The Chinese Buddhist RevivalIn China, “(t)he Buddhist revival, I believe, began as an effort by laymen to reprint the sutras destroyed in the Taiping Rebellion [1860s]. It gathered momentum as the discovery of Western Buddhist scholarship stimulated the need for Chinese Buddhist scholarship, and as the invasion of China by Christian evangelists and missionaries led to the idea of training Buddhist evangelists and sending missionaries to India and the West. ([2]) Up to this point only laymen were involved…([3]) But in the last years of the Ch’ing dynasty when moves were made to confiscate their property for use in secular education, the monks began to organize schools and social-welfare enterprises as a means of self-defense” (Welch 1968, p.259).Holmes Welch believes that three threads run through the Chinese Buddhist revival: The need to secure religious identity by the laypeople; the need for economic self- preservation on part of the monastics; and the need to gain international status, by both lay and monastics (Welch 1968, pp.260-2). Speaking of the Buddhist reformers in early twentieth-century China, “The need for status—intellectual status—led to the necessity of meeting the challenges of science and Western philosophy, of Marxism, and of Christianity. It helped to bring about the revival of interest in… weshi xue (唯識學), ‘the consciousness-only school;’ the birth of Buddhist scientism, and participation in modern, Western forms of social welfare” (Welch 1968, p.261).The major figure in the Chinese Buddhist Revival was the monk Taixu (1890-1947), with his journal Hai Chao Yin (海潮音, Sound of the Tide). His ideas about “Buddhism for human life” (rensheng fojiao 人生佛教), and “Buddhism for this world” (renjian fojiao 人間佛教) were forged in the late Qing intellectual environment of debates about religion and the relevance of Buddhism to the modern world engaged in by Kang Youwei 康有為 (1858-1927), Liang Qichao 梁啓超 (1873-1929), Zhang Taiyan 章太炎(1868-1936), Wu Zhihui 吳稚暉 (1865-1953), Xiong Shili熊十力(1885-1968), Cai Yuanpei 蔡元培 (1863-1940), Ouyang Jian 歐陽漸 (1871-1943), Liang Shuming 梁漱溟 (1893-1988), and Taixu (Ma, 2001: 2-3).Much has been written on the development of Taixu’s ideas on renjian jingtu[creating the Pure Land in the human realm]; rensheng fojiao, and renjian fojiao,([4]) and all this cannot be elaborated upon here. But it suffices to say that all three terms stress that the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha originated in the human realm [rather than the other Buddhist realms of gods, demons, animals, hungry ghosts, and hell], and while realms other than the human “…may profit from the beneficial influence of Buddhism…the human realm is the true field of its history, doctrine, and practice” (Bingenheimer 2007, p.142). By 1940, Taixu employed the term rensheng fojiao in his formal classification scheme of Buddhist principles, apparently because to Taixu, rensheng was broader thanrenjian, able “…to encompass all the lifetimes and modes of existence a practitioner has to strive through until final liberation” (Bingenheimer 2007, pp.147-148).However, used in a normative and instrumental sense, all three terms promote a world-engaging Buddhism that “…reforms society, helps humankind to progress, and improves the whole world” (Shi Taixu, 1933). The Chinese Buddhist Revival promoted such activities as growth of lay organizations and lay teachers of the Dharma; building Buddhist clinics, orphanages, and schools; a radio station in Shanghai; proselytizing in prisons; and the effort to start an ecumenical movement with Buddhists abroad. Also, the modern revival saw Buddhist publishing houses, reorganized seminaries for Buddhist monastics, and national Buddhist associations. All of the above innovations were directly or indirectly indebted to the vision and reforms of Taixu (Welch 1968, pp.262-264).Taixu wrote that his political views were formed during the tumultuous years of the 1911 revolution and his friends and colleagues included revolutionaries and anarchists. By the mid-1920s, his political stance became situated “right of center” (Welch 1968, pp.182, 192) partly for pragmatic reasons (to obtain political imprimatur for his plans to reform and modernize Buddhism, to gain some government funding, and to gain the means and support to proselytize abroad) and partly for ideological reasons. Although he never lost his conviction that Sun Yat-sen’s Nationalist program was the best solution to build a modern China, by 1924-5 Taixu realized that the Nationalists were stymied by political infighting and struggle with the Communists and warlords. Furthermore, he held that all political ideologies, whether socialist, Fascist, or democratic, were motivated by self-interest and tended toward the exploitation of others, inevitably leading to struggle and war. Thus, Taixu concluded that Buddhism is the way to attain peace and stability in China and the world by effecting fundamental changes in thinking on the individual