The Science of Chinese Buddhism: Early Twentieth-Century Engagements 9780231539586

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THE SCIENCE OF CHINESE BUDDHISM

Sheng Yen Series in Chinese Buddhist Studies

T HE SHENG Y EN S ERIES IN CHINES E 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

The Science of Chinese Buddhism Early Twentieth-Century Engagements

E R I K J. H A M M E R S T RO M

Columbia University Press New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2015 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hammerstrom, Erik J.  The science of Chinese Buddhism: early twentieth-century engagements / Erik J. Hammerstrom.   pages cm.—(The Sheng Yen Series in Chinese Buddhist Studies)  Includes bibliographical references and index.  ISBN 978-0-231-17034-5 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-231-53958-6 (electronic)  1. Buddhism and science—China—History—20th century. 2. China—Intellectual life—20th century. I. Title.  BQ4570.S3H36 2015  294.3'3650951—dc23 2014038237

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 COVER IMAGE: detail of engraving, Paris, 1861; hand-colored. antiqueprintstore.com COVER DESIGN: Noah Arlow 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.

This book is dedicated to my wife Aimee, and to the Js and Gs (you know who you are), thank you for everything.

CONT ENT S

Preface Introduction

ix 1

1

The Historical Context

18

2

Views on the Physical Universe

50

3

Empiricism and Means of Verification

80

4

The Nature of Mind

102

5

Ethics, Science, and Society

128

6

Science and Self-Cultivation

150

Epilogue

170

Notes Glossary Bibliography Index

175 211 217 233

PREFAC E

THIS BOOK IS A WORK of intellectual history. I wrote it because I am interested in how religious people think about the truth claims of their traditions in light of modern science. My focus is on what Chinese Buddhists thought about science in the first part of the twentieth century, a time when the social and intellectual realms in China were changing dramatically. My goal was to explain why Buddhists wrote what they wrote, and why they wrote it when they wrote it. I do not explain how you should think about the relationship between “science” and “Buddhism” (however you interpret these two terms) or which one is right. There are plenty of other books out there that address those issues. Likewise, I do not consider here how well these Buddhists actually understood the science they were talking about, and I am not concerned with judging whether their ideas hold any water. Certainly I have assumed their ideas made some logical sense, at least to them, and I have tried my best to report those ideas as accurately as possible. I have also tried to take advantage of the historical and cultural distance between these writers and me to try to see the bigger picture, the dominant themes in their work of which they may not have been aware, and the place of their ideas within the longer arcs of Chinese and global history. The student of modern East Asian history will note that I have said very little here about Japan. This was a conscious choice, and one that ix

PREFACE

I believe reflects the facts of the time. The people of Japan studied EuroAmerican ways of thinking and doing earlier and more deeply than the people of China, and it is undeniable that Japanese thinkers served China as an important translator, a cultural window, if you will, onto the world of Western thought in the 1890s and 1900s. But few of the big ideas discussed in this book date from the period of Japan’s greatest influence on Chinese thought. One sees the inklings of some of these in the late 1890s, but it is not until the middle of the 1920s that Chinese Buddhists developed most of their discourses about modern science. By this point, Chinese people’s access to Euro-American thought was direct and regular, and its impact was clear as intelligent Chinese dove eagerly into the latest scientific and philosophical works. Euro-American thought loomed large: China’s earliest science societies, formed in the 1910s and 1920s, were dominated by Chinese scientists who studied in America. Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, and Hans Driesch all lectured in China in the early 1920s, inspiring many in the May Fourth generation; and the theories of Henri Bergson, William James, and J.  R. Watson also had a deep influence on many. All of this is not to say that one could not examine the parallels and connections that might have existed between Chinese and Japanese Buddhist discourses on science. Indeed, I would be delighted to read the results of such an investigation. However, given that one of this book’s main claims is that most Chinese Buddhists’ discussions of science happened between the mid-1920s and the early 1930s, it is not strictly necessary to look to Japan to understand what occurred in China. As a first book, this work is the product of many years of study, writing, and rewriting. Along the way I received many kind assurances and much economic support. Without these, this book would never have come to be. Research was carried out with financial support from the Sheng Yen Education Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Indiana University. I was also supported by the U.S. government through the Fulbright Scholar program. This program is essential for the future of the United States within an increasingly globalized world, and it is my hope that it will continue to support the students and scholars who contribute to our engaging with the rest of the world through learning and cultural exchange, rather than merely through economic trade and military action. I was fortunate to be able to use all of this funding to do research and to write at several warm-hearted institutions with gracious x

PREFACE

staffs. These included Dharma Drum Buddhist College in Taiwan; the Needham Research Institute in Cambridge, United Kingdom; and a little coffee shop in Hamilton, Montana. Along the way I was helped by many more people than I can list here. First, I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers who provided important suggestions on an earlier version of this book. Thank you to my friends in graduate school, Brad, Brian, Diane, Geoffrey, Jonathan, Joy, Michael, and the Nicoles, for the many hours of stimulating conversation and merry music making. Thank you to the teachers who trained me, especially Stephen Bokenkamp and Robert Campany. Thank you to my dissertation advisers, especially the irrepressible Aaron Stalnaker and the meticulous Chuck Jones. Thanks to my many partners in crime, Beverly Foulks McGuire, Brooks Jessup, Justin Ritzinger, and especially Gregory Adam Scott. Thanks to my excellent colleagues at Pacific Lutheran University for their remarkable collegiality. If Sukhāvatī existed for a teacher-scholar, it would look much like PLU. Finally, many thanks to my family, especially my parents and my wife, Aimee, without whom life would be so much less. Finally, a note on some conventions used in this book. I have used pinyin throughout (which I suppose hardly needs stating in the twentyfirst century); the one exception is the name of the well-known Chinese intellectual Hu Shih. Also, in this book I discuss a Buddhist school of thought known by many names, which I refer to as Consciousness-Only. It is a complex philosophical system of many components, but the primary philosophical premise upon which it is based was of central importance for early twentieth-century Chinese Buddhists. To differentiate this premise from the school of thought, I refer to the former using lowercase letters. Thus, for example, the Consciousness-Only school is based on the premise that all phenomena are consciousness-only. This is, of course, not a distinction that exists in Chinese, which has no capital or lowercase letters, but it is a distinction I think is important for this study. Erik Hammerstrom Cascadia Liqiu 䩳䥳, 2014

xi

THE SCIENCE OF CHINESE BUDDHISM

Introduction The extensive application of science is one of the main characteristics of Chinese thought in the twentieth century. Since the late Qing dynasty [1644–1911], science has served as a symbol of and a call for liberation, as well as an objective criterion for all social and cultural reform. — WA N G H U I

DURING THE 1920S AND EARLY 1930s, dozens of articles and monographs devoted to the topic of science and Buddhism appeared in the rapidly growing Buddhist press of China. The subject of science and Buddhism was mentioned and discussed in passing in dozens of articles on other subjects as well. Buddhists rejected materialism and critiqued the social evolutionism associated with science even as they championed heliocentrism and the need for the empirical verification of all truth claims, even Buddhist ones. Why did Buddhists in China feel compelled to write these things about science and Buddhism? Why did they invest so much energy in the topic, and why did they say what they said? This book aims to answer these questions. Ask someone her opinion of “science and religion” and it is unlikely you will get an apathetic response. She may decline to answer your question, especially if you do not know each other well or are in polite company—at a dinner party, for example. But even if she does not answer your question, it is likely that she will have an opinion on the subject, and it will probably be quite strongly held. If you search for “science and religion” on the Internet or on the website of any major bookseller, you will find no shortage of people willing to tell you what you should think about the relationship between these two things. All of this supports the conclusion that “science and religion” refers to some important issue in our 1

INTRODUCTION

world. Since the late nineteenth century, people have understood science and religion to be specific things whose relationship must be defined. The details of this relationship have fired the imaginations of academics and laypeople, it has led to the consumption of much paper and caffeine, and it has ruined many a pleasant dinner party. The question of the relationship between science and religion can do all of these things because it connects to some of the most important questions we ask of ourselves as human beings: How does one know the world? What beliefs about the world are justified? What is the value of subjective experience? How should one act as a human here on planet Earth? Much has been written in the last century and a half about the relationship between one thing called “science” and another called “religion.” Laypeople and experts of all types have made claims about how the two interact.1 Leaving aside the constructed nature of the two categories, we can say that probably the most popular understanding of their interaction, at least in my home, the United States, is that science and religion fundamentally conflict with each other. This “conflict thesis,” popularized at the end of the nineteenth century in the writings of the chemist John William Draper and Cornell University’s first president, Andrew Dickson White, continues to have a strong impact on thinking about science and religion.2 Its supporters point to the trial of Galileo and the rejection of Darwinian evolution as disputes that occurred between science, as a whole, and religion, also as a whole, and they argue that such conflicts are inevitable when any religion is confronted with the truth of science. On the other side, there have been those who have claimed that science and religion are in accordance or that they occupy separate realms of human endeavor (e.g., the making of fact vs. the making of meaning) and that conflict arises only when one or the other has overstepped its proper boundaries.3 Over the last few decades, historians and scholars of religion have trained a critical gaze upon the issue of the relationship between religion and science in history. They have questioned the simplistic historical narratives told by the supporters of the conflict thesis, and they have delved deeper into the philosophical claims of both sides. Their findings have added much-needed historical rigor to the discussion of the relationship between science and religion. With some exceptions, their work has focused almost exclusively on science and Christianity in the West. 2

INTRODUCTION

The result of this has been, at least in the Anglophone world, that a large portion of humanity has been neglected. In this book I will try to add a little to the work that has already been done on the history of the interaction of science and religion by turning my sights to a different religion and a different part of the world. Just as the interaction of Christianity and modern science cannot be reduced to a narrative of conflict, twentiethcentury Chinese Buddhists took a varied approach to thinking about how their tradition might relate to the recently introduced category of “science.” Buddhist faith commitments are often quite different from those of Christians, and this led to differences in how they thought about scientific truth claims. If one is going to make any broad statements about “science and religion,” it is necessary to take into account these other voices. I draw extensively on Sinophone documents—monographs, journal articles, and newspaper stories—to shed light on how Chinese Buddhists used the idea of science to describe and locate their tradition, especially during the heady years of the 1920s. While little has been written on the interactions of Asian religion and modern science from a historical point of view,4 this does not mean the question of the relationship between Buddhism and science has been ignored. The last two decades have witnessed an outpouring of Englishlanguage works on Buddhism and science, but these have been written almost exclusively from the perspective of contemporary Buddhists (most of them from the West), who have argued philosophically for their views on what the relationship between science and Buddhism ought to be. This is not the goal of the current study, which is a work of intellectual history. My aim is to give those who ponder the question of science and religion, but who may not read Chinese, access to the processes by which religious thinkers operating in a different cultural and historical milieu articulated what they themselves felt to be the relationship between their tradition and the increasingly dominant discourse of modern science. But this book is more than simply another entry in the field of “science and religion studies,” because Buddhist discussions of science also tell us a great deal about the intellectual history of China as a whole during a period in which it was undergoing the swiftest philosophical and cultural changes it has ever witnessed. The very idea of science loomed large over all of these changes, casting its less-than-lifelike shadow across the face of Chinese culture. 3

INTRODUCTION

Why Science? A Compelling Discourse As the noted scholar and public intellectual Wang Hui reminds us in the quotation at the start of this chapter, an idealized notion of science served as the foundation for the rhetoric of cultural reform, liberation, and national strength that dominated twentieth-century Chinese thought.5 By “science,” neither he nor I refer to a particular body of knowledge or an institutionalized set of practices aimed at establishing that knowledge. In China, especially in the first three decades of the twentieth century, science stood for something far greater. It served as an ideological entity, a reified concept referring to an epistemology and a set of cultural values, all of which had political implications. It was, in other words, the very sign of modernity. To study it made the individual modern, and to possess it made the nation strong. At first, science was seen as inalienable from Western culture, which was itself inalienable from modernity, but this shifted as the idea of science as a universal discourse took root in China in the 1910s and 1920s. During those years, the association of science with Western culture weakened, but the notion of science as the sine qua non of modernity remained. Science was important in China during the opening years of the twentieth century because it represented both modernity and strength. People in China had been studying Western sciences, particularly mathematics and astronomy, since the late Ming dynasty (1368–1644). But it was not until the late nineteenth century that Western learning (xixue 大⬠) was reflected upon in a systematic way, and a concerted effort was made to study it in China. The presence of foreign colonial troops on Chinese soil and China’s general inability to match foreign military power precipitated a crisis among China’s governing intelligentsia. Members of this class argued for varying degrees of adoption of Western learning, as well as varying degrees of governmental reform. China’s loss in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1895 to a country long considered inferior was particularly shocking, and it led to an increase in the translation and teaching of modern science. From the last decade of the nineteenth century onward, thinkers increasingly emphasized the role that science and the technological advances to which its study led should play in the modernizing nation-state of China. For these reasons, the importance of science in Chinese education continued to 4

INTRODUCTION

grow during the first half of the twentieth century, and so too did its cultural cachet. China’s Buddhist population was well aware of the growing authority of science, and it became a compelling discourse for some of them. I use the expression “compelling discourse” for a number of reasons. An older approach to studying Chinese-Western interactions viewed Chinese engagement with modern thought as a process of stimulus-response in which modernity and the West act and China and Chinese thinkers merely react. In this approach, it is imagined that modernity and elements of modern thought, such as science, are foisted upon a passive subject who can only accept them. Justin Ritzinger has termed this the “push” model of modernity. I prefer to think of modernity, as he does, in terms of both “push” and “pull.”6 Discourses such as science were compelling to many Chinese thinkers, including Buddhists. They found themselves compelled to talk about science, both by internal drives and questions and by the external forces of their social, cultural, and even legal contexts. Modernity was not entirely forced upon China’s Buddhists, but it was not entirely their choice to engage with it either. In considering the question of science and Buddhism in China, we should not imagine that in writing about science as they did, these Buddhists were outsiders to an established discussion being had by other, authoritative individuals. Science was a fluid thing in China in the early twentieth century, as it was in the rest of the world, and its authority was not controlled, or even represented, by a single group. Many of the approaches Buddhists took to discussing modern science were created in the 1920s, when much of science was in flux both in China and elsewhere. For example, although evolutionary theory was discussed in China from the start of the twentieth century, Darwin’s works were not translated into Chinese until 1919. Relativity, which shook the classical Newtonian assumptions of science as a whole, was first discussed in China in 1921. Modern psychology was not yet a well-developed discipline anywhere in the world, and although the proton was discovered in 1920, the neutron was not known of until 1933. Parallel to this, on the philosophical front, the definition of science and the role it would play in the formation of modern China were the subjects of heated debates in the early and mid1920s, especially among intellectuals who did not actually know very much about its actual practice. 5

INTRODUCTION

When Buddhists wrote on science, they were not responding to a tradition already established in society; rather, they were actively participating in the process by which a new tradition was formed through the translation of modern science in China. Thus, we should acknowledge that these Buddhists were part of what Wang Hui refers to as the “community of scientific discourse.” Wang includes within this group both the community of professional scientists, in their extension of the meaning of science to talk about social and cultural issues, and nonscientists who used science to talk about issues unrelated to science.7 Buddhists were very much active participants in this community, and some, such as the electrical engineer and lay Buddhist Wang Xiaoxu 䌳⮷⼸ (1875–1948), knew a lot more about science than many of their secular counterparts. There were many other Buddhists, ordained or otherwise, who, though scientific laypeople, also contributed to the translation of science in China. These Buddhists were compelled to write about science for reasons both internal and external to their tradition. Sometimes they studied and wrote about science for personal reasons: they found modern science to be fascinating and exciting, and despite some current stereotypes to the contrary, their religious faith proved no hindrance to their study of science. More often, the writings studied here reflect deeper concerns about questions of value and truth. Some Buddhists did see in science a language of universal, or at least near-universal, truth. When Buddhists wrote that Darwin’s discoveries had given the lie to the Christian belief in a creator god, denied by Buddhism since its early days in India, this was more than mere cultural strategy. Buddhists believed it and may have found it refreshing to find their beliefs supported in this new discourse. In this, as in other cases, Chinese Buddhists demonstrated a keen awareness of the cultural authority of science. The invocation of scientific terms and scientific ideas in one’s writings was a valuable form of cultural capital, especially after the 1910s, and Chinese Buddhists knew it. This was particularly important because of major shifts occurring in how religion was understood in China. During the 1910s, and increasingly during the 1920s, there was heated disagreement over what religion was and whether it was compatible with the modern nation-state being constructed after the demise of the imperial system in 1911. The new categories of science and religion were discussed in conjunction with a third category—superstition—to form a complex of 6

INTRODUCTION

ideas that intellectuals used to judge virtually all traditional philosophies and practices. In these judgments, the word “superstition” signified that which was the opposite of science and thus modernity. For China to be strong, it had to abandon backward superstition and embrace science. In these discussions, religion usually occupied an ill-defined middle ground between the two poles of science and superstition. Scholars have recently shed light on the cultural and legal processes by which religion was defined and controlled in early twentieth-century China.8 These studies have demonstrated the contested nature of the very term “religion.” Arguments about the category of religion were especially fierce during the 1920s, when new legal and economic steps taken to disestablish institutional religion were justified by increasingly sophisticated discourses about national salvation, cultural reform, and the liberation of the people. Many thinkers of the mid-1910s to early 1920s rejected Chinese tradition in favor of modern, Western philosophy, political systems, and most importantly here, science. Not everyone agreed with the more radical thinkers, however, and rather than see this period as one of unidirectional advancement toward a scientific materialist worldview from which religion was absent (the secularization thesis), one should acknowledge the multiple competing voices that spoke on and disagreed about these issues. Some of these disagreements became important cultural events in their own right. Perhaps the most important of these in the context of the present study was the science and philosophy of life (kexue yu renshengguan 䥹⬠冯Ṣ䓇奨) debates of 1923, in which a number of primarily Beijing-based intellectuals argued in print about the proper boundaries of science, the authority of subjectivity, and the veracity of stimulusresponse models of human psychology. Though neither group formed a united camp, there were basically two sides in this debate. On the one hand, there were those who valued subjective experience and looked to the work of Henri Bergson (1859–1941) and German idealist philosophy. On the other, there were the supporters of scientism, a mechanistic materialist doctrine that holds that all that is knowable is knowable by science and that science has the power to provide meaning and direction in society, culture, and even art. The popularity of the scientistic viewpoint in early twentieth-century China formed a major part of the context for Buddhists’ discussions of science.9 Proponents of dogmatic 7

INTRODUCTION

scientism had little patience for religion, which they did not differentiate from superstition. Superstition as a modern category came under attack in China at the start of the twentieth century, but the term “superstition,” like religion, was ill defined during the first decades of the century. Because of this, it was incumbent upon religious persons to define their traditions in such a way as to not be seen as superstitious. To be defined as superstitious meant that one became viewed as a hindrance to the growth and even the survival of the nation; and as such, the material bases for one’s tradition—temples, land, and artifacts—could be confiscated by those in power. This happened in China repeatedly throughout the preCommunist period, but it intensified during several major antireligion movements that occurred in the 1920s. It is no coincidence, then, that the most productive period for Chinese Buddhist discourses on science began directly after the science and philosophy of life debates and ran for the next decade, coinciding with both of the major antireligion campaigns and leading into the middle of the relative calm of the Nanjing Decade (1927–1937). The period between 1923 and 1932 was thus an important one, and one of the central historical claims of this study is that ideas about the relationship between science and Buddhism hinted at during the late 1890s were fully developed in the 1920s into forms that endured through the 1940s. This study, then, is part of a recent trend toward emphasizing the importance of the 1920s in modern Chinese history.10 Buddhists who chose to talk about science during this period were compelled to do so by their own desires to explain the relationship between Buddhist doctrine and science, both of which made claims of universality, but they were also compelled by the times in which they were living.

Buddhist Philosophies of Life This book presents an intellectual history of the development of Chinese Buddhists’ attitudes toward and uses of science and scientific language in the period between 1923 and 1932. While I account for ideas that appeared earlier, notably late nineteenth-century interpretations of traditional Buddhist cosmology, most of the works cited here were published during this decade, when Chinese Buddhists developed various ways of talking 8

INTRODUCTION

about science, which they deployed in different combinations. There was no single Buddhist discourse on science in China. A study such as this naturally requires an organizing narrative structure. In rendering Chinese Buddhists’ discussions legible, I do not claim that all Chinese Buddhists were talking about science in the same way or that they all shared a common agenda. Donald Lopez has done an admirable job of using primarily Anglophone sources to trace the global emergence of something he calls the “Buddhism and Science discourse,”11 by which he means the argument made by some Buddhists that Buddhism and science are inherently compatible. He describes how this argument developed in the West and in countries colonized by the West over the last century and a half. Several other scholars have written in the same vein, discussing how this particular argument developed in China.12 What these scholars do not mention is that Buddhists did not write only to demonstrate noncontradiction between Buddhist doctrine and the facts and methodologies of science. Many also sought to maintain the separateness of Buddhism from science, as well as its superiority over it. There were those who pursued other lines of discussion beyond either of these options as well. The ideas of the noncontradiction of Buddhism and science and the ultimate superiority of Buddhism over science lay within a set of clustered discourses Buddhists drew on when invoking science. Examining how this cluster of discourses developed in China makes clear that there were certain patterns to the ways in which Chinese Buddhists engaged with science and that these patterns were influenced by the wider intellectual climate in China at the time. As a result, although Chinese Buddhists’ engagement with science may have had some similarities to that of Buddhists from other countries, the discourses they produced were specific to China. In this study I show how Chinese Buddhists’ approaches to science were shaped by the context of the 1920s and early 1930s, a time when science as an ideological entity was discussed widely in literate Chinese society. The majority of these discussions did not focus on the truth of certain ideas about the natural world, such as evolution or the functioning of the nervous system, so much as on the implications of scientific ideas for the values and goals of human life and society. Or, to use the categories of the day, the discussions of science and human values that took place owed much to the two discursive fields of Lebensanschauung13 9

INTRODUCTION

and Weltanschauung, which were translated into Chinese as renshengguan Ṣ䓇奨 (philosophy of life) and yuzhouguan ⬯⭁奨 or, less commonly, shijieguan ᶾ䓴奨 (both meaning “worldview”). These concepts, derived from German philosophy, became important modes of thought in China from the 1920s, just as they had come to pervade all of European thought by the early twentieth century.14 Not only were these terms widely used in China during the 1920s and 1930s, they are also useful for us here, because they remind us that when Buddhists wrote about science as a whole, they were concerned with more than issues of truth. Too often in the popular imagination the encounter between science and religion is understood as a clash between competing truth claims. When it came to truth claims about the natural world, there was little in science that Chinese Buddhists actually cared to refute. In fact, there were a number of claims made in modern science that Buddhists identified as having been predicted in the Buddhist scriptures. Such examples were only ever one part of a larger project, however. This project was the use of modern terms and concepts to articulate a Buddhist modernism that could take its place as an important element of Chinese society. Though not always stated explicitly, the working out of such a Chinese Buddhist modernism often took place within the discursive field of philosophies of life. The current study takes its cues from these dominant concerns and is organized according to the general features exhibited by a philosophy of life in China during the third and fourth decades of the twentieth century. I hope I will be forgiven for enumerating these features in a manner reminiscent of Clifford Geertz’s famous definition of religion.15 A philosophy of life includes (1) a theory about human origins within the world, which is connected to (2) claims about the objective ontological and subjective epistemological status of human beings. Out of this status, (3) ethical systems are deduced, which are linked to (4) ideas about self-cultivation and the proper ends of a life well lived, both for the individual and society. It can be seen from this list that a philosophy of life is heavily value laden. The ethical implications of science were just as important as any truth claim promoted in its name. For Buddhists, the most pressing issues in the discussion of science and Buddhism were not about the relative truthfulness of either but about how and in what way each could help individual humans and all of humanity. Thus, when Buddhists discussed the theory 10

INTRODUCTION

of evolution, for example, they were not as concerned with debating its factuality as they were with the ethical and societal implications of social evolutionism (often mistakenly referred to as “social Darwinism”). The six chapters of this study are meant to lead the reader through the common elements of the modern philosophies of life developed by Chinese Buddhists as they grappled with science. It begins with a general discussion of the history of the translation of modern science in nineteenth and early twentieth-century China and how this was spurred on by the political and social situation of the time. The challenge of Western expansion, which resulted in China’s semicolonial status at the end of the nineteenth century, caused many members of the Chinese literati to study Western science and technology in greater depth than had been the case in prior centuries. The aim of chapter 1 is to show that the ideological remaking of Chinese society that took place in the 1920s and early 1930s drove scientists, Buddhists, and many others to invest a great deal of energy in debating the nature and scope of science. In order to properly frame a Buddhist philosophy of life, it is important to see how that philosophy of life fits within a view of the physical universe, how it fits within a worldview. Chapter 2 explains that Chinese Buddhists, like their coreligionists in other parts of the colonized world, worked to reconcile the geocentric, flat-earth cosmology described in Buddhist scripture with modern astronomy. It was important for Buddhists to make such interventions in order to deflect the criticism that their tradition was unscientific because of its geocentrism. While they agreed with the veracity of modern views of the universe, Buddhists strongly opposed materialism, and the remainder of this chapter shows how Buddhists used subatomic and relativity physics to argue against materialism in favor of their preferred metaphysical view, which was rooted in Consciousness-Only (Weishi ⓗ嬀)16 thought. The nature of the physical universe was of interest to Chinese Buddhists, but they were generally more concerned with the activities of the human beings within the world than with cosmic mechanics. Two of the primary issues at stake in all Chinese discussions of science in the 1920s were epistemology and the nature of the human mind, which are discussed in chapters 3 and 4. Chapter 3 shows that while Buddhists did not generally disagree with the contents of science (i.e., the facts that are discovered about the workings of the natural world), they did disagree 11

INTRODUCTION

with the claims made by the proponents of scientism that science was the only, or even best, method for attaining knowledge about the world. Buddhists drew from a number of traditional doctrines to challenge the supremacy of scientific empiricism. One of the more nuanced ways this was done was by means of the analytic tools of classical Buddhist logic. Buddhist thinkers usually agreed that empiricism was essential, arguing that Buddhism and science shared a similar emphasis on the verification of theories, but Buddhists felt their tradition allowed access to a higher empiricism, one not bounded by the limitations of the ignorance that commonly blinkers human reason. As an example of this higher empiricism, a number of authors pointed to the supersensory powers that advanced practitioners of meditation are said to acquire. Chapter 4 follows Buddhists’ use of Consciousness-Only thought in the dialogue on mind, subjectivity, and psychology (as both a concept and a discipline) taking place in China during the 1920s. Buddhists deployed the notion of karmic “seeds” described in Consciousness-Only thought to answer a question then facing the psychological community: how to explain memory and instinct. The chapter concludes by describing Buddhists’ rejection of one author’s reductive materialist reading of Consciousness-Only thought using modern physiology. This serves as a case study of how consensus was reached among members of the Buddhist community around issues of Buddhism and science during the late 1920s and early 1930s. While Buddhists were interested in debating what the world is, how we know it, and how the mind works, their discussions of science also reflected their commitment to ethical behavior and the ending of suffering. In other words, they were concerned both with knowing the world and with how people should behave in that world. Chapter 5 deals with Buddhists’ thoughts on social evolutionism, the social ethic they believed was engendered by science. Social evolutionism became popular in Chinese political and intellectual discourse starting in the last decade of the nineteenth century. The notion that groups compete violently with one another for survival, with the strong defeating or simply destroying the weak, was generally accepted in China by 1920, although not by Chinese adherents of anarchist socialism or Buddhism. Buddhists rejected social evolutionism because of the violence to which it seems to lead. Identifying it as the ethical position of materialist science, Buddhists 12

INTRODUCTION

repeatedly reminded their readers about the devastation of World War I in Europe and the horrendous methods for killing (created by science) employed there. In analyzing Buddhists’ critiques of social evolutionism, several observations can be made. Few Buddhists rejected Darwinism or evolution in the broader sense; rather, they rejected what they took to be a prescriptive ethic not a descriptive theory. The evolution of species was a fact few disputed, but they felt that violent conflict between groups was not unavoidable and suggested society be built instead upon the radical egalitarianism promoted in Buddhist scripture. Although Buddhists rejected materialism and championed the empiricism of their tradition as superior to that of science, it would be difficult to label the Buddhists whose work is examined here as antiscience. Some even considered the study of science to be part of the Buddhist path. Chapter 6 describes this idea within a larger discussion of the impact science had on how Buddhists talked about spiritual self-cultivation. A number of authors pointed to the Mahāyāna “six perfections” as the core of Buddhist practice, but they argued that people should also study science as part of their Buddhist practice. Equating various modern sciences to the five traditional Indian arts (wuming Ḽ㖶) described in the Buddhist canon, they said that the Buddha had advised the aspiring bodhisattva to study mathematics, logic, and philology. The Buddha maintained that these arts were important not only for one’s own personal spiritual advancement but also as tools to be used to decrease the suffering of others. Meditation is one of the six perfections, and Buddhist discussion of meditation sometimes used explicitly scientific language. Chapter 6 ends with a study of a book published in 1932 in which the author claimed that Buddhist meditation leads to the production of an organic compound in the body he described as “super adrenalin.” He also argued, in a manner that will be familiar to anyone who is aware of recent neuroscientific investigations of meditation, that scientists should conduct experiments on meditators, including using X-ray machines to study their brains, in order to understand the physiological effects produced during meditation. While few of these ideas caught on, they are representative of the many ways that Buddhists’ discussions of ethical and spiritual cultivation were influenced by science. Such efforts were not limited to Buddhists, and they shared many ideas with those around them. Indeed, one of the primary assumptions of this work is that one cannot understand 13

INTRODUCTION

Buddhists’ discussions of science merely as reactions of one coherent ideological tradition to the challenges posed by the truth claims of another ideological tradition. Rather, what I attempt to show here are just some of the complex causes and conditions, to borrow the Buddhist terminology, that led certain Buddhists to articulate their modern philosophies of life in novel ways, using the resources provided in Buddhist language and thought as well as the language and thought of modern science and Western philosophy.

Sources for This Study and Their Authors I have depended on a number of written sources to investigate Buddhist views on and uses of science in the early twentieth century. The earliest of these date from the last decade of the nineteenth century, while the latest are from the early 1950s. Despite this range, this study is primarily based on the analysis of writings that appeared in the Buddhist periodical press between 1923 and 1932. The new print culture that developed in China in the early twentieth century was unprecedented and has been studied in several recent works.17 New technologies and improved means of transportation and communication gave China’s new Buddhist publishing houses the ability to reach an audience much wider than was reached fifty years earlier. Increased literacy among the general population led to greater demand for written material, and this affected the Buddhist world. Scriptural reprints, monthly and semimonthly journals, Buddhist newspapers, and new monographs on a variety of topics from the introductory to the highly technical were distributed by train to the many bookstores spread throughout China. In order to provide a broad account of the development of Buddhist discourses on science, I have tried to examine and reference the greatest possible range of material from the Buddhist press and have consulted many types of written media, including newspaper and journal articles, lecture transcripts, monographs, and publication notices.18 My goal here is to describe the ways that the widest range of literate Buddhists used scientific language and compared their tradition with something called “science” during the first half of the twentieth century. Rather than focus solely on the works of the usual “great men” of modern Chinese Buddhist history, such as the monk Taixu ⣒嘃 (1890–1947) or his lay Buddhist 14

INTRODUCTION

teacher Yang Wenhui 㣲㔯㚫 (1837–1911), I began by looking at everything I could find written on the topic of science in the Buddhist press, regardless of author. The purpose was to establish a historical outline of the development of these ideas: to say when each was mooted, how each developed, and where possible, to show who contributed most to each idea. In other words, this project is not a study of changes in an individual’s ideas over time but of changes in the ideas of a community over time. In the following pages I cite more than six dozen writings by more than four dozen authors from the period. Much is known about some of these authors, such as Taixu, but there are many others about whom we know little or nothing. Chinese writers have long favored the use of multiple pseudonyms, and when all one has is an author’s name, one cannot be sure whether the individual was monastic or lay, male or female. In some cases a more well-known author used a rare pseudonym, such as when Taixu wrote as Meian 㗏䚎, but in other cases the author remains unknown because he or she used a generic name. Although there are some authors we know nothing about, it is still important to include their works in this study. The most influential Buddhist writings on science were indeed produced by individuals about whom good biographical information is available, but we are able to know that their work was influential only because we see their ideas repeated by other writers. Even when those other authors are otherwise unknown, we are still able to use their work to trace the spread of ideas through the world of early twentieth-century Buddhist writing. A few general observations can be made about those authors for whom we have at least some biographical information: First, it seems that there were more laypeople interested in this topic than monastics. Second, other than the two major groups discussed later in this chapter, most people who wrote about science mentioned it only in passing and did not make it a major focus of their work. Finally, it appears that with the exception of Taixu and his colleagues, few of the major Buddhist masters of the period, such as the highly influential establishment monks Yuanying ⚻䐃 (1878–1953) and Yinguang ⌘⃱ (1861–1940), had much interest in discussing science or its relationship to Buddhism. Taixu was the most important Chinese monk of the first half of the twentieth century, perhaps of that entire century.19 It is not surprising that he was also the most important monastic voice in the development 15

INTRODUCTION

of Buddhist discourses on science. This was certainly partly the result of what he wrote, but it was also a result of the sheer volume of his publications and the range of issues he tackled (whether he understood them well or not). Taixu’s impact can also be seen in the writings of his acquaintances, especially those who taught or studied with him at the Wuchang Buddhist Seminary (Wuchang Foxue Yuan 㬎㖴ἃ⬠昊), generally considered to be the first modern Buddhist seminary in China. In considering the writings of these others, we should not let Taixu take too much of the spotlight. In other words, we need to partly decenter him from our narratives of modern Chinese Buddhism. Rather than talk about Taixu and “his disciples,” treating Taixu as the sole instigator and originator of ideas, it is perhaps better to refer to him and those around him as part of the “Wuchang School,” after the seminary where they first came together. The Wuchang Buddhist Seminary, as an institution with a curriculum and a physical facility, began operation in 1922. Many of the students in its first few classes went on to serve as abbots at major monasteries, to found and run other Buddhist seminaries, and to publish Buddhist journals. In studying Buddhist writings on science, especially from the 1920s, one repeatedly encounters students and teachers from this school, and though they do not speak with a single voice, they share a number of common positions on several of the main topics discussed in this book. For example, most of the articles that compared modern psychology to Consciousness-Only thought in the 1920s were produced by teachers and students from this seminary. Taixu may have played an important role in forming the basic direction of the seminary, but he did not found or control it, and he only taught there for two years. Many of the people who taught or studied at the Wuchang seminary wrote about science, and most of their writings are examined in this book. Another loosely affiliated group who wrote about science, not otherwise identified in the scholarship on twentieth-century Chinese Buddhism, are lay Buddhist engineers from the Jiangnan region. They did not all know each other, but this group made some of the most important contributions to the discussion of science and Buddhism. Though not technically an engineer in the modern sense, Yang Wenhui oversaw civil engineering projects in Nanjing. He also started several very important Buddhist institutions of the late Qing dynasty and developed a few important and long-lasting ideas about the consonance of Buddhist 16

INTRODUCTION

cosmology and modern astronomy. He probably introduced Taixu to the idea that the Buddha had been aware of the existence of microbes, an idea the latter successfully popularized in the 1920s. Another important writer was the engineer Wang Xiaoxu. Like Yang, his family hailed from Anhui, but he trained in mathematics and electrical engineering in Nanjing before going to work in Europe, where he published the first article by a Chinese author to appear in a European science journal. He worked in both industry and the academy in China, and from the mid-1920s to his death in 1948, he produced some of the most important writings on science and Buddhism. I discuss these at length. Two younger men who followed in Wang’s footsteps were You Zhibiao ⯌㘢堐 (b. 1901) and Luo Wuxu 伭䃉嘃 (1913–2001). As their work dates from the 1940s and later, they are not a major focus of this study, but they did write popular works that transmitted many of the ideas first developed in the 1920s. You was a Suzhou native and a Harvard-trained electrical engineer who wrote a pair of monographs on science and Buddhism in the 1940s.20 Luo was born in Shanghai and studied mechanical engineering there at a college founded by English expatriates. Like You, Luo did not seriously start writing about science and Buddhism until the 1940s, after he and his family had fled to Hong Kong due to the civil war in 1947.21 Beyond these two identifiable groups, there were many others who wrote about science and Buddhism, and they were a highly diverse lot, which included monks, industrialists, and publishers. As far as I have been able to determine, all but one of them were men, likely the result of women’s general lack of access to education at the time. The one exception was the poet and journalist Lü Bicheng ⏪䡏❶ (1883–1943), who wrote several widely reprinted pieces on the subject while pursuing a successful career in journalism. Most of the people who wrote about science only wrote one or two pieces on the topic. In some cases, this is because they simply did not write very much; in others, even though the authors had written many works that appeared in Buddhist periodicals, science was not their main concern. Even though the articulation of discourses about the relationship between Buddhism and science was not a primary focus for many Buddhists, they and those few for whom it was important produced a sizable body of literature on the topic between 1923 and 1949. Before turning to that literature, it is important to begin by reflecting on the social, historical, and political context in which this writing took place. 17

1

The Historical Context

AS A WORK OF INTELLECTUAL HISTORY, this book argues that the things Buddhists said about science were historically contingent. That is, Buddhists’ decisions to discuss what they discussed, when they discussed them, were deeply influenced by the times in which they found themselves. That in the 1890s some literati looked for similarities between what they were learning from modern science and what they read in the Buddhist canon, for example, was part of a broader movement to find Chinese origins for the Western learning then being embraced by the Chinese literati as a whole. History also explains why the most productive period for the Buddhist discussion of science was the decade from 1923 to 1932. In discussing the history of Western science in China, it is important to remember that what is being referred to for the sake of convenience as a unitary thing called “science” is not, in fact, a unitary or unchanging thing. It is true that intellectuals in China, especially in the 1910s and 1920s, did treat science as a unified discipline, and it was in its role as an ideological entity that science had its greatest impact upon Buddhist thinkers. Nevertheless, this should not obscure the fact that there are various sciences, each with their own histories and methodologies, and all of which have changed over time. During the period under examination, as in all periods of history, scientific beliefs and theories were 18

THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT

themselves changing. New theories replaced older ones, and sometimes multiple contending theories held sway simultaneously. When thinking of science in this way, it is also important to be aware of the processes by which modern Western science took root in China. I find David Wright’s thoughts on this to be particularly instructive. He argues that rather than seeing the rise of modern science in China as the result of a process of transmission, in which a coherent body of ideas and practices was transported piece by piece to China unchanged, it is better to think of it as a process of translation, in which new ideas and practices were rendered sensible by, and for, intelligent people in a different context.1 In China, this was a complex process, one that began in the nineteenth century before gathering pace during China’s period of “compressed intellectual modernization” in the early twentieth century.2 This translation of science was surrounded by a great deal of debate as an increasingly large group of people tried to make sense of it. Debates about science in the 1920s were also indicative of the social nature of China at the time, as different groups sought to establish niches for themselves within rapidly evolving social structures. For Buddhists, this meant the founding of new regional and national organizations, modern seminaries, and the associated periodicals through which they could promote their visions of Buddhism. Scientists did much the same thing, as they founded associations and periodicals in their efforts to establish an institutional base from which to build science in China. A broad range of people—including scientists and Buddhists and many, many others—made up the “community of scientific discourse,” and each of them invoked the term “science” to promote his or her own ideas and to criticize the ideas of others. Such arguments were important for Buddhists, as debates about proper and improper beliefs, along with a number of important political factors, combined to produce a series of antisuperstition campaigns in the early 1920s and again in the late 1920s. Just as a discourse of antisuperstition posed an ideological threat to Buddhism, these campaigns posed direct economic threats to the institutional bases of Buddhism in China. One element of Buddhists’ responses to such threats was a discursive defense against claims that Buddhism was superstitious. The influence of the period on Buddhists’ discussions of science is clear. In discussing science, Buddhists engaged with several of the most common topics of the day, including modern psychology, 19

THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT

logic, and social evolutionism. They spoke of science both to fight back against claims that their tradition was superstitious and to argue that it was superior to science in specific ways. The unsettledness and social creativity of the mid-1920s began to decline after the Nationalists asserted greater control over China in the late 1920s. After gaining general political and military control over China in 1927, the Nationalists worked to create a new government. By the mid1930s the places and functions of various groups within society had been basically set. This turn of events had several effects on science in China. The relative calm of the Nanjing Decade (1927–1937), coupled with the new government’s work to establish itself, led to the strengthening of science education and the creation of institutions of science, notably the Academia Sinica, but also other national organizations. Scientists of various disciplines, as well as doctors of medicine, gained unified associations and regulatory bodies. Buddhism was also affected by this social ordering as it gained recognition for its own national organizations, and in 1936 it acquired legal status as a religion with all the constitutional protections that came with that status. Around this time, Buddhists’ discussions of science declined, both in quantity and intensity. Articles on science continued to appear in the Buddhist press after the mid-1930s, but there were few new ideas generated.

The Stage Is Set: From the Late Qing to 1920 The difficulties faced by the Qing dynasty (1644–1911) during the nineteenth century led to a renewed engagement with Western learning and the start of a great reevaluation of China’s traditions. Charlotte Furth has referred to this period as “China’s modern intellectual crisis.”3 The political and intellectual foment of this period would culminate in the Xinhai 彃ṍ Revolution of 1911 and the end of the imperial system in China, but the changes that took place in the conscious life of people in China before 1911 would have lasting impacts on its culture in the early twentieth century and beyond. Many of these changes were the result of a generally pessimistic view of the state of China at the end of the nineteenth century. Various factors contributed to this depressed opinion, but the majority of scholars today agree that what led Chinese thinkers to embrace Western learning in the 1890s was a series of wars in which the 20

THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT

superiority of the Qing state, and even the idea of “China,” was repeatedly called into question. With its loss to the British during the First Opium War (1839–1842), China was forced not only to pay a handsome indemnity to the European victors, but also to open its doors to Britain and other foreign powers. European merchants and Christian missionaries, exempt from Chinese law under the principle of extraterritoriality, began settling in China in an increasing number of treaty ports that had been set up on the coasts and great waterways of a nation that had, until that point, done its utmost to keep them out. Less than ten years after the end of the First Opium War, the Taiping ⣒⸛ Rebellion (1850–1864) began. The Taipings promoted an idiosyncratic and iconoclastic form of Christianity and destroyed many of the religious institutions in the areas they occupied, razing temples, burning scriptures, smashing images, and laicizing or killing the clerics of other religions. Just as they were trying to put down this rebellion, the Qing government also became embroiled in another dispute with European powers, resulting in the Second Opium War (1856–1860), which the government in Beijing, already engaged in a battle with the Taipings, was unable to win. This war resulted in more ports being opened to the French, British, Russians, and Americans, and it allowed even greater freedom of movement to citizens of those nations in the interior of China. The Chinese government responded to these losses in a number of ways, many of which focused on education and translation. One of the major responses to the destruction caused in the Lower Yangzi (or Jiangnan 㰇⋿) region, which had long been the center of economic and intellectual life in China, was the building and rebuilding of traditional academies.4 The growing class of intellectuals produced by these academies would also eventually yield the leaders of the revolution that overthrew the Qing dynasty in 1911. But before this could occur, in light of the dangers facing China from within and from without, members of this group contributed to a new movement for “self-strengthening” (ziqiang 冒⻟) that took shape within the government during the last three decades of the nineteenth century. With this movement came the idea that wealth and power, and not merely morality and harmony, were legitimate goals of statecraft.5 In conjunction with this shift in political philosophy, there was a general move to embrace the possibilities of Western science and technology. A good example of this was the establishment of the 21

THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Jiangnan Arsenal (Jiangnan jiqi zhizao zongju 㰇⋿㨇☐墥忈䷥⯨) near Shanghai. At its peak in the 1870s, it was arguably the largest modern weapons manufacturing facility in East Asia, and its translation department, comprised of both Chinese and Western translators, rendered into Chinese more than one hundred works from Western languages covering the full range of current science and technology.6 This and other arsenals also served as training centers for a new class of professional technicians, drawn primarily from the educated but underemployed young gentry of the Jiangnan region. Because of the arsenals and their publications, the mainstream of Chinese intellectuals began to deal seriously with Western thought by the 1890s.7 This included science, though this was not widely treated as a separate category distinct from Western learning until the 1910s.8 The turn toward Western learning does not mean that China had been entirely cut off from scientific developments in the West before this period, but scientific intercourse between China and Europe was irregular until the modern period. Scientific innovations were exchanged between China and other parts of the world (more often flowing out from China, than in) through much of history, but the influx of Western scientific ideas reached a watermark with the activity of the Jesuits in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Jesuits went to great efforts to not only convert the Chinese people to Christianity but also to transmit current science and technology to China. The Jesuits’ primary impacts were in the fields of mathematics and astronomy, but until the early nineteenth century, there was little influence from, or even knowledge of, Western science in China outside these two fields.9 The nineteenth century witnessed a massive translation of modern Western science in China. At the beginning of the century, interest in Western science had been limited to optics, astronomy, and advanced mathematics. By the end of the century, hundreds of new terms had been coined in China and Japan to express a wide range of scientific concepts.10 These terms were created in the translation of hundreds of books on science and technology into Chinese. People in China learned about modern science not only through such textbooks but, from the 1870s onward, also through a number of periodicals carrying articles on popular science.11 The majority of these journals were run by Westerners who had originally come to China as Christian missionaries; by the 1870s many of these 22

THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT

missionaries had stopped mixing their scientific evangelism with their Christian evangelism, and some abandoned Christian missionary work altogether in favor of promoting science.12 Their number included figures like John Fryer (1839–1928), who was probably the single most important Westerner involved in the translation of science in China. The journals and the scientific textbooks published by the various arsenals served the needs of a growing class of amateur scientists in China, a group of keenly interested people drawn from the gentry and generally lacking any kind of formal scientific education, who came to the fore from the 1870s onward. Outside this group of amateur scientists, the literate also learned of science through general fiction and a hybrid fantasy–science fiction genre David Wang refers to as “science fantasy.”13 The translation of science in China began as the work of a few missionaries and government functionaries immediately after the First Opium War, but by the end of the nineteenth century, skilled Chinese translators had taken over the work of translation, and some of the latest scientific books from all over the world could be found in China within a few years of their publication elsewhere.14 The appearance of the many new ideas contained in these books and journals was a challenge and an opportunity for China’s thinkers as they sought to incorporate them into their own views of the world. One approach to this issue, which had begun under Emperor Kangxi ⹟䅁 (r. 1661–1722) but accelerated toward the end of the nineteenth century, was to look for the “Chinese origins of Western learning” (xixue zhongyuan 大⬠ᷕ㸸).15 This approach assumed that if one searched broadly enough within the Chinese canon, one would find that the ideas of Western learning were not actually new but were simply discoveries originally made by the Chinese people and then forgotten. Prominent among such proofs was the notion, originating in the 1840s, that one could find in the writings of Mozi ⡐⫸ (fl. 5th century CE) the origin of modern optical and mechanical theories then entering China. By the end of the century, the specific details of the identity of Mozi’s theories and those found in Western science had become test questions on imperial examinations.16 Works on the theme of the “Chinese origins of Western learning” appeared until the fall of the Qing, with the most important being Wang Renjun’s 䌳ṩὲ (1867–1900) two books from the late 1890s, titled Gezhi guwei 㟤农⎌⽖ (Record of the Ancient Secrets of Science) and Gezhi jinghua lu 㟤农䱦厗抬 23

THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT

(Record of the Essential Glory of Science). In these two works, Wang “collected quotes from the Chinese classics, histories and other sources illustrating the scientific achievements and knowledge in ancient China and related them to Western science, technology, and mathematics.”17 The work of finding “Chinese origins for Western learning” was not limited to scholarly writing and also appears as a theme in science fantasy writings. In that literature, the flora and fauna of the world described in Western science textbooks were linked to animals and plants appearing in the Shanhai jing Ⱉ㴟䴻 (Classic of Mountains and Seas), a classical Chinese almanac of world geography and culture, which dates back more than two millennia. Modern flying machines were compared with those produced by the inhabitants of a place called “the Land of the People with One Arm,” which is described in the “Foreign Lands” section of the third-century Bowu zhi ⌂䈑⽿ (Account of Wide-Ranging Matters).18 In all of these works, the real or imagined Chinese origins of inventions and discoveries from the West were given a central place. This tendency, which began among the literati in the 1880s and 1890s, was shared by a few lay Buddhist scholars of the period, who found in Buddhist scriptures examples of ideas held by modern science that seem to have been prefigured in Buddhism. As will be shown in the following chapters, these writers planted the seeds for a number of the claims commonly made by Chinese Buddhists during the 1920s, including the idea that Buddhist cosmology spoke of a round earth orbiting a sun and that the Buddha was aware of the existence of microorganisms. China’s efforts at self-strengthening were quite impressive for their day, but with the defeat of China’s better-equipped navy by the Japanese in the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), thinkers in China began to look down on previous efforts to modernize China’s military and educational institutions.19 It was this loss to Japan, another Asian nation, that spurred many in China to reconsider the state of China politically, militarily, and intellectually. An early tangible result of this collective soul-searching was the failed Hundred Days’ Reform (also called the Wuxu Reform or Wuxu bianfa ㆲㆴ嬲㱽) of 1898. Despite the failure of this reform, China continued to change, with calls for educational reform becoming common. Expanding on a trend that had begun in the late 1870s, thousands of Chinese students went to study in Europe, America, and Japan (by 1906 there were an estimated 13,000 Chinese students in 24

THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Japan20). These students would become a potent force for change and the dissemination of new ideas in China. They formed new political organizations; some called for a reform of the existing political system, while others called for abolishing the imperial system, which eventually fell in 1911. This led to the establishment of the nominally democratic Republic of China the following year, but in reality it was known as the “Warlord Era,” as various groups sought to retain and extend their power over parts of China. Out of the political, cultural, and intellectual foment of the 1910s grew the New Culture movement (Xin wenhua yundong 㕘㔯⊾忳≽), which began in 1915, and the May Fourth movement of 1919. The ideological entity “science” served an increasingly important function for the members of these movements. The major intellectual debates of the 1910s, like the debates of the late Qing, revolved around questions of the best ways to govern and strengthen the nation. But while these discussions took a primarily political tone in the late Qing, from the 1910s into the 1920s questions of culture, society, and the role of the individual became more important. For many, including those affiliated with the New Culture movement, the ideal society was increasingly imagined as composed of educated individuals of both sexes who embraced science and the principles of free inquiry. Science came to be seen as a “material force capable of generating total social systems including the views on culture and human life for the people living under them.”21 During the late Qing, intellectuals had sought to relate modern science to the Chinese traditions of natural philosophy and natural history (both referred to variously as gezhi 㟤农 or bowu ⌂䈑22), but this changed in the 1910s. Most Qing thinkers held the view that the classical tradition, one that contained the disciplines of both the humanities and the sciences, was part of an organic whole that could accommodate modern science. This view disappeared during the mid-1910s. After 1915, the traditional natural studies that had linked premodern science and medicine to classical learning were abandoned.23 By the time the May Fourth movement began in 1919, most Chinese intellectuals had discarded Chinese natural philosophy.24 This shift in worldview does not mean that the majority of the Chinese intellectuals who made use of science as an ideological entity understood science very well; most probably did not. For everyone, science was linked to a set of values and assumptions, and 25

THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT

for a minority, it became a totalizing system that could be used to sweep away tradition and the weakness of Chinese society. This was the beginning of scientism in China.25 As the importance of Western learning grew in China, traditional studies began to wane, though they did not die out. The importance of new ideas and the concomitant diminishing of classical education were demonstrated concretely in 1905 with the abolition of the imperial examination system. This event marked the end of a tradition that stretched back thousands of years, and although the content of the Chinese classical tradition remained a strong and vital part of Chinese culture, the dominance of the Confucian classics and their ethico-cosmological theories of statecraft in China began to wane. The desire to maintain a Chinese “essence” while still using ideas from the West remained important through the teens, but it lost ground during the May Fourth movement and the debates over science that took place in 1923 and 1924. On the intellectual front, several different conservative movements appeared in China in response to the popularity of Western learning. The National Essence (Guocui ⚳䱡) movement, which began in the first years of the twentieth century and lasted into the 1920s, was a loose community of scholars who participated in several groups and journals. On the popular front, there was also a rejection of some aspects of Western ideas. The Boxer Uprising of 1900–1901 had a strong anti-Christian and antiforeign element to it. These “neotraditionalist” movements were particularly critical of what were perceived to be the dominant Western ideas of competitive individualism, materialist profit seeking, and utilitarianism.26 Some of their thinkers sought to fashion a spiritualized Confucianism that could become a national religion (as proposed by Kang Youwei ⹟㚱 䁢 [1858–1927] in 191627), while others emphasized the rationalist aspects of Confucianism and its suitability for the modern age.28 Looking at an influential journal associated with the National Essence movement, Dongfang zazhi 㜙㕡暄娴 (Eastern Miscellany), one finds a cautious attitude toward science. Nevertheless, it was actually in Dongfang zazhi, one of the era’s most popular periodicals, that many of the new terms of science and modernity reached their widest audience. Between 1915 and 1920, its pages carried articles covering the newest scientific and technological ideas, all written for the scientific layman. These articles were not free from judgment, however, and many of them 26

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warned about the possible dangers that the tools of science could pose to humanity. A dominant theme among them was that the material progress made possible by science did not mean the same thing as the progress of civilization.29 Thus, even in those places where literate Chinese were most likely to encounter discussions of science during the 1910s, a note of caution was commonly heard. Such cautions eventually inspired one of the main discourses deployed by Chinese Buddhists—the idea that science, if unchecked by external ethical systems, was dangerous to humanity. This discourse developed more in the 1920s, but the seeds of doubt were planted in the 1910s.

The Turning Point: 1923 Radical Chinese thought of the 1920s is generally associated with the May Fourth movement. The May Fourth movement, which began in 1919, is usually described as a student-led popular movement that aimed to overturn retrograde aspects of traditional Chinese culture, society, and politics. Unlike the reformists and revolutionary intellectuals of the late Qing, whose target had been the Chinese political system, the young leaders of the May Fourth movement sought to radically change Chinese society itself. Their goal was nothing less than the “enlightenment” (qiming ┇㖶) of the Chinese people,30 carried out under the twin banners of science and democracy, which were anthropomorphized by Chen Duxiu 昛䌐䥨 (1879–1942) as “Mr. Science” (Sai xiansheng 岥⃰䓇) and “Mr. Democracy” (De xiansheng ⽟⃰䓇). According to this picture, the principal players in the changes that took place in the Chinese intellectual world in the early 1920s were students, their teachers, and to a lesser extent unionized labor. While this portrayal of the May Fourth movement does touch on several important aspects of the changes taking place in parts of China after 1919, these changes were part of larger processes. Recent scholarship has shown that the modernization of China was complex, resulting in a multivocal modernity.31 Urban centers and urbanites were at the heart of these changes, but the participants in the May Fourth movement came out of both the popular and the elite cultures; the educated were not the only ones grappling with modernity, though they were often the most vocal. The young thinkers of the May Fourth movement embraced several new aspects of scientific thinking that had not been emphasized by their 27

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mentors. These new interests marked a shift in the way that science was thought of in China. Previously, science had been important because of its association with the sociopolitical theory of evolutionism and the various technologies produced through the application of the physical sciences. While those intellectuals accepted the importance of these two aspects of science, they also began to study Western psychology, particularly the nascent school of behaviorism,32 which would come to dominate modern global psychology until the 1960s. Theories about perception and instinct, important contemporary topics in the West, became the subjects of much discussion in China, and several students took up the challenge of translating technical books on psychology into Chinese to help them deal with these questions.33 This interest in psychology stemmed from a general concern with the nature of the mind and truth. These interests also led thinkers to study Western philosophy and particularly to embrace formal logic, which was then being linked with philosophy in new ways through the work of Bertrand Russell (1872–1970). Russell, who lectured extensively in China in 1920 and 1921, became something of a patron saint for many of the thinkers involved in the May Fourth movement. His focus on logic and deductive reasoning had a great impact on Chinese intellectual attitudes toward truth. This form of reasoning was seen as the basis for science and the scientific thinking they promoted in their periodicals. All of this was combined with a commitment to reforming the written language to make it more closely resemble the vernacular in order to make literature and knowledge more accessible to ordinary Chinese people. The modernity developing in China during the 1920s was not limited to the May Fourth movement. As Peter Zarrow writes, “Chinese modernity was thus located among, and pursued by, numerous groups that shared a roughly common set of practices: acceptable behaviors, norms, discourses, and institutions.”34 One of these shared discourses was that of science, and science as an ideological entity came to play a large role in the public language of the 1920s. The word itself began to carry an immense amount of prestige, and people attached the word “scientific” (kexue 䥹⬠ / kexue de 䥹⬠䘬) to all manner of things. For example, in the 1920s dozens of periodicals appeared dedicated to promoting the scientific study of business (kexue de shangxue 䥹⬠䘬⓮⬠). These magazines served the growing middle class of merchants and clerks, who 28

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worked in the major urban centers serving newly emerging businesses and industries.35 The label “scientific” was also used to sell a broad range of consumer goods, such as medicine, the most “intensively and extensively marketed” product in China during the first half of the twentieth century.36 The ubiquity of science in May Fourth discourse has led some to reframe the nature of the core intellectual aspects of the May Fourth movement. Whereas the ideology of the May Fourth movement has traditionally been identified with an emphasis on linguistic reform, Wang Hui argues that the most fundamental change that occurred during the years of the May Fourth movement was not a shift from classical to vernacular Chinese as the linguistic medium of prestige but the widespread adoption of scientific language.37 Science was everywhere, even cultural conservatives adopted the cachet of the word “science.” In other words, in the years after 1919, even dissenters of the May Fourth movement were forced to make use of the language of science. The ideology of science became second only to nationalism in cutting across political and intellectual lines.38 From 1919, a broad range of actors thought and wrote about science, but the number of professional, practicing scientists in China remained relatively small in the early 1920s. Although their numbers continued to grow, trained scientists did not dominate the discourse about science during the May Fourth period. Radical intellectual supporters of scientism did not dominate it either. In reality, the ranks of those who talked about science in China during the 1920s included businesspeople, advertisers, government officials, artists, authors of fiction, and, most importantly for the present study, lay and ordained Buddhists. Wang Hui identifies those who spoke about science in China in the 1920s and 1930s as a multivocal “community of scientific discourse.” This community included, but was clearly not limited to, the scientific community—the few professionally trained and practicing scientists. In fact, the majority of participants in the community of scientific discourse, including some of the most vocal, were not trained scientists. Although Wang sees this community as “originat[ing] in a core of science associations and publications,” he includes both the community of professional scientists in their extension of the meaning of science to talk about social and cultural issues and nonscientists who used science to talk about issues 29

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unrelated to science.39 What all members of this community shared was a commitment to using a specific kind of language, rooted in the ideas and logic of science, and Buddhists were very much a part of this discursive community. It is its inclusivity that gives the notion of a “community of scientific discourse” its utility. It emphasizes the fact that a wide range of actors participated in attempts to adapt science to the intellectual landscape of China, and they did so by disseminating their particular interpretations of science to a wide audience, often for ideological ends. In my use of this term, I do not include everyone who simply mentioned the word “science.” Participants in this community include only those who made explicit use of scientific language or ideas (though I do not assume that they had to be overly familiar with the intricacies of scientific practice). For example, for the majority of people in China in the 1920s, as in the West, “science” was far more often associated with general procedures of observation and experimentation—empiricism—than with the specific use of “mathematico-deductive hypotheses” central to the practice of science.40 I do assume that for someone to be included in the community of scientific discourse, he or she must have been knowledgeable about some basic aspects of science, in the form of its methodologies, theories, or discoveries; and that he or she sought to apply those concepts to a discussion of ideas beyond the specific fields from which those concepts were initially drawn. An example of such an extension of scientific ideas would be using science to talk about ethics. As in the prior three decades, science remained intimately connected with ethics in the minds of May Fourth period thinkers. Scientists and other participants in the community of scientific discourse had to define the connection between science and ethics in order to legitimate science.41 Proponents of scientism went further than simply showing how science could be considered ethical; they sought to show that science contained within it the basis for the best possible ethical system for modern humanity. Promoting science as a totalizing system, the proponents of scientism dismissed as inferior all other ethical systems, including those based on religion or traditional morality. It should be stressed once again that not all of those who participated in the community of scientific discourse supported scientism. Within the community there was a wide range of opinion on the proper role of science in establishing and 30

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providing sanction for social and cultural values. This divergence of opinion was one of the main causes of the science and philosophy of life debates of 1923. As the science and philosophy of life debates have been dealt with extensively elsewhere,42 here I shall only touch on those issues most relevant to this analysis of Buddhist participation in the community of scientific discourse. The science and philosophy of life debates43 take their name from a two-volume collection of articles edited by Hu Shih 傉怑 (1891–1962) and Chen Duxiu and published in Shanghai in 1927. This collection, titled Kexue yu renshengguan 䥹⬠冯Ṣ䓇奨 (Science and the Philosophy of Life), contains roughly one-quarter of a million characters’ worth of articles by twenty different authors, including some of the most important Chinese intellectuals of the 1920s. There were many factors that led to the start of the debates in 1923. One of the more important proximate causes for these debates was a lecture given by Carsun Chang (Zhang Junmai ⻝⏃⊙, 1886–1969) at Qinghua University in Beijing, in which he challenged the young students gathered there to abandon the one-sided belief that science could provide a coherent life philosophy, or “philosophy of life” (renshengguan).44 This speech marked the beginning of debates considered to be one of the defining moments in China’s relationship with modern science. Although many see these debates as having taken place between two very clear camps—the supporters of science and the supporters of “metaphysics” (xuanxue 䌬⬠)—there were actually multiple voices involved, and each promoted a different agenda. Although none of the thinkers whose writings make up the content of these debates clearly defined what it was they were arguing about, there were several basic, interrelated issues at stake in the debates, which most of the participants dealt with in one way or another.45 The implicit central question of the debates was what roles ethics, aesthetics, and religion should play in a modern society governed by science. Many supported the scientistic position that any aspect of human life that could be dealt with in one of those systems could be more successfully understood and perfected using the methods of science. The proponents of scientism believed that human feeling and values could be understood and expressed through science. They also believed that science could be used to create a system of ethics far superior to those found in religion or philosophy. 31

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The issue of the relationship between science and ethics was a particularly important one for people on all sides of this debate because of current events. In 1918, a delegation including Liang Qichao 㠩⓻崭 (1873–1929) and Carsun Chang visited Europe on a fact-finding mission. There they witnessed firsthand the devastation caused by World War I, devastation made possible in large part by advances in the technology of warfare. While in Europe, Liang also met with a number of European intellectuals, with whom he discussed the failings of modern science. World War I had shaken the confidence many Europeans had in the inevitability of progress based on science. After his return to China in 1919, Liang wrote several important articles questioning blind devotion to science and progress.46 Although neither he nor any of the other thinkers from the debates who opposed scientism criticized science itself, they did counsel caution with regard to the belief that science was inevitably beneficial and entirely benign. Many did not agree with the supporters of scientism that science could explain all aspects of human life. These dissenters held different opinions about the nature of reality, and this proved to be one of the most important issues in the debates. The proponents of scientism generally held to a materialist position: the idea that all that exists is ultimately matter. Many on the other side of the debates averred the belief that mind, and that which occurs in the mind, could be independent of matter. This led many of them to talk about a difference between the “spiritual culture” of the East and the “materialist culture” of the West.47 While the supporters of scientism viewed this so-called spiritual culture negatively, as an impediment to progress, opponents of scientism saw their spiritual culture as a source of pride and a potential source of social and personal revivification in the modern world. What was at stake in the science and philosophy of life debates was the nature of life and the extent to which “life” (however defined) could be considered independent of the material world studied by science. These debates did not settle the issue conclusively, but they did popularize a number of ideas and a specific set of questions. In other words, although the debates did not result in any clear conclusions regarding the existence of a world of mind or spirit independent of the world of matter, nor about the suitability of science for creating philosophies of life, the debates did have the effect of establishing these as the most important 32

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questions to ask. The debates thus had a determinative effect on the bounds of discourses about science and scientism as ideological entities that developed in China in the 1920s and 1930s. They drew much attention to the question of science and scientism in China, and as a result, the diversities of both the membership and the views of the “community of scientific discourse” increased.

