grove’s rst great member meeting], LK 21 (November 1928), reprinted in MFQB, 10:201–3. 25. The Nanjing decade was the heyday of the WBHG, before its compound was destroyed by Japanese bombs during the Battle of Shanghai in late 1937. See Jessup, “Householder Elite.” 26. “Sun Chuanfang baohu Fojiao jushilin zhi bugao” 孫傳芳保護佛教居士 林之布告 [Announcement of Sun Chuanfang’s protection of the Buddhist Householder Grove], Shenbao 申報 (Shanghai) (hereafter SB), May 3, 1926; “Shijie Fojiao jushilin xinwu luocheng juxing kaimu li” 世界佛教居士林 新屋落成舉行開幕禮 [World Buddhist Householder Grove completes new compound and holds opening ceremony], SB, May 14, 1926. 27. Zhu Shiseng 朱石僧, “Wang Zhengkun jushi shengxi jishi” 王正坤居士生 西紀實 [Record of Householder Wang Zhengkun’s rebirth in the Western Paradise], in BGS, 133; Wang Zhen 王震, “Shijie Fojiao jushilin jianli ji” 世 界佛教居士林建立記 [Record of founding the World Buddhist Householder Grove], LK 36 (December 1933), reprinted in MFQ, 15:454–55. Wang entered the hospital and survived to remain a particularly enthusiastic member of the WBHG but died of complications a few years later. Wang’s act was referred to as “making a vow, cutting o the arm, and transferring the merit” (fashi duanbi huixiang 發誓斷臂回向). On self-in icted violence in the Chinese Buddhist tradition, see Jimmy Yu, 6DQFWLW\DQG6HOI,QϰLFWHG9LROHQFHLQ&KLQHVH Religions, 1500–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 28. “Fojiao jushilin jinri juxing kaimuli” 佛教居士林今日舉行開幕禮 [Buddhist Householder Grove holds opening ceremony today], SB, May 16, 1926. 29. Female householders (nü jushi 女居士) appear in the historical record of the WBHG as a signi cant presence as participants in its activities. However, they were neither represented in the organization’s leadership nor were they prominent voices in its public discourse. On female lay Buddhists in contemporary China, see chapter 8 in this volume. 30. On Yinguang, see Jan Kiely, “The Charismatic Monk and Chanting Masses: Master Yinguang and His Pure Land Revival Movement,” in The Making of 6DLQWV LQ 0RGHUQ DQG &RQWHPSRUDU\ &KLQD 3URϮOHV LQ 5HOLJLRXV /HDGHUVKLS, ed. David Ownby, Ji Zhe, and Vincent Goossaert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

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31. On Zhang Taiyan, see Viren Murthy, The Political Philosophy of Zhang Taiyan: The Resistance of Consciousness (Leiden: Brill, 2011). 32. “Shijie Fojiao jushilin kaimuli jixiang” 世界佛教居士林開幕禮記詳 [Detailed account of World Buddhist Householder Grove opening ceremony], SB, May 17, 1926; “Linsuo kaimu zhi shengkuang” 林所開幕之盛況 [Grand scene of the grove compound’s opening], in BGS, 21–23. 33. “Linsuo kaimu zhi shengkuang,” 23. 34. Bryna Goodman, Native Place, City, and Nation: Regional Networks and Identities in Shanghai, 1853–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 220–21; see also Guo Xuyin 郭緒印, Lao Shanghai de tongxiang tuanti 老上海的同鄉團體 [Native-place organizations of old Shanghai] (Shanghai: Wenhui chubanshe, 2003), 49–50. 35. Wen-hsin Yeh, “Corporate Space, Communal Time: Everyday Life in Shanghai’s Bank of China,” American Historical Review 100, no. 1 (February 1995): 100. 36. “Shijie Fojiao jushilin gangyao”; “Benlin gexiang zuzhi gangyao (chongding).” 37. Xiaoqun Xu, Chinese Professionals and the Republican State: The Rise of Professional Associations in Shanghai, 1912–1937 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Goodman, Native Place, 220–21; Bryna Goodman, “What Is in a Network? Local, Personal, and Public Loyalties in the Context of Changing Conceptions of the State and Social Welfare,” in Dillon and Oi, At the Crossroads, 155–78. 38. Holmes Welch, The Buddhist Revival in China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), 73. 39. Yuan Renze 阮仁澤 and Gao Zhennong 高振農, eds., Shanghai zongjiaoshi 上 海宗教史 [The history of religion in Shanghai] (Shanghai: Shanghai renmin chubanshe, 1992), 52. 40. “Jing’an si dafohui zhi renao” 靜安寺大佛會之熱鬧 [Hot and noisy great Buddha festival at Jing’an Temple], SB, May 8, 1919; see also similar reports in SB, May 15, 1920 and May 5, 1922. 41. Shijie Fojiao jushilin kecheng guiyue 世界佛教居士林課程規約 [World Buddhist Householder Grove schedule and regulations] (Shanghai: Foxue shuju, 1930?) (hereafter KCGY), 27–28, reprinted in MFQ, 129:264–65. 42. Goodman, Native Place, 91–92, 103, 220–21. 43. Yuan and Gao, Shanghai zongjiaoshi, 844–947. 44. Sherman Cochran, “Commercial Culture in Shanghai, 1900–1945: Imported or Invented? Cut Short or Sustained?” in Cochran, Inventing Nanjing Road, 3. 45. The “dharma eye” was one of six supernatural powers (shentong 神通) that could be acquired through Buddhist meditation. For a discussion of the place of supernatural powers in Chinese Buddhist modernism, see Erik J. Hammerstrom, “Science and Buddhist Modernism in Early 20th Century China: The Life and Works of Wang Xiaoxu,” Journal of Chinese Religion 39 (2012): 1–32. 46. “Longtian yonghu” 龍天擁護 [Protection of dragon kings and devas], in BGS, 132.

Buddhist Activism, Urban Space, and Ambivalent Modernity 77 47. “Youmingzhong zhi zhaojian” 幽冥鐘之超薦 [Soul saving of the ghost bell], in BGS, 136. 48. “Fojiao shichatuan lilin canguan jilue” 佛教視察團蒞林參觀紀略 [An account of the Buddhist Inspection Delegation tour of the grove], in BGS, 131. 49. “Shelishi” 舍利室 [Reliquary Room], in BGS, 134. 50. “Jinggao zhanli shelita zhi zhu shangshanren” 敬告瞻禮舍利塔之諸上善人 [Reports on ritual viewing of the Reliquary Room by superior worthies], in BGS, 135–36. 51. Tang Dayuan 唐大圓, “Guan shelita ji” 觀舍利塔記 [Record of viewing the Reliquary Room], in BGS, 134–35. 52. Benjamin Brose discusses modern deployments of Buddhist relics in chapter 4 in this volume. 53. “Baipuren dashi shilue” 白普仁大師事略 [Brief biography of Grand Master Baipuren], LK 12 (April 1926), reprinted in MFQB, 9:149–51; Gray Tuttle, Tibetan Buddhists in the Making of Modern China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 79–81. 54. “Jinggao zhanli shelita zhi zhu shangshanren,” 135–36. 55. KCGY, 33–34, reprinted in MFQ, 129:270–71. 56. This curriculum of daily practice largely coincides with what Holmes Welch reported as the liturgy for most public monasteries in the Republican era. See Holmes Welch, The Practice of Chinese Buddhism, 1900–1950 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), 56. 57. “Ji sushi guize” 寄宿舍規則 [Rules for lodging in the dorms], in BGS, 38. 58. KCGY, 31–33, reprinted in MFQ, 129:268–70. 59. “Jianli changqi nianfohui zhengqiu zanzhuren” 建立長期念佛會徵求贊助 人 [Seeking supporters for the founding of a long-term Buddha-recitation society], in BGS, 83–84. 60. “Zhangcheng” 章程 [Charter], in BGS, 30. 61. BGS, 39, 72–78. 62. Mo’an 嚜庵, “Fohua tongsu xuanjiang zhi fangfa ji mudi” 佛化通俗宣講之方 法及目的 [Method and purpose of Buddhacized vernacular preaching], LK 16 (January 1927), reprinted in MFQ, 142:125–26. 63. “Benlin xuanjiangtuan diyici fu Longhua jiangyan ji” 本林宣講團第一次 赴龍華講演記 [Record of the grove preaching brigade’s rst lecture at Longhua], in BGS, 130. 64. This comes from the WBHG’s mission statement; see “Benlin gexiang zuzhi gangyao (chongding).” 65. On Feng, see Geremie R. Barmé, An Artistic Exile: A Life of Feng Zikai (1898–1975) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 66. On Hongyi, see Raoul Birnbaum, “Master Hongyi Looks Back: A Modern Man Becomes a Monk in Twentieth-Century China,” in Buddhism in the Modern

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67. 68.