and national levels: to know that all creation is inter-related and that one benefits oneself by first benefitting others (Shi Taixu, 1940).In other writings, using the typical language of the “clash of civilizations East and West” debates of the first half of the twentieth century, Taixu wrote that Western civilizations were sick, due to their overly individualistic and aggressive orientation of zongwo, zhiwu (縱我,制物 “an unrestrained self, conquering nature”), that has led to imperialism and war. He held that other colonized Asian nations cannot offer effective means to deal with these calamities, and he concludes that Buddhism, together with the Chinese spirit of keji, chongren (克己,崇仁 “overcoming the self, respecting others”), are the best remedies for this civilizational sickness (Shi Miaozheng 1947. pp.90-91). As for Japan, he despaired that this great civilization with a rich Buddhist heritage had, in its rush to modernize in blind emulation of the West, had become but another imperialist aggressor. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Taixu appealed many times in Hai Chao Yin to the millions of Buddhists in Japan, Korea, and Taiwan to unite and oppose Japanese military rule and imperialist aggression. ([5])
It is vital to note that on the one hand, Taixu was a Nationalist, an ardent follower of Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek, and a fierce Chinese patriot during WWII who called on Buddhists to help in various ways in the war effort and to even take up arms against the Japanese invaders of China. ([6]) Yet, Taixu’s relationship with the Nationalist party-state was fraught with contradictions: Taixu liberally borrowed from Nationalist vocabulary and ideological categories, and received material support: money, means of transport, use of diplomatic channels and state-related associations abroad. But whenever the Nationalists made one of their numerous attempts to confiscate temple properties, then Taixu and others publicly opposed the government. And, a national-level Chinese Buddhist Association, one of Taixu’s life-long goals, was finally permitted to convene in May 1947, two months after Taixu’s death (Chen 2003, pp.256, 259-60, 266-8, 271).
Unfortunately Taixu was unable to fully realize his plans and ideals for Chinese Buddhism: Taixu died from a stroke in March 1947 and, from 1946-49, the chaos of civil war and collapse of the central government in Nanjing and its retreat to the island of Taiwan halted further developments in China. ([7]) A decade earlier, Taixu had already deemed his attempts to inspire “a revolution in Buddhism” to be a failure, due to both his own “weaknesses and failures” as well as the strength of his opponents (Shi Taixu, 2005 [1937]). He was too self-critical.
Though the socio-political and economic environment of the early twentieth century placed severe limits on the Buddhist Revival within China, Taixu spent much time and energy attempting to transform Buddhism into a global movement that would transcend the limits of nation, political faction, and Buddhist school. Towards this end, Taixu traveled to Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong (1917-1925); then to France, England, Belgium, Germany, and the United States (1928-9), as well as to Burma, Sri Lanka, India, and Malaysia (1939-40). ([8]) In Sri Lanka, homeland of the great Buddhist revivalist Dharmapala, Taixu spoke at length with the Buddhist scholar G. P. Malalasekera about forming a world Buddhist federation; in 1950 this plan came to fruition when Dr. Malalasekera founded the World Fellowship of Buddhists. ([9])
The contemporary term “globalization” in Chinese is quanqiuhua (全球化), too recent for Taixu’s Complete Works; rather we find quanqiu (全球 the whole world) as a noun; shijiehua (世界化 globalization) and shijiezhuyi (世界主義 world-ism). As we have mentioned, Taixu was a strong nationalist and patriot, but he was also a staunch proponent of globalization and world-ism as those terms were understood earlier in the twentieth century, especially at the close of WWII, when many people hoped that transnational bodies such as the United Nations could transcend petty nationalist interests and conflicts and prevent future wars. But even more fundamentally when Taixu spoke of shijiehua andshijie zhuyi he was referring to the potential of Buddhism and the need to propagate Buddhism worldwide. Taixu believed that Buddhism was the one international force, of all religions, “isms,” and socio-political systems that could lead to true one-world-ism, a broad and tolerant world-view, and true world peace. ([10])
Indeed, the Vietnamese monk Tri Quang (b. 1924), a leader in the 1960s Buddhist Struggle Movement, praised Taixu as “the first person to promote Buddhist integration and standardization… (he) organized many conferences for Buddhists all over the world to come together, he drafted a charter for Buddhists in the whole world, he pr
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