The Professionalization of Science in China The period of greatest interest in debates on science among the general public, Buddhists, and even among scientists themselves, coincided with the establishment of professional science in China. By the early 1930s, psychology, the social sciences, and Western medicine all not only had become firmly established but had begun to move away from theoretical questions of the type favored in the 1920s toward practical and empirical ones as the Nanjing government increasingly relied on a technocratized science for running government after 1928. Beginning in the 1910s, a new class of professional scientists, many of whom had received their training abroad, began promoting the sciences in China. These people should be seen as the direct intellectual descendants of the many Chinese technicians, inventors, and scholars who had studied Western learning at the various arsenals and translation bureaus established during the late Qing. Although their numbers were small, they exerted considerable influence on the discourses about science developing in China at the time. China’s first organization for professional scientists was the Science Society of China (Zhongguo kexue she ᷕ⚳䥹⬠䣦); first founded at Cornell University in 1914, it remained dominated by American-trained Chinese scientists after it moved to China in 1918. Upon its founding in the U.S., the society began publishing the journal Kexue 䥹⬠ (Science).48 From its humble beginnings as a small group with only forty-five members, the Science Society of China and its magazine Science expanded their influence over the following decades. Science was important because it was the first Chinese magazine devoted to science published by professional scientists to promote science as they understood it.49 Leo Ou-fan Lee has argued that periodicals such as Science were important as the primary vehicles by which modernity was introduced 33

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in China.50 In addition to articles explaining the latest developments in science, Science included many articles that were polemical in nature, focusing on a kind of moral apologetics for science. Roughly one-quarter of the articles in its pages were dedicated to demonstrating the positive effects science could have on culture, economics, education reforms, and politics—in other words, virtually every aspect of Chinese life. In these articles one thus sees some elements of the totalizing discourse of scientism. Just like contemporary Chinese Buddhists, China’s first professional scientists used their periodicals to argue for their place in and relevance to the new society of the Chinese Republic. The 1920s was a crucial time for these scientists. As they argued for the place of science in the new China, they were building institutions and publishing periodicals in order to launch professional science in China. I focus here on a few of the scientific disciplines that became fully established in China during the 1920s: sociology, economics, psychology, and Western medicine. First, however, it is important to say a few words about the discipline of formal logic, which was used by many, from May Fourth iconoclasts to Buddhist apologists, in their discussions of science. As they had done with Western astronomy, the Jesuits had introduced Western logic to China in the seventeenth century, but it did not become popular among the Chinese. The subject was generally ignored by Protestant missionaries in the mid-nineteenth century, and they translated few works on logic. Western logic did begin to garner attention in the 1910s, and in the 1920s much was published on logic as people in China became more interested in not only Western logic but also the search for a native Chinese logic.51 Among Buddhists, this led to an increased focus on their tradition’s system of formal logic, which they applied to their discussions of science (as described in chapter 3). Outside of logic, which is connected to the general practice of science, the specific disciplines of science underwent varying degrees of development and professionalization during the 1920s. Sociology and economics developed a great deal during this time. As in the Science Society of China, these disciplines were dominated by American-trained scientists because China still generally lacked the necessary institutions to train graduate students. There was very little financial or economic support for these disciplines until the late 1920s, when several universities began to receive research grants from institutions in the United States. In the early 34

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1920s, the first journal devoted to economics contained mostly news clippings and very little in the way of original research.52 High levels of research may have been lacking, but there was a lot of energy, and the period from the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s was dominated by the “social survey movement” (shehui diaocha yundong 䣦㚫婧㞍忳≽).53 This movement wedded social science to a social reformist agenda, which was exactly the role that many in the 1920s thought science should be playing in China. Psychology was also dominated by American-trained scholars in the 1920s, and as in the other social sciences, the decade was a time for laying the groundwork for the discipline in China. Bertrand Russell’s lectures, coupled with the return of students who had studied psychology abroad, led to something of a vogue in the science during the 1920s.54 The Chinese Psychological Society (Zhongguo xinli xuehui ᷕ⚳⽫䎮⬠㚫) was formed in August 1921,55 and the following year it began publishing Xinli ⽫䎮 (Psychology), the only journal devoted to the topic published in China before 1928.56 The quality of the articles in this periodical was mixed: many of them were translations from Western languages, and much of the technical terminology they contained was left untranslated or barely explained.57 The practice of modern Western medicine had a longer history in China, having been introduced by missionaries in the late nineteenth century. Despite the formation of the first association for Chinese doctors of Western medicine in the mid-1910s, the field was dominated until the 1920s by Westerners and a few Chinese who had been trained in the West. As in psychology and the social sciences, journals dedicated to Western medicine began appearing in the 1920s ( journals about Chinese medicine were not published until the following decade).58 But there was no viable national organization like the American Medical Association, and it was not until 1928–1929 that unified rules for the training of doctors and the practice of medicine were adopted in China. Despite these advances, the profession and the practice of modern science in China remained fairly marginal even at the end of the 1920s. Just as with much of the Buddhist activity discussed later, the vast majority of scientific activity—professional organizations, publication, and research—was concentrated in just four cities: Shanghai, Nanjing, Beijing, and Guangzhou.59 Outside these regions, there were few 35

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trained scientists and even fewer opportunities for them to “do” science by engaging in experimentation. This changed in the 1930s, in large part as a result of the patronage of the Nationalist government. During the Nanjing Decade, scientific research in China increased as more laboratories and institutions dedicated to research appeared. One important early institution was Academia Sinica (Zhongyang Yanjiu Yuan ᷕ⣖䞼䨞昊), founded in 1928 under the leadership of Cai Yuanpei 哉⃫➡ (1868–1940). The Academia included sections for the study of the various physical and biological sciences, as well as the humanities. The first head of its engineering division was the noted Buddhist Wang Xiaoxu, whose contributions to Buddhist discourses on science are mentioned frequently in the following chapters. By the 1930s, research was being carried out in China in every field of science at a multitude of institutions nationwide. The quantity of periodicals dedicated to science also increased dramatically over the course of the Nanjing Decade. From 1925 to 1936, the number of such periodicals nearly tripled, rising from 65 to 187. Furthermore, following a trend that had been accelerating since the 1910s, the percentage of these periodicals published by or associated with foreign institutions dropped from 50 percent in 1914 to 14 percent by 1930.60 In a similar way, the Chinese-educated second generation of modern scientists who had received their education in China under the first generation began to play an increasingly important role in Chinese science. Over the course of the 1930s, science’s role in society, particularly as an ideological tool, continued to change; this shift was recognized by scientists themselves. By the end of the 1920s, the importance of science in society was generally recognized, and scientists felt less of a need to argue the case for its relevance. This trend can be seen, for example, in the fact that by the early 1930s, the number of articles in the Chinese magazine Science devoted to arguing the significance of science to China had fallen from 25 percent to less than 10 percent.61 The reason scientists felt more secure in their place in the culture was that the Nanjing-based Nationalist government had, from 1930 onward, embraced science as an important tool for building the modern Chinese nation. Adopting Sun Yat-sen’s ⬓ᷕⰙ (1866–1925) vision of a militarycentered government bureaucracy, the Nationalists of the 1930s embarked on a “scientization” (kexuehua 䥹⬠⊾) of the government. Not only were many of the recently graduated scientists and engineers hired 36

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to build infrastructures of electrification, communication, and transportation for the nation, but the bureaucracy itself was subject to an increasing level of rationalization (in the original Weberian sense) based on “scientific” principles of management. This can be seen in the workings of the National Resource Commission (Guojia ziyuan weiyuanhui ⚳⭞屯㸸⥼⒉㚫), which was founded in 1932 and had by 1952 become the single largest bureaucratic (or more accurately, technocratic) organ in China. The technocrats of this organization were charged with applying science and technology to the “reconstruction” of China, a task linked with national security.62 In this endeavor, engineers and scientists held the most important government positions. The government’s use of trained technocrats created a firm foundation upon which to build Chinese science. The fields of sociology and economics were fairly well established in major institutions by the 1930s, and scientists in these fields were able to carry out large-scale empirical research. With money from the Rockefeller Foundation, they became an integral part of the nation’s fight against poverty and other social problems.63 As psychology became an established discipline in the service of the state, a similar empirical turn took place. Professional psychologists and the field of behaviorism came to dominate the discipline, and they were more interested in I.Q. tests and other psychometric techniques than in broad speculation about the mind.64 Western medicine was also unified during this period, and the training of Chinese doctors within China became widespread. As mentioned before, the nation’s doctors of Western medicine were given their first set of unified governing rules within two years of the start of the Nanjing Decade, and in 1932 all the various medical boards were unified under one national organization.65 Perhaps counterintuitively, just as science and scientists became increasingly prevalent within government, it became more common for people to assert that science and politics were not supposed to mix.66 This can been seen quite clearly in the social sciences. Their turn toward more empirical modes of research meant leaving behind the social survey movement of the 1920s and early 1930s, which had been closely associated with a social reformist political agenda.67 By the mid-1930s, the idea that science should be involved with the political reform of the nation, an idea prevalent from the late Qing through the May Fourth movement and into the late 1920s, had been eclipsed by the notion of dispassionate 37

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science serving those in political control of the nation. This is not to say that science did not continue to hold an important ideological place in the Chinese intellectual world; it was only that its place had shifted. While science was actively playing a role in creating the material conditions of the modern nation, the importance of science as an ideological tool changed. The philosophical discussion of the proper place of science in China declined as its role gradually became more clearly defined.

Buddhism in This Context Now that we have looked at the larger historical context for Buddhists’ discussions of science, we turn to examine the development of the Buddhist institution in the first part of the twentieth century and how this was impacted by the trends described earlier. Chinese Buddhism, which had recovered from the devastation of the Taiping Rebellion, began the twentieth century on fairly solid footing, but the century brought many new challenges. Various movements to seize temple wealth and lands in the name of the state began in 1904. New terms and concepts, and the critics who adopted them, forced Buddhists to think about their tradition using the modern categories of religion, science, and superstition. The importance of such reflection became clear as antisuperstition campaigns swept the nation in the 1920s. Some Buddhists carved out a niche for their tradition in the modernizing society, and their efforts followed a historical arc similar to that of professional scientists from the 1920s through the 1930s. Both groups worked to secure funding and legal recognition, founded educational institutes, and produced an increasing number of periodicals wherein they argued for their relevance to Chinese society. Both groups struggled to form local and national organizations from the mid-1910s, and it was not until the late 1920s and early 1930s that these groups’ organizations achieved national unification and official recognition. By the mid-1930s, both groups had established clear roles for themselves in Chinese society. There are differences between the two groups, of course, one being that whereas Chinese professional science started from scratch at the turn of the century, Chinese Buddhism began with a long history and a strong, if diffuse, institutional base. The Qing dynasty is the most understudied period of Chinese Buddhist history. Within the Qing, the late Qing has fared a little better than 38

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the early Qing, and a common theme in studies of Buddhism during the nineteenth century is that this period saw the beginning of a “revival” in Chinese Buddhism. This was first talked about in connection with the rebuilding activities that took place after the Taiping Rebellion in Jiangnan, where much damage was done to Buddhist institutions.68 Just as the government and local gentry were doing with the Confucian academies, from the 1860s monks and laypeople (often including those same gentry) worked to replace temples, texts, and artifacts destroyed by the iconoclastic Taiping rebels.69 By the 1910s, Chinese intellectuals and foreign missionaries were speaking about the Buddhist “revival” in a different way, seeing Qing Buddhism as a long period of decline. Nearly fifty years ago, Holmes Welch examined some of the various theories of decline and revival posited during the period and rejected most of them.70 Late Qing Buddhism was vital, and there was active participation by both monastics and the laity. It was not a period of decline or stagnation. The twentieth century posed many challenges to Buddhism in China resulting from a shift in the way people understood religion and its relationship to other parts of society. Scholars have written a great deal about this issue in the last decade, with Vincent Goossaert and David Palmer’s work The Religious Question in Modern China being one of the most insightful and far-ranging pieces on the subject. They point to the way in which the very category of “religion” was constructed more by modern secularists than religious believers as part of a thorough reconceptualizing of the social order of China.71 As noted by many, the term “religion” was a neologism in China. First coined as early as 1890, it did not enter the general lexicon until the 1900s and did not really become a popular term until the 1910s.72 The entry of the term “religion” into the Chinese lexicon followed the same historical trajectory as the term “science.” This is no coincidence, as the terms “science,” “religion,” and “superstition” (mixin 徟ᾉ) formed an ideological complex that lies at the very heart of Chinese modernity. By the 1910s, these terms were used to differentiate what was modern and beneficial to the nation (science) from what was backward and thus harmful to the people and the nation (superstition). Religion occupied a contested middle ground throughout the 1920s. The definitions of these categories had been, for the most part, adapted from the West, and in promoting their idea of a modern society, participants in the May Fourth movement used 39

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language that had been derived from Enlightenment critiques of religion as irrational. These intellectuals used the work of a number of thinkers, including Bacon, Descartes, and Voltaire, to bolster their arguments about the backwardness of superstition and religion. Comte’s three-stage model of the evolution of human thought, in which humans advance from theism to metaphysical speculation to positivism (i.e., science), was particularly influential. Discussions about superstition and religion boiled over into the antisuperstition (really antireligion) campaigns of the 1920s. These began with a populist protest against Christianity in China but eventually expanded to include all forms of religion. Just as Western learning had been valorized by the previous generation of reformers for its ability to produce the technological tools necessary to defend China against the military incursions of foreign powers, science was mobilized by the May Fourth generation to defend the nation against the incursion of a different foreign power: Christianity. Foreign Christian missionaries and Chinese Christian converts were still present in fairly large numbers in China in 1920. For many nationalistic Chinese, Christianity was associated with foreign colonialism, and during the May Fourth movement a new wave of anti-Christian sentiment took shape. Unlike the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, the anti-Christian tide that swept through China began among students and intellectuals and not among the rural working class. Starting around 1920, under the influence of the ideas of Bertrand Russell and various French freethinkers, a small but growing number of Chinese people began to adopt an antireligion position.73 In reaction to this trend, Christian organizations organized a conference in Beijing in 1921. This was interpreted by some as an act of colonialism, and it sparked a national anti-Christian campaign that spread beyond its intellectual base to many different levels of society and lasted until 1922. The anti-Christian campaign of 1921–1922 was the first of several campaigns carried out during the 1920s. Similar campaigns took place in 1924 and between 1927 and 1928.74 At first these were the work of loosely organized elements within society, but by the end of the decade these campaigns were directed by powerful factions within the government. After the May Fourth movement of 1919, students, and later the government itself, sought to repress religion in order to remake the nation’s people better fit the ideals of a rational modern citizenry.75 All of this 40

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meant that in the antireligion campaigns of the 1920s a different kind of logic was operating than had been in play in previous eras. During the imperial period, the government prohibited certain forms of religious practice, such as cultic activity centered on gods it deemed dangerous. Cultic activity as a whole was not prescribed and neither were the many forms of religious life in China. Instead, the government assumed a primary role in the maintenance of good religion, defined as that which was protective of the state, the nation, and its people. The discourse that developed in the 1920s had a different goal in mind, and this was the removal of religion, or at the very least the subordination of all religious activity to a lower level among the duties of a new citizen.76 Scholars have generally read the antisuperstition campaigns as examples of the movement to suppress traditional beliefs and practices in the name of nation building. Thus, though the target of the campaign of 1921–1922 was Christianity, later campaigns broadened their scope to target either all religion or just superstition.77 Given that it was not clear in the 1920s what phenomena each of these terms referred to, they posed a great challenge to the practitioners of the majority of traditional Chinese practices. Buddhism, being the most represented religion in China demographically and institutionally, bore much of the brunt of the antireligion campaigns of the 1920s, so Buddhists had a clear stake in articulating the relationship of their tradition to the terms “science,” “superstition,” and “religion.” The fact that much of the criticism of religion then common in China relied on Western ideas did have some unintended consequences (from the standpoint of critiques of religion). One of these was that many of the criticisms leveled at religion by iconoclasts were specific to monotheistic religions that aver the existence of a creator god. Buddhism affirms the existence of no such creator, and as a result it was common for Buddhist writers during the 1920s to claim that Buddhism was, for that very reason, not a religion and should not be criticized for being in opposition to science or, by extension, the modern society envisioned by those who carried out the antireligion campaigns.78 The antisuperstition campaigns were built on an ideology that equated modernity with science and rationality, and this ideology was used to further support the expropriation of the lands and money, the financial base, of Buddhism and other religious institutions, which had been occurring in China for several decades. Although the seizures that 41

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happened in the 1920s were thus motivated by a different ideology, and prompted a different ideological response from Buddhists, the forms they took did not differ greatly from those of the early 1900s. In 1904, new regulations for schools were drafted so that Western learning, including the sciences, would be taught in schools nationwide.79 In order to acquire the resources necessary to support this new education, both the national and local governments targeted the wealth of one particular class of landlords: the religious. A movement to build education with temple property (miaochan xingxue ⺇䓊冰⬠), which was briefly enacted as part of the Hundred Days’ Reform, began to bear real fruit after the education reforms of 1904. As part of this movement, local governments seized temples in order to use their wealth and land to create schools, police stations, and other organs of the modern nation-state.80 Such confiscations continued even after the movement itself was nominally ended. From 1900 to 1915, land confiscation was promoted as part of the New Policies (Xinzheng 㕘㓧) movement aimed at reforming government, the economy, and society.81 At the local level, monastic property was also seized by elites who sought to gain power by turning monastic land into educational centers under their control.82 At the national level, the New Policies movement and the founding of the republic produced a host of new laws that sought to limit the practice of religion and the operation of religious institutions. In the chaotic early years of the republic, laws regulating all aspects of Chinese life were repeatedly passed and repealed. This made the legal status of Buddhist institutions ambiguous, leaving the door open for abuses by provincial and county officials, who enforced the law as they saw fit. Although the degree to which such confiscations were carried out varied both over time and by locality, the justifications for these movements (e.g., that Buddhist and Daoist monks and nuns were debauched and parasites on society) continued in the antisuperstition and antireligion campaigns that occurred until the mid-1920s.83 The lands and wealth of religious groups were not treated uniformly throughout China. Local warlords enforced their own laws in the regions they controlled, so, until the Northern Expedition (1926–1928), laws regarding religion were simply impracticable in large areas of China. For their part, the Nationalists put heavy financial pressure on religious institutions as they worked to build their own power and unify China. Although they targeted them, the Nationalists were not as quick to use 42

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the rhetoric of antisuperstition against religious groups in the 1930s as other groups had been in the 1920s. Shuk-wah Poon has shown that this resulted (at least in Guangzhou) in a “rapid” disappearance of temples across the region during the 1920s, followed by a rebound in religious practice and the reaching of a kind of equilibrium by the middle of the 1930s.84 As various national and local governmental and nongovernmental actors sought to seize Buddhist land in the first three decades of the twentieth century, the Buddhist community responded by setting up their own schools for the education of monks and nuns. The image of the “ignorant monk” was a common stereotype in both Chinese popular and literati cultures, and though Buddhist monks were no more ignorant than the average person, their possession of wealth (most often in the form of land) meant they were more likely to be targeted for criticism than the average person. In order to deflect this criticism, a number of monastic study halls (seng xuetang ₏⬠➪) were opened at monasteries in the Jiangnan region from 1904 onward by both members of the monastic community and laypeople. By the 1920s, many modern seminaries were being founded (though many were also shutting their doors almost as quickly). By creating educated monks and nuns, these institutions worked to dispel the popular image of the ignorant monk. They also trained the majority of the people influential in the Buddhist engagement with science. The necessity of establishing new educational institutions for Buddhists was recognized all too clearly by Yang Wenhui, the “father” of modern Chinese Buddhism. Yang Wenhui was a member of the Jiangnan literati whose importance for the development of modern Chinese Buddhism is widely recognized.85 He was one of the Buddhist laymen who played a role in the recovery of Buddhism after the destruction of the Taiping period, founding a press in 1866 to make the Buddhist scriptures more available. He traveled to Europe twice, in 1878 and again in 1886. There he acquired a phonograph, as well as a microscope and a telescope, and his speculations about the connections between modern astronomy and the Buddhist canon would influence later Buddhists. He influenced the development of Chinese Buddhism in a number of other ways as well. On his second trip to Europe, he also made the acquaintance of the Japanese scholar and Jōdō Shinshū priest, Nanjō Bunyū ⋿㜉㔯晬 (1849–1927). 43

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From Nanjō, Yang would acquire and then reprint many Buddhist texts that had been lost in China. Many of these related to Consciousness-Only thought, which was an important resource for Chinese Buddhists in their discussions of science. Yang also influenced modern Chinese Buddhism through his commitment to Buddhist education. In 1908, Yang founded the Jetavana Hermitage (Zhihuan Jingshe 䣿㳡䱦况) at his home in Nanjing. The staff of this seminary was made up of both monastics like the monk Dixian 媎改 (1858–1932)86 and laypeople. There were twenty-four students, half of whom were monastic, and as Welch points out, this may have been the first time in Chinese history when Buddhist laymen taught Buddhist doctrine to monks.87 While it was not unusual before or after this time for Buddhist seminaries to employ laymen to teach subjects such as the Chinese language, mathematics, and science, the idea of a layperson teaching Buddhist doctrine to a monk or nun was virtually unheard of. Among the students at the seminary were Taixu and the lay scholar Ouyang Jingwu 㫸春䪇䃉 (1871–1943). The Jetavana Hermitage brought together some of the leading lights in late Qing and Republican-era Buddhism, and its innovations were not limited to laymen teaching monastics. In addition to more standard Buddhist subjects, students at the hermitage studied Sanskrit as well as Buddhist logic and Consciousness-Only thought.88 These subjects had not been seriously studied in China for more than a millennium, and Yang’s decision to have his students focus on them was one part of his influence on Republican Buddhism. The Jetavana Hermitage closed for financial reasons less than two years after it opened, but its impact on Buddhist education was felt throughout the years of the republic. After Yang’s death on August 17, 1911, Ouyang Jingwu took over his work, and in 1919 he founded his own Buddhist school, the Zhina Neixue Yuan 㓗恋ℏ⬠昊 (China Inner Studies Institute), in which he taught his own brand of Buddhist scholasticism.89 Dixian founded a research institute (yanjiu she 䞼䨞况) at his home temple, Guanzong 奨⬿ Temple in Ningbo, in 1913, but this did not become a full-fledged school until the late 1920s.90 In 1922, Taixu helped a group of laymen establish the Wuchang Buddhist Seminary, the first of a string of modern Buddhist seminaries founded during the Republican period and probably the most important single institution for the current study. 44

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The Wuchang Buddhist Seminary was established in 1922 by a group of laymen who were inspired to open a modern seminary by lectures Taixu gave the previous year in their city.91 They asked Taixu to run their school, and he introduced a curriculum that was influenced by the Jetvana Hermitage and modern Japanese seminaries. Just as at Yang Wenhui’s school, this seminary placed special emphasis on the Buddhist subjects of Consciousness-Only thought and Buddhist logic, to which were added modern subjects such as philosophy and psychology (which, it should be remembered, was still in its infancy in China). The plans for the school were ambitious, but things did not go as hoped. Taixu served for only two years before a falling out with the school’s lay board of directors over the direction of the school caused him to leave. And the institution itself only lasted four years in its first incarnation, closing after its expropriation by Nationalist forces in 1926 as part of their campaign to unify China. Despite its short tenure, the seminary was very influential. It became the model for a number of other, more successful, institutions, such as the Minnan Buddhist Seminary (Minnan Foxue Yuan 救⋿ἃ⬠昊) in Fujian. These seminaries were only one part of the network established by the teachers and students of the Wuchang Buddhist Seminary. Though not great in number, members of this Wuchang School established or took over a number of seminaries, published periodicals, and lectured throughout China.92 As I have argued elsewhere, the “Wuchang School” is a useful concept for thinking about the influence of Taixu. Taixu was creative and prolific, but there were many other Buddhists who contributed to the modernist project that the Wuchang School represented.93 This is certainly the case with regard to the issue of science and Buddhism, and this book cites the writings of many from the seminary, including teachers such as the layman Tang Dayuan Ⓒ⣏⚻ (ca. 1890–1941) and the monk Shanyin ┬⚈ (n.d.), and students like the monk Fafang 㱽凓 (1904–1951). The impact of the Wuchang school’s curriculum on discussions of Buddhism and science in China were immediate, especially because the years of the school’s operation coincided with the science and philosophy of life debates. Taixu published the second of his two most influential articles on Buddhism and science in 1923, and after that students and teachers from the Wuchang School contributed many articles on 45

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the topic. Some, though not all, of this writing appeared in the longrunning and influential periodical Haichao yin 㴟㼖枛 (Sound of the Sea Tide), run by Taixu and members of the Wuchang School. These articles reflected the curriculum of the school and the interests of its members. For example, as will be discussed in chapter 4, psychology was a popular topic in the mid-1920s, just as it was for non-Buddhist intellectuals in China. Members of the Wuchang School often gave voice to their ideas in the years following the science and philosophy of life debates, but they were not the only Buddhists to participate in the larger discussions of science in China. Several lay Buddhists unaffiliated with the school also found themselves caught up in the “community of scientific discourse” evolving from 1923. One such lay Buddhist, Lin Zaiping 㜿⭘⸛ (1879– 1960), actually wrote one of the central contributions to those debates, and his essay was included by Hu Shih in his collection Kexue yu renshengguan. Lin served as a professor in the Departments of Philosophy and Economics at Beijing University in the 1920s and 1930s and made this important, if overlooked, contribution to the debates of the time.94 He did not write more on the topic of science and Buddhism, so his contribution is limited to 1923. The same cannot be said of Wang Xiaoxu, who is the most important of the lay Buddhists whose work appears in the pages of this book. Wang Xiaoxu 䌳⮷⼸ (or Wang Jitong 䌳⬋⎴)95 was a prominent scientist of the Republican period and arguably the most important Chinese writer on the topic of Buddhism and science during the first half of the twentieth century. From the mid-1920s to the early 1940s he published two books and several articles on the relationship of science and Buddhism.96 In his writings, Wang attempted to bridge Buddhism and science by pointing to the considerable overlap he saw between the two. He also promoted the idea that Buddhism represented a “higher empiricism” than science. Wang was the most scientifically well-informed Buddhist to write on Buddhism and science during the Republican period, and his work is cited many times in the following chapters. As I have discussed his biography in greater detail elsewhere, I will provide only a brief outline of his life here.97 Wang was born to a gentry family in Suzhou in 1875 and grew up when Western learning was just beginning to gain popularity among the literati. He graduated from the Tongwen Guan ⎴㔯棐, the 46

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preeminent school for Western languages and scientific subjects during the late Qing. Wang excelled at mathematics and published a number of works on the subject over his lifetime, the first coming out when he was only sixteen years old. During the early 1900s, Wang became acquainted with Cai Yuanpei and, during the first decades of the twentieth century, worked with him in several organizations, including one that produced a radical political journal. In these years he also became a devout Buddhist, recounting later that in the early 1900s he read the Awakening of Faith and also attended a lecture given by Yang Wenhui, which led him to have faith in Buddhism. In 1909, Wang was sent to England as an official in the Qing government’s office for overseeing Chinese students in Europe. While in England he worked at the Siemens Brothers dynamo factory in Stafford, where he invented a type of automatic electric switch. He also became the first Chinese scientist to publish in a European science magazine. In his article “The Differentiation of Quaternion Functions,” which appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy in 1911, Wang laid out a new method for solving certain types of problems related to electrical and other systems that is still used by electrical engineers today. Wang soon returned to China, where he worked in industry and in the Ministry of Education. In the late 1920s he was appointed by Cai Yuanpei to serve as one of the first researchers in the Research Institute of Engineering of the newly formed Academia Sinica in Shanghai.98 By the early 1930s, Wang was writing articles on science and engineering for the institute’s journal, which he also edited. Wang’s contributions to Chinese science, including his novel method for analyzing electrical networks, were so important that one of his younger contemporaries, the physicist Ye Qisun 叱ẩ⬓ (1898–1977) referred to him as the “founder of Chinese telecommunications.” In 1934, Wang retired from the Academia, after which he spent most of his time with his family in Suzhou. The production of works on science and Buddhism by Wang Xiaoxu, as well as those by Taixu, Tang Dayuan, and others in the Wuchang School, reached its zenith around the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s. By the mid-1930s, production dropped off. Buddhists continued to write about science, but they did not advance many new ideas, as they turned their attention to other topics. This was likely the result of a decrease in the legal and financial aggression directed at Buddhism based 47

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on ideological discourses about science. The start of the Second SinoJapanese War brought its own forms of social and economic instability, and it is likely that this also played a factor as people became concerned with this much more acute external threat to the Chinese nation. The status of Buddhism improved during the Nanjing Decade. By 1931, a presidential decree protecting Buddhism had been issued, and land seizures were effectively halted, at least for the remainder of the Republican period. This turn of events was partly the result of the efforts of the first viable national Buddhist organization, the Chinese Buddhist Association (Zhongguo fojiao hui ᷕ⚳ἃ㔁㚫), which was formed in April 1929 and headed by Yuanying.99 This organization was recognized by the government the same year it was formed, and local chapters were established all over China soon after. In 1936, Buddhism was officially recognized as a religion, and its followers were granted, at least in theory, all the rights, freedoms, and protections guaranteed under the constitution for the practice of religion.100 Many Buddhists welcomed this move, and although some Buddhist writers continued to nuance the definition of religion when applying it to Buddhism, most seemed happy to finally call Buddhism a religion. The latter half of the Nanjing Decade became a high point for Buddhism in Chinese history, even if only in size. Based on surveys conducted by the Chinese Buddhist Association between 1930 and 1936, there were roughly three-quarters of a million monks and nuns living in one-quarter of a million temples in China at that time.101 Although we do not have reliable figures for periods before the twentieth century, this may well have represented the historical zenith in terms of the total monastic population of China.102 In other areas, Buddhism was successfully establishing itself in the modern social and political order. Protected by the successes of the Chinese Buddhist Association, monastic lands were safer from seizure than they had been during the earlier years of the twentieth century (or would be again until the last decade of the same century). Meanwhile, in addition to the various regional and local chapters of the Chinese Buddhist Association that appeared rapidly all over the country during the period, other local Buddhist organizations continued to emerge. Although their aims differed, these organizations shared a common predilection toward the production of periodicals, and by 1934 there were at least forty-four such periodicals 48

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in publication (these periodicals did continue to be predominantly shortlived ventures, however).103 As in the decades before, a number of Buddhist periodicals published during the Nanjing Decade were associated with the Buddhist seminaries that were established at an accelerated pace during the decade.

THE RISE OF ANTIRELIGION IN THE 1920s was part of a broader shift in ideas about truth and value in China. Discussions of any of the three terms “superstition,” “religion,” or “science” necessitated discussion of the other two. They defined much of the debate that took place among intellectuals at the time. Buddhists, who often found their institutions in precarious situations because of these discussions, were compelled to engage with them. Starting in 1923, during the first of the antisuperstition campaigns and the science and philosophy of life debates, some astute Buddhists began a decade of discussions on the relationship between their tradition and science. Building on ideas first mooted in the late 1890s, they argued for a consonance between their tradition and science in some areas and its superiority to science in others. The gradual establishment of clear social roles for religion and science in the 1930s diminished to some extent the urgent necessity of these arguments, but it did not end them entirely, and the arguments Buddhists created in this decade of debate appeared again and again through the 1940s.

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2

Views on the Physical Universe

DURING THE FIRST HALF OF the twentieth century, science became a compelling and universal discourse of truth in China, especially with regard to the origin, structure, and nature of the objective world. Chinese Buddhists were well aware of this, and as they began to incorporate modern concepts and language into their articulations of the nature and the proper ends of human life, one of the fundamental tasks required of them was a modernized explanation of the natural world. Other chapters of this book focus on the general contours of Chinese Buddhists’ invocation of science in their discussions of human epistemology, ethics, and selfcultivation. This chapter addresses Buddhist attitudes toward the natural world, which can be referred to broadly as their cosmology (or, to use the contemporary Chinese term, their yuzhouguan). A cosmology contains several different elements, including not only an accounting of the origins and structure of the cosmos but also of the basic composition of that cosmos in terms of its elemental or material qualities. The nature of the physical world was not the most important topic in Chinese discussions of science during the 1920s, but as the authority of modern science grew in China, it was important for Buddhists to articulate the position of their tradition with regard to the claims made in science about the structure of the universe.

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This chapter focuses on Buddhists’ engagement with the physical sciences—astronomy, physics, and chemistry—and is organized around two themes: first, Buddhist efforts to deflect criticisms that their tradition was unscientific because its scriptures advanced a geocentric, flat-earth cosmology; and second, their invocation of developments in subatomic and relativity physics to undermine scientism and promote a Buddhist onto-epistemology rooted in Consciousness-Only. Buddhists in China put forth several interpretations of passages in Buddhist scriptures to bring them in line with modern astronomy. The geocentrism presented in traditional Buddhist commentaries had made Buddhists the target of Western missionary and colonialist ridicule throughout Asia in the nineteenth century. But unlike their coreligionists in Japan, Chinese Buddhists were generally unwilling to jettison in toto canonical statements about such terrestrial features as Mount Sumeru and the disks of wind and water that the continents are described as resting upon. Instead, starting at least as early as the 1890s, Buddhists reinterpreted such statements in order to prove the scientificity of the Buddhist scriptures. This topic remained important for Buddhists throughout the period studied in this book, and Buddhist interpretations of their scriptures in this regard underwent further refinement well into the 1940s. Because their goal in discussing cosmology was a defense of their tradition, Buddhists focused on showing the noncontradiction of Buddhist scriptures and modern astronomy. Their goal when invoking physics, however, seems to have been different, and this resulted in the adoption of a different approach when discussing atoms, subatomic particles, and relativity. Buddhists referred to specific ideas from the physical sciences frequently in the 1920s and 1930s. Most often, recent developments in these sciences were used to question scientistic materialism and claims about the omniscience of modern science and to support Buddhists’ claim that all phenomena are phenomena of consciousness, which they summarized with the phrase, “the myriad dharmas are consciousnessonly” (wanfa weishi 叔㱽ⓗ嬀). Buddhists began using this phrase to stake out a position for Buddhism vis-à-vis the Western philosophies of materialism and idealism in the mid-1910s. As materialism became more popular in the 1920s, so too did Buddhists’ use of this expression in their

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discussions of science. Chinese Buddhists invoked this phrase frequently and it should be considered their default onto-epistemological position when discussing their tradition in relation to modern discourses such as science and philosophy.1

Modern Buddhist Cosmology The scientific revolution in Europe began with breakthroughs in the discipline of astronomy, and thus its importance in the rise of modern science should not be overlooked.2 Astronomical theories are also infamous in the popular imagination for the role they played in conflicts between certain natural philosophers and the Christian church. In 1543, Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543) published his book On the Revolutions of the Celestial Orbs, which marked the arrival of a modern heliocentric model of the solar system rooted in mathematics. Heliocentrism was then promoted by Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) and mathematically formulated by Johannes Kepler (1571–1630). In promoting this model of the solar system, Galileo came into direct conflict with the Catholic Church, which had long held to a Ptolemaic, geocentric view. Galileo’s trial in 1633 and his subsequent recanting of heliocentrism is a well-known event. It is also a widely misunderstood one. Work by John Brooke and others has shown that the conflict was not as straightforward as is generally believed. Galileo’s trial was not a struggle between religion and science, and it was not fought over the issue of physical reality versus scriptural reality.3 It was not a battle between truth and superstition, but when most people think of the trial of Galileo, this is precisely what they think. And when people think of religious persecution of science, the trial of Galileo is one of the first examples that comes to mind. The trial of Galileo has thus become paradigmatic of an assumed inherent conflict between science and religion, between truth and superstitious belief, between critical thinking and dogma. In both China and the West, the case of Galileo has come to be viewed as emblematic of the antiscientific attitudes of religion.4 As noted in chapter 1, the spread of the categories of “science” and “religion” in China in the early twentieth century was concomitant with, and to some extent predicated upon, the spread of the idea of an inveterate conflict between science and religion. In Chinese discourse, the two 52

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primary criticisms of religion were that it superstitiously believed in a creator deity and that the scriptures of the world’s various religious traditions all denied heliocentrism in favor of geocentrism. Buddhists argued vociferously that both claims were untrue of their tradition. Buddhism has historically been opposed to the idea of a creator deity, and it was easy for Buddhists to find canonical statements to support this claim. Finding support for heliocentrism in the Buddhist canon proved to be a more difficult task, but it was a necessary one if they were to defend themselves against accusations of being antiscientific and superstitious. These accusations came first from Christian missionaries who sought to prove that Buddhism was inferior to Christianity because it taught unscientific doctrines such as geocentrism. By the 1920s, supporters of materialistic scientism had begun criticizing Buddhism for roughly the same reason, but with a twist: they criticized Buddhism for being just like Christianity in promoting a geocentric cosmology.5 In this latter criticism, the legendary image of the trial of Galileo played an important symbolic role. This turn of events is ironic, given that it was Christian missionaries who first introduced modern Western heliocentric models to much of Asia. In China, heliocentrism was introduced briefly by the Jesuits in the late mid-eighteenth century, but it was not widely propagated until the middle of the nineteenth century by Protestant missionaries.6 Christian missionaries had been aware of Buddhist cosmology since at least the sixteenth century, and they cited Buddhist cosmology as an example of the faultiness of that religion. After the acceptance by Christians of the idea of a round earth, Christian missionaries in Sri Lanka, Japan,7 and China used the flat-earth cosmology of the Buddhists as a way to criticize their religion. As missionary activity intensified in the nineteenth century, Buddhists reacted to these attacks.8 Unlike their peers in Japan, rather than abandon all scriptural statements on Buddhist cosmology, the majority of Buddhists in China interpreted their traditional cosmology to match the one presented in modern Western science. As Buddhism’s cosmology continued to be a point of criticism well into the twentieth century, these interpretations remained important and they were continuously developed well into the 1940s. Before turning to the scriptural passages and interpretations Buddhists drew upon to construct a Buddhist heliocentrism, it is important to briefly summarize the basic cosmology presented in Buddhist scriptures. 53

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Looking in the Buddhist canon for a cosmology, one finds few comments on the structure of the world in the earliest layer of Buddhist texts. There is little that could be classified as Buddhist cosmology in the sūtras (those texts of doctrine that the tradition ascribes to the Buddha himself ). The tradition generally states that the Buddha declined to answer certain questions,9 including, most germane here, questions about the finitude of the universe in terms of both time and space. The absence of cosmological speculation in the sūtras does not mean that there is no cosmology in Buddhism, however. Continued speculation and elaboration on Buddhist doctrine after the Buddha’s death eventually led to the appearance of the Abhidharma, a class of scholastic Buddhist commentary that first appeared around the third century B.C.E.10 It was upon the discussions in these texts that Chinese Buddhists built their views of Buddhist astronomy. They used the Abhidharmakośa-bhāsya (hereafter referred to as the Kośa)11 as their primary source for discussions of cosmology until the 1930s. During that decade, owing to the general vogue in ConsciousnessOnly thought among Chinese Buddhists, the Kośa was replaced by the Yogācārabhūmi-śāstra, a text associated with Consciousness-Only whose cosmology bears a great resemblance to the one presented in the Kośa. The descriptions of the structure of the universe one finds in these two texts begin by describing the universe as primarily a great void.12 Within this emptiness, each world rests upon a stack of enormous disks, beginning with a disk of wind covered by a thinner disk of water and then by an even thinner disk of metal. The metal disk is the uppermost disk in the stack, and it is upon this disk that all of the geographic features of our world rest. Located at the center of the disk of metal is Mount Sumeru, a massive square mountain surrounded by seven (in the Yogācārabhūmi)13 or eight (in the Kośa)14 concentric mountain ranges and a great ocean, wherein the four continents of the world, each of a different shape, are arranged around Sumeru at the four compass points. Surrounding these continents is one last ring of mountains, which runs along the periphery of the disk of metal. The sun and the moon are suspended in a smaller disk of wind that girdles Sumeru. Stars and other astronomical features are also supported and orbit within the same wind disk as the sun and moon. As the sun and moon orbit Sumeru, they pass over the four great continents, where it is either night or day depending on which continent the sun happens to be over at the moment. There is an expanding 54

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and contracting of the orbit of the sun over the course of the year and a greater shift in the orbit of the moon, which account for seasonal and monthly changes. Both the sun and the moon are disk shaped, not spherical. The lower face of the sun is composed of a ruby covered in gold, while the moon is made of a crystal covered in silver. All of these features—disks, continents, and Sumeru—make up one Buddhist world system (Ch. shijie ᶾ䓴; Skt. loka-dhātu), and the scriptures describe an infinite, or near infinite, number of these worlds scattered throughout the great emptiness of space. As should be obvious, the traditional Buddhist world system is clearly geocentric. The idea of a flat earth suspended in space, above which revolve small illuminated disks that we call the sun and the moon, contradicts the heliocentric model that was eventually accepted in the West and then promoted by Christian missionaries all over Asia. By the late nineteenth century, Chinese Buddhists had begun to address the differences between that cosmology and their own. Chinese Buddhists may have discussed this issue before the end of the nineteenth century, but for the historical reasons discussed in the previous chapter, this was the point from which Buddhists felt most compelled to discuss the relationship between their tradition and science. During this period the popularity of science and the ideological role that modern astronomy, especially heliocentrism, played in discussions of religion impelled Buddhists to address the issue of Buddhist astronomy. Buddhist responses to claims that their tradition was antiscience because its scriptures did not accord with modern astronomy involved a selective approach to their canon, one in which a few ideas were reinterpreted to accord with modern astronomy. An early example of this appears in the writings of the lay Buddhist Shen Shandeng 㰰┬䘣 (1830–1902). A native of Tongxiang 㟸悱 (which lies roughly one-third of the way from Hangzhou to Shanghai), Shen was born on April 19, 1830, into a literati family.15 He earned the prestigious degree of Presented Scholar (jinshi 忚⢓) in the national examinations, and in 1868 was chosen to be a Bachelor Scholar (shujishi ⹞⎱⢓) at the Hanlin Academy (Hanlin yuan 侘㜿昊), one of the most respected and influential institutions of learning in China from the eighth century onward. Shen worked as a teacher and lived most of his life in Tongxiang and Shanghai, where he retired in 1889 and lived until his death in 1902.16 During his life he wrote a number of 55

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works, most of them related to the study of the Yijing 㖻䴻 (Classic of Changes). He also produced one large compilation of material on Pure Land Buddhism, which he started in his late forties but did not complete until the last few years of his life. From his writings it is clear that in addition to his knowledge of modern astronomy, he had some interest in modern physics and a well-developed knowledge of mathematics.17 Shen described connections between Buddhism and modern astronomy in a two-volume collection titled Discourse on Repaying Kindness (Bao’en lun ⟙】婾).18 Shen began this text while on a retreat with some of his friends at Sheng’en 俾】 Temple in Suzhou in 1878. During their retreat, he and his friends chanted the name of Amitābha Buddha and copied Buddhist scriptures.19 They also had a series of conversations about the Buddha-dharma, and Shen wrote a summary of these discussions in the form of a dialogue consisting of twenty-five questions and their answers (this format being common in Chinese Buddhist literature and the classical Chinese tradition as a whole). He later added his own commentary to the dialogue and published it near the end of his life some twenty years later, along with a number of related materials, including scripture commentaries and letters. Shen’s discussion of modern astronomy appeared in his answer to a question about whether the Pure Land of Amitābha really exists, or is simply in the mind.20 After citing scripture to support the argument that the Pure Land really does exist, Shen discussed modern Western astronomy. The following section comes from the autocommentary Shen added to the work. Academic disciplines from the West are becoming more popular, but those who understand that they can prove what is said in the Buddhist texts are few. For example, astronomers observe that the planets and moons all have mountains, rivers, and geographic features like the earth. The earth is in space, and it is also a planet. A group of planets travel around the sun. Each fixed star is a sun, and there are countless planets orbiting them. This is the same as the “sun disk” from Buddhist scripture, but they are so far away that we cannot see them all. Again, it is said that Venus and Mercury have no moons orbiting them, that Mars has two moons, Jupiter21 has two moons, Saturn has eight moons, Uranus also has four moons, and Neptune has 56

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one moon. Each of these moons orbits a planet no differently than Earth’s moon does. This can prove what Buddha said about 10 billion suns, moons, and worlds. Again, it is said that Saturn is the strangest, as it has a bright ring around it, which is divided into three layers that are broad, flat, and wide; and this ring radiates out to more than 5.1 million li. Buddha’s talk of the separation of the dwelling place for land and the dwelling place for clouds can be verified by this bright ring, which is like a kind of cloud vapor that does not disperse. Again, it is said that the fauna and flora of all these planets must be different from that of the Earth. There are three reasons for this: First, the amount of light and heat they receive from the sun is different. Second, the amount of gravity is different. Third, the densities of their bodies are not the same. This can verify what Buddha said about the vast differences in Buddha-lands of the ten directions, and the work buddhas do in adorning them. All of this is enough to demonstrate that space and worlds are inexhaustible, and that the Western Land of Bliss is a planet outside of the trichiliocosm. It is a definitely existing bejeweled land, which possesses the various adornments of great merit, and does not exist apart from the enlightenment of the inconceivable mind of sentient beings. Those who would speak casually of the Pure Land School often say that this land is concealed and seems to be empty, that it exists only as principle (li 䎮) but not as a phenomenon (shi ḳ). This is the mistake of all mistakes!22

In this passage, Shen provided four examples of how modern astronomy can prove what is found in Buddhist scripture. The author self-consciously created a discourse in which Western learning proved the truth of Buddhism. To do this he had to apply novel interpretations to some aspects of Buddhist cosmology, while wholly ignoring others. Shen identified the elliptic of a solar system as the same as the sun disk mentioned in Buddhism, thus claiming that Buddhist cosmology was heliocentric. Shen also pointed out that it has been observed that there are many moons around the planets of our solar system, and when this is multiplied by all the many planets believed to be in the universe, this is similar to what the Buddha said about there being “10 billion”23 planets and moons in the 57

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universe. In these examples, Shen went to great pains to adapt Buddhist cosmology to Western learning, and not the other way around. It is likely that ideas such as these were not limited to Shen’s treatise but were part of a discourse emerging among Chinese Buddhists. This is borne out by the fact that Shen describes the Discourse on Repaying Kindness as being the product of several days’ dialogue with other Buddhists. We can also turn to other writers from the period for other examples of the ways in which Buddhists interpreted canonical statements about cosmology. Shen’s acquaintance Yang Wenhui also grappled with the problem of making Buddhist cosmology accord with modern astronomy, though he used different evidence to support his claims.24 Yang’s ideas are important not only because they differed from Shen’s, and thus provide a broader picture of Buddhist attempts to articulate a modern Buddhist cosmology, but also because several of them were taken up later during the Republican period. In his discussions of modern astronomy, Yang focused on two main issues, proving that the world described in Buddhist cosmology was round, not flat, and that it rotated. He also shared Shen’s concern with demonstrating that the Buddhist scriptures actually say that the earth orbits the sun. These would be perennial concerns for Buddhists during the Republic. As noted above, Buddhist cosmology clearly describes a flat earth. This posed a problem for Yang, who tackled the issue directly. A clear statement of Yang’s understanding of Buddhist cosmology appears in a commentary he added to his Buddhist Primer (Fojiao chuxue keben ἃ㔁⇅⬠婚㛔),25 in which he provided expanded explanations for the terse, six-character couplets of the original text. Published in 1906, the Primer was a popular Chinese textbook on Buddhism in the early twentieth century.26 Yang had long been interested in science in general and astronomy in particular. During his 1878 trip to Europe as part of a Chinese delegation, “[Yang] took a special interest in astronomy, geography, and optics; he bought a globe, telescope, and a microscope to take back with him ‘in order to promote the sciences when he returned home.’ ”27 He later published Tiandiqiu tushuo ⣑⛘䎫⚾婒 (An Illustrated Guide to the Heavens and the Earth), which explained the major features of modern astronomy, including the notion of a round earth. This piece even briefly acknowledged the resistance the idea of a round earth faced when it was promoted in China in the modern era.28 58

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Yang applied his knowledge of geography and astronomy to his commentary on the section of the Primer dedicated to Buddhist cosmology, titled Qi shijian ☐ᶾ攻 (The Receptacle World).29 He wrote: The Śūraṃgama-sūtra includes the idea of a round earth. You should know that everything the Buddha said were “live statements.”30 If you are attached to this and deny that, you are making obstacles for yourself. Someone asked, “Is the modern theory of a round earth different from the Buddhist scriptures. What about that?” I answer that the possible shapes of the world are all deluded views generated by the shared karma of sentient beings. They are just like illusions or transformations. They have no fixed reality. When the Buddha appeared in the world, he discussed the dharma according to the capacities of sentient beings. The theory about the shape of the world already being promoted by Indian Brahmanism was that the sun and moon orbit Mount Sumeru and shine on the four great continents of the world. If the Buddha had changed this theory, then he would have mistakenly been treating the world as though it really exists.31

For Yang, any apparent difference between Buddhist cosmology and modern astronomy can be explained by the doctrine of upāya, or expedient means, in which buddhas and bodhisattvas teach the dharma according to the capacities of the person or people they are teaching. When the Buddha spoke of a flat earth, he was simply tailoring his message to his audience in early India. By historically locating the Buddha in this way, Yang placed the weight of the mistaken notions about the cosmos found in Buddhist scriptures on the Buddha’s benighted audience, who themselves owed their mistaken notions to the Brahmans. They were not the fault of the Buddha himself, who spoke of the sun and moon orbiting Sumeru only for the sake of his ignorant audience. Yang argued further on that the Buddha did know that the earth was round and rotated on its axis. According to current thinking, the earth is spherical and people dwell on its face, with their feet pointing toward its center, and their heads facing outward. Thus, there are discussions of “supporting 59

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worlds,” “covering worlds,” and “side worlds” in the scriptures. The round earth has also been recognized. Each day it makes one rotation, and every year it orbits the sun in one great circumference, which produces the cold and heat of the four seasons. The scriptures say, “The Buddha sat in the bodhimaṇḍa (site of his enlightenment), and the spirits of the earth verified his enlightenment. He said, “This is the vajra-navel.32 All other places revolve, but this place does not move.” Statements like this are proof of the rotation of the globe.33

At the end of the section of his Primer in which these passages appear, Yang reiterated his claim that the Śūraṃgama-sūtra contains descriptions of the idea of a round earth. “As for the theory of a round earth that has recently arrived in China, people of the world consider it to be true, and they doubt what is said in the Buddhist scriptures, believing them to be false. But they do not know that this idea was spoken of and hidden in the Śūraṃgama-sūtra long ago.”34 This proof turned out to be important for later Buddhists, who repeated it during the Republican period. Unfortunately, Yang did not say where in that scripture this statement came from, and I have not been able to find any passages in the Śūraṃgama-sūtra that refers, even obliquely, to the idea of a round earth. In the version of the Śūraṃgama-sūtra I believe Yang was referring to, there is in fact very little that relates to the cosmological issues being dealt with here.35 In one section the Buddha discusses how ignorance and discriminative thinking give rise to world systems, the plans of which follow the basic discussion of disks described in the Kośa and the Yogācārabhūmi, but no mention is made of Mount Sumeru, the continents, sun, moon, or stars.36 Both Shen and Yang accepted certain parts of modern astronomy and attempted to fit Buddhist cosmology to them, though they focused on different issues. Shen discussed the revolution of planets around the sun and the multitude of stars in the universe, while Yang focused on the roundness of the earth and its rotation on its axis. Shen did not provide scriptural citations to support his claims, and Yang only made reference to the Śūraṃgama-sūtra. Yang relied not only on interpretation of physical claims made in the Buddhist scriptures, but also on the Mahāyāna notion of upāya. After the writings of Shen and Yang, the claim that Buddha talked about two modern astronomical notions—a round earth orbiting a sun 60

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and a multitude of worlds in the universe—became standard ideas in Buddhist discourses about science and Buddhism during the Republican period. But as time went on, writers also made connections between the two cosmologies based on developments that took place in astronomy in the 1930s and 1940s. Two notable examples of this tendency, whose writings on the subject appeared in a number of different periodicals, were Wang Xiaoxu and Lü Bicheng. Lü Bicheng was one of the most prominent Chinese Buddhist women of the early twentieth century. She is most well known for her poetry, but her life was also defined by her commitment to Buddhism, her continued pursuit of education for herself and other women, and her career as an international journalist. Lü was originally from Anhui Province, and her parents took the then-radical step of sending her to get a modern education at her uncle’s school, rather than arranging for her to be married. At the age of twenty she moved north to Tianjin, where she worked as a journalist and helped establish one of the first nonmission girls’ schools in China. In the early 1910s she was a secretary in the administration of President Yuan Shikai 堩ᶾ↙ (1859–1916), but she quit when Yuan declared himself emperor shortly before his death in 1916. She then went to rejoin her mother in Shanghai, where she studied English and made investments in trading companies. In late 1920 Lü moved to New York, where she audited literature classes at Columbia University and served as a foreign correspondent for the Shanghai shibao ᶲ㴟㗪⟙ (Shanghai Times). After a few years in New York, Lü moved to Europe, where she developed a fairly negative impression of Europeans, perceiving them to be mired in materialism and inhumane in their treatment of animals. She lived in Switzerland from 1926 to 1933 and then returned to live in Shanghai until the advent of the Second Sino-Japanese War forced her to relocate, first to the United States, and then to Kowloon in Hong Kong, where she lived until her death on January 24, 1943.37 Lü was a devout Buddhist. In early 1920 she attended a sūtra lecture by, and took refuge under, the famous early twentieth-century monk and exponent of Tiantai Buddhism, Dixian. During her lifetime she wrote several works on Buddhism and published bilingual editions of Buddhist works she translated into English, such as of the “Pumen pin” 㘖攨⑩ (Universal Gate Chapter) of the Lotus Sūtra. She also wrote articles and a book on the state of Buddhism in Europe, where she worked with local 61

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organizations to promote vegetarianism. In addition to promoting this Chinese Buddhist practice, she seems to have been particularly interested in understanding the relationship between Buddhism and science, which led her to correspond with Wang Xiaoxu in the late 1920s. Lü and Wang’s correspondence about Buddhist cosmology began when Lü sent Wang a list of six general questions about Buddhism and science.38 That letter is not dated, but Wang included it and his replies in his 1932 essay collection Comparative Study of the Buddha-dharma and Science (Fofa yu kexue zhi bijiao yanjiu ἃ㱽冯䥹⬠ᷳ㭼庫䞼䨞; hereafter CSBS). Her letter was thus probably written while she was living in Switzerland and interacting with communities of European Buddhists. The impact of these associations can be seen in her original letter to Wang, where she said that she had recently given a talk to Buddhists in London about Pure Land practice and that the people in London all “rely on self power and not other power.” (This meant they relied on the practice of meditation for enlightenment, instead of relying on the power of Amitābha’s vows, as is done in Pure Land Buddhist practice.39) Her experiences with Western Buddhists may have been one of her reasons for writing to Wang, a scientist and a Buddhist, to ask him questions about Buddhism in light of modern thought. In addition to inquiring about the power of Pure Land practice, Lü asked Wang several questions relevant to the issue of Buddhism and science. She asked whether the Buddha had talked about infinite space and whether the geography described in the Śūraṃgama-sūtra differed from what people were saying at the time (ideas discussed before by Shen Shandeng and Yang Wenhui, respectively). It is clear in the letter that Lü was trying to find a way to think about the relationship between the truth claims made in her tradition and those put forward by modern science. In her question about whether or not the geography of the Śūraṃgamasūtra fits with the modern understanding of the structure of the earth, Lü did not explicitly mention the aspects of the text’s geography to which she was referring. It is likely that she had read or heard about the idea promoted by Yang Wenhui that this sūtra discussed the idea of a round earth. Interestingly, Wang had not previously heard that the Śūraṃgamasūtra speaks of the earth as round and could not find the passage to which she was referring.40 It is possible that he could not find such a passage because the two writers were talking about two different versions of the 62

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Śūraṃgama-sūtra. As noted earlier, however, the more likely reason for his puzzlement is the fact that the Śūraṃgama-sūtra does not explicitly talk about geography, and Lü was simply citing an apocryphal tradition started by Yang, one for which Wang could find no scriptural support. Putting the question of the Śūraṃgama-sūtra aside, we can ask how Wang explained Buddhist cosmology in his reply to Lü. His interpretation contained two elements, both of which he later repeated in his 1942 book Fofa shengyao ἃ㱽䚩天 (Brief Essentials of the Buddha-dharma). Wang identified Mount Sumeru as the North Pole and stated that the “four continents” of Buddhist cosmology actually do lay spread around the North Pole at the four compass points as described in Buddhist scriptures.41 Wang identified the South Pole with the ring of iron mountains that encircles the world. Although Buddhist scriptures seem to be fairly clear that disks of wind and water support a flat earth, Wang said these disks (or, more literally in the Chinese, “wheels,” lun 廒) described in Buddhist cosmology are actually “spheres” (qiu 䎫). He also inverted the order in which these are described in the Buddhist canon, identifying the disk of wind with our atmosphere and the disk of water with our oceans.42 In responding to Lü’s question, Wang thus offered a fairly sweeping reinterpretation of Buddhist views of the world that followed modern geology almost completely. Just as Yang had done, Wang did not wish to reject the Buddhist scriptures; instead he read them as to prove that the Buddhist scriptures spoke of a round earth. One new idea that appeared in Wang’s reply to Lü was his claim that in their cosmogony, the Buddhist scriptures discuss the formation of stars and planets from nebulae.43 In Buddhist cosmogony, after a disk of wind arises as a result of the karma of sentient beings (who are, at that time, located in the formless heavens and thus apart from the physical cosmogonic process), a great rain pours over the wind disk, accumulating until it forms a disk of water. The top of this disk congeals to form a disk of metal. Wang argued that this account, which is found in both the Kośa and the Yogācārabhūmi,44 actually refers to the formation of a star and planets, which scientists had recently begun to speculate happens when dust collecting in a nebula gathers mass until it eventually becomes stars and planets. In discussions of Buddhism and science in China, some topics came and went, while others persisted in their importance throughout the 63

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Republican period. The desire to show the scientificity of Buddhist cosmology remained important well into the 1940s. Lü Bicheng continued to consider the issue of Buddhism and modern astronomy well after her correspondence with Wang, and in 1941 she wrote an article titled “Differences and Similarities Between Buddhism and Science” (Foxue yu kexue zhi yitong ἃ⬠冯䥹⬠ᷳ䔘⎴). This article was published in three different Buddhist periodicals in the same year,45 including both the most widely circulated Buddhist newspaper in the country, Buddhism Semimonthly (Foxue banyuekan ἃ⬠⋲㚰↲), and the important Buddhist magazine Bodhisattva (Jue youqing 奢㚱ね46). Such reprinting was not uncommon in the Buddhist press of the time, but it does say something about the acceptance that Lü’s ideas received. In that article, Lü focused on disproving any claims of a difference between Buddhist and modern astronomies. She did this by defining four points of similarity between Buddhist cosmology and modern astronomy: (1) the earth is suspended in space; (2) the shape of the earth is like a vessel or container, not flat like a board; (3) the earth rotates; and (4) the earth is not alone in the universe (e.g., there are a multitude of planets in the universe).47 She provided scriptural citations for some of these claims, but for others she did not. For example, to support her claim that the Buddhist scriptures talk about the earth moving, Lü cited the same example as Yang Wenhui had done, in which the Buddha, at the time of his enlightenment, stated that the entire world, apart from where he sat, moved.48 It should be noted that in her 1941 article, Lü drew extensively from the Yogācārabhūmi, such as when she sought to show that Buddhist scriptures spoke both of the formation of stars and planets from nebulae and of the orbit of the earth around the sun. Although the passages that she cited were similar to ones found in the Kośa, the fact that she chose to use the Yogācārabhūmi, one of the main texts of Consciousness-Only, shows that she was very much a member of her generation of Buddhist intellectuals, which favored that school of thought when discussing science. By the 1940s, Chinese Buddhists had spent half a century arguing that the cosmology presented in Buddhist commentarial literature matched the cosmology put forth in modern astronomy. They argued that the Buddhist canon described a multitude of star systems floating through the vast emptiness of space and that in each of these systems round planets orbited their primary stars, and all of these had been produced from 64

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nebulae. Buddhists focused on these facts to demonstrate the noncontradiction of modern scientific and Buddhist cosmologies, which was necessary for defending Buddhism from blanket criticisms that religion was antiscientific and therefore not good for the modern Chinese nation. There were other topics in modern cosmology that were not discussed by Buddhists or that did not have the durability of these topics. I have seen no examples of Buddhists looking to refute any aspect of modern cosmology. When it came to astronomy, Buddhists seemed quite happy to agree with what science had to say, and the only conclusion that was drawn was that Buddhism agreed with it. This differed from Buddhists’ approach to the discussion of subatomic and relativity physics, to which we now turn.