69. 70. 71. 72.

73.

74. 75. 76.

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World: Adaptations of an Ancient Tradition, ed. Steven Heine and Charles S. Prebish, 75–124 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Feng appears to have mistakenly added a level to the WBHG building either through miscounting the oors or remembering incorrectly. Feng Zikai 豐子愷, “Fawei” 法味 [Taste of the dharma], in Fengzikai wenji: Wenxue juanyi 豐子愷文集: 文學卷一 [The collected works of Feng Zikai: Literature, volume 1], 21–34 (Hangzhou: Zhejiang wenyi chubanshe, 1992). Ibid., 33–34. This is the total number of discrete householder groves I have found mentioned in the Buddhist press of the period. For example, householders in other locations sent requests to the WBHG for assistance in setting up their own householder groves. On the contemporary revival of the householder grove in Shanghai, see J. Brooks Jessup, “Beyond Ideological Con ict: Political Incorporation of Buddhist Youth in the Early PRC,” Frontiers of History in China 7, no. 4 (2012): 551–81. On Daoist inner alchemy, see Xun Liu, Daoist Modern: Innovation, Lay Practice, and the Community of Inner Alchemy in Republican Shanghai (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009). On redemptive societies, see Prasenjit Duara, “The Discourse of Civilization and Pan-Asianism,” Journal of World History 23, no. 1 (2001): 99–130; David A. Palmer, Paul R. Katz, and Wang Chien-chuan, “Introduction: Redemptive Societies in Cultural and Historical Contexts,” Minsu quyi 173 (September 2011): 1–12. On martial arts, see Andrew D. Morris, Marrow of the Nation: A History of Sport and Physical Culture in Republican China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 185–229. On traditional Chinese medicine, see Xu Xiaoqun, “ ‘National Essence’ vs ‘Science’: Chinese Native Physicians’ Fight for Legitimacy, 1912–37,” Modern Asian Studies 31, no. 4 (1997): 847–77; Sean Hsiang-lin Lei, “Moral Community of Weisheng: Contesting Hygiene in Republican China,” East Asian Science, Technology and Society 3 (2009): 475–504. Kang, “Yige zhuming Shanghai shangren.” See, for example, Morris, Marrow of the Nation, 185–229. See, for example, Ruth Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).

2 BUDDHISM AND THE MODERN EPISTEMIC SPACE Buddhist Intellectuals in the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates

. The specialization of knowledge valorized by modernity gave the sciences a particular cachet and authority to participate in more general public debates on all topics, from nature to culture and politics.

—

I

1

n the previous chapter, Brooks Jessup made the case that urban lay Buddhist activity in Republican China was animated by an “ambivalent modernity,” which he characterizes as the “simultaneous ambivalence of urban elites toward discourses of both foreign-derived modernity and authentic Chinese tradition. ” For these lay Buddhists, their ongoing encounter with modernity resulted in the creation of novel religious spaces in the context of an urban space that was itself characterized by a combination of elements both modern and traditional. In creating association halls for the practice of their religion, urban elites reworked the principal signs of both modernity and Buddhism in order to inscribe them onto urban space. In this chapter, I examine the discursive developments that went hand in hand with these reworkings. As the primary signs of modernity, especially science, became increasingly prevalent in everyday China in the early decades of the twentieth century, Buddhist intellectuals employed these very signs to describe and de ne

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their own tradition. In so doing, they were in uential in inscribing both science and Buddhism into the developing epistemic space of Republican China. As new and foreign technologies, practices, and ideologies were translated in China, negotiations about their signi cance took place in a variety of spaces in China—physical, political, and epistemological. The ambivalent modernity Jessup describes appeared in many other arenas of Chinese life. In medicine, for example, the success of Western medicine in dealing with the Manchurian Plague of 1910–1911 led to widespread acceptance of Western medical theories of contagious diseases.2 This did not bring an end to the practice of traditional forms of Chinese medicine, however, as practitioners of the older methods took ideas and terms from Western medicine and “grafted” them onto their own practices and medical discourses.3 In this way, practitioners of traditional Chinese medical techniques were also active agents in establishing elements of modern medical science in China, though they did this for their own ends. Ambivalent modernity appeared in other, related spaces in society as well, in new practices and associations that applied modern scienti c terminology and techniques to traditional practices of meditation and the belief in spirits. Ruth Rogaski and Xun Liu have written about how Chinese traditions of self-cultivation—Daoist and otherwise—were discussed using modern notions of science and hygiene from the start of the twentieth century.4 And Max K. W. Huang has studied the ways in which modern scienti c methods and terms were used by Shanghai elites to study ghosts and other psychic phenomena in the early decades of the twentieth century.5 Buddhist meeting halls, Chinese medicine, meditation, and psychic research were speci c areas in which people in China represented different traditional elements using modern terms. Ultimately, they all point to the larger epistemological shift that was occurring in China in the rst decades of the twentieth century. In this chapter I focus on that shift by examining the ways that Buddhists adopted and assented to an episteme associated with science. Chinese Buddhist intellectuals disseminated modern taxonomies of knowledge related to speci c

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sciences while also resisting and rede ning the categories of science and religion themselves. In highlighting the ways in which modern classi cations of knowledge a ected these Buddhists’ discussions of their own tradition, this chapter reveals their contributions to the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates of the 1920s, an important cultural moment in China in which the potential and limits of these new categories were discussed in an explicit manner.

SCIENCE AS THE SIGN OF MODERNITY Of the many, intertwined forces of colonialism and modernity that in uenced the development of culture and society in the twentieth century, it would not be hyperbolic to claim that science was the most important. By “science,” I do not mean here speci c sets of practices or a body of public knowledge but instead a worldview, one situated in epistemological and discursive modes that have penetrated and wrought their e ects upon a wide swath of human culture. Yet even as the worldview implied by science was appropriated in various cultures, the idea of science itself functioned as the very symbol of modernity. As in other parts of the world, science was, and remains, central to the project of modernity in China. As Wang Hui has argued, from the late Qing onward, science, as an idea, served as the criterion for reform in China.6 As an ideological entity, science thus attained a vital signi cance in China during the rst decades of the twentieth century, and a variety of voices in Chinese society articulated their views on the proper place of science. They argued over the extent to which various aspects of modern society, such as its moral, ethical, and aesthetic systems, could and should be de ned and controlled by science. Together these voices formed a “community of scienti c discourse”7 that debated even the very de nition of science as its participants sought to formulate compelling visions of Chinese modernity. Buddhist intellectuals should be considered members of this community. Although generally overlooked, Buddhist intellectuals played

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an important role in the appropriation and dissemination of modern science in China. Buddhist contributions to this transition were complex, however. On the one hand, Buddhist writers drew from the intellectual resources of their tradition to critique the dogma of scientistic materialism; but on the other, they actually contributed to the extension of the hegemony of the modern scienti c worldview in China. This chapter highlights both of these aspects of Buddhist engagement with science in the 1920s by focusing on their participation in the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates, a public intellectual exchange that I de ne more broadly than most previous scholarship.8 It is the contention of this volume that Buddhist voices mattered in modern Chinese history, and this chapter gives some examples of Buddhist participation in the dominant philosophical and ideological discussions of the 1920s. The goal here is not to show how Buddhist intellectuals, as Buddhists, shared ideas and concerns with members of other religions; rather, it is to show that Buddhist intellectuals, as intellectuals, shared much with other thinkers of the period, even those who were quite hostile to Buddhism. Scholars have recently noted that, despite their di erent political and ideological a liations, the majority of Chinese intellectuals actually shared a number of the same modern commitments by the 1920s. Edmund Fung has pointed to their shared beliefs in organic growth, reform, and gradual change and that they all supported some level of social engineering, though most rejected violence as a means of reform.9 Lin Yü-sheng has highlighted a shared commitment to the unbridgeable di erence between subjectivity and objectivity, which animated the arguments between Zhang Junmai 張君勱 (Carsun Chang, 1886– 1969), Ding Wenjiang 丁文江 (1887–1936), and others.10 If Buddhists really were a part of the discussions of the day, did they also share any of these common commitments? Certain Chinese Buddhists did indeed absorb and promote scienti c schemas of classi cation of knowledge. Such ideas are particularly evident in these Buddhist scholars’ contributions to what came to be called the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates.

