Recovering Buddhism in Modern China

By Columbia University Press

Modern Chinese history told from a Buddhist perspective restores the vibrant, creative role of religion in postimperial China. It shows how urban Buddhist elites jockeyed for cultural dominance in the early Republican era, how Buddhist intellectuals reckoned with science, and how Buddhist media contributed to modern print cultures. It recognizes the political importance of sacred Buddhist relics and the complex processes through which Buddhists participated in and experienced religious suppression under Communist rule. Today, urban and rural communities alike engage with Buddhist practices to renegotiate class, gender, and kinship relations in post-Mao China.

Using fresh archival and primary sources, along with extensive ethnographic research, this volume vividly portrays these events and more, recasting Buddhism as a critical factor in China’s twentieth-century development. Each chapter connects a moment in Buddhist history to a significant theme in Chinese history, creating a new narrative of Buddhism’s involvement in the emergence of urban modernity, the practice of international diplomacy, the mobilization for total war, and other transformations of state, society, and culture. Working across an extraordinary thematic range, the book reincorporates Buddhism into the formative processes and distinctive character of Chinese history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Apr 12, 2016
• ISBN: 9780231541107

Book 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 field of Chinese Buddhism.

Michael J. Walsh, Sacred Economies: Buddhist Business and Religiosity in Medieval China

Koichi Shinohara, Spells, Images, and Maṇḍalas: Tracing the Evolution of Esoteric Buddhist Rituals

Beverley Foulks McGuire, Living Karma: The Religious Practices of Ouyi Zhixu (1599–1655)

Paul Copp, The Body Incantatory: Spells and the Ritual Imagination in Medieval Chinese Buddhism

N. Harry Rothschild, Emperor Wu Zhao and Her Pantheon of Devis, Divinities, and Dynastic Mothers

Erik J. Hammerstrom, The Science of Chinese Buddhism: Early Twentieth-Century Engagements

Jiang Wu and Lucille Chia, editors, Spreading Buddha’s Word in East Asia: The Formation and Transformation of the Chinese Buddhist Canon

RECOVERING BUDDHISM IN MODERN CHINA

EDITED BY

JAN KIELY &

J. BROOKS JESSUP

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

Columbia University Press

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Copyright © 2016 Columbia University Press

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E-ISBN 978-0-231-54110-7

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

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [e-mail].

COVER IMAGE

© Getty / DEA / W. BUSS / Contributor

COVER DESIGN

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

Acknowledgments

Introduction

JAN KIELY AND J. BROOKS JESSUP

PART I: REPUBLICAN-ERA MODERNITY

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

J. BROOKS JESSUP

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

ERIK J. HAMMERSTROM

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

GREGORY ADAM SCOTT

PART II: MIDCENTURY WAR AND REVOLUTION

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

BENJAMIN BROSE

5. Buddhist Efforts for the Reconciliation of Buddhism and Marxism in the Early Years of the People’s Republic of China

XUE YU

6. The Communist Dismantling of Temple and Monastic Buddhism in Suzhou

JAN KIELY

PART III: CONTEMPORARY SOCIAL PRACTICE

7. Mapping Religious Difference: Lay Buddhist Textual Communities in the Post-Mao Period

GARETH FISHER

8. Receiving Prayer Beads: A Lay-Buddhist Ritual Performed by Menopausal Women in Ninghua, Western Fujian

NEKY TAK-CHING CHEUNG

Bibliography

List of Contributors

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We 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 staff 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 efforts and support in seeing this volume to completion.

INTRODUCTION

JAN KIELY AND J. BROOKS JESSUP

By 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 nation-state, 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 influential political activist of the time, Liang Qichao 梁啓超 (1873–1929), had been received in Japan upon taking flight 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 first 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, finally, establish a state religion, Buddhism and Buddhists in a diverse array of forms nevertheless played important 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 specific 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 first 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 influential 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 scientific assumptions of secular modernity.⁶ Recent work by such scholars 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 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 different 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 fieldwork-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 field 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 as ethnographic fieldwork, 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 significant, 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 significance 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 unified, 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 effect, reincarnation, and salvation. Similarly widely circulated were images and narratives of supernatural beings—Buddhas, arhats, bodhisattvas, Māra, 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 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 finest and most prevalent forms of cultural production (including art, architecture, theater, and literature). Moreover, despite suffering 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 offspring 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 single, coherent movement, let alone was representative of all that was significant 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-nineteenth-century 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 influenced 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-definitions 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 first 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 social-cultural and political development in the making of modern China.

FORMATION OF SOCIAL COMMUNITIES

The lack of attention and significance scholars have accorded to these Buddhist developments has seemingly had much to do with standpoints formed in relation to much more than a simple indifference to religion. Not just contrasting analytical approaches but also differences in geographic and thematic focus as well as reliance on different 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 first half of the twentieth century acknowledge the involvement of Buddhist individuals and institutions, they assign them little significance 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 influential 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 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 different socioeconomic and educational backgrounds. At the heart of this was a project of social-community 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 first 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 affirms the significance 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 fits 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 figures of the Buddhist circles, such as Wang Yiting, Xiong Xiling, and Nie Yuntai, participated in a bewildering array of different 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 flourishing print 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 significant contribution of religious groups to the formation of modern Chinese print culture in the first 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 finding 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 figure 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 figures 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 significant source of May Fourth radicalism, and in the circles of modernist Shanghai-based cultural figures 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 officer and political figure Chen Mingshu recalls that his turn toward Buddhism as a Guangdong Army officer and self-identified 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 officers and revolutionaries joining well-known 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 outflows 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-justification 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 fulfill 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 figure 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 film 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 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 filming 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 affinity 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 undifferentiated mass of syncretic religion and ceased to have any significant 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 find 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 first 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 officially 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 official account from actual conditions. Cases of reformist zealotry could, in different situations, reflect 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 early-Republican 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 certificates to local folk Daoists, granting them legitimacy before the Republican state.⁴²

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 defined 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 significant volume could easily be filled 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 film (not least the film 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 influence. 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 figures like Juzan, devoted to building a 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 confined 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 flatly 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 sufficiently 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 figures like the senior Nationalist official 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 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 figure 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 flexible.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 qualified, 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, finally 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 of national Buddhist associations as well as provincial and subprovincial Buddhist organizing in order to negotiate with government officials 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 redefining of state-society relations.⁵³ In addition, significant 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 offered 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 officials 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 officials included fervent lay Buddhists, and many a former official, upon retirement, took a leading role in lay Buddhist associations and, in some cases, became monks. Even decidedly non-Buddhist Chinese political leaders often had close influential 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 officials, local elites, and the powerful Shanghai lay associations studied by Jessup cooperating to raise funds, implement a Buddhist version of rehabilitative education, and expand and extend modern penal reform in the name of social order and Buddhist salvation.⁵⁶ This is hardly the only such case