Subatomic Physics, Relativity, and the Nature of Reality In the early to mid-1920s, echoing their approach to modern astronomy, Buddhists sought to find parallels between the descriptions of matter found in the Buddhist canon and those described by physics and chemistry. This never became a major focus for Buddhists in their reflections on the findings of the physical sciences, however, and none of their ideas about elements exerted a wide influence in China. What emerged instead as something of a consensus by the start of the 1930s was the idea that contemporary discoveries in modern physics supported Buddhists’ claims about both the falsity of a strictly materialistic view of the world and the limits of scientific omniscience. Their use of modern physics does show us that some Buddhists were able not only to keep up to date with the latest discoveries in science as they became known in China but to incorporate these concepts into their discussions of science as a whole. In assessing Buddhists’ discussions of physics, let it first be noted that Buddhism does not deny that the material world has qualities that can be described. Although most Buddhist schools do not believe these qualities are permanent or ultimately real, methods for categorizing and talking about the matter that makes up the world have been a part of Buddhist discourse for more than two millennia. In their discussions of science, Chinese Buddhists also did not deny that useful and accurate things could be said about the material world, and they drew from their tradition’s discourses on matter just as they had used ideas from Buddhist cosmology 65

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when addressing the findings of modern astronomy; they explained that certain findings in modern chemistry and physics could be seen as confirming ideas already present in the Buddhist canon. Buddhists pointed out that there was some consonance between traditional Indian theories about the phases of matter and those identified by modern science. As with Buddhist cosmology, such statements were drawn from the Abhidharma tradition. There, the stuff of the world is described as being composed of four basic types of matter, known as “the four great elements” (Ch. si da ⚃⣏; Skt. catur-mahābhūta). The four great elements are earth, water, fire, and wind, each of which has its own properties. All things in the material world are composed of various mixtures of these four ingredients. Lest the reader think this means that the Abhidharmikas were reifying these composite things, an inherently un-Buddhist position, it should be noted that they recognized this as merely an expedient way of understanding things at the level of matter. They maintained that the four elements, like all compound phenomena, cannot be said to truly “exist” in an ideal sense. Like all phenomena, mental and physical, the four elements are substantially dependent on other factors, such as karma, and have no permanent or static state.49 From the mid-1920s until the mid-1930s, some Buddhists used the concept of the four elements to connect their tradition to the physical sciences. Taixu stated in a lecture he gave in 1923, subsequently published as an article in Haichao yin, that the four elements discussed in Buddhism are analogous to the three phases of matter in chemistry—solid, liquid, and gaseous.50 Three years later, in the second part of an article on impermanence and evolution, the Taiwanese Buddhist Zeng Puxin 㚦㘖ᾉ wrote that just as Buddhism taught that the body is made up of four great elements, so too does modern science teach that the body is made of elements.51 And another writer, Lihong 㙮⻀, wrote in 1934 that the idea of the four elements was wholly consonant with modern science, claiming this concept had recently been proven by physics.52 Whether or not modern physics had really proven the reality of the four elements as traditionally described is doubtful, but there is a clear rhetoric at work here, similar to the one employed in Buddhist discussions of cosmology. Buddhists also drew from physics to support some of Buddhism’s more expansive, theoretical claims. This was a common approach adopted by Zhang Huasheng ⻝⊾倚 (b. 1880) in several articles he published in 66

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Haichao yin while teaching at the Wuchang Buddhist Seminary in the mid-1920s. In his article “A Physical [Scientific] Discussion on the [the Concept] Form Is Emptiness, Emptiness Is Form” (Se jishi kong, kong jishi se zhi lihua tan 刚⌛㗗䨢, 䨢⌛㗗刚ᷳ䎮⊾婯), Zhang aimed to show that the physical sciences could provide support for the Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophical premise of emptiness (Skt. śūnyatā). He cited example after example of experiments drawn from physics and chemistry, providing for each an explanation of the scientific principles at work in the experiment (complete with diagrams) and how it illustrated a line from the Heart Sūtra that reads “form is emptiness, and emptiness is form.” For example, he explained in slightly inaccurate detail the chemical processes at work in dissolving a copper coin in nitric acid.53 The copper is not destroyed in this process, and Zhang discerned some parity between emptiness and the law of the conservation of matter, and he argued that this example, by demonstrating the latter, supported the former.54 He does not lay out the logic of this analogy explicitly, but it is clear that his goal was to demonstrate that the assumptions we make about the solidity and stability of matter are incorrect. In other passages he used optical illusions, such as the bend that seems to appear in a stick or pencil when partially immersed in a glass of water, to show that our perceptions of objects do not accurately reflect the objects themselves. With these examples he wished to demonstrate for the reader that science has shown that our perceptions of solid things as objectively permanent and stable are false. All of Zhang’s examples were drawn from chemistry and optics, and none of them were particularly cutting edge. In fact, most of the experiments and the scientific knowledge he drew on had first been introduced into China in translations of Western scientific works produced more than half a century earlier.55 Buddhists drew some parallels between modern chemical theories about elements and Indian elemental theory present in Buddhist scriptures, but none of these ideas established themselves within the general discourse developing at the time, and after the mid-1930s few Buddhists showed much interest in them. This may have been because many of the comparisons, such as the ones made by Zhang Huasheng, were not especially thorough or philosophically well explained. Buddhists were much more interested in developments in atomic theory, which they used in their efforts to describe the limitations of science. Mahāyāna 67

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Buddhism has always been strongly opposed to atomic theories of matter, and Buddhists could have drawn on resources already present within their scriptures to undermine atomism. Chinese Buddhists of the twentieth century were concerned with refuting atomic theory for the same reason their predecessors had been two millennia before: atomic theory was a form of materialist substantialism to which Buddhists, especially Mahāyāna Buddhists, did not subscribe. Coincidentally, Chinese Buddhists first learned about and began seriously to engage with atomic theory at the very historical moment that subatomic physics was being introduced into China, and a number of Buddhists seized on its development with great interest. The field of physics underwent major changes during the first few decades of the twentieth century. Physicists were peering ever more deeply into the fundamental nature of matter, and the Newtonian ideal of matter as being solid, predictable, and absolutely knowable was called into question. Atomic theory, which had been under development for some time, changed a great deal in this period. The theory of atoms as small, indivisible pieces of matter moving with uniform motion was overturned by the discovery that atoms are themselves composed of still smaller constituent elements. Although there was some lag between developments in global physics and Chinese Buddhists’ discussion of them, the changes that took place in how Buddhists talked about physical matter generally tracked changes in the field of physics. Buddhists had already thought of ways to compare the ideas of atoms, molecules, and phases of matter put forth in the sciences with what was discussed in Buddhist scriptures, and faced with developments in subatomic theory they began to realize that science would always eventually overturn its own ideas. Buddhists saw the discovery of building blocks of reality even more fundamental than atoms as proof that science could never arrive at ultimate answers about reality and that they were right in thinking that the philosophical position of materialism was fundamentally incorrect. By the early years of the Nanjing Decade Taixu and his confederates were no longer talking about the similarity between the four great elements of Buddhism and the elements of chemistry, and by the early 1930s they had already started to use developments in atomic physics as a way to critique scientism. Taixu had not always been so critical of atomic theory, however. In 1923 he praised the idea of atoms as 68

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useful for helping humans abandon their attachment to the idea that things really exist. He did not criticize the general idea of atoms at that time, though he did admit that he liked the idea of “force/energy only” (Ch. weili ⓗ≃) as a better final explanation for the basis for material phenomena.56 Taixu eventually changed his rhetoric, and four years later, writing under the pen name Meian, he criticized Einstein’s theories for treating atoms and electricity as the substantially real basis for material phenomena.57 He grounded this criticism in the Consciousness-Only position that all phenomena are produced by the mind. Taixu’s critique of atomic theory fit well with the general Buddhist antipathy toward atomic theories that dates back to the religion’s roots. In India the idea that the universe was made up of incredibly tiny, indivisible units dates back to the sixth century B.C.E., and was maintained by the Vaiśeṣika school, which was one of the main philosophical opponents of Buddhism in India in the early part of the Common Era. As a result, there is well-developed critique of atomism in the Abhidharma and in Buddhist logic.58 Interestingly, I have not seen any author make explicit use of these traditional critiques; instead they seemed to rely on arguments that were originally ad hoc, such as one used by Taixu’s student Fafang, which eventually become part of a kind of traditional response to modern physics. Fafang added to the argument against seeing atoms as the ultimate basis for reality in 1929, but his argument took the form of an explicit comparison of science and Christianity. It was not uncommon during the early twentieth century for Buddhists to try to prove their religion was scientific by pointing to how it was unlike Christianity. In his article, Fafang stated that if one were to claim that all things come from matter, which is produced from atoms, one would be forced to ask what produces atoms. He said that if one says that atoms are produced from electricity, one is then forced to ask what electricity is produced from, and so on. He concluded that claiming all things are made from atoms is just like Christianity’s superstitious belief that God created everything. Here Fafang alluded to contemporary criticism of Christianity in China to rhetorically support his arguments against atomic theory. He was not the only one to imply that rigid adherence to science was superstitious, but he does seem to have been the first to adopt that position in a criticism of atomic theory. 69

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The logic of Fafang’s objection requires some explanation. In criticizing the idea that atoms are produced from electrons, Fafang was analyzing the situation in terms of Buddhist causality. One of the biggest problems Buddhists see with a creator god is that it is an un-caused cause; it is a cause for the universe that itself has no cause. This makes no sense in Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy, which argues that all things arise only as the result of causes and conditions, which are themselves arisen only as the result of other causes and conditions. Fafang rejected this, just as he rejected the idea that electrons could appear out of nothing and assemble into atoms. Fafang’s argument, that seeing atoms as somehow the “source” of everything was tantamount to believing in a creator god, appealed to a number of Buddhists who used it in the defense of Buddhism.59 From 1930 onward, many Buddhists accepted atomic theory as partially accurate, but they continued to argue that it did not completely explain reality. Buddhists were aided in this argument by developments in science, particularly in discoveries about the composite nature of the atom, which fit well with traditional Buddhist teachings about atoms. The first component of the atom to be discovered was the electron. Over the course of the nineteenth century, European scientists made many advances in understanding the nature of matter. Much of this work occurred in the field of electromagnetism. In the early part of the century, Michael Faraday (1791–1867) demonstrated the connection between electricity and magnetism, which led to a unification of several fields of study. The study of electricity proceeded rapidly, but in several different directions, and by the end of the nineteenth century there were several competing theories about the nature of electricity.60 Electrons, long thought to be the basic material unit of electricity, were first identified in the last part of the nineteenth century, but it was not until 1913 that Niels Bohr (1885–1962) put forth a model of the atom that included electrons in orbit around an atomic nucleus. Bohr’s model is the one with which most of us are now familiar. In this model layers of orbiting electrons surround an atom’s nucleus, which consists of neutrons and protons.61 Our models have since evolved, becoming more nuanced with continuing advances in quantum physics, but this was the model with which Chinese would most likely have been familiar after the late 1910s. The first Chinese Buddhist to talk about electrons was Taixu, who mentioned them in 1931.62 After this, every Buddhist whose work I have 70

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read who discussed atoms mentioned electrons, though usually only to say that they were constituent components of atoms. Taixu said that scientists used to think atoms were the basis of things, but they had begun to talk about electrons. He even chided Chinese people for being stuck in nineteenth-century classical physics (meaning Newtonian physics), though this critique should be understood as rhetorical and not based on an actual failure on the part of Chinese people to embrace subatomic physics. The targets of Taixu’s critique were those who still held a mechanistic view of the world, assuming that science could provide absolute knowledge about the material world and not, as science was beginning to show, merely probable knowledge about the world. The discovery of electrons, constituent components of the supposedly indivisible atom, seemed to prove Buddhists’ point that the theories of science were neither ultimate nor final, and they took this as an opportunity to criticize the latest theories of science as a whole. This can be seen in another article by Taixu, “Buddhism, Religious Philosophy, and Scientific Philosophy” (Foxue yu zongjiao zhexue ji kexue zhexue ἃ⬠冯⬿㔁⒚⬠⍲䥹⬠⒚⬠), in which he argued for the weakness of science by pointing out that although scientists had previously taken atoms to be the basic units of reality, they had discovered electrons, which “orbit like satellites around the nucleus.” Now, he said, scientists were saying the ultimate truth is “force/energy” (Ch. li ≃).63 Like many Buddhists who came after him, Taixu treated such fundamental shifts in scientific theory as proof of an underlying epistemic uncertainty in science. In his article Taixu stated his belief that although electrons are the limit of what is knowable in science, they are not really the limit of reality.64 By this he meant there must be particles even more basic than electrons, but even if there were, they too would not be constituted on a permanent, unchanging basis and would probably be composed of still smaller pieces. During the Nanjing Decade, those Buddhists who talked about science tended to treat atoms and electrons as the scientific understanding of the most basic structure of matter, and it was not until 1942 that Wang Xiaoxu first mentioned protons.65 The discovery of more subatomic particles seems to have only reinforced the idea among Buddhists that science would never get to the bottom of things. This belief was rooted in Mahāyāna Buddhist doctrine, which argues that there are no autonomous, 71

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static entities in the universe and that as long as scientists thought there were, they would be in error.66 Among the many revolutionary developments that took place in physics in the early part of the twentieth century, subatomic theory was not the only one to catch the attention of Chinese Buddhists. They also discussed the theory of relativity. Today a broad range of writers draw from quantum theory and the idea of quantum indeterminacy to support their claims of deep causal links between human consciousness and the physical universe and to call into question scientific materialism.67 Chinese Buddhists living in the 1920s were similarly suspicious of scientific materialism, but they looked to relativity, and not the nascent field of quantum physics, to support their claim that “the myriad dharmas are consciousness-only” (wanfa weishi). Albert Einstein’s (1879–1955) theories have had far-ranging implications for philosophy and science. Einstein laid out his theory of relativity in two stages: in 1905 and from 1915 to 1917. In 1905, he outlined special relativity, which introduced the idea that all motion (in both time and space) is relative to the location and speed of the observer. In other words, there are no absolute, Cartesian vantage points. His explanation of special relativity also included the constancy of the speed of light (c), and the famous equation E = mc2, which describes the equivalence of energy and matter. This theory was “special” because it only applied to the relativity of observations made from individual frames of reference. Between 1915 and 1917, Einstein laid out his general theory of relativity, which unified the theory of special relativity with the Newtonian theory of universal gravitation. The fame of both Einstein and his theories took off in 1919 when two physicists made observations during a solar eclipse that empirically proved his theories. Around the same time, the philosopher and mathematician Bertrand Russell began to promote Einstein’s theories in earnest, and Einstein won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921. Chinese thinkers became aware of Einstein’s theories soon after his formulation of general relativity. Prior to 1910, physics education in China was not up to date; none of the most important works of physics—those by Copernicus, Galileo, Isaac Newton (1642–1727), or James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879)—had been translated. This changed during the second decade of the twentieth century, when students 72

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returning from Japan, Europe, and especially the United States began to disseminate physics, just as they were doing with psychology and other sciences. Einstein’s theories of relativity were first discussed in China in 1917 by two Chinese students who returned from Japan, but for the next three years there were virtually no academic works on Einstein written in China. Between 1920 and 1922 several events led to the widespread propagation of the theory of relativity in China.68 By 1920, news of the sensational proof of Einstein’s theory using astronomical observation began appearing in Chinese newspapers. In October of that same year, Bertrand Russell began his ten-month lecture tour of China. In his lectures he repeatedly called Einstein one of the greatest thinkers of the age. The boost this gave to the popularity of Einstein’s ideas in China was supplemented by a widely publicized plan to have Einstein give a series of lectures in China in late 1922 and early 1923. Although Einstein eventually did come to China, he only stayed one night, and the lecture tour never materialized.69 Nevertheless, from late 1922 onward, Einstein and his theories became a topic of increasing interest in China. He was hailed by many in the post–May Fourth era as a revolutionary for overturning the classical physics of Newton, and many Buddhists adopted this same attitude. Since the moment of its first introduction in China, relativity was not simply associated with mathematical or theoretical issues but was invoked in a variety of philosophical contexts. Although a scientific understanding of Einstein’s theories developed in China soon after their introduction, they were also used in discussions of such philosophical problems as meaning, epistemic certainty, and the true limits of scientific knowledge. In fact, the very first time the theory of relativity was mentioned in China was as part of just such a discussion. In an essay from the journal Xueyi ⬠喅 (Education and Arts), Xu Chongqing 姙ⲯ㶭 (1888– 1969) rebutted an argument put forth by Cai Yuanpei that though science could answer questions about morality that religion could not, questions about the finitude of space and time were best left up to philosophy. Xu concluded that Einstein had shown time and space to be interchangeable. In other words Xu seems to have agreed with Cai that religion could not answer questions about morality, but he used relativity philosophically to bolster his argument that science could indeed make pronouncements about the nature of space and time. 73

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Buddhists also used Einstein’s theories to make epistemological arguments, but they employed them to make exactly the opposite point to the one made by Xu, stating that Einstein’s theory of relativity was the best proof of the limited, contingent nature of scientific knowledge.70 They argued that Einstein had shown that all empirically derived knowledge is subjective because one’s experience of events depends upon one’s frame of reference. Buddhists used Einstein to call into question those aspects of the scientific worldview with which they disagreed. They also used his ideas to support ideas from Buddhism not recognized by science. Once the relative nature of scientific truth could be demonstrated, the absolute value of the Buddha-dharma became, for them, uncontested. Just as the ideas of a round earth and heliocentricity had been treated before as the central theories of the scientific age, by the late 1920s Einstein’s theories had come to symbolize the most current science. This was a science whose theories were constantly changing, a science based on empiricism that now claimed all empirical observations were in some sense subjective, and as a result, a science that could promise no ultimate answers for humanity. Chinese Buddhist writings on science from the late 1920s and 1930s often included some version of the phrase “just as Einstein overturned Newton’s theories.” This expression was used repeatedly to prove that people’s ways of understanding the world, be they derived from common sense or the latest scientific experiment, are only partial and could at any moment be overturned by new theories.71 For example, in an article from 1927, Taixu said that Einstein’s theories had already “made the absolute relative” in scientific thinking.72 What he meant by this was that Einstein had shown that there was no such thing as absolute objective knowledge of events. In claiming that all scientific knowledge was relative, several authors used the radical nature of relativity to make room for other Buddhist teachings that “went against common sense” (weifan changshi 忽⍵ⷠ嬀). They argued that just as the theory of relativity is, strictly speaking, not empirically demonstrable but has nevertheless been accepted by the scientific community as true, certain Buddhist theories may also be true even though they are themselves not empirically verifiable. For example, Ouyang Jingwu wrote that although most people accept that matter is permanent, this is not actually correct. He cited Bertrand Russell as saying that the only reality lies in events, not 74

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things. Ouyang wrote that this change in understanding from a belief in solid matter composed of solid particles to a belief that the universe is ultimately a process of change is just like Einstein overturning Newton’s laws of universal gravitation.73 In a preface he wrote for his own CSBS, Wang Xiaoxu used similar language in his defense of the supersensory powers described as a product of meditation. (These powers and the role they played in Buddhists’ discussions of science are covered in detail in chapter 3.) Wang argued that supernatural powers can exist only if there are exceptions to the laws of nature, and since Einstein had shown that there are exceptions to Newton’s laws, there is room for the existence of such powers.74 What Wang seems to have been saying is that the supernatural powers exist outside current scientific knowledge about the capabilities of human beings. Just as the new knowledge put forth by Einstein called into question the Newtonian view of a universe composed of objects with absolute locations and velocities, so too did it call into question the idea of absolute knowledge about what humans can perceive. The idea that Einstein had overturned absolute knowledge continued to appear in Buddhist periodicals as late as 1948. Huang Ziqiang 湫冒⻟ wrote in an article on science and Buddhism that while Newtonian physics work well on earth, Einstein had shown that the phenomena we observe are affected by when and where they are observed. Huang interpreted this to mean there is no absolute truth. He did admit there are some things that are absolutely true, such as the law of the conservation of mass, but wrote that if people really want to arrive at absolute truth about human life (rensheng Ṣ䓇), they should study the Buddhist texts, as the knowledge these texts contain about this issue surpasses that of science.75 Buddhists’ use of relativity to support claims about their tradition should be considered within the context of the global effort to come to terms with the implications of this new theory, which drew relativity into a wide range of metaphysical speculation. Buddhists were not exceptional in this. Bertrand Russell noted in 1926 that philosophers in the West were also using Einstein’s theories to prove their metaphysical positions.76 One reason why relativity was used to support so many different philosophies is that Einstein’s theories, and the cosmology that developed after his theory of general relativity was proven by empirical observation in 1919, are in some sense based on very little firsthand observation of the type 75

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easily made by the layperson. Much of modern scientific cosmology, which was born in 1931 when the American astronomer Edwin Hubble (1889–1953) began telling others about his teams’ observations that the universe is expanding, is based heavily in theory rather than empirical observation available to the layperson. Observation is still necessary, but mathematics and deductive logic now carry much of the burden in the field of astronomy. The more a science relies on this sort of reasoning, the harder it is for laypeople to understand, and the easier it is for them to criticize it on strictly philosophical grounds. It is harder to refute what science can demonstrate through empirical prediction than what it can only state through complex theory. This is in no way meant to question the validity of these theories, but when the subject matter are phenomena observed with the aided eye (as in the case of the microbiological and astronomical observations routinely cited by Buddhists), it is much more difficult to argue against the truths proclaimed about these phenomena. But when science makes claims about the origin of the universe (cosmology) or of human life (evolution), it cannot offer up the same kind of evidence. In such cases it is easier to refute what science claims on philosophical or religious grounds or to use those claims in the service of still other claims, as Buddhists did to support the position that all phenomena are consciousness-only. Buddhists interpreted the theory of relativity as refuting the idea of absolute knowledge about the objective world. Taixu adopted this reading of relativity and employed it to support a more specific position, the Buddhist premise of consciousness-only. During the first part of the twentieth century, Chinese Buddhists increasingly used the expression “the myriad dharmas are consciousness-only” to summarize the position of their tradition relative to science and modern philosophy. Whalen Lai has shown this idea, when rendered as weixin ⓗ⽫ (Mind-Only), to be associated with the traditions of the Avataṃsaka-sūtra.77 It also appears in Buddhist rituals, such as in the most common Chinese rite for feeding hungry ghosts.78 Elsewhere I have argued that the exact phrase used by twentieth-century Chinese Buddhists originated within Chan literature before becoming popular in the twentieth century as a way for Buddhists to stake a claim for Buddhism’s position on some of the major discussions of the day in pithy fashion.79

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An important question facing thinkers all over the world in the nineteenth century was the nature of the relationships among the physical, the mental, and the moral. By the second half of the nineteenth century, the opposition between materialism and idealism in European philosophy had resulted in serious philosophical battles and even in the brief popularity of monism as a way to reconcile the two.80 This had an impact in China where this opposition had evolved by the late 1910s into a viewpoint that understood the universe as matter/material (wuzhi 䈑岒) and/ or spirit/spiritual (jingshen 䱦䤆), with materialism slowly becoming the ascendant philosophical position. Under the influence of developments in Western philosophy in the later part of the nineteenth century, by the first year of the Republic it was becoming more common in China for those discussing Western learning to classify every type of Western philosophy as either materialism (weiwuzhuyi ⓗ䈑ᷣ佑) or idealism (weixinzhuyi ⓗ⽫ᷣ佑). Although such a classification does refer, albeit in simplified fashion, to distinctions made in Western philosophy, the tendency to organize phenomena according to neat dichotomies is also one of the dominant trends of Chinese thought. Dichotomy has been used rhetorically throughout Chinese history in philosophical contexts,81 and it is not surprising to see it used to classify and explain Western philosophy in this manner. In discussing the relationship between Buddhism and Western modes of thought (including both philosophy and science), many Buddhists adopted the position that all Western philosophies are ultimately either materialist or idealist and that these two tendencies oppose one another. For Buddhists, neither position was correct. The correct philosophical position one should take as to the nature of reality falls between these two extremes, which many Buddhists defined using the expression “the myriad dharmas are consciousness-only,” or simply “consciousness-only” (weishi). For many Buddhists, the central teaching of Mahāyāna Buddhism, one that transcended both of the two types of Western philosophy, lay in this expression.82 “The myriad dharmas are consciousness-only” was not originally an ontological claim but was instead meant to emphasize the fact that insofar as the world that is experienced can only be found in one’s consciousness of it, it is irrelevant to treat external objects as independent

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of the mind, as these can never be dealt with in this way in a meaningful fashion. As Dan Lusthaus states: The key Yogācāric phrase vjñāpti-mātra [consciousness-only] does not mean (as is often touted in scholarly literature) that “consciousness alone exists,” but rather that “all our efforts to get beyond ourselves are nothing put projections of our consciousness.” Yogācārins [i.e., proponents of Consciousness-Only thought] treat the term vjñāpti-mātra as an epistemic caution, not an ontological pronouncement. Having suspended the ontological query that leads to either idealism or materialism, they are instead interested in why we generate and attach to such a position in the first place.83

As with much of Buddhism, the purpose of this teaching is a therapeutic, soteriological one. Consciousness-Only thought developed as a means to describe the process whereby sentient beings make false conclusions about the world in which they live. It is these conclusions, rooted in ignorance and manifesting as discriminative thinking, that generate suffering for us. A fuller explanation of Consciousness-Only thought is offered in chapter 4. In 1927, Taixu wrote that theory of relativity states that time, space, and matter do not have an absolute existence but arise from the recognition of things in a field (changye ⟜慶) by human intelligence (lingxing 曰⿏).84 This human intelligence is tantamount to the determinative observer in Einstein’s relativity.85 Taixu argued that relativity thus agreed with the Consciousness-Only position that the external world of space, time, and matter does not exist in a meaningful way independent of a sentient observer and offered a similar interpretation of Einstein four years later, writing that Einstein had proven that matter is related to space, time, and mind, and there is no matter independent of these factors.86

IN THEIR ENGAGEMENT WITH SCIENCE, Chinese Buddhists were, on balance, only somewhat interested in what science said about the objective, natural world. As the following chapters will show, Buddhists were far more interested in questions closer to home or as Huang Ziqiang 78

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put it, truth about “human life.” Given the historical context in which they lived, however, it was not possible to ignore the great respect science was earning due to its ability to make discoveries and accurate predictions about the natural world. Nor was it possible for Buddhists to ignore the criticisms of foreign missionaries and Chinese iconoclasts that their tradition was antiscientific. In defending their tradition, there was only so far they would go in aligning it with science. Buddhists interpreted their scriptures to accord with modern astronomy, but they used subatomic and relativity physics to reject materialism. Buddhists engaged with scientific descriptions of the natural world, but they did so strategically. Their approach of combining arguments for congruence between science and Buddhism with arguments for the superiority of science appeared clearly in their analysis of scientific empiricism, which we examine next.

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3

Empiricism and Means of Verification

IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHINA, science drew much of its cachet from its ability to support its assertions with evidence, and some claimed this was precisely the reason why science was superior to other systems of thought, such as religion. It was thought that hypotheses about all kinds of natural phenomena could be absolutely proven or disproven through the rigorous employment of the empirical method, and some believed the epistemology offered by science was unique in offering such proof.1 In dealing with science, some Buddhists seemed to agree with the realist premise that knowledge of the world is both possible and verifiable. In response to the critics who described Buddhism as a deluded belief, Buddhists explained that Buddhism and science actually share a commitment to the verification of their truths. In following this line of reasoning, Buddhists claimed a methodological similarity between Buddhism and science. The two not only shared certain facts, facts about astronomy and microbiology being the most common, but also a basic methodological approach to the verification of hypotheses. Empiricism was thus one of the major themes Chinese Buddhists took up when talking about science and Buddhism in the 1920s and 1930s, but they did not limit themselves to showing their shared dedication to verification. Some carried out a deeper analysis of the scientific method using tools from classical Buddhist logic. This system of logic had 80

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originally developed in India partly to facilitate interreligious debate by establishing rules by which competing truth claims could be evaluated and critiqued. It was therefore natural for Chinese Buddhists to judge the relative merits of the truth claims of Buddhism and science using the tools of Buddhist logic, which, partly as a result of this, reached unheard of levels of popularity in China during the 1920s and 1930s. Famous scholars such as Zhang Taiyan 䪈⣒䀶 (1868–1936) and Liang Shuming 㠩㻙㹇 (1893–1988) touched on Buddhist logic in their discussions of modern Western thought, but it was a widely published argument between Wang Xiaoxu and Hu Shih at the start of the 1930s that did the most to bring ideas from Buddhist logic into Buddhist critiques of scientific empiricism. Although Buddhists recognized empirical verification as central to both Buddhism and science, in the end Buddhism was judged to be the “higher empiricism.” There were two main rationales for this claim. First, by removing false concepts, Buddhist practice allowed the use of the mundane human senses in ways unfettered by false concepts. Buddhists argued that meditation and enlightenment allowed one freedom from the ubiquitous delusions of the mind that prevented ordinary people, scientists included, from seeing the reality of what was right in front of them. Buddhist practitioners thus had a better chance of recognizing when their senses were deceiving them, and they were supposedly better at letting go of preconceived notions about the world that might get in the way of seeing the actual causes behind any given phenomenon. The other rationale for Buddhists’ claim that Buddhism represented a higher empiricism was that Buddhism allowed its practitioners to attain supernormal sensory abilities. It was not always explicitly stated, but many authors implicitly referred to such powers. For example, although he did not say it in his articles, when Taixu claimed that the Buddha had been able to see microscopic organisms in water and the multitude of worlds in the universe, he was relying on the tradition’s understanding that the Buddha perceived these truths using the superhuman senses he acquired through meditation. Their belief in supernatural powers of perception placed Buddhists in danger of being labeled superstitious by iconoclasts, but it was a belief that many, even the most educated, refused to abandon. Wang Xiaoxu not only believed in the supernatural powers, he made them central to his argument that Buddhism represented a higher empiricism than science. 81

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Verification as a Common Imperative In their writings, Buddhist authors repeatedly emphasized that one had to “verify” or “prove” (zheng 嫱)2 the theories of Buddhism. This argument required no major modification of traditional Buddhist discourse, as the word zheng (which is also part of the compound zhengming 嫱㖶, which means “to prove” in modern Chinese) has long been used to refer to either the personal realization of Buddhist truths that happens during enlightenment or simply to enlightenment itself. The idea of proving or verifying that which one has merely theorized about is common to both Buddhist and scientific uses of the word zheng. In Chinese Buddhism, one common traditional outline of the stages of spiritual practice is, “faith, understanding, practice, and verification” (xin jie xing zheng ᾉ妋埴嫱). This phrase appears in numerous Huayan commentaries and was in widespread use in Chinese Buddhism in the Republican period. One formulation of this concept appeared in Yang Wenhui’s Primer. “In studying Buddhism, the beginning lies in faith. Faith then understanding; understanding then practice. From practice to understanding and finally verification, know the order of these steps and discriminate between the deviant and the correct.”3 Although he was not writing specifically about science, it can be seen from Yang’s account that in Buddhism understanding and practice are both necessary precursors to zheng, just as understanding, hypothesis, and experiment are in science. This was used to demonstrate that Buddhism already had a discourse of verification, and this discourse was used to respond to claims made about the uniqueness of the scientific method and its ability to verify hypotheses. The general strategy of relying on the lexical resonance between the term zheng as used in science and in Buddhism was established among Buddhists in the mid- to late 1920s, and it was the basis upon which Buddhists claimed that Buddhism, like science, represented an empirical approach to the discovery of truth. In articulating this, many authors emphasized the point that Buddhists did not simply believe in what the Buddhist scriptures said. To do so would have been considered superstitious, and Buddhists were quick to argue that their tradition was not superstitious. Buddhists’ desire to highlight verification was reinforced by the science and philosophy of life debates, which promoted the notion 82

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that science was tantamount to its method. In an article from 1924, in which he drew from a wide range of sciences to support the Buddhist doctrine of impermanence, the layman Liu Xianjiao ∱栗㔁 began by saying that nirvana is something that can be verified.4 This comment bears no substantial relationship to the rest of his argument, but appearing as it does at the beginning of his article, it demonstrates that verifiability was one of the basic assumptions he made about Buddhism. It also served as a rhetorical link that allowed him to bring science into his arguments. Five years later, in his 1929 article, “The Scientific Method of Consciousness-Only,” Tang Dayuan, a member of the Wuchang School, located the similarity between Consciousness-Only and science in their shared reliance on analysis and verification. The first lines of his work read: People all over the world are arguing about the scientific method. This thing we call “science” refers to research that can be divided into different classes, such as the methods of physics, chemistry, psychology, biology, and other disciplines. This word “science” refers to those fields of studies’ ability to plan experiments, to carry out highly detailed analyses, to seek the truth of things, to systematize these activities and their findings, and so on. Buddhists have Consciousness-Only, and its analysis and methods of verification all reach the ultimate. It is the only discipline [within Buddhism] able to plan experiments.5

According to Tang, both science and Consciousness-Only are analytical and systematic, and both seek truth through verification, or zheng. In the end, however, Tang argued that Consciousness-Only can reach ultimate knowledge about the world, and by implication, science cannot. Tang was not alone in specifically citing experimentation in arguments about Buddhism and science’s shared commitment to the verification of truths. One Jian Mulu 䯉ヽ䚏 stated in a brief piece from 1931 that science shares two of its central premises with Buddhism: they both emphasize experimentation, and they do not believe in achieving success through luck. For Jian, the lesson from this is that humans must put a lot of effort into practicing Buddhism to achieve their goals, just as scientists do.6 The discourse of verification continued to appear in the Chinese Buddhist press into the 1940s. In an article that was published in 1942 83

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in both a Buddhist magazine and as the preface to the book Foxue yu kexue ἃ⬠冯䥹⬠ (Buddhism and Science) by the layman Hanhan ⭺㵝, one Guangwen ⺋㔯 argued that the Buddha-dharma was not opposed to science.7 In fact, Guangwen said, Buddhism uses the same methods as science but is more thorough in carrying them out. To support his claim that Buddhism is empirical, he invoked the phrase “faith, understanding, practice, and verification” (xin jie xing zheng) as a summary of the “method” of Buddhism.8 By demonstrating Buddhism’s commitment to verification, Buddhists tried to deflect the criticism that their tradition was superstitious because it forced people to accept its doctrines on blind faith. Nevertheless, while writers such as Tang Dayuan and Guangwen argued that Buddhism was not opposed to science, they did feel that it was superior to it. This argument was often expressed using the terms of classical Buddhist logic.

Buddhist Logic and the Scientific Method For Chinese thinkers in the 1920s and 1930s, science was a body of practices unified (both across disciplines and through history) by its adherence to a single scientific method, a method that combined empiricism and inductive reasoning. As Peter Buck has argued, this view was partly due to the influence of American attitudes toward science at the time. Many of China’s early scientists studied in America at a time when it was common to believe that scientists had, since the seventeenth century, shared a similar set of assumptions about the natural world and had carried out their research using a unified methodology regardless of the branch of science in which they were working.9 The weight of scholarship produced on the history of science over the past half century has shown this view to be incorrect. Those pursuing activities generally included under the label “science” have often had very different views about the nature of nature (e.g., with regard to its regularity) and have carried out their research using a variety of dissimilar methodologies. There has never been one “scientific method,” but the belief that there is one unified method, one single way to truth that can be applied almost mechanically without the need for fuzzy ideas of interpretation or intuition, supported the popular idea that science was a means of knowing unique in human history. In China, this idea had a significant impact on the ways in which Buddhists 84

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understood the relationship between Buddhism and science, and some of them used Buddhist logic to think about that relationship. Indian logic (Ch. yinming ⚈㖶; Skt. hetuvidyā), literally, “the elucidation of causes,” was one of the traditional “five arts” (Ch. wuming Ḽ㖶; Skt. pañcavidyā) of India (these are discussed in further detail in chapter 6). Classic Buddhist logic developed as a result of contact and friction between Buddhist and non-Buddhist schools in India sometime in the fourth and fifth centuries C.E. Prior to this, the practice of logic had developed in India within the Nyāya (Logic) school.10 The founder of classical Buddhist formal logic in India is usually regarded as Dignāga (fl. fifth century C.E.).11 There were important developments in Buddhist logic after Dignāga, and Buddhist logic is generally thought to have reached its zenith in the works of the sixth-century Buddhist Dharmakīrti. His ideas formed the basis for all later Indian Buddhist logic and for the development of logic in Tibet. Dharmakīrti’s texts were not translated into Chinese, however, and when one speaks of “Buddhist logic” in China, one is therefore speaking of a Dignāga-based logic.12 In China the two most important texts on Buddhist logic are Dignāga’s Nyāyamukha and a commentary on it, Nyāyapraveśa, written by Śaṃkarasvāmin (n.d.).13 The first real attempt to establish Buddhist logic in China was led by the great translator and traveler Xuanzang 䌬⤀ (602–664).14 He and his disciples were the main exponents of Buddhist logic and ConsciousnessOnly thought in the Tang dynasty, and he translated a number of texts from the classical Buddhist logic of India. Despite his efforts, Buddhist logic was never very popular in China, and by the end of the Tang dynasty, after the time of Xuanzang and his disciples, it fell into relative obscurity. There were some thinkers in the Ming dynasty who mentioned Buddhist logic in their writings on Consciousness-Only, but they were few and their writings sporadic. Buddhist logic would have to wait until the early twentieth century before becoming popular among Chinese Buddhists.15 Buddhist logic is closely associated with Consciousness-Only in Chinese Buddhism, but logic took a little longer to achieve the popularity attained by Consciousness-Only in the twentieth century.16 As Joachim Kurtz has pointed out, despite the early availability of texts on classical Western logic, logic as a whole was not taken seriously in China until the first decade of the twentieth century, and it was not until the 1920s that the study of formal logic really took root.17 The study of Buddhist logic 85

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in China followed roughly the same historical trajectory. Buddhist logic did appear in the curriculum at Yang Wenhui’s seminary,18 but prior to the late 1910s it was dealt with in a more or less desultory fashion as but one branch of Buddhist learning and was rarely compared with Western logic. The one major exception to this was the philologist and reformer Zhang Taiyan, who in the first decade of the twentieth century carried out the first general comparison of Buddhist, Western, and Chinese philosophies of logic in China. Zhang’s was a simple and rather unsystematic comparison, but his work represented a first step in the contemporary application of the relatively moribund field of Buddhist logic to modern philosophical discourse in China, and he developed at least one idea that was picked up by later writers. In his 1906 book Zhuzixue lüeshuo 媠⫸⬠䔍婒 (Brief Discussion on the Teachings of the Masters), Zhang identifies both “the reason” (gu 㓭) in Mozi’s thought and “the reason” (Ch. yin ⚈; Skt. hetu) in Buddhist logic, with the “minor premise” of Aristotelian logic.19 Wang Xiaoxu, who used Buddhist logic extensively in his discussions of science, made this same identification more than 20 years later in his Comparative Study of the Buddha-dharma and Science. In the end, however, Wang did not do much with this idea; instead, he and other writers made much greater use of the concept of the pramāṇas. The pramāṇas are one of the central concepts of Buddhist logic, and they figured prominently in twentieth-century uses of Buddhist logic in discussions of science.20 The term pramāṇa may be translated as “cognition,” and in Indian logic it refers to any means by which one gains authoritative knowledge about the world.21 Pramāṇas were used in both the Buddhist and non-Buddhist philosophies of logic to categorize truth claims according to the type of knowledge upon which they are based. The Nyāya school originally recognized four bases of authoritative knowledge, but Buddhist logic after Dignāga—the type discussed here—recognized only two pramāṇas as valid bases for knowledge.22 The first of these is direct cognition (Ch. xianliang 䎦慷; Skt. pratyakṣa pramāṇa), which is also sometimes called true direct cognition (zhen xianliang 䛇䎦慷).23 This is basically the perception of the senses devoid of all discriminative thinking. In both Consciousness-Only and Buddhist logic, direct perception is the most trustworthy form of knowledge, as it is not colored by mental defilement or the working of the discursive 86

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mind. Reasoning, or inferential cognition (Ch. biliang 㭼慷; Skt. anumāna pramāṇa), is the other accepted basis for knowledge, and this refers to the activity of the rational mind that generates knowledge by reflecting on sensory input. A classic example from Buddhist logic of this type of cognition would be deducing there is a fire on the other side of a wall because one can see smoke rising above the wall. In Buddhist logic, as in all of Indian logic, the pramāṇas are used to judge arguments. Any proposition put forth in an argument must be based on knowledge gained from one of the two pramāṇas and can be dealt with according to its type. An argument based on facts not discovered through one of these two modes of cognition is dismissed out of hand. This makes a certain kind of sense, given the interreligious context in which Buddhist logic developed. If one were to claim that X is true because it is discussed in the Vedas, Buddhists, who do not accept the Vedas as statements of truth, have no reason to accept that X is true. In other words, interreligious debate could only happen when the issues being debated could be judged according to information available to all participants. Logic also served important intrareligious functions within Buddhism, but it never functioned as a “formal” logic, such as that laid out by Aristotle.24 Buddhist logic was not intended to be solely a study of rules of proof; it was also meant to deal with aspects of epistemology and soteriology, which are closely connected in Buddhism. As the great scholar of Buddhist logic T. H. Stcherbatsky wrote: But the logic of Buddhism contains more. It also contains a theory of sense perception or, more precisely, a theory on the part of pure sensation, in the whole content of our knowledge, on the reliability of our knowledge, and on the reliability of the external world as cognized by us in sensations and images. These problems are usually treated under the heading of epistemology. Therefore we may be justified in calling the Buddhist system a system of epistemological logic.25

In Buddhist logic, the pramāṇas are used to evaluate the reliability of knowledge. They are used to identify the origin of knowledge, and in so doing relate that knowledge to the overall soteriological project of Buddhism, which is the transformation of our mistaken perceptions about the world into wisdom. The purpose of Buddhist logic is neatly summed 87

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up in the opening lines of the Chinese translation of the Nyāyapraveśa. “Proof and refutation, and [their associated] fallacies, are used simply to awaken others. Direct cognition and inferential cognition, [and their associated] fallacies, are used simply for one’s own awakening.”26 One of the first Chinese authors to use the pramāṇas to talk about modern Western thought was Liang Shuming, who discussed them in an article he published in 1921 that compared Consciousness-Only thought to the ideas of the French philosopher Henri Bergson.27 An Yanming has dealt with Liang Shuming’s treatment of Henri Bergson’s thought in greater detail elsewhere, so I will merely summarize Liang’s use of the pramāṇas.28 One of Liang Shuming’s primary goals in this article was to refute claims made by Chen Duxiu and others that the idea of “intuition” (zhijue 䚜奢) that Bergson put forward was the same as the Buddhist concept of direct cognition. For Bergson, intuition is a special kind of perception beyond the realm of ideological commitments such as realism or idealism, which gives us access to a realm of knowing beyond that of the rational mind.29 Liang Shuming argued that Bergson’s intuition was not the same as direct cognition because the knowledge granted by intuition still consists only of concepts (yi 佑) and not the basic substance of reality (ti 橼) that is apprehended by means of direct cognition. Liang said that Bergson’s intuition was also not inferential cognition because inferential cognition was none other than the same reason or logic (lizhi 䎮㘢) that Bergson’s intuition is meant to circumvent.30 The most important part of Liang’s article occurs in its conclusion, where he notes that Bergson’s thought differs from Consciousness-Only because many philosophers of Consciousness-Only actually use and value reason. He says Consciousness-Only uses as a scientific method the very rationality that Bergson denied.31 Liang felt Buddhism and science shared a commitment to the rational deduction of truth from observable data, and he invoked the pramāṇas to differentiate Buddhism from the then popular metaphysics of Bergson, which he felt did not share that same commitment. It is difficult to know for certain whether Liang Shuming was the first to equate the logic upon which science is based with the inferential cognition of Buddhist logic, but it eventually became an important idea in Buddhists’ discussions of science. The most notable examples are in the writings of Wang Xiaoxu, who seems to have been influenced by the terms of Liang’s arguments, if not necessarily by Liang’s 88

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conclusions themselves. The first time Wang discussed the pramāṇas in print was in his 1927 criticism of the book Foxue bashi zhi piping yu yanjiu ἃ⬠ℓ嬀ᷳ㈡姽冯䞼䨞 (Criticism and Research of the Eight Consciousnesses in Buddhist Studies) by Jin Han.32 The materialistic interpretation of Consciousness-Only offered in that book generated a great deal of criticism within the Buddhist community (discussed in detail in chapter 4). In his critique of Jin’s book, Wang agreed that the scientific method is a type of inferential cognition as defined in Buddhist logic, but he argued, pace Liang (and in contradiction to Bergson’s usage of the term), that science is actually based on intuition, which serves as the basis for all scientific activity. Wang’s usage of the term “intuition” (zhijue) relied on the term’s literal Chinese meaning, which may be translated as “direct awareness.” Accordingly, Wang argued that scientists rely on their senses to experience the world. Then, based on the empirical data they collect in this way, they construct sciences such as physics and physiology. Scientists could therefore be described as relying to some extent on both direct and inferential cognitions in their pursuit of knowledge about the universe, but Wang considered this knowledge to be ultimately limited.33 Buddhists such as Wang did not simply use the categories of Buddhist logic to show the similarity of Buddhism and science. By the time Wang was writing in the late 1920s, Buddhists had moved beyond showing the noncontradiction of Buddhism and science and were arguing that Buddhism was superior to science. In his critique of Jin Han’s book, Wang identified science as a practice based on a kind of direct cognition he referred to as intuition, but eventually concluded this is not really a form of true direct cognition but rather “pseudo-direct cognition” (si xianliang Ụ䎦慷). Scientists’ perceptions were biased and clouded by assumptions, and as long as this was the case, their attempts to create theories based on these perceptions would always be incomplete, or to use Wang’s term, their knowledge will always be based on pseudo-inferential cognition (si biliang Ụ㭼慷). In 1929, two years after writing his critique of Jin Han’s book, Wang Xiaoxu published the essay that would became the eponymous centerpiece of his popular collection Comparative Study of the Buddha-dharma and Science (hereafter CSBS). In that essay he expanded on his use of the pramāṇas and linked them with the Consciousness-Only thought. He continued to argue that the conclusions of science, the truths it arrived at 89

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through observation and reasoning, were flawed because they are based on invalid premises derived from faulty perceptions of the world. In this essay, Wang first likened direct cognition to the experience of the empiricists and inferential cognition to Western logic. There had been some change in his thinking, and in contrast to his critique of Jin Han, in this piece he accepted that the activity of the five senses of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, and touching can be forms of direct cognition. But they function as direct cognition only when they are unmediated by concepts or discriminating thoughts. This is where the problem lies for scientists.34 Scientists are not good at moving past their discriminating thoughts, and instead attach to concepts and names, which are not part of true direct cognition. This prevents them from making clear observations of the world. For Wang, the “mind” discussed in science and Western philosophy was nothing more than the sensation of thought, which is the activity of the sixth of the eight consciousnesses described in ConsciousnessOnly thought. This concept is explained in greater detail in the following chapter, but to summarize here, in Consciousness-Only the thinking that occurs within the sixth consciousness is the interaction of the data from the five senses and the discriminatory and deluded influence of a seventh consciousness. Based on this, Wang Xiaoxu argued that the “mind” that is the locus of the rational thinking characteristic of modern science is actually a form of delusion. True knowledge can only come from true direct cognition, and this is only available to buddhas and bodhisattvas.35 Wang characterized direct cognition not simply as the ordinary perception of the senses when free of discriminative thinking but rather as a supersense associated with the noetic aspects of enlightenment. Like Liang Shuming, Wang Xiaoxu saw the practice of the scientific method, with its accumulation of hypotheses, observations, and conclusions, as merely a form of inferential cognition, at best secondary to direct cognition. Wang’s understanding of the relationship between science and direct and inferential cognitions proved to be fairly influential within the Chinese Buddhist community. This was due in no small part to a preface that Hu Shih wrote, at Wang’s request, for CSBS. In that preface, Hu was scornful of the idea of direct cognition. By writing in defense of both the book and its contents, Buddhists disseminated Wang’s ideas via a number of Buddhist periodicals in the early 1930s. Both Cai Yuanpei and Hu Shih wrote prefaces to CSBS, but Hu’s was far more critical. Hu even took the 90

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step of allowing it to be published independently in the secular magazine Xinyue 㕘㚰 (New Moon) in early 1931, a year before Wang’s book was released.36 In his preface, Hu dismissed Wang’s writing and argued that there was a fundamental difference between Buddhism and science. Most importantly here, Hu leveled two criticisms at the concept of direct cognition. He criticized Wang for promoting something that he himself had not directly experienced, which Hu said went against the objective tone Wang had set at the beginning of the book’s main essay.37 This critique did not raise the hackles of the Buddhist community the way his second criticisms did, however. Later in his preface as he pondered what Wang meant by direct cognition, Hu wrote, “We must conclude that what he describes is the nature of perception at the lowest level of animals, and we must ask what value can be placed upon it.”38 In other words, direct cognition is simply an unthinking form of perception shared by even the most unintelligent animals. If this is the case, why criticize scientists and other ordinary mortals for not taking advantage of it? Hu’s was a bold statement about an idea that was becoming important to China’s Buddhists, and that community’s response was immediate. Apart from the second preface Wang wrote for CSBS in response to Hu, at least four separate rebuttals of Hu’s criticism appeared in the two years between 1931 and 1933. The authors of these pieces all made specific mention of the concept of direct cognition. In July 1931, before Wang’s book was even published, Duhuan ⹎⮘ responded to Hu by affirming that buddhas and bodhisattvas can indeed acquire the power of true direct cognition.39 One month later a Korean-born Chinese politician, businessman, and lay Buddhist Yu Huiguan 䌱ㄏ奨 (1891–1933) took the same basic position in his criticism of Hu, though he did so in greater detail than Duhuan.40 Yu said that although there was some truth to Hu Shih’s statement that direct cognition is like “the nature of perception at the lowest levels of animals,” what he is really talking about in that case are feelings and not perceptions. One cannot explain true direct cognition to ordinary people or those who have not had any “attainment in the practice of meditation” (xi suo cheng ding 佺㇨ㆸ⭂). Of course Yu was referring to Hu Shih here, but not content to let the matter go with this implied criticism, Yu described Hu Shih as the very epitome of “the lowest” of ordinary people, using the same words the latter had used to belittle the idea of direct cognition by describing animals.41 91

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It was clear that Wang’s book caused a stir in the Buddhist community, in some measure because of Hu’s negative preface. Liu Tianxing ∱⣑埴 adopted a cautious tone with regard to discussions of the relationship of science and Buddhism in a detailed response he wrote to Hu’s preface that was published in 1932.42 Liu wrote that true direct cognition would indeed be valuable, if it exists, because it could verify the existence of rebirth and supernatural powers. Although Liu took an agnostic approach to the issue of direct cognition, which is reflective of the overall tone of his piece, he did not think that Hu offered any support for his criticism of Wang. And Liu maintained that Buddhism could indeed offer verification free from discrimination.43 The monk Shengyi 俾ᶨ also emphasized many of the same points as Liu. Shengyi was shown Wang’s book by the abbot of Baoguo ⟙⚳ Temple in Suzhou while visiting him in the fall of 1932. The following year Shengyi published an article that reads as something of an extended meditation on Wang’s work.44 Like Liu, Shengyi wrote that Buddhism is indeed not science, but that it nevertheless has much to offer humanity. He was not critical of Hu the way Duhuan or Yu were, stating explicitly that he did not wish to address Hu’s comments, but he did praise Wang for proving the existence of rebirth and the supernatural powers using both science and the pramāṇas.45 Even after the immediate storm over Hu Shih’s preface died down, Wang’s interpretation of the pramāṇas continued to hold an important place for Buddhists in their discussions of science. In 1935, Chen Hushi 昛㷾⢓ repeated Wang Xiaoxu’s ideas that the hypotheses upon which science is based are simply forms of inferential cognition. For inferential cognition to be true, Chen asserted, it must be based on true direct cognition, but because modern science is not based on such valid knowledge, its theories are not true in an ultimate sense.46 Like Chen, other Chinese Buddhists repeatedly argued that the truths discovered by science are not “ultimately” (jiujing 䨞䪇) true. This allowed them to create space for the Buddha-dharma, which they felt did describe facts that were ultimately true. The debate over direct cognition was important for these Buddhists because it was seen as a more valid means of knowledge than the one offered by the inferential cognition of science, and this served as the basis for their argument that Buddhism represented a “higher empiricism.” 92

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Over the next decade Buddhists continued to identify the practice of science as a form of inferential cognition. One can look, for example, at a 1946 article written by one Tang Dahai Ⓒ⣏㴟, who argued that Buddhism was not exactly a form of science, philosophy, or religion, though it did share some attributes with each of those three disciplines. In his explanation of the scientific nature of Buddhism, he mentioned several of the ideas discussed so far in this chapter: As for the manner in which the Buddha-dharma is studied, one begins with pure faith, continues with hearing, reflecting on, practicing, and upholding the Dharma, and ends with verification. As Buddhist practice relies on direct cognition, uses inferential cognition, and returns to the verification of the truth, it is a truth-emphasizing science. Because its principles are precise and its meaning emphasizes the obscure, it is a pure philosophy. Finally, because in Buddhism one’s practice begins with faith and ends in the verification of enlightened wisdom [Ch. puti 厑㍸; Skt. bodhi] and nirvana, it is also a nonsuperstitious, atheistic, and abundantly rational religion.47

In his invocation of the pramāṇas, Tang did not totally agree with Wang Xiaoxu, who said that science uses only inferential cognition and gives no access to the wonderful realm of knowledge attained through the application of true direct cognition. Tang saw within science the use of both inferential and direct cognitions. Tang did assume that those who read his article would understand his identification of science as a form of inferential cognition, and he felt no need to explain how the categories from Buddhist logic were intrinsically related to the scientific method. From this one can conclude that among the literate Buddhist community at least, the idea that science was a form of inferential cognition may well have been widespread enough by the late 1940s to need no explanation. In this passage, Tang made reference to the idea that Buddhist practice followed the stages of “faith, understanding, practice, and verification” described at the beginning of this chapter. He also invoked another similar model, which appears most notably in the Yogācārabhūmi, “hearing, reflecting [on what is heard], and then practicing it” (wen si xiu 倆⿅ᾖ). This tells us that even in the 1940s Buddhists felt the need to show that their tradition was not based on blind belief but on the 93

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personal confirmation of the truths of Buddhism. By pointing to Buddhism’s insistence on empirical verification, Chinese Buddhists could demonstrate that Buddhism was, in Tang’s words, a “nonsuperstitious, atheistic, and abundantly rational religion.” Interestingly, throughout the 1920s and 1930s many Buddhists supported their claim that Buddhism was eminently empirical by invoking the supersensory powers of Buddhism, which were regarded by supporters of scientism as a prime example of the very superstition they opposed.

The Higher Empiricism of Supersensory Powers All of the respondents to Hu Shih’s criticisms of direct cognition mentioned and defended the Buddhist belief in supersensory powers. They argued that the reason science denied the existence of such powers was because it did not have access to the direct cognition attained through cultivation of Buddhist meditation, which was the only means by which to verify their existence.48 This argument is just one example of the ways in which Buddhists used the concept of the pramāṇas to call into question the truth claims of science, or in this case the claims of untruth that some directed at an important doctrine of Chinese Buddhism, the attainment of supersensory powers through meditation. The Buddhist tradition has long held that advanced practitioners of meditation are able to acquire certain supernatural abilities or shentong 䤆忂 (Skt. abhijñā). In the twentieth century, a number of Buddhists defended the existence of these powers, and identified them as the basis for the higher empiricism of Buddhism. In the Chinese Buddhist tradition, these powers were believed to be six in number: (1) spiritual action (i.e., flight and bodily transformation, shenzu tong 䤆嵛忂); (2) the divine eye (tianyan tong ⣑䛤忂); (3) the divine ear (tianer tong ⣑俛忂); (4) the ability to read others’ minds (taxin tong Ṿ⽫忂); (5) the ability to know about one’s own and others’ past lives (suming tong ⭧␥忂); and (6) the ability to eradicate “outflows,” or habits and karma that lead to future rebirth (loujin tong 㺷䚉忂). According to Buddhism, practitioners of nonBuddhist forms of spiritual cultivation can attain the first five of these powers, but only awakened practitioners of Buddhism can attain the sixth. The idea that Buddhism represented a higher empiricism because it allowed for the attainment of supersensory powers had actually been 94

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mooted prior to the twentieth century in the writings of the late Qing reformist martyr Tan Sitong 嬂▋⎴ (1865–1898). In his Renxue ṩ⬠ (An Exposition of Benevolence),49 Tan argued that Buddhism was superior to Western learning because while our ordinary senses can not apprehend all of the phenomena of the universe, supramundane senses are able to do so. Tan did not specifically point to the shentong as authors would three decades later, citing instead the cognate Buddhist concept of the “five eyes” (Ch. wuyan Ḽ䛤; Skt. pañca-cakṣu) or five kinds of vision identified in the Buddhist tradition.50 The first and lowest of these types of vision is the sense of sight used by ordinary people. The higher types of vision are available only to gods and human meditation masters, and they allow those who possess them the ability to see all things, including seeing into the heavens, the hells, the future, and the past. Although no similar list exists in Buddhism for the senses of hearing, scent, taste, or touch, Tan extrapolated them for the reader. He then stated explicitly that there are things that the eye cannot see without the telescope or the microscope, but those things, he implied, can be seen by enlightened beings who possess the five eyes.51 Tan’s words prefigured what would become a favorite approach adopted by Buddhists in the Republican period when discussing science. Tan limits the power of human observation, the very grounds upon which science was claimed to be a special form of knowledge. This allows for the subordination of science to Buddhism, which claims greater power in the area of empirical observation. Tan did not dwell on this issue and did not mention it again in the essay, but the superiority of the supersensory powers attained through the practice of Buddhism became an important point in the following decades. It is the very existence of these supernatural powers that makes Buddhism a “higher empiricism.” The Buddha’s employment of those same supernatural powers allowed him to observe the state of the cosmos, resulting in a cosmology that many Buddhists argued was consonant with modern astronomy. The supernatural powers also allowed the Buddha to observe microorganisms in a droplet of water. Together, these were the two most commonly cited examples for the scientificity of Buddhism deployed during the Republican period. As Buddhist cosmology was discussed in detail in the previous chapter, this chapter closes with a summary of the Buddha’s microbiology. 95

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From what I have been able to determine, Taixu was the one responsible for popularizing in the 1920s the idea that the Buddha had, by means of the supersensory powers he had gained through meditation, observed the existence of organisms smaller than can be seen by the naked eye. Microorganisms had first been observed by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek (1632–1723) in 1673 using his recently invented microscope,52 but during the 1920s and 1930s, many Buddhists claimed that the Buddha had been able to see them as well and that this was supported by Buddhist scripture. The observation that certain passages in Buddhist scripture seem to speak of microorganisms was actually first made at least two decades before, by Zhang Taiyan. As part of the larger intellectual push to find Chinese origins for Western learning, Zhang pointed out the similarity between the diseaseinducing worms discussed in Buddhist scriptures and modern theories of pathogenic microorganisms. In 1899 he published Rushu zhenlun ₺埻䛇婾 (Truthful Discourse on Confucianism) in issues 28, 29, and 30 of Liang Qichao’s magazine Qingyi bao 㶭嬘⟙ (Zhang’s essay appeared in the same issues as the first half of Tan Sitong’s Renxue). This piece was written as a reaction against both Kang Youwei’s attempts to transform Confucianism into a national religion and Tan’s unusual cosmological vision.53 The most interesting part of the Rushu zhenlun, in light of the present study, is a preface that Zhang wrote himself for this piece, titled “Jun shuo” 却婒 (On Fungi/Bacteria).54 The main argument of this essay was that the evolution of life from bacteria to human beings is the result of the search for and development of intellectual clarity (ming 㖶). Later Buddhists, even Zhang himself, would ignore much of what he wrote in “Jun shuo,” but his ideas about microorganisms did prefigure a central element of discourses about Buddhism and science. In the first few pages of “Jun shuo,” Zhang cited examples from several classic Chinese texts that all seem to talk about the existence of gametes and disease-causing microbes. The list of texts he cited includes the Zhuangzi 匲⫸ and the Huainanzi 㶖⋿⫸. Zhang also included examples of the apparent consonance between the etiology of bacteria-induced diseases and statements made in two Buddhist scriptures, the Mahāratnakūṭa-sūtra55 and the Sanghāta-sūtra.56 Both of these scriptures make reference to the numerous tiny worms (chong 嘓/垚) that cause diseases in the human body.57 96

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For Zhang, any similarity between modern microbiology and Buddhist and non-Buddhist classical Chinese literature was simply that, a similarity. Zhang did not use these agreements to justify an entire tradition (such as Daoism or Buddhism) nor even a single text from one of those traditions. Like many other thinkers in Chinese history, he was eclectic in his thought, citing passages from a broad range of Chinese literature. He used canonical classical literature to render intelligible scientific concepts from Western learning, which he neither treated as a coherent tradition nor identified by a name such as “science.” Zhang may have noted the similarity between certain ideas from Buddhism and microbiology, but he clearly was not arguing that Buddhism was special in its prediction of some of the findings of modern science, as later Buddhists would do. His use of this similarity was not aimed at demonstrating the scientificity of Buddhism. Rather, he cited two Buddhist texts along with a number of passages with similar meanings from texts belonging to the Chinese classical tradition to illustrate a general consonance between traditional Chinese knowledge writ large and Western learning. It was not until two decades later that Taixu popularized the notion that this similarity proved the existence of the supersensory powers of the Buddha and thus the truth of Buddha-dharma as a whole. In two of his earliest articles on Buddhism and science, from 1919 and 1923, respectively, Taixu argued that Buddhism should be considered scientific because it contained ideas with which modern science agrees. In addition to the cosmological interventions already discussed, Taixu argued that the Buddha had been aware of both the existence of microorganisms and the fact that the human body is composed of a multitude of cells.58 Taixu eventually popularized this example of the scientificity of Buddhism, but he did not arrive at it by himself. In 1923 he wrote that he had first seen microorganisms using Yang Wenhui’s microscope while at the latter’s home more than a decade previously.59 As noted earlier, Yang brought microscopes and telescopes back with him from his travels in Europe in the late nineteenth century. Interestingly, Yang may not have even been the first to see some evidence for knowledge of microorganisms in the Buddhist canon. Microscopes are mentioned in Chinese Buddhist texts as far back as the late seventeenth century (though in that case the topic was not microscopic organisms), when microscopy was just becoming common in the West.60 This raises the possibility that even in the 97

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absence of historical documentation, earlier Buddhists may have thought about the relationship between the discoveries of microscopy and Buddhist scripture. Regardless, it is clear that Taixu was the one who popularized some connection between the two, and he did this in the 1920s. Taxiu cited several phrases from the Buddhist canon to support his claim about the Buddha’s knowledge of microbiology. The first of these became the most popular among Buddhists in the 1920s and 1930s and is still invoked today to support belief in the supersensory powers.61 This is the expression, “The Buddha saw in one bowl62 of water 84,000 worms” (Fo guan yi bo shui, ba wan si qian chong ἃ奨ᶨ以㯜炻ℓ叔⚃⋫垚).63 This expression first appears in a Ming dynasty summary of rules from the Vinaya titled Pini riyong lu 㭿⯤㖍䓐抬 (Record of the Vinaya for Daily Use)64 written by Xingzhi ⿏䣯 (1569–1636).65 This is a short text explaining the spells (Ch. zhou ␺; Skt. dhāraṇīs)66 monks and nuns were required to recite on specific occasions in their daily lives, such as when washing one’s hands or going to the toilet. Each of these spells is preceded by an explanatory verse (jie ῰). The phrase “The Buddha saw in one bowl of water 84,000 worms” comes from the explanatory verse for the spell recited when drinking water. Together, they read, “Verse and spell for drinking water: The Buddha saw 84,000 worms in a single bowl of water. If one [drinks water and] does not recite this spell, it is like eating the flesh of sentient beings. An fuxi boluo moni shahe.67 Recite this seven times. If you first pay reverence to the Buddha and then drink it is even more wondrously effective.”68 I have discussed this passage in greater detail elsewhere, but in the context of the present study it is important to note that Pini riyong and its spells were widely used in twentieth-century Chinese Buddhism. The text and commentaries written upon it were used in the Chinese monasteries during the Republican period, and I myself have seen some of the spells they contain written in toilet stalls at monasteries in Taiwan in the present day.69 As a result, it is likely that not only Taixu but also a wide swathe of China’s Buddhist monastics would have been aware of this verse, even though Taixu never mentions the origin of the expression. This familiarity could explain why this expression was so commonly cited by writers after Taixu, while the specific phrases he used to support the Buddha’s awareness of the multicellular composition of human bodies, discussed later, generally were not. 98

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The two other points that Taixu made about the Buddha’s microbiology were that the Buddha had been aware that the human body is composed of cells and that the body is formed from gametes. In both his articles Taixu cited the phrase qi shen gen chong 崟幓㟡垚, which he interpreted to mean “the root-worms that give rise to the body.” In 1919 he explicitly stated that this is a reference to sperm. “It is also said that as for the generating cause of the physical body, there are the ‘root-worms that give rise to the body,’ which have been confirmed by the current theory of sperm.”70 Here, Taixu has actually misread the text, as the qi shen’gen chong are a type of worm that causes a man to have an erection (literally have his “root” rise up) when his bladder is full.71 For Taixu, however, whose goal was demonstrating the scientificity of Buddhism, it made more sense for him to read this phrase in light of modern biological theories. The same was true in his reading of another phrase from the Buddhist canon to support the notion of Buddhist microbiology: “visualize the body as a collection of worms” (guan shen ru chong ju 奨幓⤪垚倂).72 The character guan 奨 can mean many things, but here it refers to types of meditative practice found across Chinese religions, especially in Buddhism and Daoism,73 where it denotes any practice in which the meditator imagines and holds in his or her mind one or a series of images. These traditions maintain that such practices can lead to real changes in the meditator’s physical or spiritual state. The type of meditation Taixu was specifically referring to is one of a group of meditations on the “ten impurities” (Ch. shi bujing ⋩ᶵ㶐; Skt. daśa-aśubha) of the human body,74 which include not only worms but also pus, skin oil, saliva, blood, and synovial fluid. Each of these ten impurities becomes the basis for a meditation, the purpose of which is to help practitioners rid themselves of their attachment to their bodies and, ultimately, to attain nirvana. Although the practice was not common in China, it is described in the Chinese Buddhist canon. Buddhist monastics in some other countries have traditionally contemplated the ten impurities in order to give rise to a sense of disgust toward both their own bodies and the bodies of others, which is supposed to allow them to reduce attachments such as self-love or lust for others.75 Taixu’s exegesis of this passage changed its emphasis, away from a statement of Buddhist soteriology and toward a statement of fact about the natural world, one that is rooted in an understanding of bodies identical to the one promoted in modern biology. 99

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The notion that the Buddha had been aware of several aspects of microbiology continued to be important for Taixu and others after he popularized the idea at the start of the 1920s. Taixu mentioned the Buddha’s awareness of microorganisms to support his claim for harmony between science and Buddhism in a lecture he gave in Paris on September 16, 1928.76 A decade and a half later, in his 1946 article on the scientificity of Buddhism mentioned earlier, Tang Dahai stated, “The Buddhist scriptures always say that the human body has 84,000 worms, and that semen and blood are pervaded with miniscule life forms.”77 Two years later, at the height of the Chinese civil war, Kuairan ⟲䃞 published a very short piece on the harmony of Buddhism and science in Honghua yuekan ⻀⊾㚰↲ (Promulgation Monthly), a Shanghai-based magazine dedicated primarily to spreading the teachings of the Pure Land master Yinguang. Like many of the articles and books studied here, this article was titled simply, “Science and Buddhism” (Kexue yu foxue 䥹⬠冯ἃ⬠).78 Kuairan’s main point can be summarized with a quote, “We can see from these several issues that the more science advances, the more it can prove that the principles of Buddhism are true.”79 Kuairan did not go into detail regarding what he meant by “these several issues,” so the magazine’s editors felt it necessary to provide a few explanatory comments at the end of the article in which they marveled that the Buddha and his disciple Śariputra had been able to see 84,000 worms in a bowl of water well before such things had been observed under a microscope. This, they wrote, was due to the “spiritual wisdom” (shen zhi 䤆㘢) of the Buddha and his disciple. In other words, they were able to discover the existence of microorganisms two millennia before the microscope because of their supernatural powers of observation.