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FRAMING THE SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE DEBATES The Science and Philosophy of Life Debates often play a major role in scholarly narratives about the development of discourses of science and culture in early twentieth-century China. These debates involved a number of prominent intellectuals and are generally cited as both symbolic and constitutive of the most important philosophical discussions of the time. The debates were important and in uential, but we should not accept the narrow scope of the debates as de ned by a few of the debates’ participants. By expanding our understanding of the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates, we gain an important perspective on what was happening in other areas of China’s intellectual culture in the early 1920s. Here I use the term “Science and Philosophy of Life Debates” in a broad sense in order to show that some of China’s Buddhist intellectuals were fully integrated into the dominant philosophical discussions of their day and that these discussions, in turn, had a major impact on the trajectory of their own thought. There were many factors that led to the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates, but the spark that ignited them was an incendiary talk given by Zhang Junmai at Qinghua University in Beijing in February 1923. In this lecture, Zhang argued that rather than adopting a purely scientistic materialist view of the world, China needed to emphasize “philosophy of life” (renshengguan 人生觀).11 Zhang’s words raised the ire of the Scottish-educated geologist Ding Wenjiang, who wrote a critique to which Zhang in turn replied. Their exchange sent a shock wave through China’s intelligentsia, and, over the course of that year, many people wrote to weigh in on the issues at hand. Their contributions appeared as articles in a number of different periodicals, many of which were reprinted in two similar book collections published in 1923 and 1925.12 The more commonly cited of them was Science and Philosophy of Life; it is from the title of this work that scholars have taken the name for these debates.

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Yet it is important to recognize that this set of articles constituted only a part of a wider eld of negotiations over the relationship between science, truth, and values that occupied a wide range of Chinese thinkers during the 1920s. I propose that scholars clearly differentiate between the collection Science and Philosophy of Life and the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates. Although the two phenomena are closely linked, these terms refer to two di erent things: The former refers to a particular collection of texts, selected by a few individuals, which has assumed an undisputed place in the canon of Republicanera intellectual history. The latter refers to a particular pattern of cultural discourse, displaying a particular set of concerns, which spanned the entire third decade of the twentieth century. Although they had their roots in late nineteenth-century intellectual trends, the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates, in the broad sense, can be considered to have truly begun after 1919 when Liang Qichao publicly raised doubts about the bene ts of science and modern civilization after his return from a tour of postwar Europe. Then, the widespread discussion of the philosophical implications of science declined during the 1930s. Early in that decade, a number of cultural shifts that had been gaining momentum in the previous period came to fruition as science and science education became much more widespread in China. This was coupled with the Nationalist government’s aggressive use of science and engineering in the nation-building activities it carried out in the Nanjing Decade (1927–1937). The increasing numbers of technocrats in the government also led, somewhat ironically, to the growing opinion that science and politics should not mix.13 As a result, the practice of science shifted more squarely into the mainstream of Chinese life, and yet this also rendered it less common in philosophical discussions. China’s professional scientists were aware of this shift, and as they became more con dent of the place of science in their country, they spent less time writing polemical pieces justifying it.14 Discussion of science continued, but the speci c issues raised in the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates began to recede. In both the broad and narrow senses of the label, the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates were an important event in the evolution of the modern Chinese intellectual sphere. In the context of discussing

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the de nition of science, and the role it ought to play in Chinese life, Chinese thinkers grappled with some of the most pressing issues of the day. Some Buddhists were deeply involved in these discussions, including one whose work was included in Science and Philosophy of Life.

THE BUDDHIST AT THE CENTER OF SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE Lin Zaiping 林宰平 (1879–1960), a university professor and a lay Buddhist intellectual, had an impact on the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates, but neither Lin’s devotion to Buddhism nor his role in the debates have received much attention from scholars. For example, in the most important English-language work on the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates, Daniel Kwok’s Scientism in Chinese Thought: 1900– 1950, Lin’s piece in Science and Philosophy of Life is mentioned only once and is summarized in a single sentence. Immediately thereafter, Kwok refers to Lin and Liang Qichao as “only weak allies” for Zhang Junmai and moves on to other issues.15 Kwok may have dismissed Lin’s article, but it is clear that the contributors to Science and Philosophy of Life did not. Both Ding Wenjiang and Tang Yue 唐鉞 (1891–1987) wrote speci cally to refute Lin, and Zhang Dongsun 張東蓀 (1886–1973) cited Lin in his criticism of deterministic psychology.16 Although it was not easily discernible to many readers, the positions that Lin adopted in his contribution to Science and Philosophy of Life were in uenced by Buddhist ideas, which is not surprising given his commitment to Buddhism. Born in Fuzhou, Lin, like many of his generation of educated elites, studied in Japan, concentrating on law and economics at Tokyo Imperial University. He returned to China in 1907 and, after the founding of the Republic, joined the Ministry of Education led by Cai Yuanpei 蔡元 培 (1868–1940). He later took a dual appointment in the departments of Philosophy and Economics at Beijing University, where he taught throughout the 1920s and 1930s.17 Lin was part of the circle of prominent New Culture intellectuals in Beijing that included his friend Hu Shi and other contributors to Science and Philosophy of Life. Lin was also a devout Buddhist.

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Buddhism in uenced Lin’s life in a number of ways: he used Buddhist themes in his poetry, practiced meditation, participated in Buddhist study groups and lectures in Beijing, and maintained an acquaintance with the notable reformist monk Taixu 太虛 (1890–1947). In 1912, less than a month after the death of the Chan master Jichan 寄禪 (1852–1912), Lin wrote a short poem lamenting the loss of this eminent gure. Eight years later, after he had already begun teaching at Beijing University, Lin wrote another poem, titled “Sitting Alone While Burning Incense” (Fenxiang duzuo 焚香獨坐), about meditating outside his freshly swept room. The poem uses several Buddhist images, the most evident one being the term “unimpeded self ” (zizai shen 自在身), a reference to a mind devoid of de lements.18 While this poem suggests that Lin engaged in some form of meditation, his practice of Buddhism also included other forms of learning. He attended two lecture series given by Taixu in the capital in 1919 and in 1921.19 At these lectures, Lin would have mingled with a number of the city’s most prominent lay Buddhist intellectuals, including the noted lay Buddhist scholar Han Qingjing 韓 清淨 (1884–1949), as well as his associates Zhu Feihuang 朱芾煌 (b. 1877) and Jiang Weiqiao 蔣維喬 (1873–1958). Lin may also have been part of the Faxiang Research Group (Faxiang yanjiuhui 法相研究會) organized by Han and Zhu in 1921, and he had de nitely become a participant by 1927, when it was renamed the Three Periods Study Association (sanshi xuehui 三時學會). As with other Buddhist intellectuals of the time, the members of this group placed a special emphasis on the study of Buddhist Consciousness Only thought;20 indeed, Lin’s writings on science and psychology appear to have been in uenced by this philosophy. Aside from the Three Periods Study Association, Lin maintained other connections in the Buddhist community. Having met Taixu in the capital in 1919, Lin continued his acquaintance with him over the years, exchanging letters with him and visiting him on Mount Lu 廬 山 in 1937.21 Lin remained involved in Chinese Buddhism even into the last decade of his life. In 1950, after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, Lin joined Juzan 巨贊 (1908–1984), Zhao Puchu 趙 樸初 (1907–2000), and others as a founding member of the new, quasigovernmental Chinese Buddhist Association (Zhongguo Fojiao xiehui 中國佛教協會).22