IN THE 1920S AND 1930S Buddhists were well aware of the cachet that science gained as a result of its perceived possession of a unique tool for the apprehension of truth: the empirical method. Buddhists responded to this by saying that not only did their own tradition emphasize the direct verification of theories, it even allowed its practitioners to access higher realms of empiricism than those open to scientists. Meanwhile, Buddhist logic enjoyed a newfound, and likely unprecedented, level of popularity as Buddhists used it to think about and critique new modes 100

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of thought, especially science. Buddhist logic was used to demonstrate the limits of the epistemology of science and to clear space in the discourse for the supersensory powers, which were the primary piece of evidence for the claim that Buddhism represented a higher empiricism. These powers allowed the Buddha to learn things about the natural world that were otherwise unknown before the appearance of modern science.

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BUDDHISTS ACCEPTED ELEMENTS of the description of the objective world offered by modern science, such as the structure of solar systems and the composition of atoms, but remained skeptical of objective realism, holding instead to the position that all phenomena are “consciousness-only.” Their arguments turned conversations of science and truth back toward the nature of the human mind. Long central to Buddhist thought, the topic of the human mind became an important element in Chinese Buddhists’ emerging philosophy of life, which placed great importance on the nature of subjective experience. The importance of subjectivity was a topic of much interest in China at the time. Buddhist insistence on the primacy of subjective experience, which they felt was supported by the theory of relativity, was also important in the science and philosophy of life debates, in which it was connected to discussions of the mind drawn from the emerging field of modern psychology. As noted in chapter 1, modern psychology, though still in its infancy, became quite popular among China’s radicals in the 1920s, and the behaviorist school of psychology was particularly influential. Proponents of materialism embraced this school as a means to understand the human mind without reliance on subjectivity. This school of thought was not the only theory about the human mind in circulation in China at the time, and Buddhists contributed their own to this larger discussion. 102

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Some Chinese Buddhists were influenced by the popularity of modern psychology to write on the topic of the human mind using both the rich resources of their tradition and contemporary psychological theories. Members of the Wuchang School were the most active in this regard. During the mid-1920s, they penned a number of articles that used ConsciousnessOnly thought to explain the mind and critique modern psychology. The study of psychology was part of the curriculum at the Wuchang Buddhist Seminary at the time, and this was reflected in the writings of its members. The impact is also clear in the response the Wuchang School mustered at the end of the decade, when one Jin Han 拎㻊 offered a materialist reading of the doctrines of Consciousness-Only thought. Given the role that the philosophical premise “consciousness-only” played in Chinese Buddhists’ resistance to materialism, it was unacceptable to them to interpret Consciousness-Only thought materialistically as Jin had done. As noted before, Consciousness-Only thought and the related field of classical Buddhist logic reached unprecedented levels of popularity during the Republican period. Consciousness-Only had enjoyed some popularity among small groups of literati and highly educated monks since the latter part of the Ming dynasty, but Consciousness-Only had attained an unmatched level of popularity in China by the late Qing.1 During that time, literate Buddhists gained access to the lost classics of this school as new printings made from editions surviving in Japan and elsewhere appeared in Chinese bookstores. The influx of Western philosophy and science (particularly the emerging field of psychology) also had a large impact on the rising popularity of this form of Buddhist thought.2 Within Consciousness-Only thought, Buddhists found resources they could use both to understand and to critique what they were reading in the secular press. Just as the higher empiricism of direct cognition and supernatural powers allowed the Buddha to observe the cells that make up the human body, it also allowed him to understand the workings of the human mind in a way modern science could never do. For many Republican-era Buddhists, the theory of consciousness articulated in Consciousness-Only thought was far superior to anything produced by modern psychology. By the end of the nineteenth century, physics had replaced chemistry as the “queen of the sciences” in the West, and psychology eventually came to be viewed as its natural counterpart. The parallel that was believed to exist between physics and psychology can even be seen in 103

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the Chinese word for psychology, xinli xue ⽫䎮⬠, literally “the study of the principles of the mind,” which served as a perfect semantic parallel to wuli xue 䈑䎮⬠, physics, or literally “the study of the principles of matter.”3 But in the late nineteenth century, psychology was still a young discipline, and it did not begin to assume a fixed identity until the 1920s, and even then much disagreement remained about theories concerning the proper methods and boundaries of this new science. Psychology was slowly disseminated in China from the very end of the nineteenth century, but it was not until the 1920s that it became a common topic of discussion among Chinese intellectuals. Modern psychology became a popular subject first among many of the participants in the May Fourth movement, including many of the more radical of China’s students. It was also one of the central themes of the science and philosophy of life debates, which argued, among other things, whether or not the human mind could be described with fixed laws comparable with those laid out in classical physics. Modern psychology was a popular topic not simply because it was popular in the West but because it addressed one of the main concerns occupying the supporters of scientism: how to place human thoughts and feelings within the purview of rationalist science. Many believed that a proper understanding of the human mind was essential for the construction of the modern state and that this could be achieved through psychology. Psychology was thus held up, even by those with markedly divergent philosophical positions, as an ideal science that could be used to create a more integrated modern society. Proponents of materialistic scientism believed that modern psychology could offer an authoritative explanation for the behavior of human beings that did not rely on the existence of a subjective mental self separate from the world of matter. They looked to psychology to provide the last crucial element in their quest to unify all fields of knowledge within science.4 To do this, though, they had to first choose from among the various psychological theories then circulating. While Freudian psychology, which emphasizes the deep inner states of the human mind, was discussed in China, it was not widely accepted there during the 1920s and 1930s.5 People turned instead to the behaviorist school of psychology. Behaviorism became popular in China during the 1920s, just as it was becoming the dominant psychological theory all over the world. It was especially 104

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popular with radical students in Beijing, such as those associated with the magazine New Tide. Behaviorism took a reductive view of the mind, proposing that psychology should rely not on the study of internal mental states but instead on the relationship between stimulus and response in the observable external behavior of humans and other higher animals. For behaviorists, the mind was a kind of black box into which stimuli passed and out of which responses appeared. They believed that psychology should only be concerned with mapping the relationships between given stimuli and their responses. This naturally meant avoiding most speculation on the composition of the mind, such as the structure of ego, superego, and id that Sigmund Freud (1856–1939) was developing at the time. It also meant avoiding the study of subjective experience. Buddhists felt that the behaviorist approach was doomed to failure because of its refusal to acknowledge the subjectivity of the mind. Behaviorism also supported materialism, another bête noire of the Buddhists, and not surprisingly, a number of Buddhists wrote pieces criticizing it.6 Radicals and iconoclasts were not the only ones in China interested in modern psychology, however. The opponents of scientism looked to other forms of psychology, such as the introspective (and thus more subjective) psychology of William James (1842–1910), to justify serious consideration of internal mental states and even religious eperiences.7 Zhang Junmai and the other proponents of a subjective “philosophy of life” could thus also turn to psychology to support their arguments. The one thing everyone agreed on was that the discipline of psychology was essential for modern China. The Wuchang School’s discussions of psychology thus took place within a milieu in which thinkers turned to an as yet ill-defined discipline to formulate universal frameworks incorporating human experience within modern scientific and philosophical worldviews. Taixu and his cohort relied heavily on the Consciousness-Only doctrine of the eight consciousnesses to discuss modern psychology. Out of their discussions grew the argument that scientists could never truly understand the activity of the mind because they only studied six of its eight constituent consciousnesses. This claim, which would be repeated in the years after the 1920s, was used to lend strength to the argument that Buddhism was a higher empiricism than science. Buddhists asked how scientists could truly perceive the phenomena of the world (a basic requirement for the 105

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scientific method) if they did not fully comprehend the very tool they used to observe the world—the mind. The answer was that they could not. Because they did not sufficiently analyze their own minds, scientists’ knowledge of the world would always be incomplete. To remedy this, the Buddhists argued, scientists needed to study ConsciousnessOnly thought.

Some Elements of Consciousness-Only Thought Consciousness-Only has its roots in the mainstream (non-Mahāyāna) Indian Buddhist tradition of Abhidharma scriptural commentary, the same tradition that produced the cosmological ideas discussed in chapter 2. By the third century C.E., several works foreshadowing some of Consciousness-Only’s main ideas were already circulating in South Asia, but the Consciousness-Only school is generally considered to have begun in the fourth century with the writings of two Buddhist monks, the brothers Asaṅga and Vasubandhu, with the latter generally regarded as the more important of the two. The first transmission of Consciousness-Only thought to China happened in the sixth century in translations made by the prolific translators Bodhiruci and Paramārtha, each of whom provided different interpretations. Despite the availability of works by Vasubandhu and Asaṅga, Consciousness-Only, like Buddhist logic, did not really thrive as a separate school of thought until the pilgrim and translator Xuanzang returned to China in 645. After his return he translated or created all of the major texts that would be important for East Asian Consciousness-Only thought, including the Cheng weishi lun ㆸⓗ嬀婾 (Commentary on Attaining Consciousness-Only),8 probably the single most important Consciousness-Only text in East Asia. Xuanzang’s efforts marked the beginning of a period of brief florescence for ConsciousnessOnly thought in China, but within several generations of Xuanzang’s death it had waned almost to the point of its nonexistence as an independent body of thought. The focus of Consciousness-Only thought is a systematic exploration of the nature of human experience and the process by which delusion arises in human consciousness. Its primary mode of exploring human experience is an analysis of the process of sensation and the relationship between sense objects and the consciousnesses that apprehend them. 106

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In Consciousness-Only thought, the phenomenon of “consciousness” is understood to emerge from the interaction of several discrete components, which together form a coherent system. An individual is believed to have eight different types of consciousness. The first five of these eight consciousnesses are those of the five bodily senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. The sixth, or mental consciousness (Ch. yishi シ嬀; Skt. mano-vijñāna), is often grouped with the first five, and it refers to the sensation of mind, which takes thoughts as its sense objects. That is, mental consciousness is considered to arise from the interaction of the mental sense organ, which functions like the eyes or ears, and its sensory object, thoughts. Buddhists believed the sensation of thoughts and mental states to be akin to the physical sensations of the first five senses. Just as one’s eyes see objects, one’s mind “senses” thoughts. The sixth consciousness is also the place where the data produced by the first five consciousnesses are integrated. Sensation and cognition do not arise solely out of these six consciousnesses, however, and in Consciousness-Only there is a detailed explanation of the necessary interplay of the various sense organs, their objects, and the six associated consciousnesses. Although these processes were often explained by Republican-era Buddhists in their discussions of Consciousness-Only, they had less bearing on their discussions of science than the relationships between the sixth, seventh, and eighth consciousnesses. The seventh, or manas, consciousness is where a person’s sense of self comes from. The sense of self or ego is, of course, one of the primary delusions recognized by Buddhism and is the source of human suffering. In constructing the deluded view of itself as a self, the seventh consciousness assimilates the contents of the sixth consciousness but is also influenced by the eighth, or ālaya, consciousness. The eighth consciousness is the storehouse wherein impressions of all of one’s previous experiences are stored. These impressions are described as karmic “seeds” (Ch. zhongzi 䧖⫸; Skt. bīja) and include not only the traces left by one’s experiences in one’s current life but also from all of one’s previous lifetimes. When these seeds are “expressed” (Ch. xianxing 䎦埴; Skt. adhyācarati) they appear as mental states in the seventh consciousness, influencing a person’s perception and behavior and ultimately feeding the sense of self generated by the seventh consciousness. 107

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The concept of the eight consciousnesses is intimately connected to the soteriological goal of Consciousness-Only thought specifically and Buddhism in general. The fundamental human problem according to Buddhism is ignorance, mistaken understandings of the world. It is these mistaken understandings, particularly the one that takes as real the illusory self, which lead to suffering. One of the main goals of Consciousness-Only thought is to explain how this ignorance comes about and how it can be eradicated. Ignorance arises by a process involving what are called the “three transformations” (Ch. san nengbian ᶱ傥嬲; Skt. trividha-parināma) of consciousness. The first transformation is the expression of karmic seeds (and thus all of one’s karma) from the ālaya consciousness. This consciousness “holds” all karma from life to life, and the first transformation refers to the way in which all of the karma that one has accrued over many lifetimes affects one’s cognition. The second transformation is the activity of the seventh consciousness, which acts under the karmic influence of the eighth consciousness and constantly evaluates all objects and sensations as to how they can be of benefit to the illusory self. It is this second transformation that produces the delusional sense of self that is the root of suffering. The third transformation occurs in the acts of cognition carried out by the first six consciousnesses. In this scheme, the order of the three transformations is important, as the first transformation of the ālaya is seen as forming the basis for the second transformation of the manas, which in turn forms the basis for the third transformation. The result of these transformations is discriminative awareness, which consists of mistaken concepts about the permanence and desirability of phenomena. Consciousness-Only teaches that one should use meditation to transform the warped cognitions produced by the eight consciousnesses into wisdom and direct cognition (pratyakṣa pramāṇa) of phenomena. This transformation is referred to as “turning around the bases” (Ch. zhuanyi 廱ὅ; Skt. āśraya-paravṛtti) and results in liberation, the ultimate goal of Buddhism.

The Wuchang School on Buddhist Psychology I have discussed the Wuchang School’s engagement with modern psychology in another context, and some of the information presented here

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overlaps to some extent with that study. It is in their writings on psychology that the voice of a “Wuchang School” emerges most clearly. By looking at their writings on psychology, one can also see that others beyond Taixu had a major impact on the School’s direction. Zhang Huasheng, a layman who taught Western philosophy and Madhyamaka thought at the seminary,9 seems to have been particularly important in setting the agenda of the school in terms of their study of psychology and in bringing certain ideas to the attention of its members.10 Even after the Wuchang Buddhist Seminary itself closed for the first time in 1926, the networks its members created continued to impact Buddhist discussions of science. This can be seen in the way that two of its teachers, Tang Dayuan and Shanyin, enlisted their former student Fafang to aid them in their rejection of a materialist (and somewhat behaviorist) reading of Consciousness-Only thought put forth in the secular press in 1927. In their writings, Buddhists were primarily interested in comparing modern Western psychology with an inherent Buddhist psychology. The category “Buddhist psychology” is not a native one, however, and so it had to be created by writers in the 1920s. One of the first to do this in China was Liang Qichao, who gave a lecture titled “Brief Notes on Buddhist Psychology” (Fojiao xinlixue qiance ἃ㔁⽫䎮⬠㶢㷔) to the newly formed China Psychological Association in 1922.11 Liang drew from a wide range of early mainstream and Mahāyāna Buddhist scriptures to explain the Buddhist doctrine that the “five skandha are empty (wu yun jie kong Ḽ喲䘮䨢).”12 Like the other Buddhist writers who discussed psychology in the 1920s, he concluded that Buddhist psychology was superior to modern Western psychology. In making this assessment, he relied on an implicit and broad definition of “Buddhist psychology.” Writers associated with the Wuchang School did not follow Liang’s lead in identifying Buddhist psychology with the five skandha but focused instead on Consciousness-Only thought. Buddhists felt it was important to identify a specifically Buddhist “psychology” because they agreed that psychology was an essential scientific discipline for modern China, and most of the Buddhist authors who wrote about psychology in the 1920s emphasized its importance to modern science. They felt that psychology was fundamental to the practice of modern science, as it somehow formed the basis for all other branches of

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science. Zhang Huasheng made this clear in a 1925 article from Haichao yin in which he compared Buddhist and Western psychology. Psychology is the basis for all fields of learning. For example, there is the psychology with which philosophy consoles humanity, the psychology with which science advances humanity, the psychology with which ethics and religion express humanity, and the psychology with which government and law control humanity. There are other examples of this kind of relationship [between psychology and other disciplines], such as in [psychology’s] oblique connections to disciplines such as educational Psychology, social Psychology, child Psychology, and abnormal Psychology. Thus, psychology is directly connected to other fields of learning, and it has become one of the new irreducible terms.13

Zhang admitted that the term “psychology” was new but maintained that the study of the mind is essential to all human endeavors. Psychology is the basis for ethics, philosophy, governance, and law.14 What Zhang argued was that the mind is central to all of these things and that in order to understand philosophy or carry out governance, it was necessary to study the principles of the mind. This position fits well with the premise that “the myriad dharmas are consciousness-only” adopted by many Buddhists. It also highlights the importance and relevance of Buddhism’s focus on the mind. Zhang spelled that point out in the second section of his article, in which he also justified his use of the term “Buddhist psychology.” In the course of its development, Buddhism produced many branches of learning. Although it does not speak of Psychology (xinli xue ⽫䎮⬠) as a discipline, it does discuss psychology (xinli ⽫䎮). Likewise, it can be seen throughout the scriptures and commentaries that there is no independently organized, or pure, discipline of psychology within Buddhism. Thus, it is unclear how it was established historically. Nevertheless, there is no difference between the three categories of “mind,” “Buddha,” and “sentient beings.” Because the three realms are only mind and “the myriad dharmas are only consciousness,” all Buddhist teachings are 110

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mental teachings, all the dharmas taught by the Buddha are mental dharmas, and all Buddhist principles are psychological ones (lit. mental principles).15

There may have been no independently existing branch of Psychology, so-called, within Buddhism, but all of Buddhism was concerned with studying psychology. Taixu gave the same justification for why Buddhists should study psychology two years later in an article on behaviorism. Recently, there has been a chaotic expansion in psychological research, which is the most complex and difficult discipline in the world of the sciences. Among those sciences that used to be based on physics, there is an increasing tendency to base them on psychology. Regardless of the branch of science, all of them now research psychology. For example, to carry out sociology, one must research social psychology; to carry out the study of education, one must research educational psychology. In the pursuit of any discipline, there is a corresponding type of psychology. That each science has its corresponding type of psychology is like all of the stars saluting the polestar, or like the ten thousand rivers bowing to the East Sea. This single discipline of psychology can combine with all the other sciences, and it really is a good thing that this has happened in the academic world.16

In discussing psychology, Buddhists emphasized continuities they saw between Western psychology and Buddhism, just as they had done with Buddhist cosmology and modern astronomy. They did not, however, feel that Western psychology could match Buddhism for its understanding of the workings of the human mind. There were a number of reasons for this, but the primary rationale Buddhists gave for why Western psychology was not as good as Buddhism was rooted in ConsciousnessOnly thought and its theory of the structure of human consciousness. In Consciousness-Only thought, any account of the human mind that does not take into account the fundamental operational role of the seventh and eighth consciousnesses is incomplete, and this is precisely the problem Buddhists saw with Western psychology. In 1926, Tang Dayuan, whose work was discussed in earlier chapters, criticized psychology for only 111

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studying the first six of the eight consciousnesses. He wrote in the inaugural issue of his magazine Dongfang wenhua 㜙㕡㔯⊾ (Eastern Culture): Among scholars today, the materialists say that spirit (jingshen) comes from an amalgamation of matter and that there is no separate “spirit,” while the idealists do not know about the existence of the ālaya consciousness and thus do not understand the origin of physical phenomena (dharmas). This is why people who want to talk about true psychology ought to look for it in Eastern culture.17

It is clear elsewhere in this article that Tang treated psychology as a form of idealism, which he criticized for its lack of knowledge of the eighth consciousness. This particular point was common in early twentiethcentury China, as a number of Buddhist authors used the concept of the eight consciousnesses to think not only about psychology but also about science and philosophy more generally. Their basic argument was that philosophy (which usually meant Western schools of thought) and science are both only based on the workings of the sixth consciousness. Philosophers and scientists are totally unaware of the central roles played by the seventh and eighth consciousnesses in determining our experiences of the world. Therefore, because they know nothing of the seventh and eighth consciousnesses, neither scientists nor philosophers will ever completely understand the mind as well as Buddhists who study Consciousness-Only thought can. This idea was repeated by Tang’s colleague Taixu the following year,18 and again by their mutual student Fafang in 1929 (discussed later in this chapter).19 Buddhists used the concept of the eight consciousnesses to criticize the limitations of Western psychology, and they supported this by claiming that Consciousness-Only thought, with its unique understanding of human consciousness, could help solve specific questions about the human mind that were challenging psychology at that time. It was not sufficient for Buddhists to merely argue that Buddhism represented a form of higher empiricism because it began from a more complete premise about the nature of human experience; they had to show exactly how Buddhism could be a benefit to science because of this. They did this by showing that Consciousness-Only could help psychology answer questions about two phenomena challenging the discipline at the time: instinct and memory. 112

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One of the main questions over which psychologists disagreed during the 1920s was whether human behavior was based on instinct, and was thus entirely innate, or was learned.20 The answer to this question had implications for psychological studies of education, childhood development, penal practice, and law. For their part, a number of Buddhists pointed to the idea of the karmic seeds discussed in Consciousness-Only to explain the nature of instinct. Ouyang Jingwu weighed in on this question in his seminal 1921 essay, “The Buddha-dharma Is Not Religion, Not Philosophy” (Fofa feizongjiao feizhexue ἃ㱽朆⬿㔁朆⒚⬠). Adopting a kind of Buddhist middle-way approach to the problem, Ouyang explained that the karmic seeds planted in the eighth consciousness produce more seeds in a continuing chain that has no beginning and only one end (liberation). Thus, one cannot claim that all our knowledge comes solely from experience (as the empiricists do), nor that all our actions are based on instinct. Human beings are equally conditioned by what they learn within one lifetime and by the innate tendencies in their psyches, which psychologists call instinct and which Buddhists refer to as karmic seeds. Several Wuchang School writers also explained instinct by means of karmic seeds. The monk Manzhi 㺧㘢 wrote that the idea of instinct (benneng 㛔傥) put forth by the behaviorists was nonsense and that the idea of karmic seeds makes far more sense: “If you really want to understand the expression of karmic seeds, you ought to study the words of the Consciousness-Only school.”21 Manzhi is an interesting figure in that he studied under both Taixu and Ouyang Jingwu in the 1920s. In the two years between graduating from the Wuchang Buddhist Seminary and teaching at several seminaries associated with Taxiu and the Wuchang School, he studied at Ouyang’s Inner Studies Institute.22 Although his two teachers are often described as opponents, it seems that at least on the issue of the relationship between Consciousness-Only and modern psychology they may have had common ground, which their mutual student articulated in his article. Another area related to instinct wherein Buddhists tried to show that Consciousness-Only could provide useful conclusions for psychology was with respect to the problem of memory. Memory provides continuity to our experience of the world, and it constitutes a major component of our sense of self. As such, the issue of memory is an important one for psychologists. It had also become a question for them after it was shown in 113

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the late 1910s that memory was not localizable within any single area of the brain.23 One of the major issues psychologists faced in studying memory was how to reconcile the fact that memory appeared to be immaterial, and this complicated the picture painted by the materialist behaviorists. Because behaviorists did not take internal mental states seriously, they had to find some way to account for it, as it could be considered a longterm internalized storing of stimuli. For the dominant forms of Western psychology and philosophy during the 1920s and 1930s, the question of the process, nature, and location of memory was one to which they had not yet been able to provide thorough answers. Buddhists argued that Consciousness-Only thought was able to help them in this regard. The Wuchang School maintained that the notion of the eighth consciousness and its karmic seeds could solve the problem of memory. In a lecture he gave at the World Buddhist Federation in 1923, the monk Dayu ⣏ヂ, a associate of Taixu’s and the creator of a method of esoteric meditation method discussed in chapter 6, called into question the materialists’ reductionist approach to mind by asking rhetorically how formless memories can be stored physically as images in the brain, and how we can remember things that did not happen.24 Zhang Huasheng posed roughly the same questions in an article the following year. Both of these men argued that memory is stored in the eighth consciousness.25 This viewpoint was echoed in an article from 1934, written by Honglin 㳒㜿, a monk who did research at the Wuchang Buddhist Seminary during the period of its revitalization under Fafang between 1932 and 1937.26 Honglin wrote: Psychologists do not know that memory is the true cause of experience. This really is too bad, but it is hardly surprising. Even specialists find it difficult to learn the fundamental principles of the ālaya consciousness, how much more difficult it is for outsiders. Because of this, psychologists simply do not understand why the thing someone sees today will not be forgotten tomorrow.27

In the Wuchang School’s writings on modern psychology, one can see similarities with Buddhist writings on the role of empiricism in Buddhism and science. These writers maintained that science and Buddhism share a fundamental commitment, one perhaps not shared by other religions 114

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or philosophies (a commitment to empirical verification or to the primacy of the study of the mind), but that science is the more limited of the two because it does not accept some concepts explained in Buddhism (the possibility of attaining true direct cognition or the existence of the seventh and eighth consciousnesses). The writers then offered specific examples of how Buddhism can help improve science. The supernatural powers would allow science to understand rebirth, just as it allowed the Buddha to see microorganisms, and the eighth consciousness can explain how memory and instinct work, thus solving problems vexing psychology at the time. In this way, scientific truth was subordinated to Buddhist doctrine, which could provide ultimate (jiujing) answers to the important questions about life and reality. As a result, Buddhists did not agree to reductive interpretations of Buddhist doctrine that subordinated it to science, and they reacted strongly to those who attempted these interpretations, especially those concerning doctrines central to the framework of Buddhist thought. Because Buddhists relied upon the very premise of “consciousness-only” as a third philosophical position superior to both idealism and the materialism of scientism, they found it unacceptable to interpret Consciousness-Only thought as a type of materialism. One writer did exactly this in 1927, and the responses he drew from the Buddhist community were as immediate and as strident as the ones that Hu Shih drew four years later when he wrote his critical preface to Wang Xiaoxu’s Comparative Study of the Buddha-dharma and Science (hereafter CSBS).

Materialist Readings of Consciousness-Only In October of 1927, the Shanghai News (Shanghai xinwen bao ᶲ㴟㕘倆⟙) carried a serialized essay relating Consciousness-Only to modern science.28 There, Jin Han explained the activity of the eight consciousnesses using modern physiology. The four parts of this essay were collected and published later that year as a monograph titled Criticism and Research on the Buddhist Eight Consciousnesses (Foxue bashi zhi piping yu yanjiu ἃ⬠ℓ嬀ᷳ㈡姽冯䞼䨞). Jin’s stated aim was not to criticize Buddhism; instead, he was hoping to provide a rational, scientific basis for the specific Buddhist doctrine of the eight consciousnesses. This is clear from his concluding remarks, in which he wrote, “I hope that followers of 115

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Buddhism will not prattle on about mysterious and abstruse things, but will actively undertake real experiments in order to make good fortune and immeasurable merit.”29 Despite his wish to help the Buddhist community, Jin’s materialism and his tendency to take science as the ultimate arbiter of truth ended up rubbing many Buddhists the wrong way. Little is recorded about Jin Han, so it is difficult to determine whether he even considered himself a Buddhist. His work was carried originally in a non-Buddhist newspaper, and he does not seem to have published anything in any Buddhist periodical. Jin was certainly more sympathetic to Buddhist thinking than Hu Shih or others like him, but he was sympathetic only to a highly rationalized type of Buddhism. Jin’s primary goal was to explain the eight consciousnesses using modern science, and the intended audience of his explanation was the Buddhist community. As a result of the reasons I have outlined above, one basic problem today is that though there are many who practice vegetarianism, there are few who have been liberated. If one wants to address this problem one cannot but look outside of Buddhism, to the essential teachings of another “jeweled raft.”30 Only through using the opportunities provided by the discoveries of contemporary science, and by using science to investigate the principles of Buddhism, are we able to achieve the mysterious objectives of Buddhism. Here I will use the methods of science to analyze, critique, and investigate the eight consciousnesses, as well as the relationships between them. I do this for the purpose of making an offering to those who have taken refuge in the Buddha.31

This passage contains examples of several of the themes that appeared in his work, themes that would prove so irksome to Buddhists. Although there were many who practiced the moral teachings of Buddhism (who, because of their practice of non-harm, Jin labeled “vegetarians”), Jin lamented that there were few who really understood Buddhist philosophy. In other words, following certain Buddhist practices is not the same thing as understanding Buddhism or even, by implication, being a good Buddhist. What is required is a complete understanding of the meaning of Buddhist doctrine, which few achieved. The solution to this problem was modern science, which holds the key to unlocking the real truth 116

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of Buddhist doctrine. One sees here examples of Jin’s general attitude toward Buddhism: Buddhist doctrine is wondrous, but its interpretation cannot be trusted to Buddhists. Several times in his essay Jin stated explicitly that the Buddhists of his day did not actually understand what the Buddha originally meant. For example: There are subtle differences one observes when comparing the ālaya consciousness of [sic] the eighth consciousness and the first seven consciousnesses; they are not similar at all. If we just rely on the Buddhists’ interpretation without adding any scientific investigation of these ideas, I am afraid we will lose sight of Śākyamuni’s original, wondrous meaning.32

As noted earlier, the eighth consciousness is central to ConsciousnessOnly thought because it is the carrier of all our karma and the source of human suffering. Jin stated categorically that the Buddhist tradition misunderstands the true nature of the eighth consciousness, and it is only through the use of science that Buddhists can really understand what this Buddhist concept actually means. Jin continued, offering an extensive explanation of the nature of the eight consciousnesses from the viewpoint of modern physiology. Roughly half of his essay consists of a point-by-point explanation of each of the eight consciousnesses, which Jin then summarized as follows: Using science to speak of the eight consciousnesses, we know that the first, or eye, consciousness arises according to the various structures of the ocular nerves in the retina. We know that the second, or ear, consciousness arises according to the various structures of the tympanic membrane, ossicles, and lymphatic fluids. We know that the third, or nose, consciousness arises according to the peripheral nerves of the olfactory cells in the nasal mucous membranes. We know that the fourth, or tongue, consciousness is formed according to the various structures of the cells of the peripheral nerves. We know that the fifth, or bodily (tactile), consciousness arises according to the structures of each of the various peripheral nerves. We know that the state of transformation of the neurons shapes speech and action, according to which the sixth, or idea, consciousness 117

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arises. We know that the seventh, or manas, consciousness arises according to the functioning of the excitation of the neurons. Thus all of the first seven consciousnesses have their origin in matter.33

In addition to being critical of traditional Buddhist interpretations of the doctrine of the eight consciousnesses, Jin was a committed materialist, which was not a position with which most Buddhists were comfortable. Jin sought to reduce the Consciousness-Only scheme of eight consciousnesses to physiology, even when that physiology was not well understood (i.e., when he said, somewhat perfunctorily, “We know that the fourth, or tongue, consciousness is formed according to the various structures of the cells of the peripheral nerves”). His preference for a materialist reading can be seen clearly at the end of the passage just quoted, as well as in his detailed explanation of the sixth, or idea consciousness. Regarding the origination of consciousness, this particular phenomenon arises according to the state of the transformations of the nervous system, which shape speech and behavior. Thus it is tentatively called “consciousness.” It should therefore be recognized that consciousness arises through the movement of the transformation of atoms of matter, which shape speech and action, giving rise to consciousness.34

In other words, for Jin consciousness is nothing more than an epiphenomenon of matter; it emerges out of collections of atoms and has no nonmaterial component. Such claims are not particularly important with regard to the first six consciousnesses, but they become more problematic with reference to the seventh and eighth consciousnesses, which Buddhists used to explain how there can be any continuation of consciousness and its associated elements (such as memories, habits, instincts, and, more fundamentally, karma) beyond the life of an individual body. The eighth consciousness was originally posited in order to explain continuity from lifetime to lifetime, but Jin saw it differently. He was quite willing to allow for the operation of instinct and memory within one lifetime, but did not see the eighth consciousness as continuing beyond that. He defined the eighth consciousness in a psycho-physical fashion by renaming it the “force consciousness” (dongli shi ≽≃嬀)35 and sought 118

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to explain it according to the mechanistic terms of classical physics. The influence exerted by behaviorism on Jin as he made this argument is clear. Jin envisioned the eighth consciousness as nothing more than a state of a certain form of matter (the nervous system), which acts in predictable ways according to physical stimuli. This interpretation brought Consciousness-Only thought in line with behaviorism. Jin was not the first to try and locate any of the last three consciousnesses of Consciousness-Only thought in the physical nervous system in this fashion. The notion that the seventh and eighth consciousnesses can be located in the physical body had been mooted at least as early as the 1890s by Tan Sitong in his Renxue. Tan did not aim to provide a systematic explanation of the connections between Consciousness-Only thought and Western learning, but he did identify a few homologies between concepts in Consciousness-Only and Western neurology. The connections he drew between the physical nervous system, thoughts, and consciousness were based on his understanding of the luminiferous ether (yitai ẍ⣒). Modern-day readers of the Renxue are often struck by Tan’s use of the somewhat bizarre concept of the ether, a ubiquitous substance with both material and mental-moral properties, which in Tan’s thinking unified the moral, spiritual, and physical worlds. As David Wright has pointed out, however, Tan’s use of this concept was well in line with not only the work of other Chinese thinkers seeking to unify Chinese and Western cosmologies but also the state of the field in the physical sciences worldwide.36 Although scientific opinion was not unanimous, at the end of the nineteenth century many scientists accepted the existence of a universal medium called ether (or æther) through which light, heat, and electricity were transmitted. From the early 1870s until Einstein’s theory of special relativity appeared in 1905, the concept of the ether was used to unify the various branches of physics, and unlocking the secrets of the ether was a preoccupation of many professional scientists.37 Tan’s use of the ether was consonant with global trends in another way. While it would seem that positing a material substance like the ether to unify all physical phenomena would reinforce mechanistic materialist views of the universe, the concept of the ether was actually quite popular in the West during the late nineteenth century among those who sought to reconcile materialism with a wide range of mainstream and esoteric religious and quasi-religious traditions.38 Clairvoyance, animal 119

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magnetism (hypnotism), mental healing, astral travel, and spiritualism were all given scientific respectability by those who explained them with reference to the ether. This was partly made possible because the ether, the existence of which has since been disproved, was not strictly defined in science and this allowed it to be interpreted in many different ways by scientists and nonscientists. The idea of the ether in some respects occupied a similar place in discourses about science and religion to the one held in recent years by quantum mechanics, which a broad range of religious thinkers have enlisted to provide some proof of continuity between mental and material phenomena.39 For Tan, the ether supported his ontological view of the universe. The concept of the ether allowed him to describe a world in which electricity, the mind, and the nervous system were all manifestations of a unified spiritual/material substance held together through the power of love/gravity (which were synonymous for Tan40). The concept of the ether served as the basis for Tan’s explanations of Consciousness-Only. Tan declared the brain (by which he meant the entire nervous system) and electricity to be composed of the same substance: ether.41 The nervous system is ether in a substantial (material) form, but when the ether has not taken on any kind of form, when it is in space, it is electricity. Thoughts are composed of electricity, which renders possible not only everyday perception but also telepathy.42 In Renxue, Tan several times identified the cerebrum (da’nao ⣏儎) as the location of the ālaya, or eighth consciousness.43 By identifying a supposedly immaterial part of the mind with a physical organ, Tan was not only turning away from traditional Buddhist interpretations of the eighth consciousness, he was also breaking with a long-standing belief among Chinese literati who, until the 1880s, had vigorously opposed any attempt by the Western translators of science to locate the mind, memory, or anything remotely resembling a soul in the brain.44 In writing that the sixth and seventh consciousnesses were located within the nervous system and that the eighth consciousness was nothing but the nearly mechanical operations of that system defined by behaviorists, Jin Han was thus making a claim similar to the one Tan Sitong had made three decades before. This was the claim that the nonsensory consciousnesses, especially the eighth consciousness, could be identified as the physical nervous system. The philosophical implication for each 120

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thinker was different, however, based on the historical context in which he was writing. For Tan, the ether allowed him to unify material and nonmaterial causality at a time when many believed this was possible. Jin, however, wrote after the appearance of scientism in China and the clear separation of materialism and idealism in intellectual discourse. He was also writing at a time when consciousness-only had emerged for Buddhists as a viable and superior philosophical premise to either materialism or idealism. In such a climate, it was no longer possible for Buddhists to see Jin’s reduction of Consciousness-Only thought to materialism as something they could accept. Science was useful in explaining some things, but not all Buddhist ideas could be reduced to its tenets. Jin claimed that he was using science to explain Buddhism, and he cited passages from Buddhist scripture that seemed to be illuminated by the scientific discourse he laid out. Nevertheless, his vision of the nature of human sensation and consciousness was taken completely from contemporary materialist physiology and owed very little to Buddhism. Unlike Wang Xiaoxu, who argued that the theory of relativity had undermined the epistemic certainty of a strictly mechanistic science, Jin held modern science up as the ultimate arbiter of truth. He may have set out to help Buddhists establish their doctrine on rational grounds, but they would have none of it.

Rejecting Jin Han Upon publication in 1927, Jin’s essay immediately attracted criticism from the Buddhist community, including several individuals whose work has already been discussed here. Within two years, critiques by five authors had appeared in four different Buddhist journals. Two of these journals— the Shanghai-based Magazine of the World Lay Buddhist Association (Shijie fojiao jushilin linkan ᶾ䓴ἃ㔁⯭⢓㜿㜿↲) and the Beijing-based Great Cloud (Dayun ⣏暚)—reprinted Jin’s essay in its entirety on the pages following the critiques.45 One of these pieces was written by the monk Shanyin, who had taught at the Wuchang Buddhist Seminary and served as its headmaster after Taixu stepped down. Three others were by laymen, including Wang Xiaoxu, who wrote under his rarely used Buddhist name Buqing ᶵ庽; Luo Jihe 榙⬋␴, an active lay Buddhist letter writer and contributor to Great Cloud; and Tang Dayuan.46 And in 1929, Fafang 121

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published his own massive, two-part rebuttal of Jin’s work at the behest of Shanyin, his teacher. Though short, Wang’s piece may have eventually reached the widest audience. It appeared in two different Buddhist magazines in 1928, and Wang included it in his 1932 collection, CSBS.47 Wang was first critical of Jin’s choice of the Buddhist texts upon which to base his argument. Although he was dealing with a topic central to Consciousness-Only thought, nowhere did Jin cite any of the major canonical texts of Chinese Consciousness-Only, such as the Cheng weishi lun or the Yogācārabhūmiśāstra. Instead, Jin made extensive use of the Śūraṃgama-sūtra, which is a borderline Consciousness-Only text.48 Much of the rest of Wang’s critique revolved around his concerns over Jin’s understanding of the eight consciousnesses and his use of the pramāṇas. Repeating the argument made by members of the Wuchang School, Wang argued that modern psychology and authors like Jin who relied upon it did not understand the seventh and eighth consciousnesses. To Jin’s claim that the function of the seventh consciousness was “retention” (they both used the English word written in roman letters), Wang countered that this is actually the function of the sixth consciousness and that Jin’s misuse of the term underscored his general misapprehension of Consciousness-Only thought.49 On the general issue of science’s ability to understand the phenomenal world, Wang reiterated the argument discussed in chapter 3 that the activity of science is only pseudo-inferential cognition, and not true direct cognition, as was offered in Buddhism. In other words, it is a mistake to measure Buddhist truth by means of the yardstick of science. What one should do instead is measure science using the yardstick of the more ultimate truths of Buddhism. Wang was displeased with Jin Han’s ideas, but was not nearly so detailed in his criticism as Shanyin and Fafang. Shanyin broke his argument down into several parts and deployed Buddhist logic in a way not seen in any of the other Buddhist writings on science consulted for this study. For each of Jin’s errors (e.g., that atoms alone give rise to consciousness or that the ālaya consciousness does not exist), Shanyin provided a brief narrative account of Jin’s argument and why it was wrong, then cited a handful of Buddhist scriptures in support of his critique. Finally, and most interestingly, Shanyin constructed a classical Buddhist logical syllogism for each argument. Using the three-part 122

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syllogistic structure (san zhi ᶱ㓗) of proposition (Ch. zong ⬿; Skt. pakṣa), reason (Ch. yin; Skt. hetu), and example (Ch. yu ╣; Skt. dṛṣtāna), Shanyin pointed to what he saw to be the specific errors in Jin’s thinking. In chapter 3 I showed how Wang Xiaoxu and others employed the pramāṇas, one of the basic concepts of Buddhist logic, to compare Buddhist and scientific empiricisms. Shanyin is the only Buddhist I have encountered who actually used Buddhist logic in this way during the Republican period in a critique of claims made in science. Most of Shanyin’s criticism revolved around Jin’s treatment of the eighth consciousness. Shanyin was uncomfortable with the idea that the eighth consciousness could be read as functioning solely at the level of matter. Near the beginning of his article, Shanyin wrote that Jin’s biggest mistake was in thinking that an amalgamation of insentient atoms could give rise to consciousness.50 Shanyin offered the following logical proof to support his argument. Thesis: Fiery atoms51 cannot combine to produce sentient consciousness. Reason: This is because it is insentient matter. An example based on similarity (tongyu ⎴╣): This is like diamond. [Supplemental explanation:] No type of insentient matter can combine to produce sentient consciousness. This is like diamond: because diamond is insentient matter, it cannot combine to produce sentient consciousness. Because fiery atoms are insentient matter, they cannot combine to produce sentient consciousness either.52

His argument is that consciousness cannot emerge from matter alone, because matter is not sentient. For Shanyin, consciousness results from nonmaterial causes, and he dared Jin to find a chemist who could combine insentient compounds to create a sentient animal. Nor did Shanyin accept Jin’s explanation that the eighth consciousness was a kind of “force consciousness” that operated at the level of physical stimulus and response. He repeatedly resisted this reductive, behaviorist reading of Consciousness-Only thought, arguing for the reality of the ālaya consciousness, its identity with the eighth consciousness, and the primary (not secondary) role it plays in forming the human mind. It was important for Shanyin and others to defend the existence of an immaterial 123

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eighth consciousness because, as noted earlier, knowledge of the seventh and eighth consciousnesses was one of the areas in which Buddhists felt Consciousness-Only was superior to science. The eighth consciousness is also an essential part of the philosophical system supporting the premise consciousness-only, which Buddhists cited as their tradition’s alternative to materialism. Around the same time that Shanyin was writing his piece, Tang Dayuan gave a copy of Jin’s essay to his former student Fafang and encouraged him to write his own criticism of it. Fafang finished his critique on November 5, 1928, and his detailed deconstruction of Jin’s work was published in Haichao yin in two parts early the following year. Fafang’s critique was more than four times the length of Jin’s original essay53 and was structured as a commentary in which he first cited a line or section of Jin’s essay and then offered a lengthy rebuttal of the point it made before moving on to the next line of the text. There were few statements made by Jin that Fafang did not criticize. The first of Fafang’s criticisms was aimed at Jin’s materialism in particular and materialist scienticism in general. Looking at Jin’s general argument, it is nothing more than relying on science, and superstitiously believing in materialism. He clings to matter, taking it to be all that is real, and he believes that science is a kind of jewel. Believing that matter exists is what the Buddhist scriptures refer to as “the obstruction of the defilements.” Science, likewise, is “the obstruction of knowledge.” These two obstructions54 are precisely what Consciousness-Only thinkers destroy in their philosophy. Now, Jin wears the glasses of materialism and employs the knowledge of science, using them to criticize the incredibly subtle concept of the eight consciousnesses. How could he not be mistaken?55

Like most of his peers, Fafang opposed materialism, and later in this same section he brought up the argument (already discussed in chapter 2) that the belief that everything in the universe is made up of atoms or electrons is similar to the belief in a creator deity.56 Recall that the problem Buddhists had with these claims lay in their explanation of causality. In Buddhism there is no event or phenomenon that can appear or exist 124

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independently, and to claim that matter is made of atoms or electrons forces one to ask the question of where electrons come from or what their cause is. Buddhists perceived this to be the same conundrum faced by those who believe the universe was created by a deity. If a deity created the universe, what created that deity? Fafang believed that the world was, in the short term and for each sentient being, the product of the eighth consciousness and its constituent karmic seeds. In the long term, Buddhists did not believe in a universe that was finite in time, which rendered the question of what created the first karmic seeds nonsensical. Current karmic seeds are the product of previous seeds, which are themselves the product of previous seeds, and so on, in a process that stretches through infinite time. In his rebuttal of Jin’s work, Fafang repeated the criticism common in the writings of the Wuchang School that science only studies the first six of the eight consciousnesses57 and does not have the tools or methods to effectively study, and will therefore never be able to fully understand, the entirety of the human psyche. Fafang even turned this argument into an intra-Buddhist polemic in order to criticize Jin. Fafang pointed out that several of the texts Jin cited in his essay belonged to the Chan tradition and argued, in what may have been an established ConsciousnessOnly critique of Chan: “The furthest extent of the enlightenment attained in the Chan school is only one of understanding the delusional [nature] of the sixth and seventh consciousnesses. It cannot verify/realize (zheng) the truth of the eighth consciousness.”58 For Fafang, even when Jin cited Buddhist texts correctly, he chose texts belonging to the wrong kind of Buddhism. Intra-Buddhist polemic was not common in Buddhist discussions of science dating from the Republic, but it did appear from time to time.59 Like Shanyin, Fafang felt that the materialism of science was incorrect and that it was not possible for science to understand the eighth consciousness. For these reasons, he strongly disagreed with Jin’s basic premise that science could offer a better explanation of Buddhist doctrine than Buddhists or the Buddhist tradition itself could. He repeatedly chided Jin for his lack of understanding of Buddhist scripture, citing half a dozen scriptures to prove his points. To Jin’s claims that the Buddhist tradition misunderstood the Buddha’s original meaning because it lacked an accurate record of what the Buddha had said, Fafang replied that when 125

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the Buddha taught there were five hundred arhats (enlightened disciples) present, and they had correctly heard his words. Fafang also added an ad hominem attack for good measure, stating that Jin’s insistence on believing only what he had seen with his own eyes must mean Jin could not be certain that his father really was his father because Jin had not seen himself being conceived. He was, in effect, implying that Jin was a bastard.60 Fafang did agree with Jin’s point that most Buddhists did not understand Buddhism as well as they should. His prescription for this problem differed from Jin’s, however. “You also said, ‘there are many vegetarians, but few who have been liberated.’ If you want to treat this basic problem, I ask that you read more Buddhist books dealing with ConsciousnessOnly, and that you teach more about those awakened ones that came before who attained the mind of Consciousness-Only.”61 The real solution to a lack of understanding is to study the Buddhist scriptures more, but for Fafang this did not mean just any scriptures. He made it clear that Chan teachings would not do, only Consciousness-Only thought could truly help liberate human beings. Like many other Buddhists, Fafang opposed scientific materialism but not science, and he even used a few ideas from science to explain certain Buddhist phenomena. In the second part of his critique of Jin’s work, for example, Fafang used chemistry to explain the halo the Buddha was said to manifest according to the Buddhist scriptures. He said that people have oxidizable compounds within their bodies and that years of ascetic practice in the mountains enabled the Buddha to oxidize the compounds in his body to manifest a halo.62 Here, Fafang was trying to clarify the process by which something discussed in the Buddhist tradition occurs, and he used science to explain aspects of something not explicitly discussed in the scriptures. Such attempts to use modern science to explain the material process by which certain phenomena, particularly those associated with meditation, emerge were not unique to Fafang. I show this in chapter 6. Fafang was willing to accept material explanations for certain phenomena, but this was only due to the fact that he ultimately adhered to the position that “the myriad dharmas are consciousness-only.” Fafang stated that atoms, the basic stuff of material phenomena, are created by the “transformation of consciousness.” In other words, matter itself is a product of consciousness.63 Fafang was willing to accept materialistic 126

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explanations of nearly all phenomena, but he was unwilling to accept the explanations of the seventh and eighth consciousnesses given by Jin because those two consciousnesses were the very basis of all reality, including matter itself, and Jin had reversed this. For Fafang, consciousness is not an epiphenomenon of matter; matter is, in some sense, a phenomenon of consciousness.

PSYCHOLOGY WAS POPULAR WITH YOUNG Chinese intellectuals in the 1920s, and members of the Wuchang School such as Fafang engaged with this emerging science more than with any other specific science during that decade. They agreed that in order to understand human beings and to carry out many of the tasks needed to create a functioning society—education, law, governance—it was imperative to have an adequate comprehension of the human mind. But the Buddhists believed modern psychology was limited when compared with the psychology of Consciousness-Only thought. While modern psychology could not explain memory or instinct, Consciousness-Only, with its awareness of the constitutive roles played by the seventh and eighth consciousnesses, could. As an orthodox interpretation of the doctrine of ConsciousnessOnly was necessary for Buddhists who held fast to the premise of consciousness-only as a superior worldview to materialism, they would not accept a physiological reduction of that doctrine. These were the ideas that animated Buddhists’ discussion of psychology in the 1920s. The 1930s saw a change in the way that sciences such as psychology were discussed as those sciences became more and more established as a result of the Nationalists’ increasing focus on technocratic governance. As psychologists themselves grew less interested in talking about the philosophical bases for their science, so too did Buddhists. This is not to say that Buddhists did not talk about psychology after the 1920s; some did, and most of those writers were members of the Wuchang School.64 But by the middle of the 1930s, psychology was no longer a major topic of discussion in the writings of those Chinese Buddhists who talked about science.

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5

Ethics, Science, and Society

AS THE THREE PREVIOUS CHAPTERS have shown, Chinese Buddhists believed that some of the discoveries made by science had already been known to Buddhism and that although there was some overlap between the empirical methods of science and those of Buddhism, there were limitations to the scientific approach that made Buddhism ultimately superior. In other words, the three previous chapters dealt primarily with truth claims about humans and the natural world and the bases for those claims. The final two chapters of this study deal with a different type of question. A philosophy of life speaks not only of what human life is and how it functions but of what it ought to be by addressing the question of how humans should behave. What are the proper goals of a life well lived? And how do science and Buddhism differ in their answers to this question? Chapter 6 will deal with the issue of meditation and personal spiritual cultivation, while this chapter reflects on Buddhists’ ethical criticisms of science. In their critiques, Buddhists took aim at the concept of the survival of the fittest, which they treated as the central moral philosophy of science. And just as they had done in their critique of the scientific method, Buddhists offered an alternative, in this case in the form of a thoroughgoing Buddhist egalitarianism. As noted in chapter 2, one of the two most commonly cited examples of a conflict between science and religion is the trial of Galileo. The 128

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other case, which is certainly more famous in the United States where I write these words, is the issue of Darwinian evolution. As with the trial of Galileo, the idea that religions are superstitious because they believe in creator gods and reject Darwinism was an important element of antireligion rhetoric in China during the 1920s. For their part, Buddhists repeatedly pointed out that Buddhism does not have a creator deity and that Darwin’s theories support their traditional view that such beliefs are in error.1 In the works I have examined, I have not seen any Buddhists reject the idea of biological evolution. This is likely due to the fact that Buddhist doctrine is quite comfortable with the idea of the change and development of the universe and its inhabitants and agrees there is no fundamental ontological difference between humans and animals. It is possible that if Buddhists had dug deeper, they would have found they shared some of the reservations some Christians have with accepting random variation and natural selection as the mechanisms for evolution,2 a concept that does not fit well with most traditional interpretations of the doctrine of karma.3 In their critique of Darwinism, Buddhists did share with Christians in the West the concern that the theory of evolution seemed to require struggle and murder and even to make virtues of these in the name of progress.4 It was relatively easy for Buddhists to elide any conflicts that existed between their tradition and the biological aspects of the theory of evolution because evolution was treated primarily as a sociopolitical theory and not a biological one in China during the first decades of the twentieth century. Although Buddhists and others used the name “Darwin” metonymically to refer to the theory of evolution, Chinese ideas about evolution owed far more to Herbert Spencer’s (1820–1903) social evolutionism and what it said about society and international politics. In order to make this distinction in interpretation clear, in this chapter I will mostly refer to “evolutionism” and not “evolution” or the “theory of evolution,” as I consider the latter to be primarily a biological theory. Because Buddhists dealt with evolutionism as a sociopolitical theory, they treated it as prescriptive rather than descriptive, as a moral system that peoples and nations could choose to embrace or not embrace.5 Buddhists argued that the people of the world should instead adopt an ideal of equality (pingdeng ⸛䫱), which was rooted in both traditional Buddhist and modern political discourses. 129

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Because Buddhists treated evolutionism as the moral system of science, their discussions of the two were closely linked. However, the former was also connected more broadly to views of how societies work and interact with one another, and Buddhist arguments about evolutionism did not follow the same historical trajectory as arguments about the other branches of science described in the previous chapters. This chapter thus spends some time reflecting on sources from the 1940s, in order to trace the continued vitality of critiques of evolutionism in Buddhist circles. Buddhists’ understandings of the types of ethical problems caused by science and technology continued to develop from 1920 to 1950, but the solution they proposed to them remained fairly static. Regardless of the cause of the ongoing ethical crisis that makes the appalling destruction of war possible in the human world, Buddhists felt that Buddhism, with its focus on ethical behavior, compassion, and equality among living things, was the solution to the problem. Their ethical critique of science began in earnest in the 1920s after Liang Qichao questioned the rhetoric of Western-style progress in the wake of his 1919 visit to a Europe ravaged by World War I. During that decade, most Buddhists directed their ire at the philosophy of social evolutionism, which they saw as the primary, and amoral, framework for the scientific worldview. From the 1930s onward, as Marxist notions of history began to replace social evolutionism, Buddhists spoke in a more general way about the ethical implications inherent in adopting science as a guiding worldview. An interesting and important element of these discussions, especially as they developed in the 1940s, was disagreement over the relationship between Buddhism and religion. As mentioned in chapter 1, during the first few decades of the twentieth century and especially during the 1920s, the ideological complex of science–religion–superstition was treated as a zero-sum game, with the middle position, religion, vague both in the eyes of the law and in intellectual discourse. For Buddhists, to show that their tradition was not superstitious meant to move it closer to science. In so doing, most Buddhists maintained through the 1920s that Buddhism was not a religion.6 This changed, of course, after the government’s 1936 pronouncement that Buddhism was a religion and should receive protection under the constitution. Nevertheless, adherents of Buddhism continued to argue that their tradition was more scientific and more appropriate for the modern world than mere religion. 130

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However, by the mid-1940s, Buddhists were extolling the virtues of religion and the benefits it could bring to human society, especially in light of the violence of World War II.

Evolutionism in China Of all the changes wrought by Chinese thinkers’ engagement with modern science in the late Qing period, the most important was a shift in the cosmology upon which their views of their nation, society, and culture were based. Charlotte Furth identified the two essential elements of this shift. First, Chinese thinkers had to contend with the existence of other civilizations. The long-held idea that China was the center of and the only civilized place in the world was overturned as China was forced to recognize the depth of culture and the military superiority of the nations of Europe, America, and most shockingly, Japan. This disorienting decentering of China was coupled with the new idea of a deterministic universe. The old universe, based on the principles of harmony and morality, in which the governance and behavior of the emperor of China played a determining role in the fate of the world, was gradually replaced by a deterministic universe ruled by the laws of Newtonian physics and biological and social evolutionism.7 Evolutionism was first introduced in China in the late 1880s by the missionary Joseph Edkins (1823–1905),8 but it did not garner much attention from China’s thinkers until after the scholar Yan Fu ♜⽑ (1854–1921) published in 1898 his Tianyan lun ⣑㺼婾 (On Evolution), which was a loose translation and commentary upon Thomas Huxley’s (1825–1895) Evolution and Ethics.9 Until that time the dissemination of evolutionism in China had been delayed by the Protestant missionaries most responsible for translating science.10 By the turn of the century, Yan, Liang Qichao, and others had succeeded in spreading evolutionism among segments of the Chinese intelligentsia. The type of evolutionary theory Yan introduced is more accurately called social evolutionism, because it focused on the conflict between and progressive development of social groups and not on the biological evolution of species. This philosophical discourse is often referred to as “social Darwinism,” but this is inaccurate. As Frank Dikötter writes in his history of the concept of race in China, “In the context of modern Chinese intellectual history, social Darwinism 131

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is a myth. The predominant evolutionary theories in China from the end of the nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth century were non-Darwinian. Complete translations of Charles Darwin’s works were not even available until 1919.”11 Despite the fact that the social evolutionism embraced in China was not drawn primarily from Darwin himself, evolutionary theory was, nevertheless, strongly associated with Darwin there, and by the start of the Republic the name Darwin had become synonymous with social evolutionism. This approach to evolution was well suited to Chinese thinkers, for whom the biological implications of Darwin’s theories were not as important as the social and political ones. A clear example of this is the fact that in his first essays on evolutionism, Yan Fu left out the idea of the descent of humanity from apes completely. What fired the creativity of China’s thinkers most during the first decade of the twentieth century was a social evolutionism of the kind espoused by Herbert Spencer, who believed in the evolution of not only organisms but of the human mind, society, and culture. Yan Fu promoted Spencer’s view of human evolution, in which a Malthusian struggle to control a finite amount of resources carried out between groups (qun 佌)12 was the mechanism by which the “survival of the fittest” (an expression coined by Spencer, not Darwin) was realized.13 Although they interpreted it differently (toward constitutional monarchism, revolution, or Hancentric racism14), Chinese thinkers found in this discourse an explanation for China’s current predicament. The idea of social evolutionism in China was, like all philosophy during this period, deeply connected with political theory. Ideas from social evolutionism were used primarily in discourses about the fate of the nation and the best way for China to respond to foreign encroachment and the rise of the industrial age. The connection between evolutionism and politics that occurred in the late Qing was not unique to China and should be seen as part of the worldwide rise of the social sciences. From the 1870s onward, evolutionism, European history, mechanistic physicalism, and the ideal of social progress increasingly influenced politics, economics, and sociology.15 It was during this period that these disciplines came to be seen as sciences. Typified for Chinese thinkers by evolutionism, they were seen as immutable laws of nature that nations ignored only at their peril. Ideas about social evolutionism, which were connected with Western notions 132

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of progress, were also linked to a new utopianism that grew in China from the late 1880s. The idea that the nation could exist in perfect internal and external harmony had a long history in China, but these new utopias reversed the flow of time, in a sense, as they were seen to come about as the culmination of the historical development of industry and culture as it progressed forward in time. In other words, utopia was no longer imagined to be the result of a return to a past golden age. One now looked to the future, to the new. In their excitement about their “discovery” of the West, Chinese thinkers of the 1890s and 1900s saw the West as a repository of tools and ideas needed for reaching this utopia, and the West became the imagined world leader in something called progress.16 The worldview of social evolutionism became a central part of the intellectual and political contexts in which science was studied in China. It was difficult to rhetorically separate science from the instrumental role it played in the continued advancement of society. Science and technology were the means by which such progress could be achieved. The doctrine of social evolutionism was also the primary interpretive lens through which Chinese thinkers understood the crisis facing China in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. China was weak because it did not have science, and if China remained weak it would be dominated and ultimately weeded out by more powerful nations. Thus, what China needed was the strength that only science and technology could bring. This line of thinking made social evolutionism the springboard from which debates about China’s need for modern science were launched. By the 1920s there already were well-developed alternates to social evolutionism in China. Many literati were appalled by the idea of the survival of the fittest, and they sought alternate understandings of society and progress. Primary among these was an anarchist socialism deeply influenced by Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921). This version of social evolutionism said that human beings and human society have evolved and will only continue to evolve through mutual assistance. Two key tenets of this view are a progressive utopianism and a commitment to egalitarianism. These ideas were embraced in the late Qing by two thinkers whose work has already been discussed, Zhang Taiyan and Tan Sitong.17 Anarchist socialism remained a viable option for many thinkers after the founding of the Republic in 1912 and was “actually the dominant radical ideology in China until the mid-1920s.”18 In his work, Justin Ritzinger has shown 133

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the degree to which this ideology influenced Taixu in the 1910s and other Buddhists in the 1920s. It is clear that the vision set forth in anarchist socialism, especially its criticism of violence and its emphasis on universal equality, had a deep impact on the Buddhists whose writings are studied here.

Chinese Buddhists on Evolutionism Because evolutionary theory was popularized relatively late, Chinese intellectuals did not use Buddhism to think about evolutionism in an extended manner during the late Qing.19 Unlike astronomy, evolutionary theory and its relationship to Buddhist doctrine were not discussed by writers until the 1920s. This was not the case in Japan, where prominent Buddhist philosophers discussed in detail the consonance they saw between evolutionary theories and Buddhist doctrine as early as the late 1880s.20 Although those thinkers argued for the noncontradiction of evolutionary theory and Buddhism, most of them opposed the notions of materialism and unerring progress (favoring cyclicality instead).21 What one does not see in the Japanese Buddhist literature of these decades is the sort of ethical critique that would become central to Chinese Buddhists’ discussions of evolution thirty years later. During the 1920s it became a widespread practice among Chinese Buddhists writing about science to either include or center their work upon critiques of amoral science. In making such criticisms, Buddhists often cited a world order based on struggle, of the type envisioned in popular social evolutionism in China, as one of the most deplorable aspects of modern science. As with their claims about psychology and the scientific method, Buddhists’ interest in discussing evolutionism from a philosophical standpoint coincided with a peak in the popularity of that topic among Chinese thinkers as a whole, which reached its zenith in the 1920s. As a result of the popularity of evolutionism, this period also saw the publication of the greatest concentration of articles by Buddhist authors on the issue of evolution. By the 1930s, however, evolutionism and the term “Darwinism” were already fading from ideological use as Marxist dialectical materialism spread among many of China’s intellectuals, replacing the interpretation of history offered by evolutionistic notions of competition and progress with those of industrialization and 134

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class struggle.22 Buddhists continued to respond to evolutionism throughout the 1930s but not to the same degree that they talked about other scientific theories. Chinese Buddhist discussion of evolution in the 1920s was characterized by two general themes. First, Buddhists criticized the evolutionary worldview, particularly Spencerian social evolutionism, for being unethical, and they blamed it for the expansion of warfare and the technologies of war then occurring in the world. This was an attitude they shared with a number of other Chinese thinkers, including Liang Qichao and the editors of the Dongfang zazhi. The second way Buddhists talked about evolution was to redefine it in order to give it a Buddhist meaning. The term “evolution” was used to describe the spiritual progress a Buddhist makes toward enlightenment. In this way, Buddhists adopted the prestige associated with the term “evolution” (as well as some of the theory’s assumptions) while claiming that this kind of Buddhist evolution was “true” evolution, just as they had done by arguing that Buddhist empiricism was “true” empiricism. The most common criticism of science made by Buddhists after 1919 was that it is at best unethical and at worst inherently dangerous to humanity. Buddhists’ criticisms of the unethical nature of science were based in large part on their implicit definitions of science. The specter of World War I and the continuing presence of foreign powers (especially Japan) on Chinese soil were both seen as having been made possible by modern science, which forced many in China to question the idea that science was inherently an instrument for good. The cautionary statements Liang Qichao made about science in 1919 continued to reverberate within the intellectual world of China, especially among Buddhists. From 1919 until 1949 Buddhist authors repeatedly pointed to World War I in Europe as an example of the dangers science posed to the human race. In describing the battlefield carnage modern science made possible, many authors resorted to expressions reminiscent of descriptions of Buddhist hells, describing the sites of modern warfare as “seas of blood and mountains of bones” (xiehai gushan 埨㴟橐Ⱉ) or “mountains of corpses and seas of blood” (shishan xiehai ⯠Ⱉ埨㴟). Blaming the destruction of World War I on science in this manner depended upon a lack of differentiation between science and the technology it engendered. Buddhists argued that the chemical weapons, bombs, and rapid-fire guns responsible for 135

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increasing the amount of killing that occurred during World War I would not have been possible without science. Rather than seeing the forward march of science as a boon to the human race, many Buddhists saw it as a threat. This theme was a constant in Buddhists’ discussions of science throughout the remainder of the Republican period. With the creation of the nuclear bomb in the United States and its subsequent use on Japan in 1945, Buddhists added warnings about the danger posed by nuclear weapons, with Taixu taking the lead.23 For many Buddhists, their ethical criticisms of science were not based solely on the fact that science had a hand in producing vicious weapons. Nor was their criticism based on the idea that science, as a field of study, lacked any system for judging the ethics of a person’s actions. Ethical condemnation of science as a whole was usually based on criticisms of the philosophy of “might makes right,” which many Buddhists saw as central to the modern scientific endeavor and which they inaccurately attributed to Darwin’s theories of evolution. A certain Miaokong ⥁䨢 made exactly this point in 1925.24 In an article he wrote comparing the ethical systems underlying Buddhism and evolutionism, he argued that evolutionism (jinhuazhuyi 忚⊾ᷣ佑) abandons ethics, but that Buddhism promotes true evolution because it believes evolution must be rooted in ethics.25 Of evolutionism he wrote: Because the moral capability of today’s evolutionists is weak, they have created a simplistic discipline. But they take the ideology of Darwin’s “natural selection” and “survival of the fittest” as something profound, to the point where Mr. Darwin’s disciple, Nietzsche, who is basically in his [intellectual] lineage, produced a kind of “Superman-ism,” according to which it is supposed that extraordinarily talented people with great creative abilities are the best adapted among humankind. Their [talent] is the basis for worldly evolution. It is like the evolutionary axiom of “the strong eating the weak.”26

This passage contains several of the themes commonly present in Buddhist criticisms of evolutionism. In virtually all of the Buddhist articles on evolution I have examined, at least one of the three expressions “survival of the fittest,” “natural selection,” or “the strong eating the weak” 136

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appeared, and these were taken to represent the very essence of that theory. Miaokong’s identification of Nietzsche as a “disciple” of Darwin was unusual, but it makes a certain sense given the German thinker’s reputation and Miaokong’s desire to reduce evolution to a particularly brutal form of social evolutionism. Miaokong argued that Buddhism and Buddhist ethics offered a true evolutionary path. Just as Buddhists had done when they claimed that Buddhism offered a higher form of empiricism than did science, Miaokong accepted that “evolution” was something desirable but stated that Buddhist ethics offered a better system for its realization than the ethic of survival of the fittest. Again, this criticism of social evolutionism only makes sense if one appreciates that Chinese Buddhists took evolutionism to be prescriptive rather than descriptive. They were able to call for alternatives because they viewed social evolutionism as optional. Given the perceived deficiencies of the modern evolutionistic worldview when compared with a Buddhist one, some Buddhists sought to redefine evolution along Buddhist lines as Miaokong had done when he referred to the “great evolutionism” of Buddhism. Jinhua 忚⊾, the Chinese neologism used to translate the word evolution, is not found in the Buddhist scriptures, but the two characters that make up the word are quite common. In Buddhism, jin 忚 (advancement) is measured in terms of the spiritual progress one makes toward enlightenment. Apart from this spiritual progress, existence is repetitive and cyclical in nature. The concept of automatic and unidirectional progress from a lesser physical or mental state of existence to a higher state is foreign in Buddhism, wherein sentient beings are believed to be reborn as one of six types of beings, changing from life to life. Buddhists agree that a monkey could be reborn as a human, but a human can just as easily be reborn as a monkey. For most Buddhists, the only real progress possible is advancement on the path to enlightenment. “Transformation (hua ⊾),” the other component of the Chinese word for evolution, can have both negative and positive connotations in Buddhism. On the one hand, a common metaphor for the imaginary nature of things is that they are like things produced through transformation. On the other hand, one of the main activities of buddhas and bodhisattvas in Mahāyāna Buddhism is “teaching and transforming sentient beings” (jiaohua zhongsheng 㔁⊾䛦䓇), an idea that implies both converting them to Buddhism and leading them to liberation.27 With 137

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these associations in mind, it is easier to understand the ways in which some Buddhists redefined evolution. For Buddhists, ethical behavior, or śīla (Ch. jie ㆺ), is one of the cornerstones of spiritual practice. As a result, it is no surprise that in reformulating evolution, Buddhists would stress the need for ethics. Their understanding of what is required for true evolution was not limited solely to ethics, as is evident in several of Taixu’s writings from the 1920s. Taixu was not overly critical of the idea of evolution the first few times he talked about it. In his important 1923 lecture “The Buddhadharma and Science,” he said little that was directly critical of evolution. He even cited Darwin’s discovery of the origin of human life alongside Newton’s discovery of gravity as examples of science’s accomplishments.28 Taixu praised evolutionary theory for overturning the idea of a creator god and vaguely referred to a similarity between Darwin’s theory of inherited adaptation and the Buddhist idea of karma.29 Taixu’s positive estimation of evolutionism theory did not last, however, and by 1925 he had already begun to decry it as a form of nihilistic materialism.30 It was at this point that he began to use a more expansive definition of evolution, identifying a bodhisattva’s progress toward complete enlightenment as evolution. He argued that only Mahāyāna Buddhism contains a “true evolutionary theory” (zhen jinhua lun 䛇忚⊾婾), which is the path by which a bodhisattva reaches the stage from which there is no possibility of backsliding in spiritual progress.31 In writing about evolutionism, Buddhists such as Taixu attempted to redefine the meaning of the term “evolution” to accord with Buddhist ethics and soteriology. Doing so allowed them to accept evolution by claiming it as their own, while still allowing them to maintain their critique of amoral science. Taixu and others from the Wuchang School continued to write about the idea of Buddhist evolution over the next decade. Taixu talked about this idea again in an article from 1931, in which he laid out several different theories of evolution, including those espoused by Bergson and Kropotkin. In that article he criticized each in turn before concluding with a discussion of the path of Buddhist practice as a type of evolution. He said that each step of Buddhist practice, from Hīnayāna to Mahāyāna, from the Mahāyāna to bodhisattvahood, and from bodhisattvahood to buddhahood, is a form of evolution.32 This identification of Buddhist spiritual progress as evolution appeared again as late as 1936, by which 138

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time evolution was already losing its popularity as a topic for Buddhist writers. In 1936, Taixu’s former student Zhifeng 剅Ⲙ (1901–1949)33 took aim at people who would equate Buddhist saṃsāra and Darwinian evolution. Zhifeng wrote that biologists’ theories about the evolution of humans from apes and the evolution of organic materials from inorganic ones are all rooted in materialism.34 As did many of his peers, Zhifeng rejected materialism in favor of the premise of consciousness-only. His ultimate argument was that modern evolutionary theory was incomplete, not because it claimed humans evolved from apes but because the path to becoming fully human lies only in the spiritual evolution brought about through Buddhist practice.35 If Buddhist practice allowed for a higher form of evolution than that discussed in modern evolutionary theory, one could ask what kind of world this evolution would create and what kind of beings it would produce. One gets some sense of this in Miaokong’s piece. For most of his article, Miaokong compared two types of evolution, Buddhist and social evolutionist. He concluded by stating that only Buddhist evolution could lead to a world of equality and freedom. We should cause everyone in the world to follow this [Buddhist] path together, to work hard with zeal to attain the wondrous fruits of transcending the world, to attain the truly wondrous goals of equality, freedom, and no self. This is nothing like the extinction of weaker kinds of people proposed by Misters Darwin and Nietzsche. They plan in advance for evolution and then later take the results to be evolution.36 In other words, this is the “supermanism” of the new, struggle-oriented modes of thinking. Only with the morality of Buddhism can we bring about equality and freedom, uproot suffering, and grant happiness. This is the great evolutionism that will bring order to the new world.37

One can see in this passage the extent to which the discourses of his day had influenced Miaokong’s thoughts about the ideal society. The three pillars of freedom and equality, along with fraternal love (boai ⌂ッ), were the key slogans of the French Revolution, and they were central pillars of the anarchist socialist view of society. Taixu himself embraced them explicitly in the early 1910s.38 Equality and freedom also became 139

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two of the main goals of the May Fourth movement, which held them up as the very things whose realization in Chinese society was prevented by adherence to outmoded superstitions like Miaokong’s Buddhism. Like Buddhist writers before and after him, Miaokong saw no contradiction between the values of freedom and equality and those of Buddhism. This position was bolstered by the fact that the Chinese terms used to translate “freedom” (Ch. ziyou 冒䓙) and “equality” (Ch. pingdeng) are regularly used in Buddhist scripture. As other Buddhists were doing with the term “verification” (zheng), which appeared in both scientific and Buddhist discourse, writers like Miaokong took advantage of lexical resonance to argue that only Buddhism could bring about the freedom and equality that both it and the May Fourth movement demanded. From what I have seen, of the two terms, pingdeng had the greater circulation among Buddhists writing critically on the ethics of the modern, scientific age. The term pingdeng encapsulated the alternative worldview Buddhists wished to promote in lieu of one derived from a social evolutionism based on constant conflict between groups. The concept of pingdeng is a common one in Mahāyāna Buddhism, though there it generally refers to equality between phenomena, particularly in light of a realization of the emptiness of all things (it can also refer to the Buddha’s impartiality).39 In classical Buddhist literature, it rarely, if ever, carried the specifically social egalitarian connotations it had when used by intellectuals in early twentieth-century China to translate the modern political concept of equality. This did not prevent Buddhists from taking advantage of lexical resonance between a term native to their tradition and one important in modern political discourse. Such appropriations were not limited to China, and Buddhists in both Korea and Japan in the early twentieth century pointed to the concept of pingdeng (Kor. p’yǒngdǔng; Jp. byōdō) as evidence of the inherent compatibility between Buddhism and modern political philosophy.40 For Chinese Buddhists, pingdeng represented an alternative to the struggle, conflict, and destruction inherent in a world that followed the law of social evolutionism. In a world where all were equal, there was no need for social groups to compete with one another and no need for violent wars. This was spelled out clearly by one Tuochen 僓⠝ in an article he wrote in 1930.41 Tuochen argued that because of the influence of the West, people in China were praising equality and freedom but that 140

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these would never be reached because people were going about it all wrong. For the sake of freedom, people were fighting violently with one another. Tuochen also argued that laws and punishment were not enough to transform the people and lead them away from this kind of conflict. Not surprisingly, he felt that what society needed was Buddhism, specifically the Buddhist concept of pingdeng. If this virtue could be cultivated in the hearts of the people, violence would decline, and equality among people would be realized. He concluded his article by saying that this was the only way to save the world and usher in a state of Great Unity (Datong ⣏⎴). Here, Tuochen drew on a strain of Chinese utopianism to argue for the importance of the Buddhist notion of pingdeng. This Great Unity, a peaceful utopia ruled by a meritocracy, harkens back to the Chinese utopian thinkers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most notably Kang Youwei, one of whose most famous works was the Book of Great Unity (Datong shu ⣏⎴㚠), parts of which were first published in the 1900s. Like Zhang Taiyan and Tan Sitong, Kang Youwei embraced the ideas of egalitarianism and progressive utopianism, and these ideas are central in his Book of Great Unity.42 Tuochen drew from both this tradition in China and Buddhism but located his argument within discussions ongoing in China about national salvation and the possibility of ending violence in the world. Although Tuochen supported the idea of pingdeng, he felt the Buddhist version of equality was different from the one talked about by his non-Buddhist peers. The idea that the Buddha had preached a kind of social equality was cited by several writers, but not all agreed that the secular version of equality was something supported in Buddhism. Liu Linghua ∱曰剙 argued that Buddhist and secular social equality represented the same thing in a piece he wrote in 1930.43 In showing how Buddhism fit with modern thought, Liu raised several of the points discussed in previous chapters: he criticized modern psychology for studying only the first six of the eight consciousnesses, and he said that single-celled organisms had been discovered in ancient India.44 Liu also said that the Buddha had taught things about the structure of society germane to contemporary philosophical debates. The Buddha had given up a position in the upper class of society in order to teach pingdeng to his followers. The Buddha taught that greed for wealth is a common human problem, but Liu said that if a sense of community could be extended throughout 141

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Asia, class struggle could be overcome, and divisions between people would not arise.45 Not everyone agreed that the search for social equality was something supported in Buddhism. In 1929, the year before Tuochen’s and Liu’s pieces came out, Tang Dayuan stated that political theories directed at liberation, freedom, and equality are all predicated on deluded notions of the self and that the search for material well-being is problematic because the material things of the world are finite and (following Malthus) if one person or group gets something, this necessarily means another person or group will have less.46 Perhaps Tang would have been more sympathetic to the notion of equality if he had seen in it some echo of the Buddhist concept of pingdeng, the way that Liu Linghua and Tuochen did. By approaching the notion of equality as the solution to a world of violence and conflict, these two writers discussed evolutionism in ways similar to the ways in which Buddhists discussed the empirical method. While the notions of empiricism, evolutionism, and equality promoted by the champions of science in the early twentieth century were laudable, these writers felt that each was incomplete when compared with its Buddhist counterpart. Evolution and secular equality, in particular, were more than simply insufficient, they were downright dangerous to humanity, and only through the intervention of Buddhist teachings could they be rehabilitated for the good of the world.

Amoral Science Is the Problem, Religious Ethics Are the Answer Although the importance of social evolutionism in China diminished in the 1930s with the rising popularity of Marxist views of history, Buddhist ethical criticism of science did not decrease significantly during that time. Due to the chaos of the Second Sino-Japanese War, the total output of the Buddhist press decreased, but the ethical critique of science remained a theme in the material that was published. With the end of the war and a return to prewar levels of publication, Buddhists’ criticisms of science and technology continued. Within a year of the end of the war, a number of new, more political Buddhist periodicals appeared. These, along with some of the other periodicals that had been published without interruption during the war, carried articles decrying the horrors of 142

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war and offering suggestions on how to ameliorate the destructive ends to which science had been put in the course of those conflicts. In these discussions, the concept of “religion” played a greater role than it had in the writings of Buddhists in years before the war. During the mid-1930s, Buddhists continued to link science with weapons of war, and with World War II in particular. Buddhists did not use this connection to reject science in its entirety, they desired only to point out its drawbacks and to counter the claims of scientism that religion should be completely abandoned in favor of science. To cite but two examples of this type of rhetoric, the following two passages are taken from articles that appeared in a 1936 issue of the Hong Kong–based Ren haideng Ṣ㴟䅰 (Altar Lamp of Humanity). The main thrust of both of these articles was to defend Buddhism against claims that it was superstitious, outdated, and a detriment to Chinese society. Fayuan 㱽䶋 said that although Euro-American thought was popular in China, Chinese people should not accept it, precisely because it led to violence and destruction. We cannot totally accept [Euro-American science], and the war in Europe is a good example of why not. If we use limited material things to make ourselves wealthy, we will fight with one another, this is the rule of wealth and it leads to more suffering. Within a clan and among different ethnicities there will be mutual killing. Moreover, science will provide us with many weapons [an extensive list is given here] so that there will be a mountain of bones and seas of blood. The war in Europe has been going on for seven or eight years, if we accept science, won’t it bring such a war to the Pacific?47

This was a prescient statement in light of Japan’s increasingly aggressive military stance in East Asia. On July 7, 1937, thirteen months after Fayuan’s piece was published, the Japanese military used a minor incident in which they were prevented by the Chinese government from searching for a missing soldier as an excuse to begin an invasion of China. Even when Fayuan was writing, Japan had already set up the puppet state of Manchukuo (1932–1945) in Manchuria, which had long been a part of China under the Qing dynasty. Fayuan sought to defend Buddhism from claims of superstition by undermining the claim that science was in some way morally superior. He 143

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was not alone in making this argument. In another article from the same issue of Ren haideng, the likely pseudonymous Ding San ᶩᶱ argued that Buddhism was superior to all other forms of philosophy, including other religions and science. He first criticized Christianity for its belief in god, which he labeled, in Marxist fashion, a narcotic. For Ding San, science was no better because of its association with weapons and death. “Science researches the material world, culture, and evolution. It has given us steamships and railroads, reduced our workload, and it has helped us to be free from various kinds of suffering. But science has also produced weapons and even the ability to destroy the world.”48 The criticism that science is amoral and leads inevitably to violence when unchecked had been in circulation among Buddhists for a decade and a half by the time Fayuan’s and Ding San’s articles appeared in print. Both writers accepted the assertion that Buddhism was not a religion, or if it was, it was not like other religions. In arguing that their tradition was not superstitious, Buddhists were quite willing to criticize science and were not shy about criticizing other religions. During the 1930s, Buddhists sought to establish Buddhism as something apart from the complex of science–religion–superstition.49 Arguments along these lines appeared in Buddhist writings until the 1940s, but they declined in popularity as a very different argument gained ground in Buddhist circles. This was the argument that Buddhism was able to provide the needed moral corrective to materialistic and amoral science, not because it was unlike other religions but precisely because it was. Discussions about Buddhism’s relationship to the category of religion often occurred in the context of discussions about Buddhism’s relationship to science. In these discussions, some continued to argue that Buddhism was superior to other forms of religion, especially with regard to its underlying ethical system, which was based on pingdeng. In the second of his two major works on science and Buddhism, 1942’s Fofa shengyao ἃ㱽䚩天 (Brief Essentials on the Buddha-dharma), Wang Xiaoxu wrote that Buddhism is neither science nor philosophy, it is a religion, but one that is superior to all others. As with writers of the 1920s and 1930s, Wang seemed to treat religion as synonymous with Christianity, or at least with Western monotheisms. Buddhism was superior to these for several reasons. The last reason he gave is that Buddhism, unlike other religions, teaches about “absolute pingdeng.” Mahāyāna Buddhism teaches 144

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that all sentient beings have Buddha nature, even animals, and because of this there is no room for prejudice in Buddhism.50 One of Wang’s acquaintances, the engineer You Zhibiao, discussed this issue in greater detail in his Fojiao kexueguan ἃ㔁䥹⬠奨 (The Scientific Outlook of Buddhism). After its initial publication as a monograph at the end of the 1940s, You’s work was serialized in several Buddhist periodicals, and it has been reprinted numerous times since. Like Wang’s CSBS, You’s book has become a classic work on the relationship between Buddhism and science in the Sinophone world. In Fojiao kexueguan, You discussed in detail what he saw to be the essential elements of the Buddhist theory of pingdeng. For him, Buddhist pingdeng is superior to conventional notions of equality popular in political discourse because while such theories do deal with politics, gender, and economics, they do not take into account a host of other differences, such as appearance and family background. In contrast, Buddhism teaches that all dharmas are equal.51 You concluded his discussion of Buddhist pingdeng by pointing out how it differs from that of “other religions,” by which it is clear he meant Christianity. You said that religions promote altruism (boai), but as a kind of love, such altruism still depends on notions of subject and object, I and you.52 Buddhist compassion, on the other hand, lies in treating all things as equal, even across the divide of self and other. Buddhist equality is the basis for its compassion (cibei ヰず), which is egoless.53 Wang and You admitted that Buddhism was a religion, but a religion of a special kind, and claimed that its uniqueness lay, at least in part, in the superior value of its ethical system. Not all Buddhists sought to emphasize the differences between Buddhism and other religions in their ethical cautions about science. Others saw in all religions the kind of ethics that were necessary to ameliorate the negative effects of the misuse of technology in war. This was the standpoint adopted by Luo Wuxu. Luo, or “Upasaka Wu Shu,” as he is more commonly known in the Anglophone world,54 gave a number of lectures on science and Buddhism that were published in both Chinese and English.55 In 1945 he wrote that science had not only been responsible for tremendously destructive new weapons, such as the atomic bomb, but, with its philosophies of materialism and “the survival of the fittest,” it also contributed to a destructive worldview. In the West, this worldview replaced monotheism, which was the traditional source of “spiritual” ethics until it was overturned by 145

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science.56 As noted above, the idea that science had overturned monotheisms was a common theme among Buddhists in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. Unlike earlier writers, however, Luo linked monotheism to something positive, the positive value of ethics. Like those Buddhists who came before him, he did not regret that science had supposedly exposed the flaw of monotheistic faith, but he admitted that this type of religion had provided some of the guidance needed by the peoples of the world. Luo took a similarly balanced position with regard to the culpability of science in times of war. He said science is just a tool, like a knife, and it is the people who make use of it who determine its moral character. The greatest danger that comes from science, Luo said, is that it causes people to place too much emphasis on the material world. This situation is not helped by a mechanistic view of human life, although this, he pointed out, is not a problem of science but of philosophy. The antidote to the materialism in science is a “rational, spiritual faith” (lizhi de jingshen xinyang 䎮㘢䘬䱦䤆ᾉẘ), which is the only basis for peace. For Luo this rational, spiritual faith was best represented by the Buddha-dharma.57 This did not mean that there was no place for science in Luo’s view. On the contrary, Luo said he had faith in both science and Buddhism, which he demonstrated by using certain ideas from science both to point to the deficiencies of other scientific ideas and to demonstrate some consonances between Buddhism and science. Luo raised several points already discussed here. He said that relativity and quantum physics toppled the philosophy of materialism and that the practice of Buddhism is like science because it progresses from faith to understanding, then to practice, and finally to verification. He also added that Buddhism, like science, aimed at understanding the laws of cause and effect in human life and in the cosmos. Science was not inherently harmful, he said, and it had its uses. Atomic energy, for example, could be used for peaceful purposes. And the ultimate solution to all human ignorance, which is the root of conflict and war, lies in using both the Buddha-dharma and science. Luo concluded his piece by saying that if we can use the thought and language of science to establish faith in the Buddha-dharma, then the realms of spirit and matter, of feeling and reason, can be brought together.58 The equal importance of science and religion, not simply the superiority of religion to science, was not a new theme among Chinese 146

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intellectuals as a whole, but it was one that received increasing attention in the Buddhist press after the mid-1940s. In July of 1946, a year after the end of World War II, Shitan ⷓΆ wrote that Japan and Germany had lost their ways in the world because they had lost the altruistic spirit of religion.59 It was because they had lost this altruistic spirit that they invaded other countries, and the same deficiency also eventually led them to lose the wars they had started. This altruistic spirit, he argued, could be seen alive and well among the Americans, who possessed it because they had religion. Fighting a fight that Buddhists had been fighting for decades, Shitan said that religious faith was not inimical to scientific progress. He stated that Americans were religious but were still able to develop the atomic bomb. Their belief did not hinder their progress on the technological front, but it did instill in them a certain set of ethics when using the technologies they developed. The reason why he believed they would only use atomic weapons for good was because Americans do not call religion a “poison.” The likely target of such comments were Marxists and others who were of the opinion, by then long-entrenched in China, that it is religion that causes a nation to fall behind other nations in the way that China had done in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Shitan said it was imperative for the advanced and the advancing nations to have both the knowledge and know-how that comes from science and the ethical altruism that comes from religion. Shitan’s article appeared in the short-lived periodical Juequn zhoubao 奢佌忙⟙ (Awakening the Multitude Weekly News), which was founded in Shanghai by Taixu and others in 1946 to agitate for the political involvement of the sangha.60 This magazine was, during its short run, particularly interested in war, and those among its contributors who discussed science often touched on the issue of war and ethics. Like Luo and Shitan, most of them felt that science, and scientists themselves, had something to offer a world determined to forge a lasting peace. Taixu was a prime example of this when, in a short piece also published in 1946, he called for the establishment of an international body of pacifist religious persons and scientists to control all atomic weapons. These weapons would only be used in cases in which one nation invaded another.61 Presumably, it was the hope of Taixu that the mere threat of atomic bombardment would be enough to prevent further invasions of the type that had just been witnessed in Europe, Africa, and Asia. In this piece Taixu called for 147

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scientists and religious persons to carry out this plan together. He placed more emphasis on the importance of the scientists, however—a fact that can be gleaned from the article’s title, “Returning the Atom Bomb to the Safekeeping of Pacifist Scientists” (Yuanzi tan gui aihao heping de kexuejia baoguan ⍇⫸⻰㬠ッ⤥␴⸛䘬䥹⬠⭞ᾅ䭉). It should be noted that not all Buddhists looked to Buddhism to find solutions to the problem of the perceived unethical nature of science. Some turned to the idea of “ethics,” broadly construed, or to social science. This approach appeared in an article written by Daxing ⣏愺 (1899–1952), one of the original students at the Wuchang Buddhist Seminary, a teacher and officer at the Minnan Buddhist Seminary, and a longtime campaigner for the reform of the Buddhist community. He also started the periodical Xiandai sengqie 䎦ẋ₏ụ (Modern Sangha) in 1928, which became Xiandai fojiao 䎦ẋἃ㔁 (Modern Buddhism) in 1932.62 In 1946, Daxing wrote an article responding to a lecture given by Columbia University professor Nathaniel Peffer (1890–1964) at Tongji ⎴㾇 University in Shanghai, which was reprinted in the September 6 edition of the Shanghai newspaper Shen bao 䓛⟙. In his lecture, Peffer had said that although world science had advanced a great deal in the previous two hundred years, and Chinese science in the last fifty, an adequate study of humanity was still lacking. Because of this, there remained a chance that science would lead to the destruction of humanity. The solution that Peffer proposed for this problem was the revitalization of the study of Confucius and Mencius, who he said could keep pace with the thinking of Einstein. Daxing quoted a large portion of Peffer’s speech and then added his own comments, saying that as people in China had learned more about science over the previous fifty years, they had left behind the humaneness (ren ṩ) and righteousness (yi 佑) taught by Confucius and Mencius. Daxing, a Buddhist monk, argued that China needed to once again embrace these values. To that he added that it was also necessary to carry out further research in the social sciences (shehui kexue 䣦㚫䥹⬠) to help society advance.63 Writers of articles in Buddhist periodicals remained generally concerned with the impact of science on humanity, and in addressing their concerns they did not rely solely on Buddhism or Buddhist scripture. Just as Daxing had pointed to the authoritative words of a Columbia University professor and promoted Confucianism and social science for the 148

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betterment of the nation, others also relied on the words of foreigners to bolster their arguments. In 1949, Mao Banghan 㮃恎㻊 wrote in the Singaporean Buddhist magazine Fojiao renjian ἃ㔁Ṣ攻 (Buddhist Humanity)64 that because science can be used for both good and evil purposes, there is a fundamental need for ethics to guide science. Used for good, science can produce better medicines and modes of transportation, but when science falls into the hands of imperialists or “wild-minded” people, it is used to make bombs and other weapons. For Mao, the solution to this problem is an unspecified system of “ethics.” To support his arguments, Mao cited the American aviator and notable pacifist Charles Lindbergh.65 It is likely that Mao had become aware of Lindbergh’s views from a Chinese translation of an August 22, 1946, radio interview from New York in which Lindbergh discussed his forthcoming book, Of Flight and Life. This report appeared in Chinese in the Buddhist periodicals Bodhisattva and Honghua yuekan in 1948.66 In it, Lindbergh warned that governments and armies cannot guarantee the safety of the people, and only when ethics ruled over science would people be safe. Like Daxing, Mao drew on the authority of foreigners’ voices to support his argument for the importance of ethics in a world of powerful science. Borrowing the authority of foreigners was certainly not a new practice; it had been happening since Western learning first became popular among the intelligentsia in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Nor were Buddhist calls for an ethical system to control science anything new. As has been shown here, such calls continued until at least midcentury. Whether they argued that it was Buddhism specifically, religion generally, or some other philosophical resource, Buddhists of the 1930s and 1940s continued to warn about the danger that science, unregulated, posed to humanity. Where they had first cautioned about the doctrine of social evolutionism during the 1920s, Buddhists of those later decades still pointed to the violence wrought using tools handed to bloodthirsty people by a science unconcerned with questions of morality. Buddhists sought to show that Buddhism, with its commitment to universal social equality, was essential in a modern world dominated by science.

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Science and Self-Cultivation

DURING THE SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY of life debates and the decade that followed, science was invoked in discussions of personal conduct and the social order. Although Buddhists’ writings on science did discuss truth claims, they also focused on prescriptive issues, the other important element of the ideological entity science in early twentiethcentury China. In other words, they discussed not only what is in the world but also what ought to be in terms of how we, as human beings, should act in the world. Buddhists rejected a “survival of the fittest” ethos in favor of an egalitarianism linked explicitly to the Buddhist tradition, which also had its roots in late nineteenth-century Chinese reformist thought. This was a prescription for society. This chapter examines the personal side of the Buddhist prescriptive project, looking at the intersection of science and Buddhist regimes of personal self-cultivation. Morality was a major element of the self-cultivation discussed by Buddhists in their writings on science. This is hardly surprising given the traditional belief that moral behavior is a central pillar of Buddhist practice. It is also not surprising that the calls for self-cultivation that appeared in the writings of Chinese Buddhists were usually framed in terms of the bodhisattva path and the six pāramitās, or perfections, that define that path.1 This is not surprising because China has been almost exclusively Mahāyānist in orientation, and the six perfections hold a significant place 150

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within Mahāyāna Buddhist praxis. What is not intuitive is that Buddhist writers in the 1920s would identify the study of science as a necessary part of the bodhisattva path by arguing that science is one of the ways in which a bodhisattva can ameliorate the suffering of sentient beings. In order to make this argument, Buddhists identified modern science with the “five arts” of ancient India described in Buddhist scripture. Apart from general statements about the six perfections, most of the Buddhists who spoke of self-cultivation and science did not provide much detail regarding specific meditation or bodily practices, but some did. This chapter closes with an examination of Science and Buddhism (Kexue yu foxue 䥹⬠冯ἃ⬠), a 1932 book by Hu Chaowu 傉崭ẵ. Hu promoted a new form of esoteric Buddhist meditation by using language and ideas drawn from modern science and extolling the health benefits it supposedly provides. Hu also predicted some of the comments made about Buddhism and science today when he called for Western scientists to use X-rays to study the brains of meditators. The idea that the apparatus of science should be used to study meditational states is strikingly similar to the enthusiasm one sees today for examining the brain states of people in meditation using PET scans, fMRI, and other technology.2 Though some of his ideas were similar to those encountered today, Hu’s book falls squarely within a discourse that had developed within China over the previous half century that linked physical cultivation to moral cultivation and saw the strength of the nation as dependent upon the physical health of its citizens. Although Hu’s book does not appear to have been very successful, it is a clear example of the attempts made by some Buddhists to establish their meditative practices as scientific during the 1920s and 1930s using terms and ideas drawn from Western chemistry and physiology.

Science and the Bodhisattva Path As has been shown, the published version of Taixu’s 1923 lecture, “The Buddha-dharma and Science,” played a role in popularizing ideas about the relationship of Buddhism and science. There Taixu promoted the idea that the pāramitās are an essential complement to the practice of science. He concluded his lecture by stating that although scientists may work hard to refine their instruments, they do not refine their own thinking, 151

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and if they could only improve their minds they could really understand the world. How could they do this? They, and everyone else, should practice the six pāramitās. But the ultimate aim of such practice is not simply to gain a better understanding of the natural world. Taixu said that people should practice the pāramitās in order to make our world into a Buddhaland so that the people within it would no longer face difficulties.3 For the individual, then, a good life consists not only of knowing how the world works but also of actively laboring to improve it by engaging in the cultivation of charity, morality, wisdom, and the other perfections. Such comments do not differ greatly from the ones Buddhists were making about social evolutionism at the same time, but the focus of these comments differed; one dealt with social structures while the other dealt with personal behavior. Nevertheless, the end goal was the same: a social structure and a world in which sentient beings were protected and succored. Taixu made this clear in his article “Mahāyāna Gradualism and Evolution.” There, he explained the Mahāyāna Buddhist path as a kind of evolution, in which the Buddhist first learns the teachings of the non-Mahāyāna schools, then engages in the practice scheme of (1) understanding, (2) practice, and (3) personal verification of the doctrine. Interestingly, Taixu stated that the attainment of buddhahood is only the penultimate stage of the path. The final stage is the salvation of all sentient beings.4 This does not represent a major break from the Mahāyāna tradition, but it is worth noting the emphasis. Rather than seeing the attainment of buddhahood as the final result of the spiritual “evolution” he describes, what was most important for Taixu was the salvation of all beings. Personal self-cultivation is important but only because its real beneficiary is not the individual. The idea that the six pāramitās represent the core of Buddhism was popular even among those who favored more rationalistic interpretations of Buddhist doctrine. One such writer was Jing Changji 㘗㖴㤝 (1903–1982), who spent the mid-1920s as a student and then as a teacher at Ouyang Jingwu’s Inner Studies Institute before pursuing a career as a college professor in the Jiangnan region. Jing left behind only a few writings on Buddhism, but those that survive reflect a mind that was both deeply skeptical of all truth claims and well steeped in Buddhist doctrine. Jing shared with Ouyang a highly critical attitude toward mainstream East Asian Buddhist doctrine.5 By contrast, though he was suspicious of 152

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scientism, Jing generally held science in high regard. He felt that Chinese Buddhism had become burdened by all manner of metaphysical and theological accretions and needed to return to its core doctrines. Buddhist teachings on causality were one of these, but Jing also held up the pāramitās as the center of Buddhist ethical practice, stating that they represent one of its key doctrines and would never collapse, even after the emergence of science.6 Jing Changji agreed with Taixu that morality and the pāramitās were the backbone of Buddhist practice, but they both also believed that a person needed to understand the workings of the universe as well. As already noted, Chinese Buddhists of the 1920s emphasized that the truths of Buddhism were not something that one took on blind faith, but required the personal verification (zheng) that could only be attained through practice. In their discussions of the practices and wisdom required of one on the bodhisattva path, Chinese Buddhists even went so far as to say that bodhisattvas, or anyone working to become one, were required to learn about the world using science. They did this by linking modern science with the “five arts,” a traditional Indian taxonomy of disciplines of knowledge. The five arts are (1) grammar and composition, (2) arts and mathematics, (3) medicine, (4) logic, and (5) philosophies specific to the different religions.7 This was a common way of classifying the different forms of knowledge in ancient India and was not limited to Buddhism, but the concept was important for Buddhists, and the phrase “five arts” appears often in the Chinese Buddhist canon. Given that the five arts are meant to function as a classificatory scheme for all worldly knowledge, it is not surprising that Buddhists in China would use it when reflecting upon modern science. The idea that contemporary Buddhists should learn the sciences because the bodhisattva path requires study of the five arts was put forward in 1923 by Taixu and Liu Xianliang. In his 1923 lecture, Taixu said that bodhisattvas should seek the wisdom of the Buddha in the traditional five arts. Taixu glossed these as “the five sciences of ancient India” and gave a modern equivalent for each: philology and linguistics, logic, the fine arts, medicine and pharmacology, and philosophy.8 In addition to defining the specific sciences that a bodhisattva should study, Taixu argued that Buddhism also teaches the usefulness of the scientific method itself. After bodhisattvas attain enlightenment they 153

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should promote the scientific method among all sentient beings. This is because science can help dispel “deluded sentiments” (miqing 徟ね). Taixu stopped just short of literally saying that science is the opposite of superstition, but that assumption lies beneath the surface of his comment. (Elsewhere he did say that as science has advanced, it has disproven many of the ideas of religion, including ideas of an eternal god or an eternal soul.9) Taixu was not content to simply state his case and claimed authority for his view through recourse to scripture. He said the idea that bodhisattvas should teach science accords with the principle that they “use the power of upāya to speak to all beings,” as stated in the Lotus Sūtra.10 Liu Xianliang ∱栗Ṗ put forth an argument similar to Taixu’s that same year. Liu Xianliang (not to be confused with the Liu Xianjiao mentioned in chapter 3) was involved with the publication of several Buddhist periodicals produced in Beijing during the 1920s. These included a journal with the very May Fourth–inspired title Buddhicize the New Youth (Fohua xin qingnian ἃ⊾㕘曺⸜), which was briefly associated with the Wuchang Buddhist Seminary. Liu’s article, “The Relationship Between Buddhicization and Science” (Fohua yu kexue zhi guanxi ἃ⊾冯䥹⬠ᷳ斄Ὢ), appeared in that journal in September 1923, the same month that Taixu’s lecture was published in Haichao yin. Liu drew from a commentary on the Huayan Sūtra to argue that Buddhist youth of the day needed to study science and that the “new youth” of Beijing (that is, members of the May Fourth generation) needed to study Buddhism.11 Liu cited the Gaṇḍavyūha chapter of the Avataṃsaka Sūtra (Huayan ru fajie pin 厗♜ℍ㱽䓴⑩), which consists of the well-known tale of the exemplary youth Sudhana in his travels in search of enlightenment. Liu likened Sudhana to the Buddhist youth for whom the magazine was written, saying they should try to be like Sudhana. In the Gaṇḍavyūha, Sudhana studied the various sciences of craftsmanship, business, agriculture, mathematics, and medicine, as well as supernatural powers, with first one master and then another.12 Liu provided glosses for each of the various non-Buddhist arts studied by Sudhana, so readers could understand them in modern terms. For example, Liu wrote that “the sciences of craftsmanship, business and agriculture” (shougong de kexue, shang nong suanyin ㇳⶍ䘬䥹⬠炻⓮彚䬿⌘) refer to accounting, geology, and math; “the medicinal arts” (zhibing zhuye 㱣䕭媠㤕) refer to medicine 154

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and physiology; and “clouds, fog, and climate” (yunxia qihou 暚曆㯋῁) refer to astronomy and geography.13 For Liu, such passages proved that the Buddha supported the study of science, and Liu’s glosses were meant to demonstrate that the disciplines the Buddha referred to in this scripture are the same as ones discussed today. Liu Xianliang’s claim that Sudhana had studied science became a popular one in the early 1930s and was repeated in 1931 by another Liu, Liu Linghua. Liu Linghua argued that in order to create a world order of human flourishing along the model of a Buddhist Pure Land, we must begin by understanding worldly truths.14 Liu Linghua said that these truths can be understood using the five arts of ancient India and explained that these were the sciences (kexue) of the time. Repeating a common theme, he praised ancient Indian science for discovering microorganisms. He also referenced the tale of Sudhana, saying that the skills Sudhana learned during his pilgrimage, from math and medicine to architecture and forestry, were all indirectly learned from Mañjuśrī, who held this knowledge by virtue of being a bodhisattva.15 Liu Tianxing (no known relation to the other Lius) reiterated in 1933 the argument that Buddhists should study science because the Buddha had recommended it. Liu Tianxing wrote that the Buddha had said in the Bodhisattva-bhūmi16 that a bodhisattva should seek the dharma in the five arts. He explained this as meaning that the Buddha had commended the study of science to his followers.17 Liu Tianxing generally adopted a restrained approach in his discussions of Buddhism and science and urged caution with regard to sweeping claims that the two were identical. He did state that Buddhists were compelled to study science in order to better understand the world and to better carry out the salvific activities of a bodhisattva. Liu Tianxing was applauded for his ideas three years later in an article by the monk Huazhuang ⊾匲.18 At the time he wrote his piece, Huazhuang was a student at the Minnan Buddhist Seminary, the most durable of the seminaries run by graduates of the Wuchang Buddhist Seminary. In 1936, Huazhuang wrote a two-part article, titled “Science and Buddhism,” which referenced most of the major works on Buddhism and science produced in the previous decade and repeated many of their ideas. He mentioned Taixu and another Wuchang school teacher Zhang Huasheng and cited at length the writings of Wang Xiaoxu and 155

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Liu Tianxing. Like Liu Tianxing, Huazhuang was cautious about reading too much into apparent similarities between scientific discoveries and passages in Buddhist scriptures. He knew that some people believed science was not gaining strength in China because it was hindered by Buddhism, but he did not agree that Buddhism was antiscience. In response to such criticism, Huazhuang said that he learned from the writings of Wang Xiaoxu that the Yogācārabhūmi contains a passage wherein the Buddha exhorted would-be bodhisattvas to study logic, linguistics, and the various worldly arts.19 As Taixu and the three Lius had done over the previous thirteen years, Huazhuang provided both the traditional term and the modern equivalents for the five arts in order to strengthen the claim that the Buddha had promoted the study of science. For example, yinming (Indian logic) is glossed using the neologism luoji 怷廗 (a transliteration of the word “logic”), and shenglun 倚婾 (grammar) is glossed as yuyanxue 婆妨⬠ (linguistics). Like Taixu and the Lius, Huazhuang’s hope was that those who believed in the omnipotence of science and those who believed in the omnipotence of Buddhism would each see the value of the other and promote their dual application for the benefit of the world.20 From 1923 to the mid-1930s, that crucial period for establishing the statuses of both science and Buddhism in China, Buddhists deployed the argument that modern science fell under the umbrella of the traditional five arts. Although they cited a number of different scriptural sources to support the claim that the Buddha had told his followers to study science, they shared the same line of reasoning: for Chinese Buddhists to accomplish the primary goal of Mahāyāna Buddhism—the succor of all beings—they had to study science as part of their path of selfcultivation. Through such comments, science was domesticated within Buddhism by means of the canonical taxonomy of the five arts, and its study was made an integral part of the Buddhist path. Even within this scheme though, the study of science remained subordinate to the pursuit of Buddhist wisdom and enlightenment. Recall that Buddhists at that time were also making a similar move by pointing to Buddhism and science’s shared commitment to empirical verification, but holding Buddhism up as offering access to the higher empiricism of true direct cognition and supernatural powers.

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Cultivation and the Body By the late 1920s, Buddhists had begun arguing that meditation can produce changes in the physical state of the body that can be explained using the sciences of chemistry and physiology. It has already been mentioned that the Wuchang School monk Fafang believed the halos manifested by buddhas were the result of their ability to activate “oxidizable compounds” within their bodies, a skill acquired as a result of facility in meditation. Taixu provided a more theoretical explanation of how Buddhist practice can cause physical changes in the body in 1932, four years after Fafang wrote those words. Taixu’s ideas appeared in an article in which he sought to define Buddhism with regard to the categories of science, philosophy, and religion. He concluded his article by saying that Buddhism shares some qualities of each but is ultimately its own entity, primarily because it contains a practical scheme for self-cultivation, which he summarized using the Buddhist doctrine of the “three disciplines” (san xue ᶱ⬠). These three are ethics (Ch. jie; Skt. śīla), meditation (Ch. ding ⭂; Skt. samādhi), and wisdom (Ch. hui ㄏ; Skt. prajñā). Taixu explained that living a life of moral conduct effects changes in the mind that effect changes in one’s physiology that in turn effect changes at the “level of physics” (by which he presumably meant the atomic level).21 Taixu used the modern words “physics” and “physiology” to add weight to his argument, but he did not provide any specific examples of the physiological and physical changes Buddhist practice was supposed to effect. In general, his notion that the mind can affect the physical world fits well with the philosophical position that “the myriad dharmas are consciousness-only” adopted by many Chinese Buddhists of the day. The idea that the mind has power over the body and the physical world is certainly not limited to Buddhism, to China, or even to the twentieth century. Buddhist articulations of scientific meditation regimes were part of larger tendencies in China and were influenced by history. Just as the self-strengthening movement of the late nineteenth century led China’s intellectuals to turn toward Western learning as a source of knowledge and military might, it also led them to a focus on the health of the individual. From the 1850s there was an increasing emphasis on bodily health. At first this created a renewed interest in traditional techniques

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of “nourishing life” (yangsheng 梲䓇) and the Daoist traditions with which they were associated. The idea that there was a crucial connection between the health of the individual and the health of the nation grew in popularity as time went by. Bodily health continued to be important after the revolution of 1911, and physical education became integral to the education curriculum introduced by the new government.22 Mirroring trends in the West, groups devoted, at least in part, to creating healthy young bodies for the state appeared in China, especially during the 1920s. The YMCA, Young Pioneers, Boy Scouts, and other groups were founded and promoted their regimes for bodily strength. Just as they had politicized science and religion during that decade, the Nationalists politicized the body, making it central to their project of modernity.23 Modern regimes for bodily health were incorporated into existing Chinese discourses such as yangsheng, partly because their goals overlapped with those of the traditional practices but also for other reasons. Ruth Rogaski has shown that one factor in this was the discourse of “hygiene” sweeping through Western nations, which entered China via Japan. The term used to translate hygiene, weisheng 堃䓇, had a long history in China before being pressed into use in the late nineteenth century in Japan, and then China, as the name for the new science of public health. Because of this history, well into the twentieth century the term weisheng held connotations in the minds of many educated Chinese that were not necessarily part of the laboratory-based, state-sanctioned practice of public health, as the term hygiene eventually came to be understood. Rogaski says that in the late imperial period, weisheng meant (1) “the choice of the appropriate time and place for life’s activities,” (2) the “maintenance of appropriate ingestion regimes,” (3) “the practice of sexual economy,” and (4) “the circulation of vitalities through breathing, movement, massage, and inner visualization.”24 The idea of hygiene continued to be associated with these practices for many in China through the 1930s. As a result of this understanding of hygiene and the emphasis placed on physical and social health in China, a vogue in physico-spiritual cultivation developed in China in the first decades of the twentieth century.25 Methods for seated meditation or “quiet sitting” (jingzuo 朄⛸) were especially popular, becoming “a public health and spiritual regimen” of their own during that time.26 The most influential work to lay out such 158

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a technique was Master Yinshi’s Methods for Quiet Meditation (Yinshizi jingzuo fa ⚈㗗⫸朄⛸㱽). This book was a more or less direct Chinese translation by Jiang Weiqiao 哋䵕╔ (1873–1958) of a Japanese work by Okada Torajirō ⱉ䓘嗶Ḵ恶 (1872–1920). Jiang’s version first came out in 1914 and was reprinted with additional material in 1922.27 Jiang was an important man in the modern Chinese education system at the time and was a longtime friend of Wang Xiaoxu. Master Yinshi’s Methods for Quiet Meditation begins with a story of how Jiang went from being sickly to healthy by practicing the meditation method outlined in the book. Okada and Jiang’s awareness and acceptance of the discursive authority of science are clear throughout the work. It repeatedly describes the physiological bases for the efficacy of this method by making references to chemistry and metabolic processes. This work inspired others to provide scientific rationales for their methods of psycho-spiritual cultivation, and it laid the foundation for the discourse of scientific qigong 㯋≇ that eventually arose in China during the middle of the twentieth century.28 Although Jiang did write a supplement for his manual in 1918 at the behest of a Buddhist friend,29 the book is explicitly nonsectarian. Jiang promoted a scientific form of meditation that was neither Daoist nor Buddhist. Some of those who followed in Jiang’s footsteps did endorse scientific meditation regimes of an explicitly Buddhist or Daoist nature. As shown by Liu Xun, in the early 1930s the Daoist teacher Chen Yingning 昛㪣⮏ (1880–1969) began including scientific explanations in the instructions for Daoist meditation he published in Daoist periodicals.30 He argued that the Daoist meditative practice of inner alchemy (neidan ℏᷡ) was congruent with modern chemistry and explained the bodily changes one undergoes as a result of this practice, using terms and ideas drawn from modern physics, psychology, and cell biology.31 Chen’s was but one of the many competing practices of personal physical and spiritual cultivation disseminated in China during the 1920s and 1930s. Just as the ideological entity “science” was the subject of competing discourses during those years, the nature of the body, its potential, and the best methods to care for it were also the subjects of much debate.32 Chen himself became strongly anti-Buddhist in the late 1930s, despite having spent much of the 1910s and 1920s studying Buddhism in conjunction with Daoism.33 One thing the teachers of these various techniques shared was their tendency to rely on scientific language as they 159

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argued for the efficacy of the specific practices they promoted. This was certainly true of the Buddhist Hu Chaowu. There is little information in the historical record about Hu Chaowu. He is best known for his book Science and Buddhism (Kexue yu foxue), which is dedicated to promoting one specific form of Buddhist meditation.34 Hu learned this form of meditation from the monk Dayu, a onetime associate and student of Taixu. In the late 1920s, Dayu founded a popular and primarily lay esoteric Buddhist (mijiao ⭮㔁) movement in China, eventually referred to as the Mudrā-Mind School (Yinxin zong ⌘⽫⬿), which was based on teachings revealed to him in a vision by the celestial Bodhisattva Samantabhadra while he was on a meditation retreat.35 Like Consciousness-Only thought, esoteric Buddhism experienced a renewed popularity in China during the Republican period as part of a drive initiated by Yang Wenhui to revive all of the supposed original schools of Chinese Buddhism. There is currently much scholarly debate about whether esoteric Buddhism ever even existed as a separate school of thought or practice within China,36 but what is relevant here is that many Buddhists of the Republican period believed that it once had and that it needed to be revived just as Consciousness-Only thought was being revived. There was a particular challenge facing those who wished to revive esoteric Buddhism in China. In order to practice esoteric Buddhism one must receive initiation into an existing lineage of practice from a living master of that tradition; one cannot learn esoteric Buddhism simply by studying scripture. Because there were no living lineages of esoteric Buddhism in China, the country’s monks and laypeople had to turn elsewhere for initiation. They turned first to Japan, then to Tibet, two nearby countries that had living esoteric Buddhist traditions.37 Dayu’s method of esoteric Buddhism, called the “heart-of-mind method” (xin zhong xin fa ⽫ᷕ⽫㱽), is an exception. Although it is likely he had studied esoteric Buddhism at the Wuchang Buddhist Seminary under two Chinese monks who had received initiation in Japan, Dayu claimed to have been initiated into his lineage by a celestial bodhisattva, and his method incorporated elements of both Japanese and Tibetan forms of esoteric Buddhist practice. Dayu left behind few writings about this method, and it seems that his method was popularized primarily by his students, especially by the man who was probably the Mudrā-Mind School’s actual founder, its second patriarch Wang Xiangliu 䌳樌映 (1876–1937),38 who taught it in the 160

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Chinese coastal cities of Tianjin and Shanghai in the 1930s. It is unclear what relationship, if any, Wang and Hu Chaowu had to one another, but they taught the same method of meditation, and they both faced the challenge of justifying their new form of Chinese esoteric Buddhism. Wang justified the practice by citing Buddhist scripture and emphasizing Dayu’s initiation by Samantabhadra.39 Hu, however, chose to follow what James Lewis, a scholar of New Religions, refers to as a “rational appeal,” an appeal to the authority of science, to legitimize his practice.40 Hu provided a fairly standard definition of science in the first chapter of Science and Buddhism. He stated that science studies natural phenomena by relying on observation, experiment, and other theoretical methods to discover principles and produce systematic knowledge. He then introduced the basics of Buddhist doctrine in a single chapter, before spending one chapter each on “pure Buddhism” (chuncui foxue 䲼䱡ἃ⬠) and “applied Buddhism” (yingyong foxue ㅱ䓐ἃ⬠). The division between “pure” and “applied” is drawn from discourses about science found in China and in the West at the time.41 For Hu, “pure Buddhism” was Buddhist doctrine, especially the truth of the emptiness of all dharmas. If the division of Buddhism mirrored the divisions of science, then one might assume that “applied Buddhism” would include any form of Buddhist practice aimed at the realization of those truths, such as Chan or Pure Land practice. Hu turned away from traditional Chinese Buddhist ecumenism, however, and described applied Buddhism as meaning only his practice of esoteric Buddhist meditation,42 the essential points of which he laid out in the fifth chapter. The most explicitly scientific discussions in Science and Buddhism occupy chapters 6 through 11 (more than a third of the book). In each of these chapters, Hu explained one or more aspects of samādhi (Ch. sanmei ᶱ㗏, a state of deep meditative concentration) using a specific science: chemistry, physiology, psychology, hygiene, medicine, and, finally, anthropology. In chapter 12, he introduced his school’s basic method of meditation, which consisted of (1) cross-legged, seated meditation; (2) the regulation of breath and its circulation throughout the body; (3) the use of mudrās, or special hand gestures; (4) the focusing of the mind; and (5) the chanting of mantras.43 These instructions are followed in chapter 13, which is titled “Essential Elements of Buddhism” (Foxue yaosu ἃ⬠天䳈) and contains six basic rules that one should follow once one 161

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has decided to adopt this practice. These rules enjoined the practitioners to (1) pay attention to what they eat, to eat twice a day, with a diet consisting of fruits and vegetables and not too much fat; (2) reduce the amount they sleep; (3) not get angry; (4) reduce their sexual desires; (5) “rationalize their emotions” (ganqing lizhihua デね䎮㘢⊾); and (6) read the scriptures.44 Thus, Hu first argued for a scientific basis for Buddhist meditation, and only then, once his readers were already convinced of the scientific soundness of the practice, did he outline how to actually do it. The conclusion of Science and Buddhism serves as a good summary of both Hu’s approach to talking about science and his overall goals in writing the book. I translate it here in its entirety. Hu’s writing was not always clear, especially in the third section, and I suspect this was due to the fact that he did not entirely understand the scientific terms he was using, choosing them partly for their rhetorical value. I now close this essay with a conclusion in order to bring the whole book together. (1) Buddhism is a type of hygiene of bodily cultivation [xiuyang ᾖ梲]. Although its methods are numerous, the practice of the Three Mysteries employed by Śākyamuni and those like him are the most superior. (2) Although the practice of the Three Mysteries is comprised of mudrā, dhāraṇī, and samādhi; mudrā and dhāraṇī are the method, and samādhi is the goal. (3) The practice of samādhi is the gathering of the body’s energies into one point, which causes chemical changes in its molecules, atoms, and electrons. In physics, this is called “the reciprocal propulsion of matter and force.”45 In physiology, there is a relationship between stimulus and response; and in psychology, behaviors are formed because of the relationship between stimulus and response, leading to increasing wisdom. This [practice] is far more effective for the hygiene of the body and as a medical treatment than [the Daoist alchemical practice of ] repairing the brain.46 This incredibly valuable dharma treasure follows certain fixed physiological rules of cause and effect: You must focus your mind two inches below the diaphragm, without giving rise to even one 162

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thought. It does not matter who you are, anyone can attain bodhi (enlightened wisdom). The Brahma Net Sūtra says, “All sentient beings have Buddha nature.”47 The Discourse on Giving Rise to Bodhicitta says, “All sentient beings are originally endowed with sattva [Ch. saduo 啑➝], or [Buddha] nature.”48 This [focusing of the mind to give rise to bodhi] is similar to the principle in physics whereby metals expand when they are heated. My views on this issue are respectable and objective truths, so I just wrote them all out boldly, I would have been unwilling to [character illegible] using my personal views. Regarding those parts of this explanation that might be unclear, I admit only that my erudition is insufficient, but there are no mistakes in my methodology. Using the methods of science to explain the Buddha-dharma is necessary work for anyone who respects learning and seeks truth while living in twentieth-century China, and there are none who can oppose that.49

Here, as in much of the rest of the book, Hu’s presentation of esoteric Buddhist meditation was deeply influenced by notions about hygiene and self-cultivation prevalent in China during the early twentieth century. Hu was explicit about this and used the term weisheng often. He used it in its modern biomedical sense, for example, when making reference to the proteins of the brain, the physiology of stimulus and response, and the physiology of cells.50 He simultaneously deployed weisheng in its more traditional sense, such as in the rules for living that he laid out in the thirteenth chapter. Among other things, practitioners were called upon to limit their diets, decrease their sexual desires, and reduce the amount they slept. These are obvious examples of the first three common elements of traditional Chinese practices of weisheng described by Rogaski, “choice of appropriate time and place for life’s activities,” “maintenance of appropriate ingestion regimes,” and “sexual economy.” In his invocation of weisheng, Hu may have sought to take advantage of the full range of meanings associated with the term at the time, but his primary aim was to promote his form of Buddhist meditation by linking it to science. Hu spoke intentionally of hygiene and physiology to explain the physical changes that occur in the body during esoteric Buddhist meditation. He seemed to think that not everyone would agree with his ideas, however, as indicated by his rather truculent closing statements 163

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that no one could oppose his use of science to explain Buddhism. Hu did not argue that Buddhism contained all scientific truth. Instead, he tried to show how science could explicate certain phenomena associated with Buddhist meditation that might have otherwise seemed miraculous. I cite here one of the scientific explanations that Hu put forth for phenomena described in the Buddhist tradition. Buddhism has long held that when the dead body of a holy person is cremated, śarīra, or small hard relics, will be left behind within the ashes. Such relics are common throughout the Buddhist world, and reliquaries containing them are the centers of much cultic activity. Hu stated that these relics are actually crystallized masses of adrenaline, which is produced in large quantities when one is absorbed in samādhi.51 This explanation says nothing about the wishgranting powers relics are supposed to hold within the Buddhist tradition, but it did allow Hu to further highlight the supposedly rational and scientific nature of the formation of Buddhist relics. Hu continued in this vein, drawing on science to show that Buddhist meditation, which is believed to have positive spiritual effects, also provides quantifiable physical benefits. Hu said that meditation slows the pulse, and this conserves oxygen in the body and lowers the blood pressure.52 Hu felt that the scientific study of meditation should continue to advance, so it could provide even more explanations of the ways in which meditation functions. He said that meditation should be studied in the advanced physiological laboratories of Europe, especially to take advantage of their X-ray machines, in order to establish “a place for Buddhism within natural science” and “accurately evaluate and establish the value of Buddhism.”53 That Hu wanted to establish a place for Buddhism “within natural science” is clear as Science and Buddhism is essentially an argument for the scientificity of Buddhist meditation. Like the writers of other such works, Hu held science in high regard and was well aware of the cachet attached to it in Chinese culture at the time. Although he was thoroughly convinced that science would ultimately provide sanction for the practices of Buddhism, he nevertheless felt that Buddhist practices were still capable of producing phenomena that science could not. Hu said that although modern medicine had given us knowledge of malaria and diphtheria, insulin, antibiotics, and X-ray-assisted diagnosis, it was not able to treat the root causes of certain illnesses that were spiritual in nature, and Buddhism could, of course, 164

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fill this lacuna in therapeutic techniques.54 It is important to note that the benefits that Hu ascribed to Buddhism in this way were all physical ones. Although they may have spiritual causes, Hu was absolutely certain that the positive effects of Buddhist meditation could be understood on a material level. Still, it is not entirely clear whether Hu was himself a materialist in the mold of Jin Han or believed that matter was an epiphenomenon of some other reality. Nowhere did Hu invoke ConsciousnessOnly thought, which made him relatively rare among Buddhists writing about science in the Republican period. He also did not gesture toward the creation of a dialogue between two entities called “science” and “Buddhism” based on the doctrinal and theoretical underpinnings of each. Hu was mostly concerned with specifics: specific practices, specific meditative states, and specific sciences. He was also explicitly sectarian, which was a rarity among Chinese Buddhists writing on science, who favored a more ecumenical approach to Buddhism. Hu’s work displayed a pronounced bias against Tiantai Buddhism, one of the most important schools of Buddhist thought in East Asia. Chinese Buddhism is, in general, not sectarian, and Hu’s criticisms of Tiantai did much to harm the popularity of his book. Hu’s anti-Tiantai stance can be seen clearly in the introduction, in which he wrote that the teachings, especially the doctrinal classification scheme (panjiao ⇌㔁), of Zhiyi 㘢柿, the founder of Tiantai, are “poisonous” to Buddhism.55 Hu may have developed his attitudes toward Tiantai under the influence of his teacher Dayu. In addition to the teaching Dayu received in his visionary experience of the Bodhisattva Samantabhadra, Dayu likely studied esoteric Buddhism under the two monks and famed Republican exponents of esoteric Buddhism Chisong ㊩㜦 (1894–1972) and Dayong ⣏≯ (1893–1929). Both of these men visited the Wuchang Buddhist Seminary in 1923 while Dayu, then still a layman, was there assisting Taixu. At the seminary, Chisong and Dayong taught the Shingon 䛇妨 esoteric Buddhism they had learned in Japan in 1922 and 1923, giving initiation (Ch. guanding 㿴枪; Skt. abhiṣeka) in that tradition to many people in Wuchang city.56 It is probable that Dayu was among those to receive initiation. In Japan, the Shingon and Tendai (i.e., Tiantai) sects represent the two dominant forms of esoteric Buddhism, and there has been competition and animosity between them for more than a millennium. The fact that Hu’s teacher Dayu had studied in a Shingon-derived lineage probably 165

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explains Hu’s own enmity toward the teachings of the Tiantai school. Hu’s attitude was probably also reinforced by Cheng Zhaian’s 䦳⬭⬱ popular 1929 work on esoteric Buddhism, Essentials of the Esoteric School (Mizong Yaoyi ⭮⬿天佑), which Hu cited in Science and Buddhism.57 Cheng, a layman, had also studied Shingon with Chisong but went to the additional effort of traveling to Japan to study Shingon. Whatever the origins of Hu’s attitude, his comments on the poisonous nature of Tiantai thought, however brief, appear to have left a greater impression on his Buddhist readers than his discussion of science.

The Reception of Hu’s Book in the Buddhist Community Hu’s book was not published by the Commercial Press, Buddhist Books, or any of the other larger Chinese publishing houses that produced Buddhist works in the early twentieth century. Instead, his book was published by Xinsheng 㕘倚 Books, a small Shanghai publishing house active in the 1920s and 1930s that does not appear to have produced any other Buddhist titles. Unlike some of the other works studied here, Hu’s work was never reprinted, and, as a result, copies of this book are not widely available in libraries today.58 His work was also never serialized in any Buddhist periodical. In fact, the only article about Hu’s book to appear in the Buddhist press was a critical review written by the prominent lay Buddhist publisher Fan Gunong 劫⎌彚 (1881–1951) that was printed in both the journal of the Shanghai Lay Buddhist Association and Foxue banyuekan ἃ⬠⋲㚰↲, the most important Buddhist newspaper of the Republican period.59 Fan’s review of Science and Buddhism was less than favorable, and Fan’s stature in the Buddhist community and the fact that his review appeared in two of the leading Buddhist periodicals of the day would have gone some way toward creating a negative impression of Hu’s book. Fan took issue with several of the things Hu wrote, but his primary critique of the book, which occupied roughly half of his article, was of Hu’s dismissal of Tiantai thought as pernicious and misleading. Fan had himself taken refuge in 1917 under Dixian, the leading exponent of Tiantai Buddhism in China in the early twentieth century,60 but Fan’s criticism of Hu was probably not entirely based on some sectarianism on Fan’s part. As chief editor at Shanghai Buddhist Books, Fan published works on all 166

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types of Buddhism, including esoteric Buddhism, and he can be considered to have been a proponent of the ecumenical spirit commonplace among many Buddhists of the day.61 This was why Hu’s strident sectarianism grated on Fan, and it was the primary reason he found Hu’s work so distasteful. It was not the only reason, however. Fan was also wary of any tendency to reduce Buddhist meditation to simply an exercise for physical health. Fan wrote his article as a series of questions and answers about Hu’s book, beginning with the question of whether or not Hu had written that Buddhist meditation was a form of physiology and hygiene. Fan said that, yes, Hu did say that, but that was only because Hu had himself used meditation to solve his own physical problems. Fan wrote that this is just like the humane person seeing humaneness in others, and the wise seeing wisdom.62 In other words, people see only what they want to see, and Hu was no different. Buddhist meditation is far more than hygiene, wrote Fan, but Hu only saw that aspect of it because it was what he was seeking. Fan did not think that science could offer a complete explanation for what is discussed in Buddhism, and insofar as Hu thought it could, he felt Hu was mistaken. Fan pointed out that there are many different forms of meditation, Buddhist and non-Buddhist, and argued that what Hu was talking about was simply a lesser form of meditation.63 The most informative point Fan made came immediately after this comment. He asked, “Layman Hu used science to prove Buddhism. Is this far-fetched?”64 Fan answered his own question by saying that Hu’s use of science to prove the efficacy of meditation was only of relative value because Hu had only spoken of one kind of meditation and his discussion did not exhaustively treat all the different forms of meditation within Buddhism, let alone all the teachings within Buddhist doctrine.65 Fan disagreed first with Hu’s sectarianism and second with his narrow understanding of Buddhism, and these two points were connected. Fan did not approve of Hu’s approach, which was limited to using science to address only one aspect of Buddhism. The crucial point is that Fan did not oppose Hu simply because he was using science, but Fan did not think science could account for the entirety of Buddhism. In this respect, Fan’s views fit with many Buddhists of his generation who felt that science could not offer ultimate answers about life and the universe.