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Lin was both a Buddhist intellectual and a member of the New Culture intelligentsia of Beijing. He demonstrated the overlap that existed between these circles usually thought of as so distinct. Lin’s contribution to Science and Philosophy of Life was important, regardless of his religious a liation. However, understanding his study of Buddhism clari es why he adopted certain positions. To this end, it is important to appreciate a few of the fundamental issues at stake in the discussions to which Lin contributed. The articles eventually collected in Science and Philosophy of Life contained discussions of various philosophical issues important in the early 1920s. Although the authors whose works ll its pages did not always agree on the grounds for their debates, there are certain themes that emerge as central to their discussions. They discussed the de nition of science, the nature of the scienti c method, the philosophy of science, and the relationship between science and ethics. One area of much disagreement concerned the limits of the knowledge produced by and contained in science. Although everyone agreed in general that science was the application and result of the scienti c method, they disagreed on the limits of that method. Empiricism thus emerged as an important theme. Many writers accepted the idea that knowledge owed automatically from the application of a single scienti c method rooted in the observation and measurement of phenomena.23 For Ding Wenjiang and his group, though, the scienti c method became the ultimate technique for the apprehension of truth,24 one whose universal application should brook no limitation. Lin was highly critical of this attitude. Lin’s contribution to Science and Philosophy of Life, “On Reading Mr. Ding Zaijun’s Metaphysics and Science” (Du Ding Zaijun xiansheng de Xuanxue yu kexue 讀丁在君先生的《玄學與科學》), was rst published in Shishi xinbao (時事新報) in 1923. Lin began his essay by critiquing Ding Wenjiang’s view that science can serve as an overarching system of truth. He referenced one of the lectures given by John Dewey in China wherein the American pragmatist philosopher had argued that, ever since Kant and Hegel, the possibility of a systematic philosophy had become impossible. Lin cited this in order to claim that Ding’s notion that science is a system of thought that can be used to reject

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other systems of thought was mistaken. In making claims that it could, Ding displayed a devotion to science, Lin argued, that was the same as a devotion to religion. Indeed, he twice accused Ding of acting like a “Pope,” making pronouncements about reality by at and holding to a dogmatic view of truth. Lin stated that all religions, with the exception of Buddhism, reject other systems of thought, such as philosophy and science.25 He did not elaborate on why he excluded Buddhism, a topic that he mentioned would better be discussed elsewhere. The rhetorical weight of Lin’s critique is best understood in the context of the antireligious fervor that was sweeping through the ranks of Beijing’s young intellectuals. For his part, Lin sought to highlight the dangers of any kind of monodevotionalism, be it to Allah or to science. Indeed, he even wrote that Ding was like Muhammad building his kingdom with a raised sword.26 Having assailed Ding’s general attitude with these comments, Lin proceeded to a discussion of what was meant by “science” and the scienti c method. Lin was deeply skeptical of the idea that either was a monolithic entity. Lin referenced the German philosopher and scientist Wilhelm Wundt’s (1832–1920) division of the sciences into three types: exact mathematical sciences, objective natural science, and subjective “spiritual science” (by which Wundt meant the human sciences, such as hermeneutics, phenomenology, and psychology).27 Lin also referred to the German debate about whether to include certain elds—such as history and anthropology—under the heading of science. Lin’s point in raising these examples was that “science” was neither as simple nor as clear an entity as Ding had made it out to be.28 In other words, Lin resisted the simple taxonomy of knowledge that Ding had set forth and sought instead to leave open the conversation about how knowledge should be classi ed. Lin added further nuance to the concept of science by delinking science and the scienti c method. He argued that there was more to science than simply its method; the scienti c method was not tantamount to science. Just as science was not a clearly coherent entity, there was no one scienti c method. If there were, Lin noted facetiously, we could use the methods of geometry to paint and make music, and call art and music geometry; and we could use the methods of mathematics in

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radio, and just call radio science and math.29 Here Lin’s examples are evidence of his limited knowledge of science, in that mathematics is necessary in electrical engineering; and, in fact, Lin fully admitted his lack of understanding of science at the end of the article.30 However, he stood by his larger point that di erent disciplines utilize methods speci c to those disciplines to answer the questions that they pose. Hence, science is more than simply a method. Lin again asked, if science were simply a method, then would not Christian Science, British Spiritualism, or the supernatural research carried out by Inoue Enry 井上圓了 (1858–1919) in Japan also be considered legitimate sciences since they used scienti c methods?31 It is not entirely clear whether Lin believed these practices to be legitimate sciences;32 however, given the rhetorical context of these statements, he seemed to be making the point that because the possibility existed that groups like Christian Science may utilize the methods of science but not be scienti c, “science” cannot be entirely equated with its methods. Once again, Lin resisted scientism by undercutting Ding’s classi cation of science as a special kind of activity rooted in a speci c methodology. For Ding Wenjiang, the scienti c method was de ned by its deep practice of empiricism. But Lin disputed the claim that science was entirely empirical, stating that even the scienti c method relied on certain assumptions and unproven ideas.33 Lin and other contributors to Science and Philosophy of Life thus adopted a fairly narrow understanding of “empirical” as the observation of phenomena with the human senses. While this allowed for the inclusion of data gained through the use of telescopes and microscopes, some of the authors, Lin included, considered other phenomena discussed in science as outside the scope of empiricism. Lin cited the shift in physics from an atomic view to a subatomic one as an example of science moving away from strict empiricism; he argued that in discussing electrons, scientists had already moved into the realm of supersensory phenomena. By discussing such supersensory phenomena, scientists seemed to have broken from their stated commitment to rigorous empiricism.34 What this meant for Lin was that the rules about what was and was not science were not as hard-and-fast as Ding asserted. Just as Lin felt that Ding’s uncompromising standard of empiricism was not being universally

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applied within science, he also wondered how empirical scientists could reject the sensations felt during dreams as legitimate data about the world.35 As Lin understood it, the scientistic worldview Ding promoted accepted only those truths that were gained as objective experience through the senses; yet this view was far too limited to deal with the reality of human experience of the world, which he considered subjective in nature and deeply connected to human psychology. Lin Zaiping, Zhang Junmai, and others argued that those who supported scientism failed to see that science could never provide the ethical and aesthetic foundations necessary for a healthy society. What was required instead of slavish devotion to science alone was “philosophy of life.” In the talk that set o the urry of exchanges captured in Science and Philosophy of Life, Zhang placed great emphasis on subjectivity, while painting science as simply objective in nature. The relative values of objectivity and subjectivity, as well as the possibility of subjectivity, were key themes to which many of these authors returned. Very much in accord with this, Lin took up a topic of great interest in the wider debates in his discussions of subjectivity focused on Ding’s reductionist approach to psychology. The notion that the scienti c method could provide answers to questions about all the phenomena of the world, even mental and emotional phenomena, was the driving factor behind discussions of the nature of human consciousness and psychology. These discussions generally formed around the question of whether or not the workings of the human mind were completely determined according to laws of cause and e ect (yinguolü 因果律). Supporting the worldwide turn toward materialist and mechanistic behaviorist psychology, the proponents of scientism argued that human psychology followed speci c rules of cause and e ect, which, once understood, could provide complete explanations for the behavior and feelings of human beings without need for the positing of subjectivity and subjective values of the types advocated by Zhang and others. It was for this reason that psychology was frequently invoked in the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates. Arguments over modern psychology were not limited to the contributors to Science and Philosophy of Life; similar discussions prompted lay and monastic Buddhists associated with the Wuchang