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The year Hu’s book was published, 1932, was an important year for the history of Chinese Buddhist writings on science. It had been nine years since the science and philosophy of life debates, and most of the major ideas that Chinese Buddhists developed to talk about the relationship of their tradition to science had already been worked out by this point. It was a symbolically important year because this was the year that Wang Xiaoxu’s Comparative Study of the Buddha-dharma and Science (hereafter CSBS) first appeared in print. Given that Wang’s and Hu’s books were published in the same year, it is instructive to compare their contents and the reception they received by the Buddhist community in an effort to better understand the nature of that community. While Wang Xiaoxu’s CSBS generated a great deal of interest in the Buddhist press, Hu’s book seems to have generated very little. Wang’s book was reprinted several times during the 1930s and in each subsequent decade, and it remains in print today; Hu’s book was never reprinted. Wang’s book was widely cited and commented upon by Buddhist authors, but Hu’s book was the subject of only one, negative review in the Buddhist press. Hu’s book may have enjoyed a certain amount of popularity among practitioners of esoteric Buddhism, or even Buddhists as a whole, but I have not found any evidence of this. There may have been a number of reasons why Hu’s book was not as popular as CSBS. Perhaps it was not Wang’s work itself but Hu Shih’s criticism that caused Buddhists to take notice of CSBS and close ranks to support its author’s claims. Hu Chaowu’s book did not suffer a well-publicized attack by a prominent non-Buddhist. The fact that the main essays in CSBS were independently published and reprinted in the Buddhist press certainly also contributed to the book’s popularity, while Hu’s book did not enjoy this same kind of promotion. But this lack of circulation of Hu’s writings should be read only as a symptom of the failure of his ideas to capture the imagination of China’s Buddhists, not the reason for it. In comparing the relative popularities of the two books, then, the most important issue was their content. Wang’s book dealt with the relationship between science and Buddhism from a theoretical perspective, addressing the underlying logic of both Buddhist doctrine and scientific theory. Wang employed the related disciplines of Buddhist logic and Consciousness-Only thought to articulate a general scheme for understanding the entirety of Buddhism and science in relation to one another, 168

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arguing that Buddhism grants access to a higher truth through its higher empiricism. Although these schools of thought were popular among the Buddhists most interested in science, Hu did not cite either of them. Hu also made few general claims in his book, choosing to focus his efforts on using the content of certain specific sciences to explain one particular form of Buddhist practice. The fact that Hu was so explicitly sectarian in his writing meant that his work was either less useful or simply offensive to the majority of Buddhists who engaged in other forms of Buddhist practice, including Chan meditation, Pure Land recitation, sūtra study, and charity.

THE IDEA THAT SCIENCE COULD be used to create a better Chinese nation was popular in the 1920s. Buddhists agreed that the study of science was important, and they incorporated this into their own articulations of paths for spiritual development. The thought that the Buddhist notion of egalitarianism could provide a better ethical framework for the nation than one based on the survival of the fittest was paralleled by the idea that individual human beings should include the study of science as part of a broader path of ethical conduct and spiritual insight undertaken for the benefit of others. In the service of these goals, Buddhists embraced science, but not scientism; science was part of the big picture, but it was not the entire picture. This was the reason that most Buddhists rejected Jin Han’s reductive materialist readings of ConsciousnessOnly and the sectarian meditation method of Hu Chaowu. These writings seemed to place the truths of Buddhism beneath science and as somehow dependent upon its sanction. As shown again and again in this book, Buddhists were comfortable deferring to science on many issues but not on issues of ultimate meaning or authority. Buddhists thought that some of the miraculous phenomena associated with meditation described in their scriptures could indeed be explained by science, but Hu’s book seemed to recognize science as holding the authority to legitimize Buddhist truth, and this was rejected.

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Epilogue

IT IS CUSTOMARY TO CONCLUDE a study such as this with a summary of one’s findings; such conclusions provide an opportunity for the author to lead the reader out from the specifics of his or her findings back into the wider world of thought. I will attempt to do this in these last few pages. At the outset of this study I noted that many books have been written in English over the past several decades that deal with the question of the relationship of Buddhism and science. Just as with the many articles and monographs cited in the preceding pages, these writings have been deeply influenced by the historical and cultural context in which they were written. Nevertheless, if one looks carefully, one can see in the writings of Buddhists in the West today some of the same ideas put forth by Taixu, Wang Xiaoxu, and others nearly a century ago. I conclude this book by stepping back to look at the arguments whose histories have been uncovered here by comparing them to some ideas about Buddhism and science current in the West. I have chosen to look at a book by one author, the American scholar B. Alan Wallace, who is probably the most popular and most prolific writer on the subject today.1 I examine one of his books to see how the ideas of Chinese Buddhists living in the 1920s compare with the ideas of a Buddhist living in the West ninety years later. In doing this, I do not mean to suggest that Wallace was directly influenced by the writings of these Chinese Buddhists or 170

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even that he was aware of them when he wrote his book. Nor am I offering a complete summary of his many ideas; the interested reader can and should read Wallace’s work directly. Rather, my goal is to show that there are some basic ideas that Mahāyāna Buddhists have tended to promote when dealing with modern science in the last century. Wallace has written, edited, and translated and cowritten, coedited, and cotranslated nearly three dozen books and has published numerous essays and articles. Much of his work has dealt with Tibetan Buddhism, but he has also written quite a bit about science and Buddhism. I have selected one of his solely authored monographs, which I believe to be representative of his thoughts on Buddhism and science. This book, Contemplative Science: Where Buddhism and Neuroscience Converge, was published in 2007.2 In it, Wallace argues for the creation of an introspective, subjective science of the mind informed by Buddhism that can supplement current objective approaches to neuroscience and psychology. In support of this argument, Wallace covers some of the same ground as Buddhists did in China in the 1920s and 1930s. This epilogue is organized not by the themes of chapters of his book but by the major themes of the current study. First, Wallace shares early twentieth-century Chinese Buddhists’ resistance to materialism, and though he does not use the same terms they used, Wallace supports the premise of consciousness-only, at least in the sense that the only world that matters to Buddhists is the world of phenomena as understood through consciousness.3 More significantly, Wallace seems to agree with Fafang’s assessment that we cannot posit energy as an explanation for the phenomena of the material world. Fafang was writing against subatomic theories of matter when he said there must be even smaller components to atoms than electrons (and by extension all subatomic particles). The point he was trying to make is that we cannot ever reach the most fundamental elements of matter, because the universe is not, ultimately, solely a material phenomenon. Wallace draws on quantum physics to make a similar point. To those who would support a materialist position by identifying energy as the basis for the universe, he cites Richard Feynman’s statement that we do not even know what energy is.4 Both Wallace and early twentieth-century Buddhists felt that materialism is an assumption and not a fact. As such, it could well be mistaken, and if one does not account for this possibility, one 171

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will overlook the central role that consciousness plays in the unfolding of the phenomenal world. As discussed in chapter 3, Chinese Buddhists emphasized the empirical nature of Buddhism when comparing it with science, which is also a major theme in Wallace’s book. Chinese Buddhists argued that their tradition stresses the need for one to verify Buddhist doctrine for oneself, and Wallace concurs, saying that “the Buddha himself discouraged his followers from accepting his words simply on the basis of his authority.”5 Both Wallace and the Chinese Buddhists feel that Buddhism, especially Buddhist meditation, could provide human beings with tools, much like Galileo’s telescope, with which they could gain a greater understanding of the mind. Wallace is primarily concerned with the possibility of using Buddhist meditative techniques to understand the workings of the mind, but even he leaves open the possibility that a contemplative empirical study of the mind might lead to proof for the reality of rebirth and the supernatural powers described in the Buddhist tradition.6 This is very similar to what Wang Xiaoxu and others said in the 1920s and 1930s about the power of meditation and true direct cognition. Wallace argues that the application of Buddhist techniques to the study of the mind will also reveal the reality of the eighth consciousness and the central role it plays in the human mind. Like Chinese Buddhists writing in the 1920s, Wallace feels that current psychological theories, and thus knowledge of the human mind, will remain incomplete until the seventh and eighth consciousnesses are taken seriously. He even mentions, though only in passing, the idea popular among members of the Wuchang School in the 1920s that memory is stored in the eighth consciousness.7 Wallace also repeats the idea offered by several Chinese Buddhists in their discussions of Consciousness-Only thought that scientists’ theories about the world will remain compromised so long as they do not undertake a serious study of the mind, the primary apparatus through which they perceive the world.8 Finally, though it is not central to the work, Wallace begins his book by sounding a note of caution about science similar to the one commonly heard among Chinese Buddhists in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. He writes:

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It is sobering to note that the twentieth century, which generated the greatest growth of scientific knowledge in the entire course of human history, also witnessed man’s greatest inhumanity to man, as well as the greatest degradation of our natural environment and the decimation of other species. The expansion of scientific knowledge has not brought about any comparable growth in ethics or virtue.9

Science, for all its promise, still poses a great danger to life on earth, but what of its role in human development? There too, Buddhism has much to offer humanity in a world of science. Wallace says that although science has done a good job at studying “hedonic happiness” and in creating technologies for its satisfaction, it does not offer humans a way toward actual growth.10 Again, this idea is similar to those offered by Buddhists writing in the 1920s and 1930s as they thought about the relationship between their tradition and modern science. Wallace and the writers discussed in this study thus share a number of common ideas, but there are some ideas they do not share. Nowhere does Wallace talk about the miraculous knowledge the Buddha possessed about things later discovered by science, such as microorganisms or the structure of the solar system. He does not even really address Buddhist cosmology. He is not interested in refuting social evolutionism, which has advanced beyond its place in early twentieth-century China and now plays a very different role. Likewise, while Wallace does discuss relativity, he makes far more use of quantum physics in his arguments against scientistic materialism. This is in line with current trends. The majority of Buddhists still oppose materialism, but the early twentieth-century emphasis on Einstein’s theories common among Chinese Buddhists has been replaced by quantum theory. Just as science changed over the last century, so too did the ways in which Buddhists understood the relationship between it and their religion. Early twentieth-century Chinese Buddhists lived in a very different context, but there is much in their writings that is still intelligible to us now.

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Introduction 1. In the Anglophone world, the most well-known schema of the possible relationships between religion and science is the one created by Ian Barbour, who identified four possible relationships: conflict, independence, integration, and dialogue. Ian Barbour, Religion and Science (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1997), 77–104. 2. John William Draper, History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (n.p.: Henry S. King, 1874; repr., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Andrew Dickson White, History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (New York: D. Appleton, 1896; repr., Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus, 1993). 3. This idea was advanced, in a way, by the early Christian thinker Origen in the form of God’s two books, the Book of Nature and the Book of Scripture. The most famous contemporary work on this issue is probably still Stephen Jay Gould, Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life (New York: Ballantine, 1999). 4. Two works on this issue in the context of India are Gyan Prakash, Another Reason: Science and the Imagination of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Peter Gottschalk, Religion, Science, and Empire: Classifying Hinduism and Islam in British India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 5. Wang Hui, “Scientific Worldview, Culture Debates, and the Reclassification of Knowledge in Twentieth-Century China,” trans. Hongmei Yu, boundary 2 35, no. 2 (2008): 125. 6. 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), 12–22.

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7. Wang Hui, “Discursive Community and the Genealogy of Scientific Categories,” in Everyday Modernity in China, ed. Madeleine Yue Dong and Joshua Goldstein (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 84–86. 8. Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives in Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Vincent Goossaert and David Palmer, The Religious Question in Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Rebecca Nedostup, Superstitious Regimes: Religion and the Politics of Chinese Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009). 9. David W. Y. Kwok, Scientism in Chinese Thought, 1900–1950 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965). 10. Peter Zarrow, ed., Creating Chinese Modernity: Knowledge and Everyday Life, 1900–1940 (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 1. 11. Donald S. Lopez Jr., Buddhism & Science: A Guide for the Perplexed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 12. Tao Jiang, “A Buddhist Scheme for Engaging Modern Science: The Case of Taixu,” Journal of Chinese Philosophy 29, no. 4 (2002): 533–552; Chen Bing 昛ℝ and Deng Zimei 惏⫸伶, Ershi shiji Zhongguo fojiao Ḵ⋩ᶾ䲨ᷕ⚳ἃ㔁 [Twentieth-Century Chinese Buddhism] (Beijing: Minzu, 1999), 410–433. 13. A more literal translation of both renshengguan and Lebensanschauung is “life view,” but I find this to be inelegant and not descriptive enough for my purposes. 14. David Naugle, Worldview: The History of a Concept (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2002), 62. 15. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic, 1973), 90. 16. Consciousness-Only was known in both China and India by various names, including the “yoga-practice school” (Ch. yuqiexing pai 䐄ụ埴㳦; Skt. Yogācāra), and in China by the pejorative “dharma-characteristic school” (faxiang zong 㱽䚠⬿). I have chosen to use the name Weishi ⓗ嬀 (Consciousness-Only; Skt. vijñāpti-mātra or citta-mātra) in this study, as it was the most commonly used name for the school in early twentieth-century China. 17. Christopher A. Reed, A Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876–1937 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004); Gregory Adam Scott, “Conversion by the Book—Buddhist Print Culture in Republican China” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2013). 18. I was greatly aided in this research by the publication in 2006 and 2008 of the Collection of Republican-Era Buddhist Periodical Literature (Minguo fojiao qikan wenxian jicheng 㮹⚳ἃ㔁㛇↲㔯䌣普ㆸ). Huang Xianian 湫⢷⸜ and his team collected the majority of Chinese Buddhist periodicals published in the first part of the twentieth century and reproduced them in a 292-volume collection. Though not without its flaws, this work is an immeasurably important resource for scholars of the period, and Huang should be commended. Most of the articles cited here were taken from this resource. 19. For a detailed study of Taixu’s life and works, see Don Pittman, Toward a Modern Chinese Buddhism: Taixu’s Reforms (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001). 20. Yu Lingbo Ḷⅴ㲊, Zhongguo jin xiandai fojiao renwu zhi ᷕ⚳役䎦ẋἃ㔁Ṣ䈑⽿ [Biographical Almanac of Early Contemporary and Modern Chinese Buddhism] (Beijing: Zongjiao wenhua, 1995), 619–628. 21. Yu Lingbo Ḷⅴ㲊, ed., Xiandai fojiao renwu cidian 䎦ẋἃ㔁Ṣ䈑录℠ [A Dictionary of Modern Buddhist Persons] (Taipei: Foguang, 2004), 2:1720b–1721c.

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1. The Historical Context 1. David Wright, Translating Science: The Transmission of Western Chemistry Into Late Imperial China, 1840–1900 (Leiden: Brill, 2000). 2. Brantly Womack, “The Phases of Chinese Modernization,” in Modernization in China, ed. Steve S. K. China (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1979), 1–16. 3. Charlotte Furth, ed., The Limits of Change: Essays on Conservative Alternatives in Republican China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), 24. 4. Barry Keenan, Imperial China’s Last Academies: Social Change in the Lower Yangzi, 1864–1911, China Research Monograph 42 (Berkeley: Center for China Studies, University of California, 1994). 5. Chang Hao, Chinese Intellectuals in Crisis: Search for Order and Meaning, 1890–1911 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 31. 6. Benjamin A. Elman, On Their Own Terms: Science in China 1550–1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 360–362. 7. Chang, Chinese Intellectuals in Crisis, 4. 8. While it was understood that science was a discrete subdivision of Western learning, this distinction was not important for China’s intellectuals until the twentieth century. The rise of the idea of science as a distinct field of learning paralleled the popularization of a new word for science: kexue 䥹⬠. This term, an imported Japanese neologism, was first used by both Yan Fu and Kang Youwei in 1900 (Wright, Translating Science, 9), but it did not fully supplant the previously used term gezhi 㟤农 until the start of the Republic in 1911. Elman, On Their Own Terms, 397. 9. Wright, Translating Science, xxiii. 10. Federico Masini, The Formation of Modern Chinese Lexicon and Its Evolution Toward a National Language: The Period from 1840 to 1898, Journal of Chinese Linguistics Monograph Series 6. (1993). 11. For example, Zhong xi wenjian lu ᷕ大倆夳抬 (Record of Things Heard and Seen in China and the West), which ran from 1872 to 1875, carried articles on geology, optics, and telegraphy, as well as the biographies of famous scientists like Archimedes. Wright, Translating Science, 155–157. 12. Ibid., 93. 13. This genre incorporates elements of both science and traditional Chinese fiction. David Der-wei Wang, Fin-de-siècle Splendor: Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1840–1911 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 253. 14. See Elman, On Their Own Terms; Wright, Translating Science. 15. Iwo Amelung, “Weights and Force: The Reception of Western Mechanics in Late Imperial China,” in New Terms for New Ideas: Western Knowledge & Lexical Change in Late Imperial China, ed. Michael Lackner, Iwo Amelung, and Joachim Kurtz (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 214. 16. Iwo Amelung, “Naming Physics: The Strife to Delineate a Field of Modern Science in Late Imperial China,” in Mapping Meanings: The Field of New Learning in Late Qing China, eds. Michael Lackner and Natascha Vittinghoff (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 395– 396. Mozi was also given credit for originating Christianity, which had spread West out of China two millennia prior. Chen Hsi-yuan, “Confucianism Encounters Religion: The

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Formation of Religious Discourse and the Confucian Movement in Modern China” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1999), 45–46. 17. Wright, Translating Science, 18. 18. Chen Pingyuan, “From Popular Science to Science Fiction: An Investigation of Flying Machines,” in Translation and Creation: Readings of Western Literature in Early Modern China, 1840–1918, ed. David Pollard (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1998), 230. 19. This is one of the main theses of Elman, On Their Own Terms. 20. Chow Tse-tung, The May Fourth Movement: Intellectual Revolution in Modern China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), 31. 21. Charlotte Furth, “Intellectual Change: From the Reform Movement to the May Fourth Movement, 1895–1920,” in An Intellectual History of Modern China, ed. Merle Goldman and Leo Ou-fan Lee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 46. 22. Prior to the Yuan dynasty, studies of the natural world were generally referred to with the designation bowu, or “broad learning concerning the nature of things.” During the Yuan, the term gezhi, which is a shortened form of the expression gewu zhizhi 㟤䈑农䞍 (“inquiring into and extending knowledge”), was used. From the Yuan until the twentieth century both terms were used. Scholars are still not clear about the different areas covered by each term during that period. Benjamin Elman, “From Pre-Modern Chinese Natural Studies 㟤农⬠ to Modern Science 䥹⬠ in China,” in Mapping Meanings: The Field of New Learning in Late Qing China, ed. Michael Lackner and Natascha Vittinghoff (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 30. 23. Elman, On Their Own Terms, xxxviii. 24. Wright, Translating Science, 424. Wright notes that traditional Chinese medicine was an exception to this trend. 25. David W.  Y. Kwok, Scientism in Chinese Thought, 1900–1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), 3. 26. Furth, “Intellectual Change,” 43–44. 27. Chow, The May Fourth Movement, 292–293. 28. Furth, “Intellectual Change,” 40. 29. Wen-hsin Yeh, ed., Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 34–35. 30. Vera Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 31. Madeleine Yue Dong and Joshua Goldstein, eds., Everyday Modernity in China (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006); Hung-Yok Ip, Tze-Ki Hon, and Chiu-Chun Lee, eds., “The Plurality of Chinese Modernity: A Review of Recent Scholarship on the May Fourth Movement,” Modern China 29, no. 4 (October 2003): 490–509; Wang, Fin-desiècle Splendor; Wen-hsin Yeh, Shanghai Splendor: Economic Sentiments and the Making of Modern China, 1843–1949 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 32. Behaviorism is a branch of psychology that holds that the true study of psychology is the study of human behavior and not the study of inner mental states. For the behaviorist, mental terms and motivations are irrelevant when studying human behavior. Behaviorism is usually recognized as starting with the publication of J. B. Watson’s “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It,” Psychological Review 20 (1913), 158–177. Cited in Graham Richards, “Of What Is History of Psychology a History?” British Journal for the History of Science 20, no. 2 (April 1987): 202. 178

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33. Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment, 71, 104. 34. Zarrow, Creating Chinese Modernity, 21. 35. Yeh, Shanghai Splendor, 32. 36. Sherman Cochran, “Marketing Medicine and Advertising Dreams in China, 1900–1950,” in Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond, ed. Wen-hsin Yeh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 62–97. 37. Wang Hui, “Discursive Community and the Genealogy of Scientific Categories,” 80–120. 38. Grace Shen, “Murky Waters: Thoughts on Utility, Desire, and the Sea of Science,” Isis 98 (2007): 590. 39. Wang, “Discursive Community and the Genealogy of Scientific Categories,” 84–86. 40. Benjamin Schwartz, “Themes in Intellectual History: May Fourth and After,” in An Intellectual History of Modern China, ed. Merle Goldman and Leo Ou-fan Lee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 131. 41. Wang, “Discursive Community and the Genealogy of Scientific Categories,” 98. 42. Kwok, Scientism in Chinese Thought; Chow, The May Fourth Movement, 333–337; Wang, “Discursive Community and the Genealogy of Scientific Categories.” 43. These “debates” took place in essays and were thus not actual live debates held in public, but intellectual disagreements that played out in the pages of periodicals. 44. This phrase, literally “view of life,” is a translation of the German word Lebensanschauung, which was the title of a book by Rudolf Eucken. Chow, The May Fourth Movement, 333. 45. Kwok, Scientism in Chinese Thought, 157–160. 46. The most important of these, “Kexue wanneng zhi meng” 䥹⬠叔傥ᷳ⣊ [The Dream of Scientific Omnipotence] by Liang Qichao, was reprinted several times in the Buddhist press: HCY 1, no. 3 (1920): MFQ 147.433–435; again in HCY 1 (1924): MFQ 158.247–249; and in Foyin ἃ枛 2 (1924): MFQ 145.69–70. 47. The history of the development and dissemination of this view is a complex issue. Briefly, it evolved out of the interaction of Euro-Americans and Asians under the shadow of colonialism (in India and other nations) and semicolonialism (in China and Japan). Some in the West saw in Asian culture a perfect antidote to all that was wrong in Western culture, and a “pan-Asian culture” was imagined to play the role of civilizational foil. Theosophy and elements of the late romantic movement were informed by this view. Such ideas were used also by intellectuals in Asia as they resisted the hegemonic discourse of the superiority of Western civilization. A major proponent of this view was the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, who was partly responsible for promoting the idea of a spiritual Eastern culture in China. His work was known among Chinese students and thinkers from the early 1910s, and he exerted an important influence on the writing of Liang Shuming, author of the influential 1919 book Dong Xi wenhua ji qi zhexue 㜙大㔯⊾⍲℞⒚⬠ (Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies). Tagore lectured in Beijing in 1923 as part of the same lecture series that had brought Bertrand Russell to China. Unlike Russell, Tagore was criticized by the more left-leaning students, who saw him as a reactionary. Sisir Kumar Das, “The Controversial Guest: Tagore in China,” in Across the Himalayan Gap: An Indian Quest for Understanding China, ed.

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Tan Chung (New Delhi: Indira Gandhi Centre for the Arts/Gyan Publishing House, 1998), 311–334. 48. Peter Buck, American Science and Modern China, 1876–1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 94–96. 49. Buck, American Science and Modern China, 95. 50. Leo Ou-fan Lee, “The Cultural Construction of Modernity in Urban Shanghai: Some Preliminary Explorations,” in Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond, ed. Wen-hsin Yeh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 33. 51. Joachim Kurtz, “Coming to Terms with Logic: The Naturalization of an Accidental Notion in China,” in New Terms for New Ideas: Western Knowledge & Lexical Change in Late Imperial China, ed. Michael Lackner, Iwo Amelung, and Joachim Kurtz (Leiden: Brill, 2001), 147–175. 52. Chiang Yung-chen, Social Engineering and the Social Sciences in China: 1919–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 53. Tong Lam, A Passion for Facts: Social Surveys and the Construction of the Chinese Nation State, 1900–1949 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 3. 54. Zhang Jingyuan, Psychoanalysis in China: Literary Transformations, 1919–1949 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell East Asia Program, 1997), 10, 40. 55. Louise T. Higgins and Zheng Mo, “An Introduction to Chinese Psychology— Its Historical Roots Until the Present Day,” Journal of Psychology 136, no. 2 (March 2002): 229. 56. In total, Xinli ran to 14 issues from 1922 to 1927. In this run were 150 original articles, 20 percent of which were by the editor. It also included 330 summaries of articles from other journals. Most of the pieces that appeared were translations of Western articles. Geoffrey Blowers, Boris Tat Cheung, and Han Ru, “Emulation vs. Indigenization in the Reception of Western Psychology in Republican China: An Analysis of the Content of Chinese Psychology Journals (1922–1937).” Journal of the History of Behavioral Sciences 45, no. 1 (Winter 2009): 25. 57. Blowers et al., “Emulation vs. Indigenization in the Reception of Western Psychology in Republican China,” 28–29. 58. Bridie Andrews, “The Making of Modern Chinese Medicine, 1895–1937” (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 1996), chap. 3. 59. Buck, American Science and Modern China, 212. 60. Ibid., 210. 61. Ibid., 209. 62. William Kirby, “Engineering China: Birth of the Developmental State, 1928– 1937,” in Becoming Chinese: Passages to Modernity and Beyond, ed. Wen-hsin Yeh (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 150–151. 63. Chiang, Social Engineering and the Social Sciences in China, 5. 64. Blowers et al., “Emulation vs. Indigenization in the Reception of Western Psychology in Republican China,” 30. 65. Andrews, “The Making of Modern Chinese Medicine,” 145. 66. Yeh, Becoming Chinese, 11. 67. Chiang, Social Engineering and the Social Sciences in China, 57–58. 68. Francesca Tarocco, The Cultural Practices of Modern Chinese Buddhism: Attuning the Dharma (New York: Routledge, 2007), 7. 180

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69. Holmes Welch, The Buddhist Revival in China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), 9–10. 70. Welch, The Buddhist Revival in China, 227–235. 71. Vincent Goossaert and David Palmer, The Religious Question in Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 3. 72. Chen, “Confucianism Encounters Religion,” 55. 73. Ibid., 201–207. 74. Nedostup, Superstitious Regimes. 75. Prasenjit Duara. Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives in Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 95. 76. Goossaert and Palmer, The Religious Question in Modern China, chap. 2. 77. Many of the more radical intellectuals of the period actually saw no difference between religion and superstition, so for them any such difference was merely semantic. Chen, “Confucianism Encounters Religion,” 175–176. 78. Ouyang Jingwu said that religions have (1) worship of God, (2) sacred scriptures, (3) beliefs, and (4) rituals, and that Buddhism has none of these. Chen, “Confucianism Encounters Religion,” 265. 79. Hu Danian, China and Albert Einstein: The Reception of the Physicist and His Theory in China, 1917–1979 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 40. 80. Huang Yunxi 湫忳╄, Zhongguo fojiao jindai fa’nan yanjiu ᷕ⚳ἃ㔁役ẋ㱽暋䞼䨞 1898–1937 [Research on the Persecutions of Early Contemporary Chinese Buddhism] (Taibei: Fajie, 2006), 75–132. 81. Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation, 95. 82. Buck, American Science and Modern China, 102. 83. Vincent Goossaert, “1898: The Beginning of the End for Chinese Religion?” Journal of Asian Studies 65, no. 2 (May 2006): 307–336. 84. Shuk-wah Poon, Negotiating Religion in Modern China: State and Common People in Guangzhou, 1900–1937 (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 2011). 85. Welch, The Buddhist Revival in China, 2–10; Kenneth K.  S. Ch’en, Buddhism in China: A Historical Survey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), 448–449; Tarocco, The Cultural Practices of Modern Chinese Buddhism, 51–53. 86. Dixian was a prominent figure in late Qing and early Republican Buddhism. Forty-third patriarch of the Tiantai ⣑⎘ school, he is generally considered to have been the most important master of that school in the modern period. He is said to have had dozens of monastic disciples and hundreds of thousands of lay disciples, though this is most likely an exaggeration. Yu Lingbo Ḷⅴ㲊, ed., Xiandai fojiao renwu cidian 䎦ẋἃ㔁Ṣ䈑录℠ [A Dictionary of Modern Buddhist Persons] (Taipei: Foguang, 2004), 2:1624a. 87. Welch, The Buddhist Revival in China, 9. 88. Yang’s ideas for the curriculum can be seen in his “Shishi xuetang neiban kecheng” 慳㮷⬠➪ℏ䎕婚䦳 [Course Schedule for Inner Classes of the Buddhist Study Hall], in Yang Wenhui, Yang Renshan quanji 㣲ṩⰙℐ普 [Complete Works of Yang Renshan], 㣲㔯㚫 (Anhui: Huangshan, 2000), 334–337. In the first year, students were to study not only the basic texts of Consciousness-Only and Buddhist logic but also the Awakening of Faith in the Mahāyāna, the Heart Sūtra, and several texts related to Buddhist history. 89. Welch, The Buddhist Revival in China, 117. 181

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90. On the founding of this school and its daily and quarterly schedule, see Chen Yongge 昛㯠朑, Fojiao honghua de xiandai zhuanxing: Minguo Zhejiang fojiao yanjiu ἃ㔁⻀⊾䘬䎦ẋ廱✳烉㮹⚳㴁㰇ἃ㔁䞼䨞 1912–1949 [Modernization of Buddhist Growth: Research on Zhejiang Buddhism of the Republic] (Beijing: Zongjiao wenhua, 2003), 61–68. 91. Shi Dongchu 慳㜙⇅, Zhongguo fojiao jindai shi ᷕ⚳ἃ㔁役ẋ⎚ [The Early Modern History of Chinese Buddhism], 2 vols. (Taipei: Dongchu, 1974), 1:206–207. 92. Along with the Minnan Buddhist Seminary, members of the class of 1924 also started the Sino-Tibetan Institute (Han-Zang Jiaoli Yuan 㻊啷㔁䎮昊) in Sichuan. Together, these were two of the most influential and long-standing of the Republican period’s Buddhist seminaries. The school’s students also helped found half a dozen other, shorter-lived, seminaries, and they published periodicals including Ren haideng Ṣ㴟䅰 (Altar-lamp of Humanity), Xiandai sengqie 䎦ẋ₏ụ (Modern Sangha), and Zhengxin 㬋ᾉ (True Faith). 93. Erik Hammerstrom, “Yogācāra and Science in the 1920s: The Wuchang School’s Approach to Modern Mind Science,” in Transforming Consciousness: Yogācāra Thought in Modern China, ed. John Makeham (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 170–197. 94. Erik Hammerstrom, “Buddhism and the Modern Epistemic Space: Buddhist Intellectuals in the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates,” in Recovering Buddhist China in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jan Kiely and J. Brooks Jessup (New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming). 95. Xiaoxu ⮷⼸ was Wang’s hao 嘇 (style name), and his ming ⎵ (name) was Jitong ⬋⎴ (his alternate ming was Jikai ⬋拯 and his zi ⫿ (courtesy name) was Mengpu ⬇㘖). Wang used his hao and ming with equal frequency in his writings. I refer to him using his hao because (1) it is more respectful and (2) he seems to have been referred to as Xiaoxu slightly more often than Jitong in Buddhist contexts. 96. His first article, “The Basic Problematic of Science,” appeared in 1926. For an English translation of this essay see Erik Hammerstrom, “A Buddhist Critique of Scientism,” Chung-Hwa Buddhist Journal 27 (July 2014): 35–57. Two years later his most important essay, “Fofa zhi kexue de shuoming” ἃ㱽ᷳ䥹⬠䘬婒㖶 [A Scientific Explanation of the Buddha-dharma], was published in HCY 10, no. 8 (1929): MFQ 173.233–243. It eventually became the centerpiece of his Comparative Study of the Buddha-dharma and Science [Fofa yu kexue zhi bijiao yanjiu ἃ㱽冯䥹⬠ᷳ㭼庫䞼䨞] (1932; repr., Hong Kong: Xianggang fojing liutong chu, 1956; hereafter CSBS). CSBS came out in print for the first time in 1932, and it remains the more important of his works on science and Buddhism. For English translations of the titular essay in this collection, see Douglas Lancashire, ed. and trans., Chinese Essays on Religion and Faith (San Francisco: Chinese Materials Center, 1981). Wang’s other work, in which he discussed Buddhism in relation to philosophy, religion, and Marxism, was “Fofa shengyao” ἃ㱽䚩天 [Brief Essentials of the Buddhadharma], in Fofa yu kexue ἃ㱽冯䥹⬠ [The Buddha-dharma and Science] (1944; repr. Taipei: Tianhua, 1998), 97–152. 97. Erik Hammerstrom, “Science and Buddhist Modernism in Early 20th Century China: The Life and Works of Wang Xiaoxu,” Journal of Chinese Religion 39 (2011): 1–32. 98. Liang Chengrui 㠩ㆸ䐆 and He Aisheng ỽ刦䓇, eds., Zhongguo minguo keji shi ᷕ⚳㮹⚳䥹㈨⎚ [History of the Science and Technology of Republican China],

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vol. 20 of Zhongguo quanshi ᷕ⚳ℐ⎚ [Comprehensive History of China] (Beijing: Renmin, 1994), 16. 99. Welch, The Buddhist Revival in China, 41. 100. Ibid., 141. 101. The results of this census are analyzed in Welch, The Buddhist Revival in China, 411–413. It is virtually impossible, however, to estimate the population of lay Buddhists. 102. It was certainly the case that Buddhism declined dramatically over the subsequent half century, in terms of numbers of clergy and temples. One could compare the data from the 1930s with figures released in 2000, e.g., which indicate there were 200,000 monks and nuns in 13,000 temples and monasteries associated with Han 㻊 Buddhism at that time. Yoshiko Ashiwa and David Wank, eds., Making Religion, Making the State: The Politics of Religion in Modern China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 1. In other words, even with the recent resurgence of religion in China over the last three decades, the Buddhist monastic population in China as a percentage of the total population of the country is only about a tenth of what it was in the 1930s. 103. Welch, The Buddhist Revival in China, 279.

2. Views on the Physical Universe 1. Erik Hammerstrom, “The Expression ‘The Myriad Dharmas Are Only Consciousness’ in Early 20th Century Chinese Buddhism,” Chung-Hwa Buddhist Journal 23 (2010): 71–92. 2. The material here is drawn from Stephen F. Mason, A History of the Sciences (1959; repr., New York: Collier, 1962); and John North, Cosmology: An Illustrated History of Astronomy and Cosmology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 3. John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 77–80; Richard G. Olson, Science and Religion 1450–1900: From Copernicus to Darwin (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2004), 12–15. 4. In China, for example, see Dongfang zazhi she 㜙㕡暄娴䣦 [Eastern Miscellany Society], Mixin yu kexue 徟ᾉ冯䥹⬠ [Superstition and Science] (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1923), 22–29. 5. The antireligion movements of the 1920s adopted many criticisms of Chinese religion originally put forth by Christian missionaries but added an anti-Christian argument. Chen Hsi-yuan, “Confucianism Encounters Religion: The Formation of Religious Discourse and the Confucian Movement in Modern China” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1999), 218–219. 6. Some of the calculations worked out by Tycho Brahe and Copernicus were imported into China in the early seventeenth century, but a general ban on Copernicus by the Catholic Church meant that the heliocentric aspect of their theories was generally downplayed and often ignored until the middle of the eighteenth century. Benjamin A. Elman, On Their Own Terms: Science in China 1550–1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 98–100, 150. The Catholic recall of the Jesuits from China in

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1773 meant that widespread dissemination of heliocentrism would have to wait until the arrival of Protestant missionaries in China in the middle of the nineteenth century. George Dunne, Generation of Giants: The Story of the Jesuits in China in the Last Decades of the Ming Dynasty (London: Burns and Oates, 1962), 325, 367. 7. In Japan, until the Meiji restoration in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Japanese Buddhists of all the major schools, inspired by the work of the monk Fumon Enstū 㘖攨⚻忂 (1755–1834), continued to adhere to the flat-earth model of the solar system presented in what he had labeled bonreki 㡝㙮 (traditional Indian or Buddhist astronomy). Masahiko Okada, “Vision and Reality: Buddhist Cosmographic Discourse in Nineteenth-Century Japan” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 1997), 166, et passim. By the end of the nineteenth century, just as Buddhists all over the world were doing, most Japanese Buddhists were beginning to reject much of traditional Buddhist cosmology. In particular, famous Japanese thinkers such as the philosopher Inoue Enryō ḽᶲ⚻Ḯ (1858–1919) and Kimura Taiken 㛐㛹㲘岊 (1881–1930) rejected Buddhist cosmology altogether. 8. Donald. S. Lopez Jr., Buddhism & Science: A Guide for the Perplexed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 39–56. 9. These questions are called avyākṛta, or “questions difficult to answer” (Ch. shisi wuji ⋩⚃䃉姀). There are usually fourteen of them. 10. It is generally agreed that the Abhidharma arose out of the contact and debates that occurred between both supporters of Buddhist and Brahmanic schools of thought and between members of the different Buddhist schools that had begun to appear during this period. Disagreement between these groups led to the need for doctrinal clarification, which gave rise to developments in exegesis, logic, and epistemology. In form, Abhidharma literature developed as an extended explanation of various lists found in the sūtra literature. Abhidharma is primarily concerned with questions of the nature of reality, mostly through giving exhaustive accounts of dharmas, the smallest existing components of reality, and the nature of their existence, interaction, and duration. Noa Ronkin, Early Buddhist Metaphysics: The Making of a Philosophical Tradition (New York: Routledge, 2005), 19–31. 11. Apidamo jushe lun 旧㮀忼䢐῞况婾 [Abhidharmakośa-bhāsya], by Vasubandhu, CBETA, T 1558.29.1–160; hereafter Kośa. The main Chinese version was translated into Chinese by Xuanzang between 651 and 654. This text was translated into French by Louis de la Valleé Poussin, L’abhidharmakosa. Traduit et annoté par Louis de la Vallée Poussin (Paris: P. Geuthner, 1923–1931). 12. This discussion is drawn from Kośa, CBETA, T 29.57a14–61a12; and Yuqie shidi lun 䐄ụⷓ⛘婾 [Yogācārabhūmi-śāstra], CBETA, T 30.286c14–288a20. For a more thorough treatment of Buddhist cosmology as presented in the Kośa, see Sadakata Akira, Buddhist Cosmology: Philosophy and Origins, trans. Gaynor Sekimori (Tokyo: Kōsei, 1997). For a full translation of the cosmology section of the Yogācārabhūmi cited here, see Kajiyama Yuichi, “Buddhist Cosmology as Presented in the Yogācārabhūmi,” in Wisdom, Compassion, and the Search for Understanding: The Buddhist Studies Legacy of Gadjin M. Nagao, ed. Jonathan Silk (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000), 183–200. Although Kajiyama made his translation primarily from a Sanskrit version of the text, he notes where and how the Chinese text differs.

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13. Yogācārabhūmi, CBETA, T 30.286c25–287a5; Kajiyama, “Buddhist Cosmology as Presented in the Yogācārabhūmi,” 192–193. 14. Kośa, CBETA, T 29.57b2–c5. 15. Lai Xinxia Ἦ㕘⢷, ed., Qingdai keju renwujia zhuan ziliao huibian 㶭ẋ䥹冱Ṣ䈑 ⭞⁛屯㕁⋗䶐 [Collected Materials on the Biographies of Qing Dynasty Imperial Examinees] (Beijing: Xueyuan, 2006), 5:399–408. 16. Zhu Pengshou 㛙⼕⢥, Zhu Ao 㛙毚, and Song Lingzhu ⬳剻䎈, eds., Qingdai renwu dashi jinian 㶭ẋṢ䈑⣏ḳ䲨⸜ [Yearly Record of Major Events in the Lives of Qing Dynasty Persons] (Beijing: Beijing tushuguan, 2005), 1692. 17. This is apparent in his lengthy commentary on the Yijing, titled Xushi miaoyan 暨㗪䚯妨 [Subtle Words at a Time of Waiting], composed in the last years of his life and published posthumously. There Shen makes extensive use of calculus to explain the hexagrams. He also mentions optics (guangxue ⃱⬠), acoustics (shengxue 倚⬠), and chemistry on several occasions. Shen Shandeng 㰰┬䘣, Xushi miaoyan 暨㗪䚯妨 [Subtle Words at a Time of Waiting], 10 juan, in Xu xiu siku quanshu 临ᾖ⚃⹓ℐ㚠 [Continuation to the Complete Collection of the Four Treasuries] (1902; repr., Shanghai: Shanghai Guji, 2002), 25: 246b11–12. 18. CBETA, X 1205.62.713c2–785c11. 19. Ibid., 719a8–b15. 20. This question points to the tension that existed between Chinese proponents of two different interpretations of the meaning of “Pure Land.” In the first view, “Western Direction Pure Land” (xifang jingtu 大㕡㶐⛇), the Pure Land, Sukhāvatī, is really an existing place. In the second view, “Mind-Only Pure Land” (weixin jingtu ⓗ⽫㶐⛇), the Pure Land of Amitābha is nothing more than an image in the mind. For an analysis of the apologetic strategies surrounding (primarily the first of ) these two views, see Charles Jones, “Apologetic Strategies in Late Imperial Chinese Pure Land Buddhism,” Journal of Chinese Religions 29 (2001): 69–90. 21. Here the text has benxing 㛔㗇, which should be read as muxing 㛐㗇. 22. CBETA, X 1205.62.729b2-b11 (paragraph breaks added). 23. The exact number here is not important and should simply be interpreted as “a multitude.” 24. Evidence of a relationship between Yang and Shen can be observed in a letter from Yang preserved in the second juan of Shen’s Discourse on Repaying Kindness. In this lengthy letter, Yang describes the scenery at the retreat where the letter was written. He then goes into great detail about his work collecting and printing Buddhist scriptures no longer extant in China. The letter includes no introduction, but does include several personal asides between the two men that lends it a familiar tone. CBETA, X 1205.62.776a22–777b21. 25. Yang Wenhui 㣲㔯㚫, Yang Renshan quanji 㣲ṩⰙℐ普 [Complete Works of Yang Renshan] (Anhui: Huangshan, 2000), 102–111. The original text, which was titled Shijiao sanzi jing 慳㔁ᶱ⫿䴻 (The Three Character Classic of the Teaching of Śākya[muni]) and modeled after the Confucian Sanzi jing ᶱ⫿䴻 (Three Character Classic), dates from the Ming dynasty. It had been updated by the monk Yinguang ⌘⃱ (1861–1940) before Yang revised it and added his commentary. Holmes Welch, The Buddhist Revival in China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), 295n.18. The commentary is Fojiao chuxue

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keben zhu ἃ㔁⇅⬠婚㛔姣 [Commentary to a Buddhist Primer], in Yang, Yang Renshan quanji, 112–145. 26. This text seems to have had a large impact on the lives of many Buddhists during this period. For example, the Buddhist publisher Fan Gu’nong began his study of Buddhism with Yang’s Primer in the first decades of the twentieth century. Yu Lingbo Ḷⅴ㲊, ed., Xiandai fojiao renwu cidian 䎦ẋἃ㔁Ṣ䈑录℠ [A Dictionary of Modern Buddhist Persons] (Taipei: Foguang, 2004), 1:491. 27. Welch, The Buddhist Revival in China, 4. 28. Yang, Yang Renshan quanji, 561–563. 29. This phrase refers to the idea that sentient beings tend to see the world as an implement (qi ☐) for them to use in fulfilling their desires. 30. A “live statement” (huo ju 㳣⎍), in contrast to a dead one (si ju 㬣⎍), is a statement that comes out of an individual’s enlightenment and represents enlightened wisdom. This phrase appears primarily in Chan 䥒 contexts. 31. Yang, Yang Renshan quanji, 140–141. 32. This is an obscure phrase. Its meaning in this passage is clear, but I have not been able to locate the tradition or text source from which it comes. Virtually the only use of jin’gang ci 慹∃兵 I could locate elsewhere was as a title of one bodhisattva in a list of ten and one buddha in a list of thirty-six, both of which appear in the Avataṃsaka-sūtra. Da fangguang fo huayan jing ⣏㕡⺋ἃ厗♜䴻 [Avataṃsaka-sūtra], CBETA, T 279.10.2a22; 344a17. 33. Yang, Yang Renshan quanji, 141–142. 34. Ibid. 35. There are two scriptures in China known by the name Lengyan jing 㤆♜䴻 (Śūraṃgama-sūtra). The first historically was the Śūraṃgama-samādhi-sūtra, a twojuan Mahāyāna meditation manual translated into Chinese at least six times between the late second and early fifth centuries. All versions of this text have been lost, save for the translation done by Kumārajīva in the first decade of the fifth century C.E. (Foshuo shoulengyan sanmei jing ἃ婒椾㤆♜ᶱ㗏䴻, CBETA, T 642.15.629–645). All existing citations and translations in Chinese, Tibetan, and Sanskrit of the Śūraṃgamasamādhi-sūtra have been studied, and a full translation provided in Étienne Lamotte, Śūraṃgamasamādhisūtra: The Concentration of Heroic Progress, trans. Sara Boin-Webb (London: Curzon, 1998). The other text known by the name Lengyan jing, which is the one Yang cited, is supposedly a translation by the Central Asian monk *Pramithi 凔 ⇢囄ⷅ dating from the eighth century C.E. (Da foding rulai miyin xiuzheng liaoyi zhu pusa wanxing shouleng jing ⣏ἃ枪⤪Ἦ⭮⚈ᾖ嫱Ḯ佑媠厑啑叔埴椾㤆♜䴻 [Śūraṃgamasūtra], CBETA, T 945.19.105b25–155b4). But in actual fact, this text was most likely composed by one Fang Rong ㇧圵, a minister of Empress Wu, sometime directly after her reign (705–710). When it first appeared in China, its Indian origins were quickly contested, but its apocryphal nature did not prevent it from becoming very influential in East Asian Buddhism, where it was associated with the Huayan, Chan, and esoteric traditions. Paul Demiéville, Le concile de Lhasa: Une controverse sur le quiétisme entre B0uddhistes de L’Inde et de la Chine (1952; repr., Paris: Collége du France, 1987). By the end of the Qing when Yang was writing, there had been close to one hundred commentaries written on it.

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36. Da foding rulai miyin xiuzheng liaoyi zhu pusa wanxing shouleng jing CBETA, T 945.19.120a7–24. For an English translation of this passage see Charles Luk, The Śūraṅgama Sūtra (1966; repr., Delhi: Munshiram Monharlal, 2003), 88–89. 37. Yu Lingbo Ḷⅴ㲊, Zhongguo jin xiandai fojiao renwu zhi ᷕ⚳役䎦ẋἃ㔁Ṣ䈑⽿ [Biographical Almanac of Early Contemporary and Modern Chinese Buddhism], (Beijing: ZOngjiao wenhua, 1995), 5:505–511. 38. Lü Bicheng ⏪䡏❶, “Lü Bicheng zhuozhe shu” ⏪䡏❶叿侭㚠 [A Letter from Lü Bicheng], in Fofa yu kexue ἃ㱽冯䥹⬠ [The Buddha-dharma and Science], by Wang Xiaoxu 䌳⮷⼸ (1932; repr., Taipei: Tianhua, 1998), 83–86. 39. Ibid., 85. 40. Wang, Fofa yu kexue, 89. 41. Wang was only able to accurately make this point in his 1942 work. Prior to that, modern cartography still recognized five continents (Europe and Asia being considered two separate continents), which Wang, writing in the late 1920s, admitted was a problem. 42. The existence of oceans was already accounted for in Buddhist cosmology, but they sit on top of the disk of metal. 43. Wang, Fofa yu kexue, 90. 44. Kośa, CBETA, T 29.57a19–26; Yogācārabhūmi, CBETA, T 30.286c19–20 (Kajiyama, “Buddhist Cosmology as Presented in the Yogācārabhūmi,” 192). 45. Lü Bicheng ⏪䡏❶, “Foxue yu kexue zhi yitong” ἃ⬠冯䥹⬠ᷳ䔘⎴ [Differences and Similarities Between Buddhism and Science], Jue youqing 奢㚱ね 7, no. 7 (1941): MFQ 89.7–8; reprinted in Foxue banyuekan ἃ⬠⋲㚰↲ no. 242 (1941): MFQB 65.494–495; and Jue yin 奢枛 nos. 30–32 (1941): MFQ 92.469–470. The three versions are identical; citations are taken from the Jue youqing version. 46. The title of the magazine Bodhisattva, literally translated, would read Awakening Those With Sentience. I use the English title provided on the front page of the periodical. This left-leaning magazine was published in Shanghai from 1939 to 1953. MFQ 204.34–35. 47. Lü, “Foxue yu kexue zhi yitong,” MFQ 89.7d–8a. 48. Ibid., MFQ 89.8a. 49. Sadakata, Buddhist Cosmology, 21–22. The concept of the four great elements came from Indian thought in general and found application in medicine and early Indian science. It came with Buddhism to China where, like Buddhist cosmology, it never fully supplanted native Chinese ideas. Notions of qi and yin and yang, as well as the idea of the “five phases” (Ch. wuxing Ḽ埴) to which this element scheme bears some similarity, remained dominant in Chinese thinking. The five phases are water, fire, wood, metal, and earth. They should be thought of not as types of matter but as “fundamental processes.” In Chinese views of the nature of the world, everything from the cycles of the seasons and dynastic history to colors, fruits, and planets could be categorized as belonging to one of these five phases. According to Joseph Needham, the idea of the five phases was first systematized (though not produced sui generis) in the fourth or third century B.C.E. by Zou Yan 槞埵. Joseph Needham, ed. Science and Civilisation in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), 2: 232–244. 50. Taixu, “Fofa yu kexue” ἃ㱽冯䥹⬠ [The Buddha-dharma and Science], HCY no. 8 (1923): MFQ 157.15. This argument was picked up and repeated verbatim by Zeng Daxu 㚦忼嘃 in Taiwan 1934. Zeng Daxu 㚦忼嘃, “Foxue yu rensheng kexue” ἃ⬠冯Ṣ䓇䥹⬠

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[Buddhism and Humanity, Science], Nanying fojiaohui huibao ⋿㿃ἃ㔁㚫㚫⟙ 13, no. 5 (1935): MFQ 116.258c. 51. Zeng Puxin 㚦㘖ᾉ, “Wuchang ji jinhua” 䃉ⷠ⌛忚⊾ [Impermanence as Evolution], part 2, Zhong dao ᷕ忻 no. 32 (1926): MFQ 123.410b. 52. Lihong 㙮⻀, “Fofa gaikuo kexue, kexue buzu zhengming fofa lun” ἃ㱽屭㊔䥹 ⬠, 䥹⬠ᶵ嵛嫱㖶ἃ㱽婾 [Discussion of How the Buddha-dharma Includes Science, but Science Is Not Sufficient to Prove the Buddha-dharma), Shanxi fojiao zazhi Ⱉ大ἃ㔁暄娴 1, no. 4 (1934): MFQ 75.135b. 53. Zhang Huasheng ⻝⊾倚, “Se jishi kong, kong jishi se zhi lihua tan” 刚⌛㗗䨢, 䨢 ⌛㗗刚ᷳ䎮⊾婯 [Physical Science’s Discussion of the Concept Form Is Emptiness, Emptiness Is Form], HCY 5, no. 12 (1924): MFQ 161.23. I say this is slightly inaccurate because it describes the chemical equation incorrectly: the product of the combination of copper and strong nitric acid includes not only copper nitrite (correctly written as Cu(NO3)2), as he states, but also water and nitrogen dioxide (NO2). 54. The law of the conservation of mass is the first law of thermodynamics and was laid out by Antoine Lavoisier in 1789. Arthur Donovan, Antoine Lavoisier: Science, Administration, and Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 55. The chemical terms Zhang used in his examples were first introduced in missionary Benjamin Hobson’s 1854 introductory textbook Bowu xinbian ⌂䈑㕘䶐 [Treatise on Natural Philosophy]. Elman, On Their Own Terms, 287–288. 56. Taixu, “Fofa yu kexue,” MFQ 157.17. 57. Meian 㗏䚎 [Taixu, pseud.], “Aiensitan xiangduilun yu weishilun” ッ】㕗✎䚠⮵ 婾冯ⓗ嬀婾 [Einstein’s Theory of Relativity and Consciousness-Only Theory], HCY no. 9 (1927): MFQ 168.365–367. 58. For a summary of the critiques of atomic theory put forth by the Sarvāstivāda, the primary Abhidharma tradition used in China, see K. L. Dhammajoti, Sarvāstivāda Abhidharma (Hong Kong: Centre of Buddhist Studies, University of Hong Kong, 2007), 259–268. 59. Taixu used this argument himself in 1932. Taixu ⣒嘃, “Foxue yu zongjiao zhexue ji kexue zhexue” ἃ⬠冯⬿㔁⒚⬠⍲䥹⬠⒚⬠ [Buddhism, Religious Philosophy, and Scientific Philosophy], HCY 13, no. 11 (1932): MFQ 182.165b. Also, in his c. 1949 Scientific Outlook of Buddhism, You Zhibiao describes atomism as just like creationism in being an example of a “theory of inconsistent causality” (Ch. bu pingdeng yinlun ᶵ⸛䫱⚈婾; Skt. viṣama-hetu), wherein one cause can produce many results without itself having been caused. This is the second of a list of four types of deviant theories that contradict the law of causality (weifan yinguo lü de xieshuo 忽⍵⚈㝄⼳䘬恒婒), the others being the denial of causality (wuyin lun 䃉⚈婾), fatalism (dingminglun ⭂␥婾), and “mechanism” (jijielun 㨇 㡘婾). You Zhibiao ⯌㘢堐, Fojiao kexue guan ἃ㔁䥹⬠奨 [The Scientific Outlook of Buddhism] (1948 [1949?]; repr., Taibei: Huayanlian she, 1998), 43–44. 60. Much of the controversy surrounded the issue of a correct understanding of the “ether,” a fluidic but presumed physical medium that allowed for the action of matter, light, heat, magnetism, and electricity to be explained by means of the interaction of solid material particles, or “corpuscles,” whose behavior could be described using classical (i.e., Newtonian) mechanics. The concept of the ether was not wholly discarded in science until the 1920s due to developments in both atomic and relativity physics. Mary

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Jo Nye, Before Big Science: The Pursuit of Modern Chemistry and Physics, 1800–1940 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996). 61. Ibid., 84–85, 167–168. 62. Taixu ⣒嘃, “Dasheng jianjiao yu jinhualun” ⣏Ḁ㻠㔁冯忚⊾婾 [Mahāyāna Gradualism and Evolution.” Fojiao pinglun ἃ㔁姽婾 1, no. 1 (1931): MFQ 46.138–142, 140. 63. Starting from the 1850s, physicists and chemists began to describe electromagnetism using the idea of “energy” rather the idea of “force” that had originated with Newton and held sway in the physical sciences until that point. Nye, Before Big Science, 88. 64. Taixu, “Foxue yu zongjiao zhexue ji kexue zhexue,” MFQ 182.165b. 65. Wang, Fofa yu kexue, 132–133. 66. One You Mengyi raised this exact point in his criticism of the concept of atoms and electrons, which he argued cannot be changeless. You Mengyi 忲⬇忠, “Fofa lun yuansheng yu yiqie kexue zongjiao zhi butong” ἃ㱽婾䶋䓇冯ᶨ↯䥹⬠⬿㔁ᷳᶵ⎴ [Dependent Origination as Discussed in the Buddha-dharma and Its Difference from All Sciences and Religions], Wenjiao congkan 㔯㔁⎊↲ no. 7 (1947): MFQ 100.83–84. 67. The body of work that uses and misuses ideas from quantum physics in the name of religious and spiritual theories is quite large. Quantum mechanics has been discussed by a number of Christian theologians. For example, see Stephen Barr, Modern Physics and Ancient Faith (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003); John Polkinghorne, Quantum Physics and Theology: An Unexpected Kinship (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Robert Russell, Nancey Murphy, and C. J. Isham, eds., Quantum Cosmology and the Laws of Nature: Scientific Perspectives on Divine Action (Berkeley, Calif.: Center for Theology and Natural Sciences, 1993). Buddhist theorists have also made use of quantum physics in their discussions. For examples, see several articles in B. Alan Wallace, ed., Buddhism and Science: Breaking New Ground (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); and Matthieu Ricard and Trinh Xuan Thuan, The Quantum and the Lotus: A Journey to the Frontiers Where Science and Buddhism Meet (New York: Crown, 2001). And two very popular works in this vein not specifically associated with any one religion are Deepak Chopra, Quantum Healing: Exploring the Frontiers of Mind/Body Medicine (New York: Bantam, 1990), and the 2005 film What the Bleep Do We Know!?, directed by Mark Vicente, Betsy Chasse, and William Arntz (2004; Beverly Hills, Calif.: 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2005), DVD. 68. The information in this and the following paragraph comes from Hu Danian, China and Albert Einstein: The Reception of the Physicist and His Theory in China, 1917–1979 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005). 69. It should be noted that on November 13, 1922, Einstein and his wife were feted at the house of Wang Yiting 䌳ᶨṕ (1867–1938), a prominent Shanghai lay Buddhist who had been instrumental in several of the major Buddhist organizations formed by Taixu and others during the Republican era. 70. Wang Xiaoxu䌳⮷⼸ states this explicitly in his 1934 piece “Weishi yanjiu xu” ⓗ 嬀䞼䨞⸷ [Preface to Consciousness-Only Studies], in Fojiao yu kexue, zhexue ἃ㔁冯䥹 ⬠, ⒚⬠ [Buddhism and Science, Philosophy], ed. Zhang Mantao ⻝㚤㾌, Xiandai fojiao xueshu congkan 䎦ẋἃ㔁⬠埻⎊↲ [Series on Modern Buddhist Studies], (Taibei: Dasheng wenhua, 1979), 63: 21.

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71. Interestingly, some Buddhists, like Wang Xiaoxu, used this idea to call for the continued advancement of science, in the firm belief that as science advanced it would come into greater accord with Buddhism. Wang, Fofa yu kexue, 17. 72. Taixu ⣒嘃, “Shuo sidu yishang de shi” 婒⚃⹎ẍᶲ䘬ḳ [Discussion of Things Greater than the Four Dimensions], HCY nos. 11, 12 (1927): MFQ 169.43–47. 73. Ouyang Jingwu 㫸春䪇䃉, “Fofa feizongjiao feizhexue” ἃ㱽朆⬿㔁朆⒚⬠ [The Buddha-dharma Is Not Religion, Not Philosophy], in Xiandai foxue daxi 䎦ẋἃ⬠⣏Ὢ [Modern Buddhist Studies Collection] (Taipei: Mile, 1984; first published Guangzhou: Jilu, 1922), 51: 73–74. 74. Wang Xiaoxu [Wang Jitong 䌳⬋⎴, pseud.], Fofa yu kexue zhi bijiao yanjiu ἃ 㱽冯䥹⬠ᷳ㭼庫䞼䨞 [Comparative Study of the Buddha-dharma and Science] (1932; repr., Hong Kong: Xianggang fojing liutong chu, 1956), viii-ix; Douglas Lancashire, ed. and trans., Chinese Essays on Religion and Faith (San Francisco: Chinese Materials Center, 1981), 92. 75. Huang Ziqiang 湫冒⻟, “Keuxe de he zhenli de” 䥹⬠䘬␴䛇䎮䘬 [The Scientific and the Truthful], Fojiao wenzhai ἃ㔁㔯㐀 6 (1948): MFQ 105.398–399. 76. Bertrand Russell, “Relativity: Philosophical Consequences,” Encyclopedia Britannica (London: 1926), 31.331–332. Cited in “Early Philosophical Interpretations of General Relativity,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/genrelearly (accessed May 5, 2008). 77. Whalen Lai, “The Meaning of ‘Mind-Only’ (Wei-hsin): An Analysis of a Sinitic Mahāyāna Phenomenon,” Philosophy East and West 27, no. 1 (1977): 65–83. 78. The opening lines of the “Mengshan Rite for the Offering of Food [to Hungry Ghosts]” (Mengshan shishi yi 呁Ⱉ㕥梇₨) read: “If you wish to know all the buddhas of the three times, you should contemplate the dharmdhatu, as, by nature, being entirely the creation of the mind.” Daniel Stevenson, trans., “Feeding Hungry Ghosts,” in Buddhist Scriptures, ed. Donald S. Lopez Jr. (New York: Penguin, 2004), 416–422. 79. Hammerstrom, “The Expression ‘The Myriad Dharmas Are Only Consciousness’ in Early 20th Century Chinese Buddhism.” 80. Philosophers in Japan were actively engaged in these debates, and some of them used Buddhist thought in different ways to solve the same problem. Gerard Clinton Godart, “ ‘Philosophy’ or ‘Religion’ ? The Confrontation with Foreign Categories in Late Nineteenth-Century Japan,” Journal of the History of Ideas 69, no. 1 (January 2008): 71–91. 81. An example of this tendency in Chinese thought can be found in views of the natural order, in which heaven and earth, halves of the human body, seasons, plants, and other things are identified as yin 昘 or yang 春. 82. This type of criticism was also used by Ouyang in his “Fofa feizongjiao feizhexue,” which was published as a booklet no later than 1922. The main focus in his writing there was a demonstration of the superiority of Consciousness-Only thought to Western epistemology. 83. Dan Lusthaus, Buddhist Phenomenology: A Philosophical Investigation of Yogācāra Buddhism and the Ch’eng wei-shih lun (London: Curzon, 2000), 5–6. 84. Meian [Taixu], “Aiensitan xiangduilun yu weishilun,” MFQ 168.366. I believe Taixu was making an epistemological point, and we should not interpret “existing” in the full ontological sense.

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85. Taixu also explicitly identified this “human intelligence” as the eighth consciousness described in Consciousness-Only thought. Wang Xiaoxu offers a similar argument in his reply to his nephew/stepson Guan Yici 䭉佑ヰ (n.d.). Wang Xiaoxu 䌳⮷⼸, “Da Guan Yici” 䭉佑ヰ [Reply to Guan Yici], in Fofa yu kexue ἃ㱽冯䥹⬠ [The Buddha-dharma and Science] (Taipei: Tianhua, 1998), 45. I describe the eight consciousnesses in more detail in chap. 4 of this book. 86. Taixu, “Dasheng jianjiao yu jinhualun,” MFQ 46.140.

3. Empiricism and Means of Verification 1. This viewpoint no longer holds in the philosophy of science. Since the work of Karl Popper, the idea of absolute proof in science has generally been abandoned in favor of ideas of falsifiability. See his The Logic of Scientific Discovery (New York: Routledge, 1977). 2. The Shuowen jiezi 婒㔯妋⫿ defines zheng as “to announce.” It also has this meaning in the Analects. It has had the meaning of “proof ” or “to prove” since the Zhuangzi 匲⫸ (c. fourth century B.C.E.). 3. Yang Wenhui 㣲㔯㚫, Yang Renshan quanji 㣲ṩⰙℐ普 [Complete Works of Yang Renshan] (Anhui: Huangshan, 2000), 110. 4. Liu Xianjiao ∱栗㔁, “Ziranjie zhi wuchang guan” 冒䃞䓴ᷳ䃉ⷠ奨 [Views of Impermanence in the Natural World], HCY 5, no. 10 (1924): MFQ 160.294–299. 5. Tang Dayuan Ⓒ⣏⚻, “Weishi de kexue fangfa” ⓗ嬀䘬䥹⬠㕡㱽 [The Scientific Method of Consciousness-Only], part 1, HCY 10, no. 5 (1929): MFQ 172.498 (emphasis added). 6. Jian Mulu 䯉ヽ䚏, “Fofazhong zhi kexuehua” ἃ㱽ᷕᷳ䥹⬠⊾ [Scienticization Within the Buddha-dharma], Foxue banyuekan no. 26 (1931): MFQ 47.251. 7. Guangwen ⺋㔯, “Foxue yu kexue xu” ἃ⬠冯䥹⬠⸷ [Preface to Buddhism and Science], Sichuan fojiao yuekan ⚃ⶅἃ㔁㚰↲ nos. 7–12 (1942): MFQ 60.255. According to a notice in the Fohua xinwen ἃ⊾㕘倆 (Buddhist News), this book was published in 1942 by Yongjiu 㯠ᷭ Publishers. Fohua xinwen ἃ⊾㕘倆 no. 250 (1942): MFQ 86.419. I have seen no other references to this book in the Buddhist press and have been unable to locate a copy of this book or to find any information about the book’s author, who wrote very little during the Republican period. 8. Guangwen, “Foxue yu kexue xu,” 255b. 9. Peter Buck, American Science and Modern China, 1876–1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 171–172. 10. This school was named after the Nyāya-sūtra, written by Akṣāpada Gotama (second century B.C.E.). 11. This traditional attribution may not be entirely correct. Although Dignāga’s texts were important for the development of Buddhist logic in India and China, Stefan Anacker has noted that several of the major innovations attributed to Dignāga can be seen in the work of the earlier thinker Vasubandhu. Stefan Anacker, Seven Works of Vasubandhu: The Buddhist Psychological Doctor (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1984), 31–34. 12. This is not to say that there was no development of Buddhist logic in China. As Christopher Harbsmeier has argued, during the translation of important Buddhist logic texts such as the Nyāyapraveśa into Chinese, Xuanzang actually clarified some of the

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grammatical ambiguities present in the Sanskrit version of the texts, producing a Chinese text that is less imprecise than the received version. Joseph Needham and Christopher Harbsmeier, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. 7, part 1, Language and Logic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 402. 13. Two very similar Chinese translations of Nyāyamukha exist: Yinming zhengli menlun ben ⚈㖶㬋䎮攨婾㛔 [Nyāyamukha], trans. Xuanzang 䌬⤀, CBETA, T 1628.32.1a1–6a7; and Yinming zhengli menlun ⚈㖶㬋䎮攨婾 [Nyāyamukha], trans. Yijing 佑㶐, CBETA, T 1629.32.6a11–11a20. An English translation of the former text was made by Giuseppe Tucci in The Nyāyamukha of Dignāga (Leipzig: Otto Harrasowitz, 1930). The Chinese text of the Nyāyapraveśa is Yinming ru zhengli lun ⚈㖶ℍ㬋䎮婾 [Nyāyapraveśa], CBETA, T 1630.32.11a–13b. This text is translated into English in Tachikawa Musashi, “A Sixth Century Manual of Indian Logic,” Journal of Indian Philosophy 1 (1971), 111–145. 14. Shen Jianying 㰰∵劙, Zhongguo fojiao luoji shi ᷕ⚳ἃ㔁怷廗⎚ [A History of Chinese Buddhist Logic] (Shanghai: Huadong shifan daxue, 2001), 63–66. 15. Shen, Zhongguo fojiao luoji shi, 213–217. 16. By the late 1920s many Buddhist thinkers in China tended to treat ConsciousnessOnly and Buddhist logic as part of a single system of thought. This was mostly a result of the fact that “Buddhist logic was introduced to China as an integral part, one might even say the methodological organon (xiao dao ⮷忻) of the Buddhist ‘theology’ of [Consciousness-Only].” Needham and Harbsmeier, Science and Civilisation in China, 360. In addition, the Buddhist tradition sees the founder of Consciousness-Only in India and the teacher of Dignāga as the same person as both were named Vasubandhu. Some modern scholars, such as Anacker, believe they were the same person, and I am inclined to agree. Anacker, Seven Works of Vasubandhu, 8–28. Other modern scholars believe they were in fact two different individuals. For a partial review of this argument, see Amar Singh, The Heart of Buddhist Philosophy: Diṅnāga and Dharmakīrti (New Delhi: Munshiram manoharlal, 1984), 18–47. 17. Joachim Kurtz, “Coming to Terms with Logic: The Naturalization of an Accidental Notion in China,” in New Terms for New Ideas: Western Knowledge & Lexical Change in Late Imperial China, ed. Michael Lackner, Iwo Amelung, and Joachim Kurtz (Leiden: Brill, 2001). 18. Holmes Welch, The Buddhist Revival in China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), 107. 19. Cited in Joachim Kurtz, “Matching Names and Actualities: Translation and the Discovery of ‘Chinese Logic,’ ” in Mapping Meanings: The Field of New Learning in Late Qing China, ed. Michael Lackner and Natascha Vittinghoff (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 489–490. 20. The Sanskrit term pramāṇa can be translated as “measure,” “scale,” “standard,” or “authority” (which is why this term was rendered into Chinese using the word liang 慷, meaning “to measure” or “to consider”). Monier Monier-Williams, A Sanskrit-English Dictionary (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1970), 685c. 21. T. H. Stcherbatsky, the great Russian scholar of Buddhist logic, does not translate the word pramāṇa by itself. Rather, he translates pratyakṣa pramāṇa as “perception” or “sense-perception,” while he translates anumāna pramāṇa as “inference.” T.  H. Stcherbatsky, Buddhist Logic (1930; repr., Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2004), 1:231.

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22. There are two pramāṇas recognized in Nyāya, but not in the logic of Dignāga. One is “cognition based upon scriptural authority” (Ch. shengjiao liang 俾㔁慷; Skt. āgama pramāṇa), meaning knowledge based on a tradition’s sacred and orthodox teachings. This pramāṇa refers to knowledge gained from studying the scriptures. The other is “cognition based on metaphor” (Ch. piyu liang 嬔╣慷; Skt. dṛṣṭānta-pramāṇa). 23. In Dignāga’s Nyāyamukha this is identified as the “correct nondiscriminating awareness of things, which does not partake of any names or concepts.” CBETA, T 32.1630.12b27–29. 24. Needham and Harbsmeier, Science and Civilisation in China, 404–408. 25. Stcherbatsky, Buddhist Logic, 1:1. 26. Yinming ru zhengli lun, CBETA, T 1630.32.11a29–30. 27. Liang Shuming 㠩㻙㹇, “Weishijia yu Bogesen” ⓗ嬀⭞冯㝷㟤㢖 [ConsciousnessOnly and Henri Bergson], in Liang Shuming quanji 㠩㻙㹇ℐ普 [Complete Works of Liang Shuming] (Qingdao: Shandong renmin, 2005), 4:649–654. 28. An Yanming, “Liang Shuming and Henri Bergson on Intuition: Cultural Context and the Evolution of Terms,” Philosophy East and West 47, no. 3, (1997): 337–362. 29. This is dealt with primarily in Bergson’s La pensée et le mouvant [The Creative Mind] (Paris: F. Alcan, 1934), and to a lesser extent in his Matière et mémoire [Matter and Memory] (Paris: F. Alcan, 1896). 30. Liang, “Weishijia yu Bogesen,” 650–651. 31. Ibid., 652–653. 32. Jin Han 拎㻊, Foxue bashi zhi piping yu yanjiu ἃ⬠ℓ嬀ᷳ㈡姽冯䞼䨞 [Criticism and Research on the Eight Consciousnesses in Buddhist Studies] (n.p., April 1928). 33. Wang Xiaoxu, Fofa yu kexue ἃ㱽冯䥹⬠ [The Buddha-dharma and Science] (Taipei: Tianhua, 1998), 13–14; Douglas Lancashire, Chinese Essays on Religion and Faith (San Francisco: Chinese Materials Center, 1981), 123–124. 34. Wang Xiaoxu 䌳⮷⼸ [Buqing ᶵ庽, pseud.], “Du Jin Han jun Foxue bashi zhi piping yu yanjiu” 嬨拎㻊⏃ἃ⬠ℓ嬀ᷳ㈡姽冯䞼䨞 [Reading Mr. Jin Han’s Criticism and Research on the Eight Consciousnesses in Buddhism], Xizai zhuankan 〗䀥⮰↲, no. 5 (1928): MFQ 134.34–36. 35. Wang Xiaoxu, Fofa yu kexue, 13–14; Lancashire, Chinese Essays on Religion and Faith, 123–124. 36. According to Yu Huiguan 䌱ㄏ奨, “Lun Hu Shi de fofa yu kexue” 婾傉怑䘬ἃ㱽 冯䥹⬠ [Discussing Hu Shih’s “Buddha-dharma and Science”], HCY 12, no. 11 (1931): MFQ 179.279a. 37. Wang Xiaoxu [Wang Jitong 䌳⬋⎴, pseud.], Fofa yu kexue zhi bijiao yanjiu ἃ㱽 冯䥹⬠ᷳ㭼庫䞼䨞 [Comparative Study of the Buddha-dharma and Science] (1932; repr., Hong Kong: Xianggang fojing liutong chu, 1956; hereafter CSBS), v; Lancashire, Chinese Essays on Religion and Faith, 86–87. 38. Wang, CSBS, v; Lancashire, Chinese Essays on Religion and Faith, 87. 39. Duhuan ⹎⮘, “Ping Hu Shi de fofa yu kexue” 姽傉怑䘬ἃ㱽冯䥹⬠ [Critique of Hu Shih’s “Buddha-dharma and Science”], Xiandai sengqie 䎦ẋ₏ụ 4, no. 3 (1931): MFQ 67.177b. 40. Yu, “Lun Hu Shi de fofa yu kexue.” 41. Ibid., 282a.

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42. Liu Tianxing ∱⣑埴, “Lueping Hu Shi de fofa yu kexue” 䔍姽傉怑䘬ἃ㱽冯䥹 ⬠ [A Brief Critique of Hu Shih’s “Buddha-dharma and Science”], HCY 13, no. 2 (1932): MFQ 180.154–158. 43. Liu, “Lueping Hu Shi de fofa yu kexue,” 155b–156a. 44. Shengyi 俾ᶨ, “Shu fofa yu kexue zhi bijiao yanjiu ji Cai Hu er xu hou” 㚠ἃ㱽 冯䥹⬠ᷳ㭼庫䞼䨞⍲哉傉Ḵ⸷⼴ [After the Two Prefaces by Cai and Hu to the Book A Comparative Study of the Buddha-dharma and Science], Hongfashe kan ⻀㱽䣦↲ no. 21 (1933): MFQ 22.365–369. 45. Shengyi, “Shu fofa yu kexue zhi bijiao yanjiu ji Cai Hu er xu hou,” MFQ 22.367a. 46. Chen Hushi 昛㷾⢓, “Kexue yu foxue zhi bjiiao” 䥹⬠冯ἃ⬠ᷳ㭼庫 [Comparison of Science and Buddhism], Beiping fojiaohui hui yuekan ⊿⸛ἃ㔁㚫㚫㚰↲ 1, no. 9 (1935): MFQ 73.228–229. 47. Tang Dahai Ⓒ⣏㴟, “Fofa yu kexue” ἃ㱽冯䥹⬠ [The Buddha-dharma and Science], HCY 27, no. 8 (1946): MFQ 203.17a. 48. Yu, “Lun Hu Shi de fofa yu kexue,” MFQ 179.282a; Liu, “Lueping Hu Shi de fofa yu kexue,” MFQ 180.155b; Shengyi, “Shu fofa yu kexue zhi bijiao yanjiu ji Cai Hu er xu hou,” MFQ 22.367a. 49. Tan Sitong 嬂▋⎴, Renxue ṩ⬠ [An Exposition of Benevolence], in Tan Sitong quanji 嬂▋⎴ℐ普 [Collected Works of Tan Sitong] (Shanghai: Commercial Press, n.d.; repr., Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1981), 1:302–303. For an English translation of this work, see T’an Ssu-t’ung, An Exposition of Benevolence: The Jen-hsueh of T’an Ssu-t’ung, trans. Chan Sin-wai (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1984). Although Tan wrote this work in response to a published request by a Hong Kong newspaper for an introduction to Buddhism, this work is a meandering manifesto for a new China that draws upon Confucianism, Daoism, and a range of Western philosophy and science. It was banned during the Qing. 50. These are (1) The flesh eye (Ch. rouyan 倱䛤; Skt. māṃsa-cakṣus), (2) the divine eye (this is the same as the second of the shentong listed above), (3) the wisdom eye (Ch. huiyan ㄏ䛤; Skt. prajñā-cakṣus), (4) the Dharmic eye (Ch. fayan 㱽䛤; Skt. dharmacakṣus), and (5) the Buddha eye (Ch. foyan ἃ䛤; Skt. buddha-cakṣus). 51. Tan, Renxue, 1:318; T’an Ssu-t’ung, An Exposition of Benevolence: The Jen-hsueh of T’an Ssu-t’ung, trans. Chan Sin-wai (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1984), 107–108. 52. Brian J. Ford, The Leeuwenhoek Legacy (London: Biopress/Farrand, 1991). 53. Chang, Chinese Intellectuals in Crisis: Search for Order and Meaning, 1890–1911 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 108. 54. Zhang Binglin 䪈䁛湇, “Jun shuo” 却婒 (On Fungi/Bacteria), in Qingyi bao quanbian 㶭嬘⟙ℐ䶐 [The Complete China Discussion], 5.2.2.10–26, Jindai Zhongguo shiliao congkan 役ẋᷕ⚳⎚㕁⎊↲ [Early Modern Chinese Historical Materials Collection], 3rd series, 15th sect., vols. 141–150, ed. Shen Yunlong 㰰暚漵 (Taipei: Wenhai, 1986), n.p. 55. An eighth-century compilation of various Mahāyāna scriptures. Da baoji jing ⣏⮞䧵䴻 [Great Jewel Collection Sūtra], CBETA, T 310.11.1a03–685a25. 56. Sengqiezha jing ₏ụ⎺䴻, CBETA, T 423.13.959b17–976c06, translated by *Upaśunya 㚰⧮椾恋 in the sixth century.

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57. Da baoji jing, CBETA, T 310.11.325a17–b28, and again at 541b11–b22; Sengqiezha jing, CBETA, T 423.13.972c11–c21. 58. Taixu ⣒嘃, “Weiwu kexue yu weishizongxue” ⓗ䈑䥹⬠冯ⓗ嬀⬿⬠ [Materialist Science and the Consciousness-Only School], Jueshe congshu 奢䣦⎊㚠 no. 3 (1919): MFQ 7.191–197; Taixu, “Fofa yu kexue,” ἃ㱽冯䥹⬠ [The Buddha-dharma and Science], HCY no. 8 (1923): MFQ 157.15. 59. Taixu, “Fofa yu kexue,” MFQ 157.15. 60. The first reference I found to a microscope in the Buddhist canon comes from the Liudao ji ℕ忻普 [Collected Writings on the Six Paths of Samsāra], CBETA, X 1645.88.107a–179b. This text was compiled by the Vinaya master Hongzan ⻀岲 (1611– 1685), a member of the Caodong 㚡㳆 Chan lineage who came from Guangdong. Shi Guodeng 慳㝄䅰, “Mingmo Qingchu Lüzong qianhua pai zhi xingqi” 㖶㛓㶭⇅⼳⬿⋫厗㳦 ᷳ冰崟 [The Arising of the Qianhua Sect of the Vinaya School in the Late Ming and Early Qing] (PhD diss., Xuanzang College, 2001), 39–42. The Liudao ji was probably completed between 1681 and 1682, as it bears a preface by one Li Longbiao 㛶漵㧁, dated to Kangxi ⹟䅁 21 (1682.2.7–1683.1.26). 61. For modern examples, see Clement Yat-biu Ching, Buddhism: You Too Can Understand (New York: Buddhist Association of the United States, 1994); Shi Huimin 慳よ㓷, “Fo guan yi bo shui, ba wan si qian chong: Fofa yu shengming kexue” ἃ奨ᶨ以㯜, ℓ叔 ⚃⋫垚烉ἃ㱽冯䓇␥䥹⬠ [The Buddha Saw 84,000 Worms in One Bowl of Water: The Buddha-dharma and Life Science], in Dang Niudun yudao Fotuo 䔞䈃枻忯⇘ἃ旨 [When Newton Met the Buddha] (Taipei: Fagu wenhua, 2007), 111–114; originally published in Rensheng Ṣ䓇 (Human Life) 281 (2007): n.p. 62. The word bo 以 is a transliteration of the Sanskrit word pātra, which is a technical term for a monk or nun’s alms bowl. 63. Taixu, “Weiwu kexue yu weishizongxue,” MFQ 6.195. 64. Pini riyong lu 㭿⯤㖍䓐抬, CBETA, X 1114.60.145a03–156c12. 65. For more on this text see Shi, “Mingmo Qingchu Lüzong qianhua pai zhi xingqi.” 66. Here I follow Michel Strickmann in translating zhou as “spell.” Zhou can translate either of the Sanskrit terms mantra or dhāraṇī. Mantras come from Vedic times and are often invocations of the gods that carried no semantic meaning. Dhāraṇīs were believed to have originated as mnemonic devices and evolved into strings of syllables, the utterance of which was thought to release power. According to Strickmann, this distinction was generally ignored when using zhou, as the term was already used widely in Chinese religion before Buddhism was introduced to China. Michel Strickmann, Chinese Magical Medicine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 103. 67. Rather than create a back-translation into Sanskrit, I have simply transliterated this spell into pinyin. I have chosen this option because I have not found this spell in any other text, other than texts quoting this one, nor have I found it in any reference work. As a result, any Sanskrit reconstruction would be purely speculative. 68. Pini riyong lu, CBETA, X 1114.60.146b11–14 (punctuation added). 69. Erik Hammerstrom, “Early Twentieth-Century Buddhist Microbiology and Shifts in Chinese Buddhism’s ‘Actual Canon’,” Theology and Science 10, no. 1 (2012): 9. 70. Taixu, “Weiwu kexue yu weishizongxue,” MFQ 7.195–196. Taixu does not give the origin of the phrase qi shen gen chong, but he appears to have drawn it from the Zhengfa

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nianchu jing 㬋㱽⾝嗽䴻 [Sūtra on the Bases of Mindfulness of the True Dharma], CBETA, T 721.17.1a–417c. This is a massive compendium (70 fascicles, or 417 pages in the modern Taishō canon) of teachings translated by Prajñāruci between 538 and 541 C.E. (Yuanxiang ⃫尉 1 and Xianghe 冰␴ 3) in Yecheng 惜❶. Xingyun 㗇暚 and Ciyi ヰ⿉, eds., Foguang da cidian ἃ⃱⣏录℠, 7 vols. (Taibei: Goguang wenhua, 1988), 2:1992. 71. CBETA, T 721.17.365a15. Taixu has read qi (to raise) and shen (body) together as a verb-object pair, and gen (root) and chong (worms) as a noun-noun pair. The phrase should instead be read as a verb phrase modifying a noun, qi shen’gen chong, in other words, “the worms that make the bodily root stand up.” 72. Taixu, “Fofa yu kexue,” MFQ 157.15. 73. See Livia Kohn, “Taoist Insight Meditation: The Tang Practice of Neiguan,” in Taoist Meditation and Longevity Techniques, ed. Livia Kohn and Sakade Yoshinobu (Ann Arbor: Center for Chinese Studies, University of Michigan, 1989), 193–224; Neil Donner and Daniel B. Stevenson, The Great Calming and Contemplation: A Study and Annotated Translation of the First Chapter of Chih-i’s Mo-ho-chih-kuan (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1999). 74. This list can be found, for example, in Jietuodao lun 妋僓忻婾 [Vimokṣamārgaśāstra] by Upatiṣya, CBETA, T 1648.32.399–462; 425b18–426b16. Translated into Chinese in 515, this text is similar to Buddhaghosa’s Visuddhimagga, the most authoritative commentary in the Theravāda tradition. 75. The visualization of worms as an antidote to the ailments of greed and desire was not limited to imagining one’s own body or the body of a desired sexual object as filled with worms. Monks or nuns with an attachment to certain foodstuffs were instructed to visualize the items they were desirous of as infested with worms as well. 76. The Chinese text of this talk is given in Yinshun ⌘枮, Taixu dashi nianpu ⣒嘃 ⣏ⷓ⸜嬄 [The Annals of Great Master Taixu] (Taipei: Zhengwen, 2003), 261–263. For an English version, see T’ai-hsü (Taixu), Lectures in Buddhism (Paris: Les Amis de Bouddhisme, 1928), 43–50. 77. Tang, “Fofa yu kexue,” MFQ 203.15b–16a. 78. Kuairan ⟲䃞, “Kexue yu foxue” 䥹⬠冯ἃ⬠ [Science and Buddhism], Honghua yuekan ⻀⊾㚰↲ no. 89 (1948): MFQ 137.52. 79. Ibid.

4. The Nature of Mind 1. For more information on the renaissance of Consciousness-Only studies in the Republican period, see Chen Bing 昛ℝ and Deng Zimei 惏⫸伶, Ershi shiji Zhongguo fojiao Ḵ⋩ᶾ䲨ᷕ⚳ἃ㔁 [Twentieth-Century Chinese Buddhism] (Beijing: Minzu, 1999), chap. 6; John Makeham, ed., Transforming Consciousness: Yogācāra Thought in Modern China (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). 2. Sin-wai Chan, Buddhism in Late Ch’ing Political Thought (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1985), 7. 3. It is not known for certain, but the term xinli xue was likely a loanword from Japanese. In Japanese, it is first attested in writing in 1886 and appears in Chinese first

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in the writings of Liang Qichao ten years later. By itself, the word wuli as a translation for “physics” was coined in China in the 1634 translation of Qiqi tushuo ⣯☐⚾婒 (Illustrated Almanac of Wondrous Devices), after which the term was adopted in Japan. Wuli xue, with the characteristically Japanese addition of xue, was first used in Japan in 1889 and was adopted back into Chinese the following year. Federico Masini, The Formation of Modern Chinese Lexicon and Its Evolution Toward a National Language: The Period from 1840 to 1898, Journal of Chinese Linguistics Monograph Series 6 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 205, 209. 4. Wang Hui, “Discursive Community and the Genealogy of Scientific Categories,” in Everyday Modernity in China, ed. Madeleine Yue Dong and Joshua Goldstein (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 115. 5. Wendy Larson, From Ah Q to Lei Feng: Freud and Revolutionary Spirit in 20th Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 32. 6. Manzhi 㺧㘢, “Xinlixue zhi benneng yu weishizong zhongzi zhi guanxi” ⽫䎮⬠ ᷳ㛔傥冯ⓗ嬀⬿䧖⫸ᷳ斄Ὢ [The Relationship Between Instinct in Psychology and the Seeds in Consciousness-Only], HCY no. 5 (1925): MFQ 162.152–157; Taixu ⣒嘃, “Xingweixue yu xinlixue” 埴䁢⬠冯⽫䎮⬠ [Behaviorism and Psychology], HCY 8, no. 1 (1927): MFQ 167.39–49; Taixu ⣒嘃, “Zai lun xinlixue yu xingweixue” ℵ婾⽫䎮⬠冯埴䁢⬠ [Talking Again About Psychology and Behaviorism], HCY 1 (1928): MFQ 169.282–284; Honglin 㳒㜿, “Weishixue yu xinlixue zhi bijiao” ⓗ嬀⬠冯⽫䎮⬠ᷳ㭼庫 [A Comparison of Consciousness-Only and Psychology], Shanxi fojiao zazhi Ⱉ大ἃ㔁暄娴 1, no. 6 (1934): MFQ 75.312–326. 7. James’s argument that human minds are not simple machines is cited in Zhang Huasheng ⻝⊾倚, “Fojiao xinlixue yu xiyang xinlixue teyi zhi dian” ἃ㔁⽫䎮⬠冯大㲳⽫ 䎮⬠䈡䔘ᷳ溆 [Special Differences Between Buddhist Psychology and Western Psychology], HCY no. 3 (1925): MFQ 161.432. 8. Cheng weishi lun ㆸⓗ嬀婾 [Commentary on Attaining Consciousness-Only], CBETA, T 1585.31.1a–60a. There are differing accounts of the exact circumstances of the translation and/or composition of the Cheng weishi lun in China, as well as what lineage of Indian Consciousness-Only it represents. Dan Lusthaus, Buddhist Phenomenology: A Philosophical Investigation of Yogācāra Buddhism and the Ch’eng wei-shih lun (London: Curzon, 2000), 382–425. What can be said with certainty is that the Cheng weishi lun was basically composed by Xuanzang, who wove together several different commentaries (though probably fewer than the ten cited by the tradition) to produce a final product. He completed the work in 659 as part of his attempts to propagate what he considered to be a more “orthodox” Indian form of Consciousness-Only than was prevalent in China at the time. 9. Yu Lingbo Ḷⅴ㲊, Xiandai fojiao renwu cidian 䎦ẋἃ㔁Ṣ䈑录℠ [A Dictionary of Modern Buddhist Persons] (Taipei: Foguang, 2004), 1:966a. 10. Hammerstrom, “Yogācāra and Science in the 1920s.” 11. This talk was reprinted as “Fojiao xinlixue qiance” ἃ㔁⽫䎮⬠㶢㷔 [Brief Notes on Buddhist Psychology], HCY (11, no. 6 [1930]: MFQ 175.407–420), and as an appendix in the edited collection of Liang’s research on Buddhism, Foxue yanjiu shi ba pian ἃ⬠䞼 䨞⋩ℓ䭯 [Eighteen Chapters on Buddhist Research] (various eds.). 12. This line comes from the Heart Sūtra and is a statement of one of the fundamental philosophical positions of Mahāyāna Buddhism. The five skandha, or aggregates, are

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the five impermanent factors that combine to make people. Buddhists maintain that a person and all of his or her experiences are simply the result of the temporary composite of these five elements, and there is no inherently existing, unchanging self. The five aggregates are (1) form (Ch. se 刚; Skt. rūpa), (2) feelings of like and dislike (Ch. shou ⍿; Skt. vedanā), (3) perceptions (Ch. xiang ゛; Skt. saṁjñā), (4) impulses (Ch. xing 埴; Skt. saṃskāra), and (5) consciousness (Ch. shi 嬀; Skt. vijñāna). For a detailed explanation of these, see Lusthaus, Buddhist Phenomenology, 46–51. Liang’s decision to focus on this particular concept for his comparison of Buddhist and Western psychology makes some sense, as the second through fifth skandha are entirely mental. 13. Zhang Huasheng, “Fojiao xinlixue yu xiyang xinlixue teyi zhi dian,” MFQ 161.429. In this passage Zhang uses two similar terms: xinli (the principles of the mind) and xinli xue (the study of those principles). I have rendered both as “psychology” but have tried to make this distinction clear by referring to the former as “psychology” with a lowercase “p,” and the latter as “Psychology” with an uppercase “P.” 14. It should be noted that the types of psychology Zhang identified correspond to half of the major categories of psychology listed in Xinli, China’s first journal dedicated to psychology, which was discussed in chap. 1. Siegen Chou, “Trends in Chinese Psychological Interest Since 1922,” American Journal of Psychology 38, no. 3 (July 1927): 487–488. 15. Zhang, “Fojiao xinlixue yu xiyang xinlixue teyi zhi dian,” MFQ 161.429. 16. Taixu, “Xingweixue yu xinlixue,” MFQ 167.49. 17. Tang Dayuan Ⓒ⣏⚻, “Dongfang xinlixue chanzhen” 㜙㕡⽫䎮⬠斉䛇 [Explaining the Truth of Eastern Psychology], Dongfang wenhua 㜙㕡㔯⊾ no. 1 (1926): MFQ 20.286. 18. Taixu, “Xingweixue yu xinlixue,” MFQ 167.42. 19. Fafang 㱽凓, “Weishixue yu kexue: Pingpo Jin Han jun zhi [Foxue bashi zhi piping yu yanjiu]” ⓗ嬀⬠冯䥹⬠烉姽䟜拎㻊⏃ᷳ˰ἃ⬠ℓ嬀ᷳ㈡姽冯䞼䨞˱ [Consciousness-Only Studies and Science: Criticism of Mr. Jin Han’s Criticism and Research on the Eighth Consciousness in Buddhism], part 1, HCY 10, no. 3 (1929): MFQ 172.361. 20. Vera Schwarcz, The Chinese Enlightenment: Intellectuals and the Legacy of the May Fourth Movement (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 104. 21. Manzhi, “Xinlixue zhi benneng yu weishizong zhongzi zhi guanxi,” MFQ 162.152. 22. Manzhi was in the first class at the Wuchang Buddhist Seminary and graduated with them in 1924. After graduating he studied Consciousness-Only thought with Ouyang Jingwu in Nanjing. From 1926 to 1929 (there is some disagreement between Yu and Tuttle as to when he left), Manzhi taught at the Minnan Buddhist Seminary, which he also ran as headmaster for a short time. He then went to Shanghai to edit Haichao yin at Taixu’s request. From 1930 or 1932 to 1934, he worked establishing the Han-Zang Jiaoli Yuan 㻊啷 㔁䎮昊 (Sino-Tibetan Institute). His activities and whereabouts after 1934 are unknown. Yu Lingbo Ḷⅴ㲊, Zhongguo jindai fomen renwu zhi ᷕ⚳役ẋἃ攨Ṣ䈑⽿ [Biographical Almanac of Early Modern Chinese Buddhism] (Taipei: Huiju, 1999), 5: 244–248. For more on Manzhi’s association with the Sino-Tibetan Institute, see Gray Tuttle, Tibetan Buddhism and the Making of Modern China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 125–126, 177. 23. Raymond E. Fancher, Pioneers of Psychology, 3d ed. (New York: Norton, 1996), 96–97.

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24. Dayu ⣏ヂ, “Kexue de wuwo guan” 䥹⬠䘬䃉ㆹ奨 [Science’s View of No-Self ], HCY no. 11 (1924): MFQ 160.403. 25. Zhang, “Fojiao xinlixue yu xiyang xinlixue teyi zhi dian,” MFQ 161.433. 26. Shi Dongchu 慳㜙⇅, Zhongguo fojiao jindai shi ᷕ⚳ἃ㔁役ẋ⎚ [A Modern History of Chinese Buddhism] (Taipei: Dongchu, 1984), 2:899. 27. Honglin, “Weishixue yu xinlixue zhi bijiao,” MFQ 75.324b. This article was notably not published in HCY but in the Shanxi fojiao zazhi Ⱉ大ἃ㔁暄娴 (Shanxi Buddhist Magazine), which began (and may have ended) publication that year. This magazine, despite its distance from Nanjing and Wuchang, was heavily influenced by Taixu’s students and, in this case, his students’ students. MFQ 205.24. 28. Jin Han 拎㻊, Foxue bashi zhi piping yu yanjiu ἃ⬠ℓ嬀ᷳ㈡姽冯䞼䨞 [Criticism and Research on the Eight Consciousnesses in Buddhism] (n.p.: n.p., 1927), 20a. 29. Ibid., 19b. 30. Buddhism is often referred to as a vehicle, or even a jeweled vehicle; here Jin played on that association by referring to science as a vehicle like Buddhism. 31. Jin Han, Foxue bashi zhi piping yu yanjiu, 1b–2a. 32. Ibid., 10a–b. 33. Ibid., 12b–13a. 34. Ibid., 9a. 35. Ibid., 19a. 36. David Wright, Translating Science: The Transmission of Western Chemistry Into Late Imperial China, 1840–1900 (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 395; Benjamin A. Elman, On Their Own Terms: Science in China 1550–1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 401. 37. The concept of the ether originated in the 1850s and 1860s, and it became more important after James Clerk Maxwell’s Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism came out in 1873. In that book, Maxwell used the idea of the ether, a substance that acted according to the laws of mechanics, to unify the theories of electricity and magnetism that existed at the time. Iwan Rhys Morus, When Physics Became King (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2005), 56–57, 166–167. 38. Wright, Translating Science, 378. 39. As previously noted in chap. 2. 40. Tan, Renxue, 1: 302–303; T’an Ssu-t’ung, An Exposition of Benevolence: The Jenhsueh of T’an Ssu-t’ung, trans. Chan Sin-wai (Hong Kong: Chinese University of Hong Kong Press, 1984), 83–84. 41. Tan, Renxue, 1: 295; T’an, An Exposition of Benevolence, 69, 72. 42. Here one sees the influence of John Fryer, and also the possible influence of contemporary science fantasy. A decade after Tan’s death, several stories appeared in fiction journals that revolved around using electric devices to read and control thoughts. David Pollard, ed. Translation and Creation: Readings of Western Literature in Early Modern China, 1840–1918 (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1998), 195, 204–405. This link is obviously historically tenuous, but further historical research may yield other examples contemporaneous with Tan. 43. Tan, Renxue, 1:331, 364; T’an, An Exposition of Benevolence, 69, 135, 209. 44. Elman, On Their Own Terms, 293.

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45. Jin Han 拎㻊, “Bashi zhi piping yu yanjiu” ℓ嬀ᷳ㈡姽冯䞼䨞 [Criticism and Research on the Eight Consciousnesses], Shijie fojiao jushilin linkan ᶾ䓴ἃ㔁⯭⢓㜿㜿↲ 21 (1928): MFQB 10.134–142; Jin Han 拎㻊, “Foxue [bashi] zhi piping yu yanjiu” ἃ⬠ˬ ℓ嬀˭ᷳ㈡姽冯䞼䨞 [Criticism and Research on the Eight Consciousnesses Buddhism], Dayun ⣏暚 83 (1928): MFQB 18.437–458. 46. Luo Jihe 榙⬋␴, “Jin Han jun Foxue bashi zhi piping yu yanjiu fu ba” 拎㻊⏃ἃ ⬠ℓ嬀ᷳ㈡姽冯䞼䨞旬嵳 [Supplemental Preface to Mr. Jin Han’s Criticism and Research on the Eight Consciousnesses in Buddhism], Xizai zhuankan 〗䀥⮰↲ no. 5 (1928): MFQ 134.32–34; Tang Dayuan Ⓒ⣏⚻, “Ping Jin Han jun Foxue bashi zhi piping yu yanjiu” 姽拎㻊⏃ἃ⬠ℓ嬀ᷳ㈡姽冯䞼䨞 [Critique of Mr. Jin Han’s Criticism and Research on the Eight Consciousnesses in Buddhism], Shijie fojiao jushilin linkan ᶾ䓴ἃ㔁⯭⢓㜿㜿↲ no. 21 (1928): MFQB 10.134–135. 47. Wang Xiaoxu 䌳⮷⼸ [Buqing ᶵ庽, pseud.], “Du Jin Han jun Foxue bashi zhi piping yu yanjiu” 嬨拎㻊⏃ἃ⬠ℓ嬀ᷳ㈡姽冯䞼䨞 [Reading Mr. Jin Han’s Criticism and Research on the Eight Consciousnesses in Buddhism], Xizai zhuankan 〗䀥⮰↲ no. 5 (1928): MFQ 134.34–36; Wang Xiaoxu 䌳⮷⼸ [Buqing ᶵ庽, pseud.], “Du Jin Han jun Foxue bashi zhi piping yu yanjiu” 嬨拎㻊⏃ἃ⬠ℓ嬀ᷳ㈡姽冯䞼䨞 [Reading Mr. Jin Han’s Criticism and Research on the Eight Consciousnesses in Buddhism], Da yun ⣏暚 no. 83 (1928): MFQB 18.461–463. I cite here the version of the article that appeared in the 1932 Kaiming shudian edition of Fofa yu kexue zhi bijiao yanjiu ἃ㱽冯䥹⬠ᷳ㭼庫䞼䨞 [Comparative Study of the Buddha-dharma and Science] (hereafter CSBS). 48. Wang, CSBS, 38. 49. Ibid. 50. Shanyin ┬⚈, “Jin Han jun [Piping bashi] zhengwu” 拎㻊⏃ˬ㈡姽ℓ嬀˭㬋婌 [Correcting the Errors in Mr. Jin Han’s Criticism of the Eight Consciousnesses], HCY 9, no. 12 (1928): MFQ 171.448. 51. Here, Shanyin is simply following Jin, who referred to atoms as both atoms (yuanzi ⍇⫸) and “fiery atoms” (huo yuanzi 䀓⍇⫸). The term huo yuanzi is obscure, and I have not been able to determine what, if any, difference Jin was trying to indicate when he chose to use that term instead of the more common yuanzi. 52. Shanyin, “Jin Han jun [Piping bashi] zhengwu,” MFQ 171.449. 53. Jin’s original essay ran to roughly 2,500 characters, while Fafang’s reply was well over 11,000 characters long. 54. These two obstructions (Ch. er zhang Ḵ晄; Skt. āvaraṇa-dvaya) are (1) “obstructions of the defilements” (Ch. fannao zhang 䄑゙晄; Skt. kleśa-āvaraṇa), which refer to the obstructions to wisdom caused by greed, anger, ignorance, and other states of mental defilement; and (2) “cognitive obstructions” (Ch. suozhi zhang ㇨䞍晄; Skt. jñeyaāvaraṇa), which refer to the obstructions caused by knowing too much, a hindrance to the development of wisdom. Digital Dictionary of Buddhism, “Er zhang Ḵ晄” (Charles Muller; accessed July 7, 2014). 55. Fafang, “Weishixue yu kexue,” part 1, MFQ 172.357. 56. Ibid., 358. 57. Ibid., 361. 58. Ibid., 360.

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59. For example, a strongly anti-Tiantai bent is present in Hu Chaowu’s Science and Buddhism. This is discussed in greater detail in chap. 6. 60. Fafang, “Weishixue yu kexue,” part 1, MFQ 172.359. 61. Ibid., 361. 62. Fafang 㱽凓, “Weishixue yu kexue: Pingpo Jin Han jun zhi [Foxue bashi zhi piping yu yanjiu]” ⓗ嬀⬠冯䥹⬠烉姽䟜拎㻊⏃ᷳ˰ἃ⬠ℓ嬀ᷳ㈡姽冯䞼䨞˱ [Consciousness-Only Studies and Science: Criticism of Mr. Jin Han’s Criticism and Research on the Eighth Consciousness in Buddhism], part 2, HCY 10, annual issue (1929): MFQ 174.222. 63. This is a complex point, and the argument over whether this makes ConsciousnessOnly thought a kind of idealism still rages on. 64. For example, in Haichao yin in 1933, Yu Deyuan 嘆⽟⃫ (1909–1989) repeated the idea that psychology is the most important of the sciences. He also linked the mental states described in Western psychology with the dharmas listed in the Abhidharmakośabhāsya and the Yogācārabhūmi-śāstra, as well as in Consciousness-Only thought more generally. Yu Deyuan 嘆⽟⃫, “Fojia xinlixue qiance” ἃ⭞⽫䎮⬠㶢㷔 [Brief Notes on Buddhist Psychology], HCY 10 (1933): MFQ 185.175–180. Yu had been a student in the first class at the Wuchang Buddhist Seminary, and his writings on this matter can be seen as a continuation of work he started there nearly a decade prior. He studied in the Department of Psychology at Xiamen University from 1930 to 1934. During this period, he often attended lectures at the Minnan Buddhist Seminary, housed at the nearby Nan Putuo ⋿㘖旨 Temple, where Taixu was abbot. These lectures were given by teachers at the seminary as well as professors from the university. Yu later pursued a career in academia, teaching philosophy and Buddhist logic until his death. Yu Lingbo, Zhongguo jin xiandai fojiao renwu zhi, 638–642.

5. Ethics, Science, and Society 1. A few examples of this are Taixu ⣒嘃, “Fofa yu kexue” ἃ㱽冯䥹⬠ [The Buddhadharma and Science], HCY no. 8 (1923): MFQ 157.15; Manzhi 㺧㘢, “Jinhualun zai jindai de yingxiang ji qi jiuzheng zhi fangfa” 忚⊾婾⛐役ẋ䘬⼙枧⍲℞㓹㬋ᷳ㕡㱽 [Evolutionary Theory’s Effect on the Early Contemporary Period and Its Method for Seeking the Correct], HCY 1 (1925): MFQ 161.154; Liu Xianliang (1930): MFQ 29.203b–204a; Huazhong ⊾ᷕ, “Ping jinhualun zhi wuju” 姽忚⊾婾ᷳ䃉㒂 [Criticism of the Theory of Evolution’s Lack of Evidence], HCY 8 (1933): MFQ 184.403a–b. 2. Edward J. Larson, Summer for the Gods: The Scope’s Trial and America’s Continuing Debate Over Science and Religion (New York: Basic, 1997), 25. 3. Owen Flanagan, The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized (2011; repr., Boston: MIT Press, 2013), 74–80. The doctrine of karma, a sine qua non of Buddhism, is in most interpretations at odds with the purely naturalist causality generally assumed in science, though this is often ignored by those who would claim that Buddhism and science are inherently compatible. Frank Fair, “Buddhism, Christianity, and Modern Science: A Response to Masao Abe,” Buddhist Christian Studies 25 (2005): 67–74. 4. For example, William Jennings Bryan (1860–1925), the famous prosecutor in the Scopes Monkey Trial, opposed the teaching of Darwinian evolution for the same reasons

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he opposed militarism, unfettered capitalism, and eugenics. He saw in all of these an evil morality at work in which the strong are lauded for taking advantage of the weak. His semiliteralist reading of the Bible was only part of his objections at the trial. Larson, Summer for the Gods, 27–28. 5. Erik Hammerstrom, “Buddhists Discuss Science in Modern China, 1895–1949” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 2010), 239n428; Justin Ritzinger, “Dependent Co-evolution: Kropotkin’s Theory of Mutual Aid and Its Appropriation by Chinese Buddhists,” Chung-Hwa Buddhist Journal 26 (2013): 95. 6. Erik Hammerstrom, “Buddhism and the Modern Epistemic Space: Buddhist Intellectuals in the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates,” in Recovering Buddhist China in the Twentieth Century, ed. Jan Kiely and J. Brooks Jessup (New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming). 7. Charlotte Furth, “Intellectual Change: From the Reform Movement to the May Fourth Movement, 1895–1920,” in An Intellectual History of Modern China, ed. Merle Goldman and Leo Ou-fan Lee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 15–16. 8. Benjamin A. Elman, On Their Own Terms: Science in China 1550–1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 324. 9. Yan Fu’s translation of evolutionism and its uses in the modern discourses of China have been studied in detail in Benjamin Schwartz, In Search of Wealth and Power: Yen Fu and the West (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 1964), and in James Reeve Pusey, China and Charles Darwin (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983). 10. Elman, On Their Own Terms, 320. 11. Frank Dikötter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 100–101. 12. Part of the reason for the popularity of social evolutionism lay in its emphasis on the strength of groups, for which there was precedence in the classical tradition in the thought of Xunzi 勨⫸. Pusey, China and Charles Darwin, 111. 13. Pusey, China and Charles Darwin, 64–65. 14. During the late nineteenth century, traditional Chinese discourses of race were merged with those developing in the West, and Chinese thinkers increasingly saw the world as composed of distinct races. These were usually considered to be five in number: white, yellow, brown, red, and black. Under the influence of social evolutionism and traditional Chinese cultural chauvinism, many thinkers in the late Qing and Republican periods argued that the white and yellows races were now locked in a struggle for survival. See Dikötter, The Discourse of Race in Modern China. 15. Elman, On Their Own Terms, 331. 16. Furth, “Intellectual Change,” 31. 17. 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 46–47, 59–60. 18. Justin Ritzinger, “Dependent Co-evolution,” 101. 19. One interesting exception to this is the discussion of Buddhism that appears in Huxley’s original Evolution and Ethics, which, along with the choice Yan Fu made in not translating them, are certainly worthy of study. Huxley’s use of Buddhism has been studied in Vijitha Rajapakse, “Buddhism in Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics: A Note on a

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Victorian Evaluation and Its ‘Comparativist Dimension,’ ” Philosophy East and West 35, no. 3 (July 1985): 295–304. 20. See Gerard Clinton Godart, “Darwin in Japan: Evolutionary Theory and Japan’s Modernity” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2009), 140–165, 175–191. 21. Ibid., 195–196. 22. Pusey, China and Charles Darwin, 439. 23. Taixu ⣒嘃, “Yuanzi tan gui aihao heping de kexuejia baoguan” ⍇⫸⻰㬠ッ⤥ ␴⸛䘬䥹⬠⭞ᾅ䭉 [Returning the Atom Bomb to the Safekeeping of Pacifist Scientists], Juequn zhoubao 奢佌忙⟙ 1, no. 24 (1946): MFQ 101.374. 24. Not to be confused with a mid-nineteenth-century monk of the same name. I have been unable to locate any information about this writer, beyond the fact that he wrote a dozen articles in Haichao yin. 25. Miaokong ⥁䨢, “Fojiao daodezhuyi yu xin sichao jinhuazhuyi zhi bijiao” ἃ㔁忻 ⽟ᷣ佑冯㕘⿅㼖忚⊾ᷣ佑ᷳ㭼庫 [A Comparison of Buddhist Moralism and Contemporary Thought’s Evolutionism], HCY no. 9 (1925): MFQ 163.261–263. 26. Ibid., 163.262a. 27. “Transformation” also appears in the expression Fohua ἃ⊾, which refers to the propagation of Buddhism. Both the idea and the expression were popular in China in the 1920s and 1930s, as evidenced by the fact that there were several different periodicals with that phrase in their titles published in the cities of Hong Kong, Beijing, and Shanghai in those years. 28. Taixu, “Fofa yu kexue,” MFQ 157.14. 29. Ibid., 15. 30. Taixu ⣒嘃, “Shijian wanyou wei jinhua yiwei tuihua?” ᶾ攻叔㚱䁢忚⊾㈹䁢徨⊾ ? [Are All Worldly Things Evolving or Degenerating?], HCY no. 2 (1925): MFQ 161.262–267. 31. Ibid., 266. 32. Taixu ⣒嘃, “Dasheng jianjiao yu jinhualun” ⣏Ḁ㻠㔁冯忚⊾婾 [Mahāyāna Gradualism and Evolution], Fojiao pinglun ἃ㔁姽婾 1, no. 1 (1931): MFQ 46.138–142. 33. Zhifeng was one of Taixu’s main disciples until they had a falling out in 1932, when the latter disapproved of Zhifeng’s decision to publish a special issue of Haichao yin on esoteric Buddhism, which was dedicated to the writings of the controversial lay esoteric Buddhist master Wang Hongyuan 䌳⻀栀 (1876–1937). The rift between them lasted until 1945, the year before Taixu passed away. Yu Lingbo Ḷⅴ㲊, Zhongguo jin xiandai fojiao renwu zhi ᷕ⚳役䎦ẋἃ㔁Ṣ䈑⽿ [Biographical Almanac of Early Contemporary and Modern Chinese Buddhism], Beijing: Zongjiao wenhua, 1995), 249–255. 34. Zhifeng 剅Ⲙ, “Jinhua de rensheng” 忚⊾䘬Ṣ䓇 [Evolving Humanity], HCY no. 1 (1936): MFQ 192.275b. 35. Ibid., 277b. 36. I believe that what the author meant here is that evolution in general, but more specifically the struggle for survival, is not something that occurs naturally but is something that people plan and carry out. In other words, they plan for their own success and struggle with others, and then when change comes they call it evolution. 37. Miaokong, “Fojiao daodezhuyi yu xin sichao jinhuazhuyi zhi bijiao,” MFQ 163.263a–b.

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38. Justin Ritzinger, “The Awakening of Faith in Anarchism: A Forgotten Chapter in the Chinese Buddhist Encounter with Modernity,” Politics, Religion & Ideology 15, no. 2 (2014): 228. 39. Digital Dictionary of Buddhism, “Pingdeng ⸛䫱” (Charles Muller; accessed June 25, 2014). 40. The Buddhist notion of equality was a key component of the thinking of the prominent Korean Buddhist reformer Han Yong’un 杻漵暚 (1879–1944). It is emphasized in his 1910 work Ch’osǒn Pulgyo Yushinnon 㛅歖ἃ㔁䵕㕘婾 (On the Reformation of Korean Buddhism), in which he argued that Buddhist equality was the very wellspring of modern liberalism and cosmopolitanism. Vladimir Tikhonov and Owen Miller, trans., Selected Writings of Han Yongun: From Social Darwinism to “Socialism with a Buddhist Face” (Kent: Global Oriental, 2008), 7–8, 52–55. In Japan, the priest Mibu Shōjun ⢔䓇䄏 枮 (1908–1987) was arrested and excommunicated from the Tendai order after his radical group, the Shinkō Bukkyō Seinen Dōmei 㕘冰ἃ㔁曺⸜⎴䚇 (Youth Alliance for New Buddhism) was disbanded by the government in 1937 for calling for the use of Buddhist equality to reform capitalist society. Stephen Covell, Japanese Temple Buddhism: Worldliness in a Religion of World Renunciation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2005), 72. 41. Tuochen 僓⠝, “Shijie renlei yushang pingdeng ziyou fei caiyong fojiao buzu yizi jinhualun” ᶾ䓴Ṣ栆㫚⯂⸛䫱冒䓙朆㍉䓐ἃ㔁ᶵ嵛ẍ屯忚⊾婾 [The People of the World Desire More Equality and Freedom, but If They Do Not Use Buddhism, the Doctrine of the Evolution of Capital Is Insufficient], Hongfashe kan ⻀㱽䣦↲ġ17 (1930): MFQ 144.285. 42. Ritzinger, “Anarchy in the Pure Land,” 46–47. 43. Liu Linghua ∱曰剙, “Yong kexue fangfa daxing fohua shixian letu” 䓐䥹⬠㕡㱽 ⣏冰ἃ⊾⮎䎦㦪⛇ [Using the Method of Science to Develop Buddhist Realization of the Land of Bliss], HCY 12, no. 2 (1931): MFQ 177.192–198. 44. Ibid., 193, 194. 45. Ibid., 195. 46. Tang Dayuan Ⓒ⣏⚻, “Weishi de kexue fangfa,” ⓗ嬀䘬䥹⬠㕡㱽 [The Scientific Method of Consciousness-Only], part 1, HCY 10, no. 5 (1929): MFQ 172.502. 47. Fayuan 㱽䶋, “Foxuede jiazhi” ἃ⬠䘬₡ῤ [The Value of Buddhist Studies], Ren haideng Ṣ㴟䅰 3, no. 6 (June 1936): MFQB 50.67. 48. Ding San ᶩᶱ, “Zhengxin yu mixin” 㬋ᾉ冯徟ᾉ [True Faith and Superstition], Ren haideng Ṣ㴟䅰 3, no. 6 (June 1936): MFQB 50.74. 49. The argument that Buddhism was not science, superstition, or religion was not uncommon in the 1920s. Hammerstrom, “Buddhism and the Modern Epistemic Space.” 50. Wang Xiaoxu, “Fofa shengyao,” 122. 51. You Zhibiao ⯌㘢堐, Fojiao kexue guan ἃ㔁䥹⬠奨 [The Scientific Outlook of Buddhism], (1948 [1949?]; repr., Taibei: Huayanlian she, 1998), 22. 52. The Chinese term boai was indeed originally derived from Christian discourse, but it was also used to translate the concept of “fraternal love” (discussed previously in this chapter) that was so important to radical ideologies that promoted equality and freedom in China during the early decades of the twentieth century. Ritzinger, “Anarchy in the Pure Land,” 84, 119. 53. You Zhibiao, Fojiao kexue guan, 27–29.

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54. See, e.g., Upasaka Wu Shu, “Atom and Anattā,” in Buddhism & Science, ed. Buddhadasa P. Kirthisinghe (1984; repr., Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1999), 49–54. These works have been widely cited by Anglophone Buddhists, particularly those from South and Southeast Asia, as authoritative regarding the issue of Buddhism and science. 55. Luo Wuxu 伭䃉嘃, Fofa zai yuanzi shidai ἃ㱽⛐⍇⫸㗪ẋ [The Buddha-dharma in the Atomic Age] (Hong Kong: Xianggang fojing liutong chu, 1966). (Also available at http://www.bfnn.org/bookgb/books/0708.htm, accessed June 25, 2014.) This work is composed primarily of lectures he delivered in Hong Kong in 1964 and 1965. 56. Luo Wuxu 伭䃉嘃, “Cong heping shuodao kexue yu fofa” ⽆␴⸛婒⇘䥹⬠冯ἃ㱽 [Speaking of Science and the Buddha-dharma from the Standpoint of Peace], Jue youqing 奢㚱ね 7, nos. 5–6 (1945): MFQB 62.435. 57. Ibid., 435. 58. Ibid., 436. 59. Shitan ⷓΆ, “Zongjiao yu kexue yao bingzhong” ⬿㔁冯䥹⬠天᷎慵 [Religion and Science Must Be Equally Emphasized], Juequn zhoubao 奢佌忙⟙ 1, no. 6 (1946): MFQ 101.129–130. Shitan wrote this article on July 9, 1946, in response to an article written by Yu Ying 恩⼙ titled (after the three-stage model of human development promoted by Comte) “Shenxue, xuanxue, kexue” 䤆⬠炻䌬⬠炻䥹⬠ (Theology, Metaphysics, and Science), which had been published in Zhongyang ribao ᷕ⣖㖍⟙ (Central News) on July 8 of that year. 60. MFQ 204.44–45. 61. Taixu, “Yuanzi tan gui aihao heping de kexuejia baoguan,” MFQ 101.374. 62. Yu Lingbo, Zhongguo jin xiandai fojiao renwu zhi, 222–229. 63. Daxing ⣏愺, “Kexue huimie renlei de weiji” 䥹⬠㭨㹭Ṣ栆䘬⌙㨇 [The Crisis of Science Destroying Humanity], Juequn zhoubao 奢佌忙⟙ 1, no. 14 (1946): MFQ 101.223–224. Here we see a Buddhist calling for the expansion of science, particularly those sciences related to things like human behaviors, a “fuzzier” area than the physical sciences. In more common Buddhist articulations of what science is, and what they were willing to admit that it could be good for, Buddhists generally claimed for Buddhism the power to positively mold and shape minds and societies, leaving to science the power to mold and shape matter. Here, Daxing thought that social science needed to advance so that science could improve people themselves, not merely their material living conditions. 64. This bilingual English-Chinese periodical ran from 1947 to 1950 and was an organ of the Singapore Buddhist Institute (Fojiao renjian she ἃ㔁Ṣ攻䣦) founded by Fafang and Cihang ヰ凒 (1895–1954) in 1947. MFQ 204.49. 65. Mao Banghan 㮃恎㻊, “Kexue jiuguo yu daode jiuguo shuping” 䥹⬠㓹⚳冯忻⽟ 㓹⚳徘姽 [Commentary on the Issue of Science Saving the Nation and Ethics Saving the Nation], Fojiao renjian ἃ㔁Ṣ攻 2, no. 5 (1949): MFQ 106.298–299. 66. Charles Lindbergh, “Renlei ying yi daode kefu kexue” Ṣ栆ㅱẍ忻⽟⃳㚵䥹⬠ [Humanity Ought to Use Ethics to Subdue Science], Jue youqing 奢㚱ね 9, no. 9 (1948): MFQ 90.27; Charles Lindbergh, “Renlei ying yi daode kefu kexue” Ṣ栆ㅱẍ忻⽟⃳㚵䥹⬠ [Humanity Ought to Use Ethics to Subdue Science], Honghua yuekan ⻀⊾㚰↲ 89 (1948): MFQ 137.58.

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6. Science and Self-Cultivation 1. The six perfections are (1) charity (Ch. bushi ⶫ㕥; Skt. dāna), (2) morality (Ch. chijie ㊩ㆺ; Skt. śīla), (3) forbearance (Ch. renru ⽵彙; Skt. kṣānti), (4) effort (Ch. jing jin 䱦 忚; Skt. vīrya), (5) meditation (Ch. chanding 䥒⭂; Skt. dhyāna), and (6) wisdom (Ch. zhihui 㘢ㄏ; Skt. prajñā). Digital Dictionary of Buddhism, “Liu poluomi” ℕ㲊伭囄” (Charles Muller; accessed July 9, 2014). 2. For example, Sharon Begley, “Scans of Monks’ Brains Show Meditation Alters Structure, Functioning,” Wall Street Journal, November 5, 2004, B1. Most of the recent studies of this nature are summarized in Owen Flanagan, The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Buddhism Naturalized (2011; Reprint, Boston: MIT Press, 2013), chap. 1. 3. Taixu, “Fofa yu kexue” ἃ㱽冯䥹⬠ [The Buddha-dharma and Science], HCY no. 8 (1923): MFQ 157.17. 4. Taixu, “Dasheng jianjiao yu jinhualun” ⣏Ḁ㻠㔁冯忚⊾婾 [Mahāyāna Gradualism and Evolution], Fojiao pinglun ἃ㔁姽婾 1, no. 1 (1931): MFQ 46.142. 5. Eyal Aviv, “Differentiating the Pearl from the Fish Eye: Ouyang Jingwu (1871– 1943) and the Revival of Scholastic Buddhism” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2008); Lin Chen-kuo, “Metaphysics, Suffering, and Liberation: The Debate Between Two Buddhisms,” in Pruning the Bodhi Tree: The Storm Over Critical Buddhism, ed. Jamie Hubbard and Paul Swanson (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997), 298–313. 6. Jing Changji 㘗㖴㤝, “Yin yu guo: Shenxue xuanxue kexue zhi yiqu” ⚈冯㝄[䤆⬠ 䌬⬠䥹⬠ᷳ䔘嵋] [Cause and Effect: The Differing Tendencies of Theology, Metaphysics, and Science], HCY 9, no. 8 (1928): MFQ 171.24, 26. 7. Digital Dictionary of Buddhism, “Wu ming Ḽ㖶” (Charles Muller; accessed July 3, 2014). 8. Taixu, “Fofa yu kexue,” 16. 9. Ibid., 14. 10. Taixu, “Fofa yu kexue,” 17. A digital search of the Chinese Buddhist canon failed to find the passage of the Lotus Sūtra to which Taixu was referring, though it does appear in a number of other, unrelated texts. 11. Liu Xianliang ∱栗Ṗ, “Fohua yu kexue zhi guanxi” ἃ⊾冯䥹⬠ᷳ斄Ὢ [The Relationship Between Buddhist Propagation and Science], Fohua xin qingnian ἃ⊾㕘曺⸜ 1, no. 6 (1923): MFQ 14.65–68. 12. Liu Xianliang, “Fohua yu kexue zhi guanxi,” 14.65b. Here Liu actually cited not the Avataṃsaka-sūtra but an illustrated version of this tale found in Foguo chanshi wenshu zhinan tuzan ἃ⚳䥒ⷓ㔯㬲㊯⋿⚾孂 [Chan Master Foguo’s Illustrated Verses of Praise on the Teaching of Mañjuśrī], by one Zhang Shangying ⻝⓮劙. CBETA, T 1891.45.796a3–806b13; 804a1–4 (picture on lines 10–20). 13. Liu, “Fohua yu kexue zhi guanxi,” MFQ 14.65b. 14. Liu Linghua ∱曰剙, “Yong kexue fangfa daxing fohua shixian letu” 䓐䥹⬠㕡㱽 ⣏冰ἃ⊾⮎䎦㦪⛇ [Using the Method of Science to Develop Buddhist Realization of the Land of Bliss], HCY 12, no. 2 (1931): MFQ 177.195. 15. Ibid., 177.193–194. 16. It is likely that Liu copied this citation from someone else, as the exact wording he used does not appear in Bodhisattva-bhūmi or in Yogācāra-bhūmi, of which it later

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became a part. The citation Liu provided does appear in several texts, including Kuiji’s commentary on the Nyāyapraveśa, a manual of Buddhist logic popular with some Buddhists who wrote on science, such as Wang Xiaoxu. See Yinming ru zhengli lun shu ⚈㖶ℍ 㬋䎮婾䔷, CBETA, T 1840.44.91c7–8. 17. Liu Tianxing ∱⣑埴, “Fofa yu kexue zhi zheng” ἃ㱽冯䥹⬠ᷳ䇕 [The Struggle Between the Buddha-dharma and Science], HCY 10 (1933): MFQ 185.167a. 18. Huazhuang ⊾匲, “Kexue yu foxue” 䥹⬠冯ἃ⬠ [Science and Buddhism], part 1, Fo haideng ἃ㴟䅰 1, no. 12 (1936): MFQB 51.358–361; part 2, Fo haideng 2, no. 1 (1936): MFQB 51.380–386. 19. The original passage from the Yogācārabhūmi can be found at CBETA, T 1579.30.500c14–16. 20. Huazhuang, “Kexue yu foxue,” part 2, MFQB 51.384b. 21. Taixu, “Foxue yu zongjiao zhexue ji kexue zhexue” ἃ⬠冯⬿㔁⒚⬠⍲䥹⬠⒚⬠ [Buddhism, Religious Philosophy, and Scientific Philosophy], HCY 13, no. 11 (1932): MFQ 182.167a. There is a possibility that Taixu’s comments here were influenced by Jin Han’s controversial 1927 essay, wherein Jin argued for basically the inverse of the causal chain laid out by Taixu. Recall that Jin, a committed materialist, had written that atoms give rise to physiological structures and that consciousness arises as a result of the physical structures of the body, especially the brain and nervous system. 22. Liu Xun, Daoist Modern: Innovation, Lay Practice, and the Community of Inner Alchemy in Republican Shanghai (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009), 22–25. 23. Hwang Jinlin, “Authority Over the Body and the Modern Formation of the Body,” in Creating Chinese Modernity: Knowledge and Everyday Life, 1900–1940, ed. Peter Zarrow (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 183–212. 24. Ruth Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 43. 25. Liu, Daoist Modern, 25–26. 26. Ibid., 161–163. 27. On this work, see Utiraruto Otehode, “The Creation and Reemergence of Qigong in China,” in Making Religion, Making the State: The Politics of Religion in Modern China, ed. Yoshiko Ashiwa and David L. Wank (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 241–265; Livia Kohn, “Quiet Sitting with Master Yinshi: Religion and Medicine in China Today,” Zen Buddhism Today 10 (1993): 79–95. 28. David Palmer, Qigong Fever: Body, Science, and Utopia in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 29. Kohn, “Quiet Sitting with Master Yinshi,” 87. 30. Liu, Daoist Modern, chap. 3. 31. Ibid., 250–252. 32. Ibid., 80. 33. Ibid., 49–55. 34. Hu Chaowu 傉崭ẵ, Kexue yu foxue 䥹⬠冯ἃ⬠ [Science and Buddhism] (Shanghai: Xinsheng shuju, 1932). 35. Yu Lingbo, Xiandai fojiao renwu cidian 䎦ẋἃ㔁Ṣ䈑录℠ [A Dictionary of Modern Buddhist Persons] (Taipei: Foguang, 2004), 1:52b–c; Wang Xiangliu 䌳樌映, Wang

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Xiangliu jushi quanji 䌳樌映⯭⢓ℐ普 [Complete Works of Wang Xiangliu] (Taipei: Dasheng jingshe, 2005), 11. 36. See Geoffrey Goble, “Chinese Esoteric Buddhism: Amoghavajra and the Ruling Elite,” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 2012); Richard McBride, “Is There Really ‘Esoteric’ Buddhism?,” Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 27, no. 2 (2004): 329–356; Robert Sharf, Coming to Terms with Chinese Buddhism (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000), 263–278. 37. Ester Bianchi, “The Tantric Rebirth Movement in Modern China: Esoteric Buddhism Re-vivified by Japanese and Tibetan Traditions,” Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 57, no. 1 (2004): 31–54. There are several factors that led to the increasing popularity of esoteric Buddhism during the Republican period. The presence of Japanese missionaries, who represented both ancient esoteric traditions and the powerful and modern state of Japan, was one factor. Erik Schicketanz, “Kindai Chūgoku bukkyō no rekishi ninshiki keisei to Nitchū bukkyō kōryū” [Sino-Japanese Buddhist Exchange and the Formation of Historical Consciousness in Modern Chinese Buddhism] (PhD diss., University of Tokyo, 2012), chap. 4. Another factor was the presence of Tibetan masters in Chinese cities. Holmes Welch, The Buddhist Revival in China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), 173–179, 196–199. Finally, esoteric Buddhism, which contained practices shared by many East Asian countries, may have served as an alternate modernity to that offered by the West. Francesca Tarocco, The Cultural Practices of Modern Chinese Buddhism: Attuning the Dharma (New York: Routledge, 2007), 39–41. 38. Wang’s courtesy name (zi), which was 樌映, would normally be pronounced Xianglu, rather than Xiangliu, but the biography in his Complete Works provides the rhyming gloss xiangliu 䚠ℕ, indicating the latter is more likely the correct pronunciation. Wang Xiangliu, Wang Xiangliu jushi quanji, 9. 39. Erik Hammerstrom, “The Heart-of-Mind Method: Legitimating a New Buddhist Movement in 1930s China,” Nova Religio 17, no. 2 (November 2013): 5–23. 40. James R. Lewis, Legitimating New Religions (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 14. 41. These categories were used by other Buddhists as well, but there seems to have been no set interpretation for what they meant. For example, the Wuchang monk Manzhi (writing under the name Yupu) argued for the need to use “applied science” as a means to organize the unwieldy mass of Buddhist scriptures. “Applied science” was thus somehow connected to the practice of rigorous historiography. Shi Yupu 慳做㘖 [Manzhi 㺧㘢, pseud.], “Ying yong kexue zhi fangfa yi zhengli foxue shuo” ㅱ䓐䥹⬠ᷳ㕡㱽㔜䎮 ἃ⬠婒 [We Ought to Use the Methods of Science to Arrange Buddhist Theories], HCY 10 (1925): MFQ 163.295–298. Wang Xiaoxu invoked the categories of “applied science” and “practical science” in his Fofa shengyao, but he argued, pace Hu, that all of the Buddha-dharma was a “practical science” because it provided a method for the cultivation of wisdom. He stated that “the Buddha-dharma is a religion, it is something that is absolutely not disconnected from human’s lives. Moreover, it is especially effective in cultivating rationality, which makes it a practical science.” Wang Xiaoxu, “Fofa shengyao,” 98. 42. Hu Chaowu, Kexue yu foxue, 14. Here he used zhenyan 䛇妨, another term for esoteric Buddhism. This is a generally accepted term for esoteric Buddhism in China, and

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I do not believe he was specifically referring to the Japanese Shingon school, the name of which is written with the same Chinese characters. 43. Ibid., 67–69. 44. Ibid., 71–76. 45. Chinese: zhi li xiang cui 岒≃䚠㍐. Hu likely drew this term from the preface to Yan Fu’s Tianyan lun, which is the text that introduced this term into China. There, Yan uses the term to render Herbert Spencer’s idea that force and matter, though different constituent elements of reality, cannot exist without the influence of the other. It is unclear what Hu meant by using this term here, as this idea is not relevant to his previous comment. 46. “Repairing the brain” (bunao 墄儎) is a psycho-physical Chinese mediation practice associated most strongly with the Daoists. It involves the retention of semen, which is circulated up the spine during meditation in order to replenish and tone the brain. This practice is first discussed in the Yellow Court Classic (Huangting jing 湫⹕䴻), dating from the Han Dynasty (206 B.C.E.–220 C.E.). Isabelle Robinet, Taoist Meditation: The Mao-Shan Tradition of Great Purity, trans. Julian Pas and Norman Giradot (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 89. 47. CBETA, T 1484.24.1003c23. 48. This is most likely a reference to the text Jin’gangding yuqie zhong fa a’nouduoluo sanmiaosanputi xin lun 慹∃枪䐄ụᷕ䘤旧俐⣂伭ᶱ啸ᶱ厑㍸⽫婾 [Discourse on Giving Rise to Bodhicitta in the Vajraśekhara Yoga], which contains this expression. CBETA, T 1665.32.573c12. This text is popular in Japanese esoteric Buddhism and has been the subject of numerous commentaries. 49. Hu, Kexue yu foxue, 77–78. 50. Ibid., 44–45. 51. Ibid., 39. 52. Ibid., 55. 53. Ibid., 9. 54. Ibid., 57. 55. Ibid., 2. 56. Yu, Xiandai fojiao renwu cidian, 1.755–756. 57. Hu, Kexue yu foxue, x. 58. I would like to thank Joy Brennan, then a doctoral student at the University of Chicago, for assisting me in examining their copy of this text for my research. 59. Fan Gunong 劫⎌彚, “Guanyu kexue yu foxue yi shu zhi wenda” 斄㕤䥹⬠冯ἃ⬠ ᶨ㚠ᷳ⓷䫼 [Questions and Answers About the Book Science and Buddhist Studies], Shijie fojiao jushilin linkan ᶾ䓴ἃ㔁⯭⢓㜿㜿↲ 35 (1933): MFQ 143.448–451; Fan Gunong 劫⎌ 彚, “Guanyu kexue yu foxue yi shu zhi wenda” 斄㕤䥹⬠冯ἃ⬠ᶨ㚠ᷳ⓷䫼 [Questions and Answers About the Book Science and Buddhist Studies], part 1, Foxue banyuekan ἃ ⬠⋲㚰↲ no. 44 (1933): MFQ 47.510–512; part 2, Foxue banyuekan no. 46 (1933): MFQ 48.13–15. 60. Yu Lingbo, Zhongguo jin xiandai fojiao renwu zhi ᷕ⚳役䎦ẋἃ㔁Ṣ䈑⽿ [Biographical Almanac of Early Contemporary and Modern Chinese Buddhism], Beijing: Zongjiao wenhua, 1995), 491–499. 61. Welch, The Buddhist Revival in China, 199–200.