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school, in which Taixu played a guiding role, to write a number of articles in the mid-1920s in which they used Consciousness-Only thought to criticize behaviorist psychology.36 Although his criticisms of mechanistic psychology were not overtly Buddhist, Lin wrote certain passages that re ect the in uence of Buddhism on his thinking. As with all Ding’s critics, Lin was skeptical of Ding’s reduction of human psychology to physiological reactions, a position based on the assumption that there was a uniform objective reality. Lin argued that when looking at a bookcase, there are both objective and subjective aspects. He held that the color of the bookcase is in some sense produced by the reaction in our sense organs. Because our experiences of phenomena are thus always based on both subjective and objective factors, it is di cult to posit purely objective hypotheses about the natural world. One can see hints here of a view of perception derived from Consciousness-Only thought, a Buddhist philosophical school holding that cognition of an object occurs through the interaction of that which perceives (jianfen 見 分) and that which is perceived (sefen 色分). Lin’s articulation of this understanding of perception, however, is couched in the language of the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates rather than that of Buddhist scripture.37 Lin also raised several questions about modern psychology that would be taken up by other Buddhists in the next two years. He pointed out that neither Ding nor the entire eld of mechanistic psychology had been able to explain certain psychological phenomena. The two questions that were commonly picked up later by Buddhists were What is memory? and Do we have subjective existence when we are not sensing anything? Answering these questions from the standpoint of Consciousness-Only, members of the Wuchang school argued that memory is synonymous with the karmic “seeds” (zhongzi 種子, Skt. EҸMD) that exist in consciousness, and that the interactions of the various levels of consciousness are the content of much of what we label “subjective experience.”38 Once again, Lin did not directly mention Buddhist doctrine in this context, but it seems likely that the speci c questions he raised about the limits of psychology were inspired by his study of Buddhism.

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There are several reasons why Lin may not have discussed Buddhism in his writings as explicitly as he might have wished. Perhaps in 1923 Lin did not yet know enough about Buddhism to use it in his arguments. Maybe his Buddhist practice had not focused on scriptural learning to this point, and he felt he did not have adequate command over the subtleties of Buddhist thought. Given his attendance at several lecture series presented by Taixu and his likely participation in a study group focused on Consciousness-Only thought, this does not seem likely. A second, and more probable, reason why Lin may not have made explicit use of Buddhist thought in his essay is that he knew his intended audience and that they would not take such a discussion seriously. Lin’s piece did not appear in a Buddhist periodical but in a national newspaper. His target audience was made up of the learned, secular scholars whom he counted as his peers. He knew that some, such as Ding Wenjiang, Hu Shi, and Chen Duxiu, had little sympathy for Buddhism and would likely not give much credence to an argument built upon its doctrine. Even those scholars with whom he agreed, such as Zhang Junmai and Zhang Dongsun, would not have been overly welcoming of Buddhist thought. The two Zhangs were strongly in uenced by German philosophy, and both rejected traditional Chinese thought in favor of Western philosophy; Buddhism did not play a positive role in either of their approaches to modernity. Knowing his audience, Lin provided most of his examples exclusively from European and American thinkers he knew would be accepted as authoritative. Wilhelm Wundt and John Dewey were among his favorites. He also used as exemplars Europeans who had advanced the causes of science and those who, despite their training in science, failed to act as morally as Ding insisted they ought to simply by virtue of being scientists.39 Lin did not praise the Chinese sages of old, as generations of Chinese thinkers before him had done. He did not even mention Confucianism or Daoism. He did, however, mention Buddhism three times; and, in each case, Lin found Buddhism to be exceptional, in the literal sense of the word. As already mentioned, Lin likened Ding Wenjiang’s devotion to science to that of a religious believer. He said that all religions, with the exception of Buddhism, reject other systems of thought. Lin’s idea that

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Buddhism was unlike all other religions was not atypical of Buddhists of his day, nor was it atypical of Lin’s own opinions. At the end of the same section in which he criticized Ding’s dogmatic faith in science, Lin stated that Buddhism teaches people to abandon attachments to self and to dharmas, but that Ding was attached to science in the hopes that it could be used to improve the hearts of human beings. This faith in science seemed unconvincing to Lin.40 Lin’s invocation of Buddhism does not t smoothly within the overall ow of his argument; yet this is precisely the kind of brief comment that reveals the ideas running through his mind: when reaching for an example of negative aspects of human psychology, he looked beyond the examples given by Ding and Zhang in their writings to what Buddhism upheld as at the root of human problems. The third time Lin mentioned Buddhism was as part of his argument against Ding’s idea that the sheer fact of being a scientist would guarantee that one would also be a moral paragon for society. This and similar arguments demonstrate that Ding and the proponents of scientism were still concerned with questions of personal conduct and the public duty of scholars that had occupied Chinese thinkers since the time of Confucius. For Ding, it was science, a xue 學, that was best suited to molding ethical citizens in a modern China. Lin commented that such a claim could not but destroy Asian culture. Even though science could be used to do good, this did not mean that it was impossible for scientists to go astray. Lin asserted that Indian Buddhist thought was fundamentally concerned with liberating people into a realm without hindrances and without limits, and that it could be regarded as one of humanity’s precious spiritual traditions. Still, he acknowledged that its superior qualities did not prevent its giving rise to what he referred to as the Chan Buddhism of lifeless meditation and wild speculation.41 Lin was likely not making a wholesale criticism of Chan per se; as mentioned, Lin showed great respect for the Chan master Jichan. Rather, his target was certain types of Chan discourse. The more salient point here is that Lin chose to include such praise for Buddhism. Even so, he was careful to use language acceptable among his peers in Beijing, referring to Buddhism as “Buddhist thought” (Fojiao sixiang 佛教思想), which, with the neologism sixiang, identi ed Buddhism as a system

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of philosophical thinking on a par with Western philosophy. Lin did not develop his views on Buddhism further in this essay but implied that it could be just as useful a resource as science for assisting in the reform of humanity. In the highly charged and secularized intellectual environment of Beijing’s New Culture thinkers, this was not a minor point to assert. For all his criticism of scientism, Lin did not reject science itself. Lin felt it important to be clear that he disagreed with the claim that science was morally bankrupt and that it inherently led to struggle, killing, and war. The application of science needed to be controlled, and it should not be used by greedy businesspeople to make money or for violence or to kill others.42 These comments are a useful reminder that despite what Ding Wenjiang, Hu Shi, and others claimed, the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates were not about science but about de ning the limits of the category of science. Lin could not accept the establishment of science as the sole arbiter of truth and values for the nation; but he did feel that it was valuable and should hold an important place in China. This attitude was shared by other thinkers who opposed the proponents of scientism. Despite their di erences, there was a lot of ground that gures like Ding Wenjiang and Lin Zaiping shared with one another. The articles in Science and Philosophy of Life share a commitment to the idea of science and to many of the modern taxonomies of knowledge implicit in the discipline. Such notions were also adopted by other Buddhists writing at the time who have not normally been included as participants in the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates.

MODERNITY AND THE CLASSIFICATION OF KNOWLEDGE One of the main projects of modernity has been the ever-increasing compartmentalization of human life and activity and the cognitive shift implied in this subdivision of these larger wholes into smaller pieces. For example, industrialization is, in part, the process by which the work of production is reduced to speci c steps, which can be

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repeated and ampli ed to great scales. This type of division and specialization also occurred in other realms, including government and science. One can look at the emergence in the middle of the nineteenth century of chemistry and physics as independent elds of study, with their own methods and objects of study, as indicative of this process of individuation.43 Wang Hui has pointed out that the adoption of science in China was not simply the process of adopting a suite of methodologies for the production of knowledge and assenting to the knowledge thus produced; it also entailed the assumption of a new schema for classifying all knowledge. Establishing in China clearly de ned divisions of the institutions of knowledge, which placed them in coherent disciplines classi ed according to a universally adopted rubric, was an implicit element of the education reforms carried out in the rst decades of the twentieth century, and this followed a process Chinese intellectuals had already begun in the late nineteenth century.44 This move toward a new classi cation of knowledge was also a key component of the New Culture and May Fourth Movements. This classi cation operated on two levels. At a lower taxonomic rank,45 various scienti c disciplines, such as geology, biology, and physics, were placed alongside one another as subtypes of science. At a higher taxonomic rank, such distinctions disappeared and science as a whole was placed alongside religion and philosophy. The lower-level classi catory schema explicit in science was accepted with little serious emendation in China. The latter type of classi cation, however, was much debated during the 1920s: What counted as religion, what as philosophy, and what as science? And which was better for doing what in society? As shown in the preceding discussion of Lin Zaiping, questions such as these were central to the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates. The best early examples we have of this drive to inculcate in the Chinese people this new ordering of knowledge are found in textbooks. To note just one example, in 1885 the British missionary Joseph Edkins (1823–1905) completed his translation into Chinese of Harry Roscoe’s updated Science Primers. These came out the following year in China as Primers of Western Learning (Xixue qimeng 西學啓蒙), becoming a popular introduction to science. Devoted to an overview of Western

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learning, the rst book in this series features Edkins’s careful division of Western learning into twenty-three subsciences. This list included categories new to China, such as chemistry, physics, and physiology.46 Certainly scholars in China had pondered some of the questions studied in these disciplines before the late nineteenth century, but what Edkins introduced was a modern schema for dividing knowledge into discrete elds. Such classi cation remained a theme in science textbooks published in China and became more prevalent with the education reforms of 1905 that saw modern science identi ed as a key component of the curriculum.47 Naming and delimiting the proper new boundaries of the disciplines of knowledge were central to Chinese modernity, and, as such, they were underlying themes in the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates. In one sense, the hegemony of the modern classi cation of knowledge was accepted by all the participants in these discussions. They did not always agree which elds should be counted within the total schema, but they generally assented to its basic contours. As Wang Hui argues, even the e orts to establish ethics and aesthetics as legitimate elds of knowledge by Zhang Junmai and those allied with him served only to reinforce the claims of universality made by the proponents of scientism as they merely supported the idea that only those forms of learning that could be listed as subcategories of the overarching category “science” were deemed legitimate. Thus, although certain aspects of the future shape of Chinese modernity were very much up for debate, such as the relative signi cance of materialism, by the mid1920s most intellectuals had accepted the value of Western classi cations of knowledge. This was not limited to the contributors to Science and Philosophy of Life. A modernity predicated upon the acceptance of new classi cations of knowledge centered on science can be seen clearly in Buddhist works from the 1920s onward. In articles on Buddhism and science in the Buddhist press of the 1920s, many Buddhist writers not only thought it necessary to de ne science but also expressly identi ed it as a class of learning (xue 學) akin to philosophy (zhexue 哲學), which was also a newly de ned and much-debated category in China. The idea that science was a type of learning was a point easily made. It

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was supported by the very etymology of the modern Chinese word for “science,” kexue 科學, which, following its introduction around 1900, eventually replaced such previously used terms as bowu 博物 and gezhi 格致.48 In de ning science, Buddhists followed another tendency common at the time: they split the word kexue into its parts in order to identify science as a branch of learning (xue) concerned primarily with the classi cation (ke) of elds of knowledge. More than one Buddhist writer followed the pattern established in Edkins’s Primers and other early translations by pointing out that science was made up of a number of sub elds, such as chemistry (huaxue 化學), physics (wulixue 物理 學), and psychology (xinlixue 心理學). Reference to such scienti c disciplines by Buddhist writers became commonplace by the 1920s, just a few decades after they had been adopted and de ned in Chinese.49 Although Buddhists were willing to accept the subdivision of the monolithic entity science itself into multiple elds, classi cation at a higher taxonomic rank was subject to much debate. What constituted or fell within the purview of science and what means of knowing could exist outside it, such as in philosophy or religion, were central issues during the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates. For Buddhist intellectuals writing at this time, one of the most pressing issues they faced was the need to clarify the relationship of something called Buddhism to the elds of philosophy, science, and religion. Was Buddhism one type of religion? Or did it exist as its own category, at the same level as religion and philosophy. In adopting modern taxonomic schemas, Buddhists had to strike a careful balance. Even as they accepted the categories of science, philosophy, and religion, they were compelled to di erentiate their tradition from those other categories, particularly in light of the “antireligion” (fei zongjiao 非宗教) movement of the 1920s.50 As Vincent Goossaert and David Palmer have shown, members of the May Fourth Movement sought not simply to abolish superstitious practices such as spirit possession and fortune-telling, nor to simply con scate the property of wealthy temples; their goal was the reformation of society along modern, secular lines, and their target, “religion,” was an abstraction of unclear de nition. Their concept of “religion” was still associated primarily with monotheistic religions in general

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and Christianity in particular. The association of Christianity with foreign colonialism and with antievolutionary views of nature was strong in China, and these factors led to a series of severe anti-Christian campaigns from 1922 onward.51 Because these campaigns were carried out under the banner of “antireligion,” it became incumbent upon religious believers, such as Buddhists like Lin Zaiping, to place themselves outside the category of religion.52 Classi cation had consequences in Republican China. Although they disputed and debated the place of Buddhism within these schemas, Buddhists did adopt a number of elements of the modern classi cation of knowledge in their writings, thereby extending the reach of those ideas.

BUDDHIST ADOPTION OF MODERN TAXONOMIES OF KNOWLEDGE In order to assess the manner in which Chinese Buddhists adopted modern classi cations of knowledge, one can consider the writings of Buddhist intellectuals of the mid-1920s at the peak of the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates. Buddhist intellectuals dealt with these schemas in three ways. First, they consented to, and even promoted, the notion that knowledge about the world was divided into speci c disciplines, each dedicated to a certain class of phenomena, such as geology, astronomy, and zoology. Second, they attempted to create a place for science within Buddhism, and thus a place for Buddhism in modern China, by mapping modern sciences onto certain traditional Indian disciplines of knowledge. Finally, they contested the elements of the modern discourse that identi ed Buddhism as just another entry in the taxon “religion.” The acceptance of modern classi cations of scienti c disciplines can be seen in two important works by the proli c monk Taixu. The rst of these, titled “The Buddha Dharma and Science” (Fofa yu kexue 佛法與 科學), is one of the most in uential statements about the relationship between Buddhism and science to appear in print in China in the 1920s and 1930s. This piece was originally one of several talks that Taixu gave at Dalin 大林 Temple on Mount Lu in the summer of 1923 as part of

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the rst meeting of the World Buddhist Federation (shijie Fojiao lianhe hui 世界佛教聯合會).53 The article popularized the notion that certain discoveries of science had been predicted in Buddhist scriptures. For instance, Taixu held that the Buddha had observed both microscopic life and the vastness of space with its many stars and planets. These became common points emphasized by Buddhists when arguing for the lack of contradiction between science and Buddhism.54 In uential among Buddhist intellectuals, Taixu’s article is an example of a Buddhist attempt to participate in the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates in the broad sense. Delivered in mid-1923 when many of the articles of the debate appeared in print, the title of Taixu’s talk echoed the titles of both Ding Wenjiang’s critique of Zhang Junmai’s views, “Metaphysics and Science” (Xuanxue yu kexue 玄學與科學), and Liang Qichao’s “Philosophy of Life and Science” (Renshengguan yu kexue 人生觀與科學). On a deeper level, he tackled some of the same themes discussed in other works from the debates, including the de nition and limits of science. Taixu’s de nition of science contained six parts and was predominantly concerned with its empirical nature. Most signi cantly, Taixu built his de nition on the notion that science was based on the careful and orderly division of things into classes, and that each new class of learning is dedicated to the study of the phenomena in its particular class.55 Science, in his view (as for its proponents), was predicated upon the methodical division of elds of study into specialized disciplines. Early in 1924, several months after giving his lecture at Mount Lu, Taixu wrote an essay directly addressing the issues raised in the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates. Titled “The Science of the Philosophy of Life” (Renshengguan de kexue 人生觀的科學), it was published as a monograph in 1925 by Taidong Books, which had published Philosophy of Life Controversy that same year. In his essay, Taixu responded speci cally to the arguments made by Zhang Junmai, Ding Wenjiang, and other contributors to Science and Philosophy of Life. This represented an unabashedly Buddhist reaction to the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates. Taixu outlined his understanding of what a philosophy of life should be and how it was not contrary to science. He then devoted nearly a third of his piece to de ning the elds of religion, science, and