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62. Fan, “Guanyu kexue yu foxue yi shu zhi wenda,” MFQ 143.448a–b. 63. Ibid., 449b. 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid., 449b–450a.

Epilogue 1. On the life and work of B. Alan Wallace and his role in teaching about Tibetan Buddhism in the West, see Amos Yong, “Tibetan Buddhism Going Global? A Case Study of a Contemporary Buddhist Encounter with Science,” Journal of Global Buddhism 9 (2008): 1–26. 2. B. Alan Wallace, Contemplative Science: Where Buddhism and Neuroscience Converge (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). 3. Ibid., 24. 4. Ibid., 38. 5. Ibid., 63. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., 14–18. 8. Ibid., 56. 9. Ibid., 2. 10. Ibid., 10.

210

GL OS SARY

Bao’en lun ⟙】婾 Baoguo ⟙⚳ benneng 㛔傥 benxing 㛔㗇 biliang 㭼慷 bo 以 boai ⌂ッ bonreki 㡝㙮 bowu ⌂䈑 Bowu zhi ⌂䈑⽿ bunao 墄儎 bu pingdeng yinlun ᶵ⸛䫱⚈婾 Buqing ᶵ庽 bushi ⶫ㕥 Cai Yuanpei 哉⃫➡ (1868–1940) chanding 䥒⭂ changye ⟜慶 Chen Duxiu 昛䌐䥨 (1879–1942) Cheng weishi lun ㆸⓗ嬀婾 Cheng Zhaian 䦳⬭⬱ Chen Hushi 昛㷾⢓ Chen Yingning 昛㪣⮏ (1880–1969) chijie ㊩ㆺ Chisong ㊩㜦 (1894–1972) chong 嘓/垚

chuncui foxue 䲼䱡ἃ⬠ cibei ヰず Cihang ヰ凒 (1895–1954) da’nao ⣏儎 Datong ⣏⎴ Datong shu ⣏⎴㚠 Daxing ⣏愺 (1899–1952) Dayong ⣏≯ (1893–1929) Dayu ⣏ヂ Dayun ⣏暚 De xiansheng ⽟⃰䓇 ding ⭂ dingminglun ⭂␥婾 Ding San ᶩᶱ Dixian 媎改 (1858–1932) Dongfang wenhua 㜙㕡㔯⊾ Dongfang zazhi 㜙㕡暄娴 dongli shi ≽≃嬀 Dong Xi wenhua ji qi zhexue 㜙大㔯⊾⍲℞⒚⬠ Duhuan ⹎⮘ er zhang Ḵ晄 Fafang 㱽凓 (1904–1951) Fan Gunong 劫⎌彚 (1881–1951) Fang Rong ㇧圵

211

GLOSSARY

fannao zhang 䄑゙晄 fayan 㱽䛤 Fayuan 㱽䶋 Fofa feizongjiao feizhexue ἃ㱽朆⬿㔁朆 ⒚⬠ Fofa shengyao ἃ㱽䚩天 Fofa yu kexue zhi bijiao yanjiu ἃ㱽冯䥹⬠ ᷳ㭼庫䞼䨞 Fo guan yi bo shui, ba wan si qian chong ἃ奨ᶨ以㯜, ℓ叔⚃⋫垚 Fohua ἃ⊾ Fohua yu kexue zhi guanxi ἃ⊾冯䥹⬠ᷳ 斄Ὢ Fohua xin qingnian ἃ⊾㕘曺⸜ Fojiao chuxue keben ἃ㔁⇅⬠婚㛔 Fojiao kexueguan ἃ㔁䥹⬠奨 Fojiao renjian ἃ㔁Ṣ攻 Fojiao renjian she ἃ㔁Ṣ攻䣦 Fojiao xinlixue qiance ἃ㔁⽫䎮⬠㶢㷔 Foxue banyuekan ἃ⬠⋲㚰↲ Foxue bashi zhi piping yu yanjiu ἃ⬠ℓ嬀 ᷳ㈡姽冯䞼䨞 Foxue yu kexue ἃ⬠冯䥹⬠ Foxue yu kexue zhi yitong ἃ⬠冯䥹⬠ᷳ 䔘⎴ Foxue yaosu ἃ⬠天䳈 foyan ἃ䛤 Fumon Enstū 㘖攨⚻忂 (1755–1834) ganqing lizhihua デね䎮㘢⊾ gezhi 㟤农 Gezhi guwei 㟤农⎌⽖ Gezhi jinghua lu 㟤农䱦厗抬 gu 㓭 guan 奨 guanding 㿴枪 Guangwen ⺋㔯 guangxue ⃱⬠ guan shen ru chong ju 奨幓⤪垚倂 Guanzong 奨⬿ Guocui ⚳䱡 Guojia ziyuan weiyuanhui ⚳⭞屯㸸ġ ⥼⒉㚫 Haichao yin 㴟㼖枛 Hanhan ⭺㵝

212

Hanlin yuan 侘㜿昊 Han Yong’un 杻漵暚 (1879–1944) Han-Zang Jiaoli Yuan 㻊啷㔁䎮昊 hao 嘇 Honghua yuekan ⻀⊾㚰↲ Honglin 㳒㜿 Hongzan ⻀岲 (1611–1685) hua ⊾ Huainanzi 㶖⋿⫸ Huang Ziqiang 湫冒⻟ Huayan ru fajie pin 厗♜ℍ㱽䓴⑩ Huazhong ⊾ᷕ Huazhuang ⊾匲 Hu Chaowu 傉崭ẵ hui ㄏ huiyan ㄏ䛤 huo ju 㳣⎍ huo yuanzi 䀓⍇⫸ Hu Shih 傉怑 (1891–1962) Inoue Enryō ḽᶲ⚻Ḯ (1858–1919) Jiangnan 㰇⋿ Jiangnan jiqi zhizao zongju 㰇⋿㨇☐墥 忈䷥⯨ Jiang Weiqiao 哋䵕╔ (1873–1958) Jian Mulu 䯉ヽ䚏 jiaohua zhongsheng 㔁⊾䛦䓇 jie (ethics) ㆺ jie (verse) ῰ Jietuodao lun 妋僓忻婾 jijielun 㨇㡘婾 jin 忚 jin’gang ci 慹∃兵 Jing Changji 㘗㖴㤝 (1903–1982) jing jin 䱦忚 jinshi 忚⢓ jingshen 䱦䤆 jingzuo 朄⛸ Jin Han 拎㻊 jinhua 忚⊾ jinhuazhuyi 忚⊾ᷣ佑 jinshi 忚⢓ jiujing 䨞䪇 Juequn zhoubao 奢佌忙⟙ Jue youqing 奢㚱ね Jun shuo 却婒

GLOSSARY

Kangxi ⹟䅁 Kang Youwei ⹟㚱䁢 (1858–1927) kexue 䥹⬠ kexue de 䥹⬠䘬 kexue de shangxue 䥹⬠䘬⓮⬠ kexuehua 䥹⬠⊾ Kexue yu foxue 䥹⬠冯ἃ⬠ kexue yu renshengguan 䥹⬠冯Ṣ䓇奨 Kimura Taiken 㛐㛹㲘岊 (1881–1930) Kuairan ⟲䃞 li ≃ (force/energy) li 䎮 (principle) liang 慷 Liang Qichao 㠩⓻崭 (1873–1929) Liang Shuming 㠩㻙㹇 (1893–1988) Lihong 㙮⻀ Li Longbiao 㛶漵㧁 lingxing 曰⿏ Lin Zaiping 㜿⭘⸛ (1879–1960) Liu Linghua ∱曰剙 Liu Tianxing ∱⣑埴 Liu Xianjiao ∱栗㔁 Liu Xianliang ∱栗Ṗ lizhi 䎮㘢 lizhi de jingshen xinyang 䎮㘢䘬䱦䤆ᾉẘ loujin tong 㺷䚉忂 Lü Bicheng ⏪䡏❶ (1883–1943) lun 廒 Luo Jihe 榙⬋␴ luoji 怷廗 Luo Wuxu 伭䃉嘃 (1913–2001) Manzhi 㺧㘢 Mao Banghan 㮃恎㻊 Meian 㗏䚎 Mengshan shishi yi 呁Ⱉ㕥梇₨ miaochan xingxue ⺇䓊冰⬠ Miaokong ⥁䨢 Mibu Shōjun ⢔䓇䄏枮 (1908–1987) mijiao ⭮㔁 ming 㖶 (light, clarity) ming ⎵ (name) Minnan Foxue Yuan 救⋿ἃ⬠昊 miqing 徟ね mixin 徟ᾉ Mizong Yaoyi ⭮⬿天佑

Mozi ⡐⫸ muxing 㛐㗇 Nanjō Bunyū ⋿㜉㔯晬 (1849–1927) neidan ℏᷡ neng 傥 Okada Torajirō ⱉ䓘嗶Ḵ恶 (1872–1920) Ouyang Jingwu 㫸春䪇䃉 panjiao ⇌㔁 pingdeng ⸛䫱 Pini riyong lu 㭿⯤㖍䓐抬 piyu liang 嬔╣慷 Pumen pin 㘖攨⑩ puti 厑㍸ qigong 㯋≇ qiming ┇㖶 Qingyi bao 㶭嬘⟙ Qiqi tushuo ⣯☐⚾婒 qi shen’gen chong 崟幓㟡垚 Qi shijian ☐ᶾ攻 qiu 䎫 qun 佌 ren ṩ Ren haideng Ṣ㴟䅰 renru ⽵彙 rensheng Ṣ䓇 renshengguan Ṣ䓇奨 Renxue ṩ⬠ rouyan 倱䛤 Rushu zhenlun ₺埻䛇婾 saduo 啑➝ Sai xiansheng 岥⃰䓇 sanmei ᶱ㗏 san nengbian ᶱ傥嬲 san xue ᶱ⬠ san zhi ᶱ㓗 se 刚 seng xuetang ₏⬠➪ Shanghai shibao ᶲ㴟㗪⟙ Shanghai xinwen bao ᶲ㴟㕘倆⟙ Shanhai jing Ⱉ㴟䴻 Shanyin ┬⚈ shehui diaocha yundong 䣦㚫婧㞍忳≽ shehui kexue 䣦㚫䥹⬠ Shen bao 䓛⟙ Sheng’en 俾】

213

GLOSSARY

shengjiao liang 俾㔁慷 shenglun 倚婾 shengxue 倚⬠ Shengyi 俾ᶨ Shen Shandeng 㰰┬䘣 shentong 䤆忂 shen zhi 䤆㘢 shenzu tong 䤆嵛忂 shi (consciousness) 嬀 shi (phenomenon/a) ḳ shi bujing ⋩ᶵ㶐 shijie ᶾ䓴 Shijie fojiao jushilin linkan ᶾ䓴ἃ㔁⯭⢓ 㜿㜿↲ shijieguan ᶾ䓴奨 Shingon 䛇妨 shishan xiehai ⯠Ⱉ埨㴟 shisi wuji ⋩⚃䃉姀 Shitan ⷓΆ shou ⍿ shougong de kexue, shang nong suanyin ㇳⶍ䘬䥹⬠炻⓮彚䬿⌘ shujishi ⹞⎱⢓ Shuowen jiezi 婒㔯妋⫿ si biliang Ụ㭼慷 si da ⚃⣏ si ju 㬣⎍ si xianliang Ụ䎦慷 suming tong ⭧␥忂 Sun Yat-sen ⬓ᷕⰙ (1866–1925) suozhi zhang ㇨䞍晄 Taiping ⣒⸛ Taixu ⣒嘃 (1890–1947) Tang Dahai Ⓒ⣏㴟 Tang Dayuan Ⓒ⣏⚻ (ca. 1890–1941) Tan Sitong 嬂▋⎴ (1865–1898) taxin tong Ṿ⽫忂 ti 橼 Tiandiqiu tushuo ⣑⛘䎫⚾婒 tianer tong ⣑俛忂 Tiantai ⣑⎘ Tianyan lun ⣑㺼婾 tianyan tong ⣑䛤忂 Tongji ⎴㾇 Tongwen Guan ⎴㔯棐

214

Tongxiang 㟸悱 tongyu ⎴╣ Tuochen 僓⠝ wanfa weishi 叔㱽ⓗ嬀 Wang Hongyuan 䌳⻀栀 (1876–1937) Wang Jitong 䌳⬋⎴ (or Wang Xiaoxu 䌳⮷⼸; 1875–1948) Wang Renjun 䌳ṩὲ (1867–1900) Wang Xiangliu 䌳樌映 (1876–1937) Wang Xiaoxu 䌳⮷⼸ (or Wang Jitong 䌳⬋⎴; 1875–1948) weifan changshi 忽⍵ⷠ嬀 weifan yinguo lü de xieshuo 忽⍵⚈㝄⼳䘬 恒婒 weili ⓗ≃ weisheng 堃䓇 Weishi ⓗ嬀 weiwuzhuyi ⓗ䈑ᷣ佑 weixin ⓗ⽫ weixin jingtu ⓗ⽫㶐⛇ weixinzhuyi ⓗ⽫ᷣ佑 wen si xiu 倆⿅ᾖ Wuchang Foxue Yuan 㬎㖴ἃ⬠昊 wuli xue 䈑䎮⬠ wuming Ḽ㖶 wuxing Ḽ埴 Wuxu bianfa ㆲㆴ嬲㱽 wuyan Ḽ䛤 wuyin lun 䃉⚈婾 wu yun jie kong Ḽ喲䘮䨢 wuzhi 䈑岒 Xiandai fojiao 䎦ẋἃ㔁 Xiandai sengqie 䎦ẋ₏ụ xiang ゛ Xianghe 冰␴ xiangliu 䚠ℕ xianliang 䎦慷 xianxing 䎦埴 xiao dao ⮷忻 xiehai gushan 埨㴟橐Ⱉ xifang jingtu 大㕡㶐⛇ xing 埴 Xingzhi ⿏䣯 (1569–1636) Xinhai 彃ṍ xin jie xing zheng ᾉ妋埴嫱

GLOSSARY

xinli ⽫䎮 xinli xue ⽫䎮⬠ Xinsheng 㕘倚 Xin wenhua yundong 㕘㔯⊾忳≽ Xinyue 㕘㚰 Xinzheng 㕘㓧 xin zhong xin fa ⽫ᷕ⽫㱽 xi suo cheng ding 佺㇨ㆸ⭂ xiuyang ᾖ梲 xixue 大⬠ xixue zhongyuan 大⬠ᷕ㸸 xuanxue 䌬⬠ Xuanzang 䌬⤀ (602–664) Xu Chongqing 姙ⲯ㶭 (1888–1969) Xueyi ⬠喅 Xunzi 勨⫸ Yan Fu ♜⽑ (1854–1921) yang 春 yangsheng 梲䓇 Yang Wenhui 㣲㔯㚫 (1837–1911) yanjiu she 䞼䨞况 Yecheng 惜❶ Ye Qisun 叱ẩ⬓ (1898–1977) yi 佑 yin (cause, or in logic, reason) ⚈ yin (dark element, yin/yang) 昘 Yinguang ⌘⃱ (1861–1940) yingyong foxue ㅱ䓐ἃ⬠ yinming ⚈㖶 Yinshizi jingzuo fa ⚈㗗⫸朄⛸㱽 Yinxin zong ⌘⽫⬿ Yijing 㖻䴻 yishi シ嬀 yitai ẍ⣒ You Zhibiao ⯌㘢堐 (b. 1901) yu ╣ Yuan Shikai 堩ᶾ↙ (1859–1916) Yuanxiang ⃫尉 Yuanying ⚻䐃 (1878–1953) yuanzi ⍇⫸

Yuanzi tan gui aihao heping de kexuejia baoguan ⍇⫸⻰㬠ッ⤥␴⸛䘬䥹⬠⭞ ᾅ䭉 Yu Deyuan 嘆⽟⃫ (1909–1989) Yu Huiguan 䌱ㄏ奨 (1891–1933) yunxia qihou 暚曆㯋῁ yuyanxue 婆妨⬠ Yu Ying 恩⼙ yuzhouguan ⬯⭁奨 Zeng Puxin 㚦㘖ᾉ Zhang Huasheng ⻝⊾倚 (b. 1880) Zhang Junmai ⻝⏃⊙ (1886–1969) Zhang Taiyan 䪈⣒䀶 (1868–1936) zheng 嫱 zhengming 嫱㖶 zhen jinhua lun 䛇忚⊾婾 zhen xianliang 䛇䎦慷 zhibing zhuye 㱣䕭媠㤕 Zhifeng 剅Ⲙ (1901–1949) Zhihuan Jingshe 䣿㳡䱦况 zhihui 㘢ㄏ zhijue 䚜奢 zhi li xiang cui 岒≃䚠㍐ Zhina Neixue Yuan 㓗恋ℏ⬠昊 Zhiyi 㘢柿 Zhongguo fojiao hui ᷕ⚳ἃ㔁㚫 Zhongguo kexue she ᷕ⚳䥹⬠䣦 Zhongguo xinli xuehui ᷕ⚳⽫䎮⬠㚫 Zhong xi wenjian lu ᷕ大倆夳抬 Zhongyang Yanjiu Yuan ᷕ⣖䞼䨞昊 zhongzi 䧖⫸ zhou ␺ Zhuangzi 匲⫸ zhuanyi 廱ὅ Zhuzixue lüeshuo 媠⫸⬠䔍婒 zi ⫿ ziqiang 冒⻟ ziyou 冒䓙 zong ⬿ Zou Yan 槞埵

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BIB L I OGRAPH Y

Abbreviations Chinese Buddhist Electronic Text Association, Taishō Shinshū Daizōkyō ⣏㬋 㕘僑⣏啷䴻. CBETA, X Chinese Buddhist Electronic Text Association, Xuzang jing 临啷䴻. CSBS Wang Xiaoxu 䌳⮷⼸ [Wang Jitong 䌳⬋⎴, pseud.]. Fofa yu kexue zhi bijiao yanjiu ἃ㱽冯䥹⬠ᷳ㭼庫䞼䨞 [Comparative Study of the Buddha-dharma and Science]. 1932. Reprint, Hong Kong: Xianggang fojing liutong chu, 1956. HCY Haichao yin 㴟㼖枛. MFQ Collection of Republican-Era Buddhist Periodical Literature, Minguo fojiao qikan wenxian jicheng 㮹⚳ἃ㔁㛇↲㔯䌣普ㆸ. MFQB Supplement to the Collection of Republican-Era Buddhist Periodical Literature, Minguo fojiao qikan wenxian jicheng bubian 㮹⚳ἃ㔁㛇↲㔯䌣普ㆸ墄䶐. CBETA, T

Primary Sources Buddhist Canonical Works Apidamo jushe lun 旧㮀忼䢐῞况婾 [Abhidharmakośa-bhāsya]. By Vasubandhu. CBETA, T 1558.29.1a–159b. Avataṃsaka-sūtra. See Da fangguang fo huayan jing. Bao’en lun ⟙】婾 [Discourse on Repaying Kindness]. CBETA, X 1205.62.713c2–785c11. By Shen Shandeng 㰰┬䘣. Cheng weishi lun ㆸⓗ嬀婾 [Commentary on Attaining Consciousness-Only]. CBETA, T 1585.31.1a–60a. By Xuanzang 䌬⤀.

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Da baoji jing ⣏⮞䧵䴻 [Great Jewel Collection Sūtra]. CBETA, T 310.11.1a03–685a25. Da fangguang fo huayan jing ⣏㕡⺋ἃ厗♜䴻 [Avataṃsaka-sūtra]. CBETA, T 279.10.1a3– 444c30. Da foding rulai miyin xiuzheng liaoyi zhu pusa wanxing shouleng jing ⣏ἃ枪⤪Ἦ⭮⚈ᾖ嫱 Ḯ佑媠厑啑叔埴椾㤆♜䴻 [Śūraṃgama-sūtra]. CBETA, T 945.19.105b25–155b4. Fangbian xinlun 㕡ὧ⽫婾 [Heart Discourse on Skillful Means]. CBETA, T 1632.32.23b–28c. Foguo chanshi wenshu zhinan tuzan ἃ⚳䥒ⷓ㔯㬲㊯⋿⚾孂 [Chan Master Foguo’s Illustrated Verses of Praise on the Teaching of Mañjuśrī]. CBETA, T 1891.45.796a3–806b13. By Zhang Shangying ⻝⓮劙. Foshuo shoulengyan sanmei jing ἃ婒椾㤆♜ᶱ㗏䴻 [Śūraṃgama-samādhi-sūtra]. CBETA, T 642.15.629b13–645b. Jietuodao lun 妋僓忻婾 [Vimokṣamārga-śāstra]. CBETA, T 1648.32.399c10–461c. By Upatiṣya. Jin’gangding yuqie zhong fa a’nouduoluo sanmiaosanputi xin lun 慹∃枪䐄ụᷕ䘤旧俐⣂伭 ᶱ啸ᶱ厑㍸⽫婾 [Discourse on Giving Rise to Bodhicitta in the Vajraśekhara Yoga]. CBETA, T 1665.32.572b19–574c24. Kośa. See Apidamo jushe lun. Liudao ji ℕ忻普 [Collected Writings on the Six Paths of Samsāra]. CBETA, X 1645. 88.107a–179b. By Hongzan ⻀岲. Nyāyamukha. See Yinming zhenglimen lunben. Nyāyapraveśa. See Yinming ru zhengli lun. Pini riyong lu 㭿⯤㖍䓐抬 [Record on the Vinaya for Daily Use]. CBETA, X 1114.60.145a03– 156c12. By Xingzhi ⿏䣯. Sengqiezha jing ₏ụ⎺䴻. CBETA, T 423.13.959b17–976c06. Translated by *Upaśunya 㚰⧮椾恋 in the sixth century. Śūraṃgama-sūtra. See Da foding rulai miyin xiuzheng liaoyi zhu pusa wanxing shouleng jing. Yinming ru zhengli lun ⚈㖶ℍ㬋䎮婾㛔 [Nyāyapraveśa]. CBETA, T 1630.32.11a–13b. By Śaṃkarasvāmin. Yinming ru zhengli lun shu ⚈㖶ℍ㬋䎮婾䔷. CBETA, T 1840.44.91b6–143a20. By Kuiji ➢㑘. Yinming zhenglimen lun ⚈㖶㬋䎮攨婾 [Nyāyamukha]. CBETA, T 1628.32.1a1–6a7. Translated by Yijing 佑㶐. Yinming zhenglimen lunben ⚈㖶㬋䎮攨婾㛔 [Nyāyamukha]. CBETA, T 1629.32.6a11– 11a20. Translated by Xuanzang 䌬⤀. Yuqie shidi lun 䐄ụⷓ⛘婾 [Yogācārabhūmi-śāstra]. CBETA, T 1579.30.279a–882a14. By Asaṅga.

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232

I NDE X

Abhidharma, 54, 66, 184n10 Abhidharmakośa-bhāsya (Kośa), 54, 201n64 Abhidharmikas, 66 ability to eradicate “outflows” (loujin tong), 94 ability to know about past lives (suming tong), 94 ability to read others’ minds (taxin tong), 94 absolute knowledge: Einstein and, 75; relativity and, 76; science and, 71 Academia Sinica (Zhongyang Yanjiu Yuan), 20, 36, 47 Account of Wide-Ranging Matters (Bowu zhi), 24 against common sense (weifan changshi), 74 ālaya, 108, 112, 122 Altar Lamp of Humanity (Ren haideng), 143 altruism (boai), 145, 204n52 Amitābha Buddha, 56 anarchist socialism, 133–34 anti-Christianity, 40–41, 183n5 antireligion campaigns, 40–41, 49, 129, 183n5

antisuperstition campaigns, 19, 40–43 applied Buddhism (yingyong foxue), 161 arhats (enlightened disciples), 126 Aristotle, 87 astronomy, 16–17, 51, 58 atoms (yuanzi), 68–72, 200n51 attainments in practice of meditation (xi suo cheng ding), 91 Avataṃsaka Sūtra, 76, 154 Awakening of Faith, 47 Bachelor Scholar (shujishi), 55 bacteria, 96 Bao’en lun (Discourse on Repaying Kindness) (Shen Shandeng), 56, 58 Barbour, Ian, 175n1 behaviorism, 28, 37, 104–5, 119, 178n32 Bergson, Henri, 7, 88–89 biliang (inferential cognition), 87, 90, 93 boai (altruism), 145, 204n52 bodhimaṇḍa (site of Buddha’s enlightenment), 60 bodhisattva, 152–56; enlightenment of, 138, 153–54 Bodhisattva (Jue youqing), 64, 149

233

INDEX

Bodhisattva-bhūmi, 154 Bohr, Niels, 70 Book of Great Unity (Datong shu), 141 bowu (natural history), 25, 178n22 Bowu zhi (Account of Wide-Ranging Matters), 24 Boxer Uprising, 26 Brahe, Tycho, 183n6 Brahma Net Sūtra, 163 Brief Discussion on the Teachings of the Masters (Zhuzixue lüeshuo) (Zhang Taiyan), 86 Brief Essentials of the Buddha-dharma (Fofa shengyao) (Wang Xiaoxu), 63, 144 Britain, 21 Brooke, John, 52 Bryan, William Jennings, 201n4 Buck, Peter, 84 “The Buddha-dharma and Science” (Taixu), 138, 151 Buddhicize the New Youth (Fohua xin qingnian), 154 Buddhism, 38–49; antireligion campaigns and, 41; applied Buddhism, 161; astronomy and, 16–17, 51; Christianity and, 53, 69; cosmology of, 16–17, 24, 50, 51–65, 184n7; Darwinism and, 13; decline of, 183n102; empiricism and, 12, 13, 80–101; ethics in, 128–49; evolutionism and, 13, 129–30; higher empiricism of, 46, 81, 105; history and, 18–49; logic in, 34, 84–94, 192n16; materialism and, 11, 13; mind and, 102–27; Modern Buddhism, 148; in Nanjing Decade, 48–49; philosophies of life of, 8–14; physics and, 50–79; pure Buddhism, 161; Pure Land Buddhism, 56, 100, 185n20; Qing dynasty and, 38–39; reality and, 65–79; relativity and, 65– 79; scientific method and, 84–94; social evolutionism and, 12–13; subatomic physics and, 65–79; subjectivity in, 102; as superstition, 19; Tiantal Buddhism, 165–66, 181n86; Yang Wenhui and, 43–44. See also Mahāyāna Buddhism

234

“Buddhism, Religious Philosophy, and Scientific Philosophy” (Foxue yu zongjiao zhexue ji kexue zhexu) (Taixu), 71 Buddhism and Science (Foxue yu kexue ) (Hanhan), 84 Buddhism Semimonthly (Foxue banyuekan), 64, 166 Buddhist Humanity (Fojiao renjian), 149 Buddhist Primer (Fojiao chuxue keben) (Yang Wenhui), 58, 82 bunao (repairing brain), 209n46 bushi (charity), 206n1 Cai Yuanpei, 36, 47, 73, 90–91 catur-mahābhūta (four great elements), 66 causality, deluded denial of (weifan yinguo lu de xieshuo), 188n59 cerebrum (da’nao), 120 Chang, Carsun, 31, 32, 105 changye (things in field), 78 charity (bushi), 206n1 Chen Duxiu, 31, 46, 88 Cheng weishi lun, 122 Cheng Zhaian, 166 Chen Hushi, 92 chijie. See morality Chinese Buddhist Association (Zhongguo fojiao hui), 48 Chinese origins of Western learning (xixue zhongyuan), 23 Chinese Psychological Society (Zhongguo xinli xuehui), 35, 109 Chisong, 165–66 chong (worms), 96, 196n75 Christianity: Boxer Uprising and, 26; Buddhism and, 53, 69; Darwin, Charles and, 6; evolutionism and, 129; extraterritoriality and, 21; Galileo and, 52; Jesuits and, 22; journals and, 22–23; May Fourth movement and, 40; quantum physics and, 189n 67; science and, 2–3; Taiping Rebellion and, 21. See also Jesuits cibei (compassion), 145

INDEX

Classic of Changes (Yijing), 56 Classic of Mountains and Seas (Shanhai jing), 24 clouds, fog, and climate (yunxia qihou), 154 cognitive obstructions (suozhi zhang), 200n54 community of scientific discourse, 19, 29–30 Comparative Study of the Buddha-dharma and Science (Wang Xiaoxu), 86–92, 115, 168 compassion (cibei), 145 concept (yi), 88 conflict thesis, 2 Confucianism, 26, 96 Consciousness-Only (weishi), 11, 12, 77–78, 106–8, 160, 176n16; eight consciousnesses of, 90; epistemology and, 51; Jin Han and, 103, 115–27; karmic seeds in, 12; logic in, 85–86, 192n16; materialism and, 51–52, 103, 115–21; mind and, 69; relativity and, 72, 78; in Republican period, 103; Taixu and, 191n85; in Tang dynasty, 85; verification and, 83; at Wuchang School, 16, 109–15; Yang Wenhui and, 44 conservation of mass, law of, 188n54 Contemplative Science: Where Buddhism and Neuroscience Converge (Wallace), 171–73 Copernicus, Nicolaus, 52, 72, 183n6 cosmology: astronomy and, 58; of Buddhism, 16–17, 24, 50, 51–65, 184n7 creationism, 188n59 Criticism and Research of the Eight Consciousnesses in Buddhist Studies (Foxue bashi zhi piping yu yanjiu) (Jin Han), 89, 115 CSBS. See Comparative Study of the Buddha-dharma and Science da’nao (cerebrum), 120 Darwin, Charles, 5, 6, 132, 136, 138 Darwinism, 2, 13, 129, 201n4. See also evolutionism; social Darwinism

Datong shu (Book of Great Unity), 141 Daxing, 148 Dayu, 160 deluded sentiments (miqing), 154 denial of causality (wuyin lun), 188n59 Descartes, 40 De xiansheng (Mr. Democracy), 27 dhāraṇī, 162 Dharmakīrti., 85 dharmas, 201n64 “Differences and Similarities Between Buddhism and Science” (Foxue yu kexue zhi yitong) (Lü Bicheng), 64 “The Differentiation of Quaternion Functions” (Wang Xiaoxu), 47 Dignāga, 85, 193n23 Dikötter, Frank, 131–32 ding. See meditation dingminglun (fatalism), 188n59 Ding San, 144 direct cognition (xianliang), 86, 90, 91, 92 Discourse on Giving Rise to Bodhicitta, 163 Discourse on Repaying Kindness (Bao’en lun) (Shen Shandeng), 56, 58 divine ear (tianer tong), 94 divine eye (tianyan tong), 94 Dixian, 44, 181n86 Donfang zazhi, 135 Dongfang wenhua (Eastern Culture), 112 Dongfang zazhi (Eastern Miscellany), 26–27 dongli shi (force consciousness), 118–19 Dong Xi wenhua ji qi zhexue (Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies) (Liang Shuming), 179n47 Draper, John William, 2 Duhuan, 91 Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies (Dong Xi wenhua ji qi zhexue) (Liang Shuming), 179n47 Eastern Culture (Dongfang wenhua), 112 Eastern Miscellany (Dongfang zazhi), 26–27 economics, 34–35

235

INDEX

Edkins, Joseph, 131 Education and Arts (Xueyi), 73 education, build with temple property (miaochan xingxue), 42 effort (jing jin), 206n1 eight consciousnesses, 112–13, 115–27 Einstein, Albert, 72–79, 119, 189n69 electromagnetism, 70, 189n63 electrons, 70–71 elucidation of causes (hetuvidyā), 85 empiricism: Buddhism and, 12, 13, 80–101; community of scientific discourse and, 30; direct cognition and, 90; relativity and, 74; verification of, 80–101, 191n1. See also higher empiricism emptiness (śūnyatā), 67 enlightened disciples (arhats), 126 Enlightenment, 39–40 enlightenment (qiming), 27, 57, 60, 90; advancement toward, 135, 137–38; of bodhisattva, 138, 153–54; meditation for, 62; zhengming and, 82 epistemology, 10, 11, 51, 74 equality (pingdeng), 129, 140–41, 145, 204n40 esoteric Buddhist (mijiao), 160, 208n37, 208n42 “Essential Elements of Buddhism” (Foxue yaosu), 161–62 Essentials of the Esoteric School (Mizong Yaoyi) (Cheng Zhaian), 166 ether (yitai), 119–20, 188n60, 199n137 ethics (śīla), 138, 157; in Buddhism, 128– 49; evolutionism and, 11; in philosophy of life, 10; in science, 128–49; in scientism, 30–33 Evolution and Ethics (Huxley), 131, 202n19 evolutionism (jinhuazhuyi), 2, 5, 20, 131–34; Buddhism and, 13, 129–30; Christianity and, 129; ethics and, 11; May Fourth movement and, 28; politics and, 132–33; Scopes Monkey Trial and, 201n4; Wuchang School and, 138–39. See also social evolutionism expanding universe, 76

236

expedient means (upāya), 59, 154 explanatory verse (jie), 98 Fafang, 45, 69–70, 157; Jin Han and, 121–22, 124–27 faith, understanding, practice, and verification (xin jie xing zheng), 82, 84 Fan Gunong, 166–67 fannao zhang (obstruction of defilements), 200n54 Faraday, Michael, 70 fatalism (dingminglun), 188n59 Fayuan, 143–44 fiery atoms (huo yuanzi), 200n51 First Opium War, 21 First Sino-Japanese War, 4, 24 five arts (wuming), 13, 85, 151 five phases, 187n49 five skandha are empty (wu yun jie kong), 109 flight and bodily transformation, power of (shenzu tong), 94 flying machines, 24 Fofa shengyao (Brief Essentials of the Buddha-dharma) (Wang Xiaoxu), 63, 144 Fohua xin qingnian (Buddhicize the New Youth), 154 Fojiao chuxue keben (Buddhist Primer) (Yang Wenhui), 58, 82 Fojiao kexueguan (The Scientific Outlook of Buddhism) (You Zhibiao), 145 Fojiao renjian (Buddhist Humanity), 149 forbearance (renru), 206n1 force consciousness (dongli shi), 118–19 force/energy only (weili), 69 four great elements (catur-mahābhūta), 66 Foxue banyuekan (Buddhism Semimonthly), 64, 166 Foxue bashi zhi piping yu yanjiu (Criticism and Research of the Eight Consciousnesses in Buddhist Studies) (Jin Han), 89, 115 Foxue yaosu (“Essential Elements of Buddhism”), 161–62

INDEX

Foxue yu kexue (Buddhism and Science) (Hanhan), 84 Foxue yu kexue zhi yitong (“Difference sand Similarities Between Buddhism and Science”) (Lü Bicheng), 64 Foxue yu zongjiao zhexue ji kexue zhexu (“Buddhism, Religious Philosophy, and Scientific Philosophy”) (Taixu), 71 France, 21 fraternal love (boai), 139 freedom (ziyou), 140 Freud, Sigmund, 104–5 Fryer, John, 23, 199n42 Fumon Enstū, 184n7 Furth, Charlotte, 20 Galileo Galilei, 2, 52, 72, 129–30 Gaṇḍavyūha, 154 Geertz, Clifford, 10 general theory of relativity, 72 geocentrism, 53, 55 gezhi (natural philosophy), 25 Gezhi guwei (Record of the Ancient Secrets of Science) (Wang Renjun), 23–24 Gezhi jinghua lu (Record of the Essential Glory of Science) (Wang Renjun), 23–24 Goossaert, Vincent, 39 Great Cloud (Dayun), 121 groups (qun), 132 guanding (initiation), 165 Guanzong Temple, 44 Guocui movement. See National Essence movement Guojia ziyuan weiyuanhui (National Resource Commission), 37 Haichao yin (Sound of the Sea Tide), 46, 66, 67, 110, 124, 201n64 hand gestures (mudrās), 161 Hanhan, 84 Hanlin Academy, 55 Han Yong’un, 204n40 hearing, reflecting [on what is heard], and then practicing it (wen xiu), 93

heart-of-mind method (xin zhong xin fa), 160 Heart Sūtra, 67, 198n12 heliocentrism, 52, 53, 183n6 hetuvidyā (elucidation of causes), 85 higher empiricism: of Buddhism, 46, 81, 105; direct cognition and, 92; supersensory powers and, 94–101 history, 18–49 Honghua yuekan (Promulgation Monthly), 100, 149 hua (transformation), 137, 203n27 Huainanzi, 96 Huang Ziqiang, 75 Huayan ru fajie pin, of Avataṃsaka Sūtra (see also Gaṇḍavyūha), 76, 154 Huayan Sūtra (Avataṃsaka Sūtra), 154 Huazhuang, 154–55 Hubble, Edwin, 76 Hu Chaowu, 151, 160–69, 208n42 hui (wisdom), 157 humaneness (ren), 148 human intelligence (lingxing), 78, 191n85 human life (rensheng), 75 Hundred Days’ Reform, 24, 41 huo yuanzi (fiery atoms), 200n51 Hu Shih, 31, 46; on logic, 81; Wang Xiaoxu and, 90–91 Huxley, Thomas, 131, 202n19 hygiene (weisheng), 158, 163–64 idea consciousness, 118 idealism (weixinzhuyi), 77, 121 ignorant monk, 43 An Illustrated Guide to the Heavens and the Earth (Tiandiqiu tushuo) (Yang Wenhui), 58–59 imperial examination system, 26 Indian logic, classical (yinming), 85 inferential cognition (biliang), 87, 90, 93 initiation (guanding), 165 inner alchemy (neidan), 159 instinct, 28 intuition (zhijue), 88, 89 I.Q. tests, 37

237

INDEX

James, William, 105 Jesuits, 22, 34, 53, 183n6 Jetavana Hermitage, 44 Jiangnan Arsenal (Jiangnan jiqi zhizao zongju), 21 Jiang Weiquiao, 159 Jian Mulu, 83 jiaohua zhongsheng (teaching and transforming sentient beings), 137 jie (explanatory verse), 98 jing jin (effort), 206n1 Jin Han, 89–90; atoms and, 200n51; Consciousness-Only thought and, 103, 115–27; Taixu and, 207n21 jinhuazhuyi. See evolutionism jinshi (Presented Scholar), 55 jiujing (ultimately), 92 Juequn zhoubao (Awakening the Multitude Weekly News), 147 “Jun shuo” (On Fungi/Bacteria) (Zhang Taiyan), 96 Kangxi (Emperor), 23 Kang Youwei, 26, 96, 177n8 Kepler, Johannes, 52 kexue. See science Kexue (Science) ( journal), 33–34, 36 kexue de shangxue (scientific study of business), 28 kexuehua (scientization), 36–37 kexue yu renshengguan (science and philosophy of life), 7–8 Kexue yu renshengguan (Science and the Philosophy of Life) (Hu Shih and Chen Duxiu), 31, 46 Kośa. See Abhidharmakośa-bhāsya Kuairan, 100 Kurtz, Joachim, 85 Lavoisier, Antoine, 188n54 law of causality, denial of (weifan yinguo lu de xieshuo), 188n59 law of conservation of mass, 188n54 laws of universal gravitation, 75 Lebensanchauung (philosophy of life), 9

238

Lee, Leo Ou-fan, 33–34 Leeuwenhoek, Antonie van, 96 Lengyan jing, 186n35 Lewis, James, 161 Liang Qichao, 32, 96, 109, 130, 135 Liang Shuming, 81, 88, 179n47 Lihong, 66 Lindbergh, Charles, 149 lingxing (human intelligence), 78, 191n85 Lin Zaiping, 46 Liu Linghua, 141–42, 154 Liu Tianxing, 92, 154–55 Liu Xianjiao, 83, 154–55 Liu Xianliang, 154 lizhi de jingshen xinyang (rational, spiritual faith), 146 logic (lizhi), 13, 20, 81; Aristotle and, 87; in Buddhism, 34, 84–94, 192n16; in Consciousness-Only thought, 85–86, 192n16; Jesuits and, 34; luoji and, 156; May Fourth movement and, 28; pramāṇas and, 86–94 Lopez, Donald, 9 Lotus Sūtra, 61, 154 loujin tong (ability to eradicate “outflows,” or habits and karma that lead to future rebirth), 94 Lü Bicheng, 17, 61–64 lun (wheels), 63 luoji (transliteration of word “logic”), 156 Luo Wuxu, 17, 145–46 Lusthaus, Dan, 78 Magazine of the World Lay Buddhist Association (Shijie fojiao jushilin linkan), 121 Mahāratnakūṭa-sūtra, 96 Mahāyāna Buddhism, 67–68, 70, 144–45; atomic theory and, 71–72; pingdeng in, 140; six perfections of, 13–14, 150–53 manas, 108, 119 mantras, 161 Manzhi, 113, 198n22, 208n41 Mao Banghan, 149 Marxism, 142, 144, 147

INDEX

Master Yinshi’s Methods for Quiet Meditation (Yinshizi jingzuo fa), 159 materialism (weiwuzhuyi), 77; Buddhism and, 11, 13; Consciousness-Only thought and, 51–52, 103, 115–21; Fafang and, 125–26; idealism and, 77, 121; Jin Han and, 115–27; mind and, 32; profit seeking and, 26; relativity and, 11; scientism and, 32 mathematico-deductive hypotheses, 30 mathematics: importance of studying, 13; relativity and, 73; Wang Xiaoxu and, 17, 47 matter/material (wuzhi), 77 Maxwell, James Clerk, 72, 199n137 May Fourth movement, 25, 26, 27–30, 140, 154; Christianity and, 40; Enlightenment and, 39–40; psychology and, 28, 104; science and, 27–30 mechanism (jijielun), 188n59 medicinal arts (zhibing zhuye), 154–55 medicine, 28, 35 meditation (ding), 157; attainment in practice of, 91; body and, 157; for enlightenment, 62; in Mahāyāna six perfections, 13–14; physiological effects of, 13; super adrenalin from, 13; supernatural abilities from, 12, 94; ten impurities and, 99 Meian. See Taixu metaphysics (xuanxue), 31 miaochan xingxue (build education with temple property), 42 Miaokong, 136–37, 139, 140 microbiology, 94–101 microscope, 96, 195n60 mijiao (esoteric Buddhist), 160, 208n37, 208n42 mind: body and, 157–58; Buddhism and, 102–27; Consciousness-Only thought and, 69; delusion of, 90; materialism and, 32; psychology and, 103; Pure Land of Yinguang in, 69; Wang Xiaoxu and, 90. See also Consciousness-Only thought; psychology

Mind-Only (weixin), 76 Ming dynasty, 4 Minnan Buddhist Seminary (Minnnan Foxue Yuan), 45 miqing (deluded sentiments), 154 mixin (superstition), 39 Mizong Yaoyi (Essentials of the Esoteric School) (Cheng Zhaian), 166 Modern Buddhism (Xiandai fojiao), 148 modernity, 4–5, 7, 28–29, 33–34, 41–42 Modern Sangha (Xiandai sengqie), 148 monastic study halls (seng xuetang), 43 monotheism, 145–46 morality (chijie), 206n1; Scopes Monkey Trial and, 201n4; self-cultivation and, 150–51 Mozi, 23 Mr. Democracy (De xiansheng), 27 Mr. Science (Sai xiansheng), 27 Mudrā-Mind School (Yinxin zong), 160–61 mudrās (hand gestures), 161 Nanjing Decade, 8, 20, 36; atomic theory in, 68–69, 71–72; Buddhism in, 48–49 Nanjō Bunyū, 43–44 National Essence movement (Guocui movement), 26 Nationalists, 20, 36–37, 42–43 National Resource Commission (Guojia ziyuan weiyuanhui), 37 natural history (bowu), 25, 178n22 natural philosophy (gezhi), 25 neidan (inner alchemy), 159 New Culture movement (Xin wenhua yundong), 25 New Moon (Xinyue), 91 New Policies (Xinzheng), 42 New Tide, 104–5 Newton, Isaac, 5, 68, 72, 74–75, 138 nirvana, 83, 99 Northern Expedition, 42 nourishing life (yangsheng), 158 Nyāyamukha (Dignāga), 85, 193n23 Nyāyapraveśa (Śaṃkarasvāmin), 85 Nyāya (Logic) school, 85, 86

239

INDEX

obstruction of defilements (fannao zhang), 200n54 Of Flight and Life (Lindbergh), 149 Okada Torajirō, 159 On Evolution (Tianyan lun) (Yan Fu), 131 On Fungi/Bacteria (“Jun shuo”) (Zhang Taiyan), 96 On the Revolutions of the Celestial Orbs (Copernicus), 52 ontology, 10 Ouyang Jingwu, 44, 74–75 Palmer, David, 39 pāramitās (six perfections), 13–14, 150–51 philology, 13 philosophy, 28, 46, 73 philosophy of life (Lebensanchauung), 9 philosophy of life (renshengguan), 10, 11, 31, 105 “A Physical [Scientific] Discussion on the [the Concept] Form Is Emptiness, Emptiness Is Form” (Se jishi kong, kong jishi se zhi lihua tan) (Zhang Huasheng), 67 physics (wuli xue): Buddhism and, 50–79; May Fourth movement and, 28; psychology and, 103–4; quantum physics, 72, 120, 146, 171, 173, 189n67; subatomic, 65–79 pingdeng (equality), 129, 140–41, 145, 204n40 Pini riyong lu (Record of the Vinaya for Daily Use) (Xingzhi), 98 politics: evolutionism and, 132–33; in Qing dynasty, 132; science and, 37–38 pramāṇas, 86–94, 122, 192n20, 193n22 Presented Scholar (jinshi), 55 Promulgation Monthly (Honghua yuekan), 100, 149 protons, 71–72 prove (zhengming), 82 pseudo-direct cognition (si xianliang), 89 pseudo-inferential cognition (si biliang), 89 Psychology (Xinli) ( journal), 35

240

psychology (xinli xue), 19, 37; May Fourth movement and, 28, 104; mind and, 103; philosophy of life and, 105; physics and, 103–4; scientism and, 104–5; U.S. and, 35; at Wuchang School, 46, 105–6, 108–15 pull model, of modernity, 5 “Pumen pin” (Universal Gate Chapter) (Lu Bicheng), 61 pure Buddhism (chuncui foxue), 161 Pure Land Buddhism, 56, 100, 185n20 push model, of modernity, 5 qi, 187n49 qigong, 159 qiming. See enlightenment Qing dynasty, 16–17, 20–27, 38–39, 132 Qingyi bao, 96 qi shen gen chong (root-worms that give rise to body), 99 Qi shijian (The Receptacle World) (Yang Wenhui), 59 quantum physics, 72, 120, 146, 171, 173, 189n67 quiet sitting (jingzuo), 158 qun (groups), 132 races, 202n14 rational spiritual faith (lizhi de jingshen xinyang), 146 rationalize emotions (ganqing lizhihua), 162 reality (ti), 72, 88, 119 reason, in Indian logic (hetu), 86 The Receptacle World (Qi shijian) (Yang Wenhui), 59 Record of the Ancient Secrets of Science (Gezhi guwei ) (Wang Renjun), 23–24 Record of the Essential Glory of Science (Gezhi jinghua lu) (Wang Renjun), 23–24 Record of the Vinaya for Daily Use (Pini riyong lu) (Xingzhi), 98 Record of Things Heard and Seen in China and the West (Zhong xi wenjian lu), 177n11

INDEX

relativity, 5; absolute knowledge and, 76; Buddhism and, 65–79; ConsciousnessOnly thought and, 72, 78; general theory of, 72; materialism and, 11; special, 72, 119 religion, 10; antireligion campaigns, 40–41, 49, 129, 183n5; science and, 1–3, 6–7, 39; superstition and, 39; as term, 39–40. See also Buddhism; Christianity The Religious Question in Modern China (Goossaert and Palmer), 39 ren (humaneness), 148 Ren haideng (Altar Lamp of Humanity), 143 renru (forbearance), 206n1 rensheng (human life), 75 renshengguan (philosophy of life), 10, 11, 31, 105 Renxue (An Exposition of Benevolence) (Tan Sitong), 95, 119, 120 repairing the brain (bunao), 209n46 Republican period, 44; ConsciousnessOnly thought in, 103; esoteric Buddhist in, 208n37; science and, 63–64 “Returning the Atom Bomb to the Safekeeping of Pacifist Scientists” (Yuanzi tan gui aihao heping de kexuejia baoguan) (Taixu), 148 righteousness (yi), 148 Ritzinger, Justin, 55, 133–34 Rockefeller Foundation, 37 root-worms that give rise to body (qi shen gen chong), 99 Rushu zhenlun (Truthful Discourse on Confucianism) (Zhang Taiyan), 96 Russell, Bertrand, 28, 35, 40; Einstein and, 72, 75; Ouyang Jingwu and, 74–75 Russia, 21 Sai xiansheng (Mr. Science), 27 samādhi, 161, 162, 164 Samantabhadra, 161 Śaṃkarasvāmin, 85 sangha, 147 Sanghāta-sūtra, 96

san nengbian (three transformations), 108 san xue (three disciplines), 157 san zhi (three-part syllogistic structure in Buddhist logic), 122–23 sattva, 163 science (kexue), 177n8; absolute knowledge and, 71; antisuperstition campaigns and, 41–42; bodhisattva and, 152–56; books on, 22–23; Christianity and, 2–3; compressed intellectual modernization and, 19; education of, 20; epistemology and, 11; ethics in, 128–49; history and, 18–49; importance of, 4–8; as inferential cognition, 93; Jesuits and, 22; journals on, 22–23; mathematico-deductive hypotheses in, 30; May Fourth movement and, 27–30; medicine as, 28; modernity through, 4–5; politics and, 37–38; pramāṇas and, 94; professionalization of, 33–38; in Qing dynasty, 20–27; religion and, 1–3, 6–7, 39; Republican period and, 63–64; self-cultivation and, 150–69; superstition and, 7, 39, 154; translation of, 19, 22–23; in World War I, 13, 32, 135–36; in Wuchang School, 46 Science (Kexue) ( journal), 33–34, 36 science, religion, and superstition (mixin), 39 Science and Buddhism (Kexue yu foxue) (Hu Chaowu), 151, 160–69 “Science and Buddhism” (Kexue yu foxue) (Kuairan), 100 science and philosophy of life (kexue yu renshengguan), 7–8 Science and the Philosophy of Life (Kexue yu renshengguan ) (Hu Shih and Chen Duxiu), 31, 46 science fantasy, 23, 199n42 Science Society of China (Zhongguo kexue she), 33 sciences of craftsmanship, business and agriculture (shougong de kexue, shang nong suanyin), 154 scientific method, 84–94

241

INDEX

“The Scientific Method of ConsciousnessOnly” (Tang Dayuan), 83 The Scientific Outlook of Buddhism (Fojiao kexueguan ) (You Zhibiao), 145 scientific principles of management, 37 scientific study of business (kexue de shangxue), 28 scientism, 7–8; beginning of, 26; as best method for attaining knowledge, 12; ethics in, 30–33; materialism and, 32; psychology and, 104–5 scientization (kexuehua), 36–37 Scopes Monkey Trial, 201n4 seas of blood and mountains of bones (xiehai gushan), 135 Second Opium War, 21 Second Sino-Japanese War, 142 secularization thesis, 7 Se jishi kong, kong jishi se zhi lihua tan (“A Physical [Scientific] Discussion on the [the Concept] Form Is Emptiness, Emptiness Is Form”) (Zhang Huasheng), 67 self-cultivation, 10; body and, 157–66; through Mahāyāna “six perfections,” 13; morality and, 150–51; science and, 150–69, as xiuyang, 162 self-strengthening (ziqiang), 21–22, 24–25 seng xuetang (monastic study halls), 43 Shanghai News, 115 Shanhai jing (Classic of Mountains and Seas), 24 Shanyin, 45, 109, 121, 122–24, 200n51 shehui diaocha yundong (social survey movement), 35 shehui kexue (social sciences), 148 Shen bao, 148 shenglun (grammar), 156 Shengyi, 92 Shen Shandeng, 55–58 shentong (supernatural abilities), 12, 94–101 shen zhi (spiritual wisdom), 100 shenzu tong (flight and bodily transformation), 94

242

shi bujing (ten impurities), 99 Shijie fojiao jushilin linkan (Magazine of the World Lay Buddhist Association), 121 shijieguan (worldview), 10 Shingon, 165–66 Shitan, 147–48 shujishi (Bachelor Scholar), 55 Shuk-wah Poon, 43 si biliang (pseudo-inferential cognition), 89 śīla. See ethics similarity (tongyu), 123 site of his enlightenment (bodhimaṇḍa), 60 si xianliang (pseudo-direct cognition), 89 six perfections (pāramitās), 13–14, 150–53, 206n1 social Darwinism, 11, 131–32 social evolutionism, 11, 12–13, 129–35, 137, 139–40, 142, 202n12 social sciences (shehui kexue), 148 social survey movement (shehuil diaocha yundong), 35 sociology, 34–35 Sound of the Sea Tide (Haichao yin), 46, 66, 67, 110, 124, 201n64 special relativity, 72, 119 spells (zhou), 98 Spencer, Herbert, 132 spirit/spiritual (jingshen), 77 spiritual wisdom (shen zhi), 100 Stcherbatsky, T. H., 87 subatomic physics, 65–79 subjectivity, 102, 105 Sudhana, 154–55 Sumeru, Mount, 54–55, 60 suming tong (ability to know about one’s own and others’ past lives), 94 śūnyatā (emptiness), 67 Sun Yat-sen, 36–37 suozhi zhang (cognitive obstructions), 200n54 supernatural abilities (shentong), 12, 94–101 superstition, 8; antisuperstition campaigns, 19, 40–43; Buddhism as,

INDEX

19; Fayuan and, 143–44; Miaokong and, 140; modernity and, 7; religion and, 39; science and, 7, 39, 154 Śūraṃgama-sūtra, 60, 122 sūtras, 54 Tagore, Rabindranath, 179n47 Taiping Rebellion, 21, 38 Taixu, 14–15, 44, 68–71, 78, 139–40, 147–48, 151, 154, 157, 188n59; Consciousness-Only thought and, 105, 191n85; evolutionism and, 138; Jin Han and, 207n21; microbiology and, 97–100; supernatural abilities and, 96, 97; Yang Wenhui and, 16–17; Zhifeng and, 203n33 Tang Dahai, 93–94, 109 Tang Dayuan, 45, 83, 124, 142 Tang dynasty, 85 Tan Sitong, 95, 96, 119, 120, 133 taxin tong (ability to read others’ minds), 94 teaching and transforming sentient beings (jiaohua zhongsheng), 137 telepathy, 120 ten impurities (shi bujing), 99 thermodynamics, laws of, 188n54 thought (yin), 86, 187n49 three disciplines (san xue), 157 Three Mysteries, 162 three-part syllogistic structure (san zhi), 122–23 three transformations (san nengbian), 108 ti (reality), 88 Tiandiqiu tushuo (An Illustrated Guide to the Heavens and the Earth) (Yang Wenhui), 58–59 tianer tong (divine ear), 94 Tiantai Buddhism, 165–66, 181n86 Tianyan lun (On Evolution) (Yan Fu), 131 tianyan tong (divine eye), 94 transformation (hua), 137, 203n27 Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism (Maxwell), 199n137 true direct cognition (zhen xianliang), 86 true evolutionary theory (zhen jinhua lun), 138

Tuochen, 140–41 turning around bases (zhuanyi), 108 ultimately (jiujing), 92 United States (U.S.): psychology and, 35; Science Society of China in, 33; Second Opium War and, 21 Universal Gate Chapter (“Pumen pin”) (Lu Bicheng), 61 universal gravitation, laws of, 75 upāya (expedient means), 59, 154 Upsaka Wu Shu. See Luo Wuxu U.S. See United States utilitarianism, 26 utopianism, 133 Vaiśeṣika school, 69 verification (zheng), 125; as common imperative, 82–84; Consciousness-Only thought and, 83; of empiricism, 80–101, 191n1; of nirvana, 83 Vinaya, 98 Voltaire, 40 Wallace, B. Alan, 170–73 Wang, David, 23 Wang Hui, 1, 4, 6, 29 Wang Renjun, 23–24 Wang Xiangliu, 160–61 Wang Xiaoxu, 6, 17, 46–47, 61–64, 115, 156, 168, 181n95; Academia Sinica and, 36; Jin Han and, 121–22; on logic, 81, 86; mind and, 90; pramāṇas and, 88–92; on protons, 71–72 Wang Yiting, 189n69 Warlord Era, 25 Wason, J. B., 178n32 weifan changshi (against common sense), 74 weifan yinguo lu de xieshuo (deluded denial of causality), 188n59 weili (force/energy only), 69 weisheng (hygiene), 158, 163–64 weishi. See Consciousness-Only weiwuzhuyi. See materialism

243

INDEX

weixin (Mind-Only), 76 weixinzhuyi (idealism), 77, 121 Weltanschauung (worldview), 10 wen si xiu (hearing, reflecting [on what is heard], and then practicing it), 93 Western learning (xixue), 4 Whalen Lai, 76 wheels (lun), 63 White, Andrew Dickson, 2 wisdom (hui), 157 wisdom (zhihui), 206n1 worldview (Weltanschauung), 10 worldview (yuzhouguan), 10, 50 World War I, 13, 32, 135–36 worms (chong), 96, 196n75 Wright, David, 19, 119 Wuchang Buddhist Seminary (Wuchang Foxue Yuan), 16, 44–45, 109, 198n22, 201n64 Wuchang School, 16, 45–46, 103; Consciousness-Only thought at, 16, 109–15; evolutionism and, 138–39; psychology at, 46, 105–6, 108–15 wuli xue. See physics wuming (five arts), 13, 85, 151 Wuxu Reform. See Hundred Days’ Reform wuyan (five eyes), 95 wuyin lun (denial of causality), 188n59 wu yun jie kong (five skandha are empty), 109 wuzhi (matter/material), 77 Xiandai fojiao (Modern Buddhism), 148 Xiandai sengqie (Modern Sangha), 148 xianliang (direct cognition), 86, 90, 91, 92 Xingzhi, 98 Xinhai Revolution, 20 xin jie xing zheng (faith, understanding, practice, and verification), 82, 84 Xinli (Psychology) ( journal), 35, 180n56 xinli xue. See psychology Xinsheng, 166 Xin wenhua yundong (New Culture movement), 25 Xinyue (New Moon), 91

244

Xinzheng (New Policies), 42 xin zhong xin fa (heart-of-mind method), 160 xi suo cheng ding (attainment in practice of meditation), 91 xiuyang (self-cultivation), 162 xixue (Western learning), 4 xixue zhongyuan (Chinese origins of Western learning), 23 xuanxue (metaphysics), 31 Xuanzang, 85 Xu Chongqing, 73, 74 Xueyi (Education and Arts), 73 Xunzi, 202n12 Yan Fu, 131, 132, 177n8 yang, 187n49 yangsheng (nourishing life), 158 Yang Wenhui, 14, 16–17, 58–59, 160, 185n25; Buddhism and, 43–44; on faith, understanding, practice, and verification, 82; on logic, 86; Wang Xiaoxu and, 47 Ye Qisun, 47 yi (concept), 88 Yijing (Classic of Changes), 56 yin (thought), 86, 187n49 Yinguang, 15, 100 yingyong foxue (applied Buddhism), 161 yinming (Indian logic), 85 Yinshizi jingzuo fa (Master Yinshi’s Methods for Quiet Meditation), 159 Yinxin zong (Mudrā-Mind School), 160–61 yitai (ether), 119–20, 188n60, 199n137 Yogācārabhūmi, 60, 63, 64, 93, 156 Yogācārabhūmiśāstra, 122, 201n64 You Zhibiao, 17, 145 Yuan Shikai, 61 Yuanying, 15 yuanzi (atoms), 68–72, 200n51 Yuanzi tan gui aihao heping de kexuejia baoguan (“Returning the Atom Bomb to the Safekeeping of Pacifist Scientists”) (Taixu), 148 Yu Deyuan, 201n64

INDEX

Yu Huiguan, 91 yunxia qihou (clouds, fog, and climate), 154 Yupu. See Manzhi yuzhouguan (worldview), 10, 50 Zarrow, Peter, 28 Zeng Puxin, 66 Zhang Huasheng, 66–67, 109, 110–11 Zhang Junmai. See Chang, Carsun Zhang Taiyan, 81, 86, 96–97, 133 zheng. See verification zhengming (prove), 82 zhen jinhua lun (true evolutionary theory), 138 zhen xianliang (true direct cognition), 86 zhenyan, 208n42 zhibing zhuye (medicinal arts), 154–55 Zhifeng, 139, 203n33 zhihui (wisdom), 206n1 zhijue (intuition), 88, 89

Zhina Neixue Yuan, 44 Zhongguo fojiao hui (Chinese Buddhist Association), 48 Zhongguo kexue she (Science Society of China), 33 Zhongguo xinli xuehui (Chinese Psychological Society), 35, 109 Zhong xi wenjian lu (Record of Things Heard and Seen in China and the West), 177n11 Zhongyang Yanjiu Yuan (Academia Sinica), 20, 36, 47 zhou (spells), 98 Zhuangzi, 96 zhuanyi (turning around bases), 108 Zhuzixue lüeshuo (Brief Discussion on the Teachings of the Masters) (Zhang Taiyan), 86 ziqiang (self-strengthening), 21–22, 24–25 ziyou (freedom), 140

245