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philosophy in relation to one another. Science, he held, was a process of experience, analysis, hypothesis, and experiment. He also argued that science should be based on a class-by-class analysis of phenomena, though, he felt, some of its modern proponents (presumably Ding and his cohort) upheld an overly narrow, limiting understanding of science and its categories of analysis. As in his earlier “The Buddha Dharma and Science,” Taixu placed a great deal of emphasis on sensory experience (ganyan 感驗), establishing it as the key concept around which his arguments about the di erences between various elds in the sciences revolved.56 Another example of Buddhist acceptance of the classi cation schemas of modern knowledge was the 1925 article “We Ought to Use the Methods of Science to Arrange Buddhist Theories” (Ying yong kexue zhi fangfa yi zhengli Foxue shuo 應用科學之方法以整理佛學說), written by the monk Manzhi 滿智 (dates unknown), who worked closely with Taixu in the 1920s and 1930s and was among the rst students at the latter’s Wuchang Buddhist Seminary.57 Manzhi argued that science could help in the study of Buddhism precisely because of the orderly classi cation of knowledge that it represented. He began his article by emphasizing the multiplicity of schools and scriptures that existed in Chinese Buddhism and the di culty that this embarrassment of riches had posed, and continued to pose, to the Buddhist community.58 Thereupon, he argued that Buddhists could and should begin to use science to classify and organize the Buddhist canon. He noted that, just as the masters of old had studied the canon according to schemas centered on speci c teachers or speci c texts, contemporary people should use the “scienti c method” to divide and edit the body of scripture to form a new canon. He even provided a sample list of the divisions of this new canon, each of which would be identi ed with a modern eld of study.59 Most of these elds had been introduced in China only in the previous half century; geography, biology, geology, hygiene, religious studies, sociology, politics, law, ethics, physical education, physical science, anthropology, medicine, math, and engineering were all included. His list suggests that Manzhi was attempting to show o his erudition by mentioning as many of the new elds of study as he could. Manzhi’s essay is clear evidence of the degree to which some Buddhists had

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begun to internalize and propagate modern taxonomies of knowledge. In convincing the Buddhist audience for which he was writing of the value of science for Buddhists, Manzhi took it as a given that science contained many branches and that reclassifying Buddhist ideas and texts according to these branches would naturally provide a greater understanding of Buddhism. Yet, although Manzhi thought science useful, he made it clear that he did not accept scientistic claims of the omniscience of either science or the scienti c method for discovering truth about the world. Science, he observed without further comment, has its limits.60 He also took pains to explicitly domesticate the sciences he wanted to use in Buddhist studies. He did this by prefacing each term in his list with the phrase “Buddhacized” (Fohua 佛化). Thus, hygiene became “Buddhacized hygiene” (Fohua weishengxue 佛化衛生學), and sociology became “Buddhacized sociology” (Fohua shehuixue 佛化社會學). Exactly what Manzhi meant by these terms is not clear, but it is evident that he accepted that the classi catory schema of science could make Buddhist scripture more accessible. For Manzhi, then, science was not the ultimate arbiter of truth, but the modern disciplines of knowledge that it included were a path toward greater understanding. Manzhi worked from the premise that Buddhists should adopt the specialized approach to knowledge present in science. Others, such as Taixu and the Beijing-based Buddhist layman Liu Xianliang 劉顯亮 (dates unknown), argued that science, and some of its subdivisions, had already been present in Buddhism. In 1920s China, locating science within the Buddhist tradition provided the bene t of giving Buddhists an intrareligious justi cation for studying and promoting science. More important, it also provided evidence to those outside Buddhism, especially to critics of religion, that Buddhism was suitably distant from superstition and thus suitably modern for the citizens of the nation. Both Taixu and Liu Xianliang stressed the importance of science for Buddhists, and each encouraged Buddhists to study and promote science for the good of both Buddhism and the world.61 These were not absolute claims; both men declared that science was limited in some fundamental ways, but both used modern schemas of knowledge in their promotion of science to Buddhist audiences.

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The claim that science could be found in the Buddhist scriptures required the mapping of modern classi cations of knowledge onto traditional Buddhist ones. In making the case that Buddhists should study science, each man found modern science in the Buddhist canon by identifying it with the “ ve arts” (wuming 五明, Skt. SDxFDYLG\č) of ancient India, which are mentioned many times in Buddhist scripture. Liu cited the *D‫˂ؾ‬DY\ࡃKD 6ࡃWUD, generally treated as a chapter of the $YDWDؐVDND 6ࡃWUD (Huayan ru fajie pin 華嚴入法界品) in China, which is the tale of the youth Sudhana’s travels in search of enlightenment.62 Taixu, for his part, glossed wuming as “the ve sciences of ancient India” and gave a modern equivalent for each.63 He also argued that Buddhism teaches the usefulness of the scienti c method itself. Upon attaining enlightenment, a bodhisattva should promote the scienti c method among all sentient beings. The reason given was that science can help dispel “deluded sentiments” (miqing 迷情). Although Taixu stopped just short of stating that science is the opposite of superstition, this common understanding lies beneath the surface of his comment.64 By equating speci c modern sciences with terms discussed in the Buddhist tradition, Liu Xianliang and Taixu sought to domesticate science for Buddhist use. In their view, science was neither new nor foreign; it was important not only as an inherent component of the Buddhist scriptural tradition but also for Buddhist soteriology. Showing that science was central to Buddhism rendered it safe for Buddhist use. By adopting this approach, these Buddhists were engaged in the conceptual remaking of their own tradition according to the dictates of Chinese modernity, but they were also remaking the modern in such a way that Buddhism was a part of it. Not only did Liu’s and Taixu’s statements show that Buddhism overlapped with modern categories but also their words enacted a change in the taxonomical location of certain components of Buddhism. By 1923, the value of the ve arts was no longer derived solely from their appearance in the Buddhist canon; they now drew their legitimacy equally from the extent to which they could be made to match normative categories of Chinese modernity drawn from the discourses of science. By the 1920s, some Buddhist writers were thus quite comfortable adopting aspects of a modern taxonomy of knowledge. Yet, for the

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reasons discussed, they were less willing to allow Buddhism itself to be so easily classed, particularly as a subdivision in the category of religion. This can be seen in an article by Liu Xianliang published September 10, 1923. Liu drew from a commentary on the *D‫˂ؾ‬DY\ࡃKD 6ࡃWUD to make the general argument that Buddhist youth ought to study science and that the “new youth” of Beijing (i.e., members of the May Fourth generation) needed to study Buddhism. He began the essay by acquiescing to the taxonomical demands of the day, o ering his thoughts on the place of Buddhism with respect to the elds of not only religion and philosophy (as Ouyang Jingwu had done) but also science. “You can say that it [Buddhism] is philosophy, that it is science, that it is religion; you can also say that it is not religion, philosophy, or science.”65 In other words, Liu was aware of the demands of classi cation, but he refused to let Buddhism be easily subsumed within any one of the new categories of knowledge. He alluded to the fact that one line of argument common in China at the time claimed that as science was becoming more prevalent, it was pushing religion out of the way. Liu felt that the label “religion” was too narrow for Buddhism. Although he did not elaborate on what he meant, Liu stated that people who thought Buddhism was just religion or philosophy simply did not understand Buddhism. Liu thus questioned the utility of any of the categories of science, religion, and philosophy to encompass Buddhism, but such was their discursive power that he did not question the categories themselves. Taixu took a similar approach, which he developed more extensively in “The Science of the Philosophy of Life.” Having devoted nearly a third of his essay to de ning and discussing the relationships between religion, philosophy, science, and metaphysics, Taixu focused on the role that di erent types of sensory experience played in each. He argued that religion is based upon special types of experience that are mystical or supernatural—and subjective. These experiences, Taixu explained, lead one to believe in all kinds of things, such as a creator god or gods, ghosts, demons, or even a universal self. He was quick to point out that the idea that religion requires belief in a god or gods is a Western notion. Science and philosophy, on the other hand, he held, generally focus on ordinary experiences, common to all. For this reason, science and philosophy cannot but criticize religion and its

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reliance on private experiences that are not universally observable or testable. Seeking to di erentiate Buddhism from other religions, Taixu noted that the problem was not subjective experience per se but the mistaken notions that come from accepting delusional experiences as reality. Buddhism avoided such problems in a way other religions could not, he argued, because of its perfect bodhi, or enlightened wisdom.66 In other words, while Taixu dismissed the experiential basis for religion, he still held to the notion that Buddhist experience, which was the product of meditation, should be considered valid. Like Lin Zaiping, Taixu assented to the value that was placed on empiricism in modern discourse and accepted that it was the essential criterion by which the various categories of human knowledge could be de ned.

CONCLUSION Expanding the catchment area for the term “Science and Philosophy of Life Debates” provides a new window through which to view the role of science in 1920s Chinese intellectual history beyond Hu Shi, Ding Wenjiang, Zhang Junmai, and the other thinkers usually studied. It has allowed me to reveal the impact of modern classi cations of knowledge on Buddhists who were writing at the time but whose voices have largely not been considered relevant. Just as all sides of the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates took the modern classi cations of knowledge as a given, so too did some in uential Buddhist intellectuals. And just as the limits of science and the scienti c method were the subject of disagreement by those whose works were included in Science and Philosophy of Life, it was also a common theme for those whose thematically related works were not. During the decade of the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates, Buddhist writers accepted and promoted many elements of the modern classi cation of knowledge, including a valorization of empiricism. Although they were generally resistant to the idea that Buddhism was merely another religion, they did accept the categories of science, religion, and philosophy generally and even sought to map some of those categories onto elements of traditional Buddhist learning. They

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also promoted the idea of the subdivisions within science, sharing this view with their peers among the “community of scienti c discourse.” Through their participation in this community in the 1920s, Buddhist intellectuals were as active as their non-Buddhist peers in remaking the epistemic landscape of China, even as they altered the course of this remaking by resisting and rede ning the propagation of new ideas about knowledge. It can be seen, then, that the formation of a modern Buddhism rooted in tradition required the construction of not only physical spaces for Buddhist practice that could be inserted into the context of China’s new urban landscape, as Jessup has shown, but also intellectual discourses about Buddhism that could be inserted into the new epistemological space created under the in uence of science. As Jessup notes, this process was not merely one of “scientizing” Buddhism by removing superstition: what is described here was not a process of removal but of reorganizing, of transposing Buddhism into the key of modernity. This reframing and reorganization was made possible in large part because of the rise of a new print culture in China, discussed by Gregory Adam Scott in the next chapter, that allowed for the rapid dissemination of the ideas described here among the growing population of literate people.

NOTES 1. Wang Hui, “Discursive Community and the Genealogy of Scienti c Categories,” in Everyday Modernity in China, ed. Madeleine Yue Dong and Joshua Goldstein (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 84. 2. Sean Hsiang-lin Lei, “Sovereignty and the Microscope: Constituting Noti able Infectious Disease and Containing the Manchurian Plague (1910–1911),” in Health and Hygiene in Chinese East Asia: Policies and Publics in the Long Twentieth Century, ed. Angela Ki Che Leung and Charlotte Furth, 73–106 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). 3. Bridie Andrews, “The Making of Modern Chinese Medicine, 1895–1937” (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 1996), 2. 4. Ruth Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Xun Liu, Daoist Modern: Innovation, Lay Practice, and the Community of Inner Alchemy in Republican Shanghai (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009).

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5. Huang Ko-wu 黃克武 [Max K. W. Huang], “Minguo chunian Shanghai de lingxue yanjiu: Yi ‘Shanghai lingxue hui’ wei li” 民國初年上海的靈學研 究：以「上海靈學會」為例 [Research into spiritualism in early Republican Shanghai: A study of the “Shanghai Spiritualism Society”], Jindaishi yanjiusuo jikai 55 (March 2007): 99–136. 6. Wang Hui, “Scienti c Worldview, Culture Debates, and the Reclassi cation of Knowledge in Twentieth-Century China,” trans. Hongmei Yu, boundary 2 35, no. 2 (2008): 125. 7. I have adopted this term from Wang Hui (“Discursive Community”), who uses it to indicate “a social community that uses scienti c discourses that are distinctly di erent from the everyday language of its era” (84). Wang is not referring to the (then tiny) community of practicing scientists but to the range of thinkers and writers who used scienti c terminology and scienti c ideas in a wide variety of discourses outside science. It is in this latter sense that I use the term. 8. For examples of Anglophone scholarship on these debates, see Jerome Grieder, Hu Shih and the Chinese Renaissance: Liberalism in the Chinese Revolution, 1917– 1937 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), 145–69, and D. W. Y. Kwok, Scientism in Chinese Thought, 1900–1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965). 9. Edmund S. K. Fung, The Intellectual Foundations of Chinese Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 13–14. 10. Yü-sheng Lin, “The Origins and Implications of Modern Chinese Scientism in Early Republican China: A Case Study—The Debate on Science and ‘Metaphysics’ in 1923,” in Proceedings of the Research Conference on the Early History of the Republic of China, 1912–1927 [August 20–22, 1983] (Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1984), 8. 11. Zhang coined this term as a translation of Lebensanschauung, which was the title of a book by his teacher, Rudolph Eucken. See Tse-tung Chow, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), 333. 12. The rst version, published in two volumes by Shanghai’s Dongya shuju, came out in December 1923. It contained twenty-nine articles along with prefaces by such notables as Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu. This was titled Kexue yu renshengguan 科學與人生觀 [Science and philosophy of life] and has become the standard version. Two years later, a nearly identical collection of articles was produced by Shanghai’s Taidong Books, this time as Renshengguan zhi lunzhan 人生觀之論戰 [The philosophy of life controversy]. This version included a preface written by Zhang Junmai instead of those by Hu and Chen. Both versions have been reprinted many times (though the former title has come to be used for both versions) even as recently as 2007.

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13. Wen-hsin Yeh, ed., Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 11. 14. Peter Buck, American Science and Modern China, 1876–1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 209. 15. Kwok, Scientism in Chinese Thought, 149. 16. Lin’s piece was also the rst article not written by Zhang Junmai to appear in the Taidong Books version of Philosophy of Life Controversy. 17. Zhang Zhongxing 張中行, Fuxuan suohua 負喧嗩話 [Speaking of enduring noisy utes] (Heilongjiang: Heilongjiang renmin chubanshe, 1986), 20. 18. These two poems can be found in Lin’s Beiyun ji 北雲集 [The collected writings of Beiyun] (N.p., n.d.), 4, verso, and 16, recto. 19. Shi Dongchu 釋東初, Zhongguo Fojiao jindai shi 中國佛教近代史 [A history of early modern Chinese Buddhism], in Dongchu laoren quanji 東初老人全集 [Complete works of Venerable Dongchu] (Taipei: Dongchu chubanshe, 1974), 1:243–44. 20. Consciousness Only (weishi 唯識) is a school of Buddhist philosophy that takes as its primary object of inquiry the nature of consciousness and perception and the origin of delusion. Owing to its perceived systematicity, it experienced a revival among Buddhist intellectuals in the early twentieth century. For a detailed study of the causes for this revival and the forms it took, see John Makeham, ed., 7UDQVIRUPLQJ&RQVFLRXVQHVV