Recovering Buddhism in Modern China

Ambivalent modernity appeared in other, related spaces in society as well, in new practices and associations that applied modern scientific terminology and techniques to traditional practices of meditation and the belief in spirits. Ruth Rogaski and Xun Liu have written about how Chinese traditions of self-cultivation—Daoist and otherwise—were discussed using modern notions of science and hygiene from the start of the twentieth century.⁴ And Max K. W. Huang has studied the ways in which modern scientific methods and terms were used by Shanghai elites to study ghosts and other psychic phenomena in the early decades of the twentieth century.⁵

Buddhist meeting halls, Chinese medicine, meditation, and psychic research were specific areas in which people in China represented different traditional elements using modern terms. Ultimately, they all point to the larger epistemological shift that was occurring in China in the first decades of the twentieth century. In this chapter I focus on that shift by examining the ways that Buddhists adopted and assented to an episteme associated with science. Chinese Buddhist intellectuals disseminated modern taxonomies of knowledge related to specific sciences while also resisting and redefining the categories of science and religion themselves. In highlighting the ways in which modern classifications of knowledge affected these Buddhists’ discussions of their own tradition, this chapter reveals their contributions to the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates of the 1920s, an important cultural moment in China in which the potential and limits of these new categories were discussed in an explicit manner.

As an ideological entity, science thus attained a vital significance in China during the first decades of the twentieth century, and a variety of voices in Chinese society articulated their views on the proper place of science. They argued over the extent to which various aspects of modern society, such as its moral, ethical, and aesthetic systems, could and should be defined and controlled by science. Together these voices formed a “community of scientific discourse”7 that debated even the very definition of science as its participants sought to formulate compelling visions of Chinese modernity. Buddhist intellectuals should be considered members of this community. Although generally overlooked, Buddhist intellectuals played an important role in the appropriation and dissemination of modern science in China. Buddhist contributions to this transition were complex, however. On the one hand, Buddhist writers drew from the intellectual resources of their tradition to critique the dogma of scientistic materialism; but on the other, they actually contributed to the extension of the hegemony of the modern scientific worldview in China. This chapter highlights both of these aspects of Buddhist engagement with science in the 1920s by focusing on their participation in the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates, a public intellectual exchange that I define more broadly than most previous scholarship.⁸

It is the contention of this volume that Buddhist voices mattered in modern Chinese history, and this chapter gives some examples of Buddhist participation in the dominant philosophical and ideological discussions of the 1920s. The goal here is not to show how Buddhist intellectuals, as Buddhists, shared ideas and concerns with members of other religions; rather, it is to show that Buddhist intellectuals, as intellectuals, shared much with other thinkers of the period, even those who were quite hostile to Buddhism. Scholars have recently noted that, despite their different political and ideological affiliations, the majority of Chinese intellectuals actually shared a number of the same modern commitments by the 1920s. Edmund Fung has pointed to their shared beliefs in organic growth, reform, and gradual change and that they all supported some level of social engineering, though most rejected violence as a means of reform.⁹ Lin Yü-sheng has highlighted a shared commitment to the unbridgeable difference between subjectivity and objectivity, which animated the arguments between Zhang Junmai 張君勱 (Carsun Chang, 1886–1969), Ding Wenjiang 丁文江 (1887–1936), and others.¹⁰ If Buddhists really were a part of the discussions of the day, did they also share any of these common commitments? Certain Chinese Buddhists did indeed absorb and promote scientific schemas of classification of knowledge. Such ideas are particularly evident in these Buddhist scholars’ contributions to what came to be called the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates.

There were many factors that led to the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates, but the spark that ignited them was an incendiary talk given by Zhang Junmai at Qinghua University in Beijing in February 1923. In this lecture, Zhang argued that rather than adopting a purely scientistic materialist view of the world, China needed to emphasize “philosophy of life” (renshengguan 人生觀).11 Zhang’s words raised the ire of the Scottish-educated geologist Ding Wenjiang, who wrote a critique to which Zhang in turn replied. Their exchange sent a shock wave through China’s intelligentsia, and, over the course of that year, many people wrote to weigh in on the issues at hand. Their contributions appeared as articles in a number of different periodicals, many of which were reprinted in two similar book collections published in 1923 and 1925.¹² The more commonly cited of them was Science and Philosophy of Life; it is from the title of this work that scholars have taken the name for these debates.

Yet it is important to recognize that this set of articles constituted only a part of a wider field of negotiations over the relationship between science, truth, and values that occupied a wide range of Chinese thinkers during the 1920s. I propose that scholars clearly differentiate between the collection Science and Philosophy of Life and the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates. Although the two phenomena are closely linked, these terms refer to two different things: The former refers to a particular collection of texts, selected by a few individuals, which has assumed an undisputed place in the canon of Republican-era intellectual history. The latter refers to a particular pattern of cultural discourse, displaying a particular set of concerns, which spanned the entire third decade of the twentieth century.

Although they had their roots in late nineteenth-century intellectual trends, the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates, in the broad sense, can be considered to have truly begun after 1919 when Liang Qichao publicly raised doubts about the benefits of science and modern civilization after his return from a tour of postwar Europe. Then, the widespread discussion of the philosophical implications of science declined during the 1930s. Early in that decade, a number of cultural shifts that had been gaining momentum in the previous period came to fruition as science and science education became much more widespread in China. This was coupled with the Nationalist government’s aggressive use of science and engineering in the nation-building activities it carried out in the Nanjing Decade (1927–1937). The increasing numbers of technocrats in the government also led, somewhat ironically, to the growing opinion that science and politics should not mix.13 As a result, the practice of science shifted more squarely into the mainstream of Chinese life, and yet this also rendered it less common in philosophical discussions. China’s professional scientists were aware of this shift, and as they became more confident of the place of science in their country, they spent less time writing polemical pieces justifying it.¹⁴ Discussion of science continued, but the specific issues raised in the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates began to recede.

In both the broad and narrow senses of the label, the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates were an important event in the evolution of the modern Chinese intellectual sphere. In the context of discussing the definition of science, and the role it ought to play in Chinese life, Chinese thinkers grappled with some of the most pressing issues of the day. Some Buddhists were deeply involved in these discussions, including one whose work was included in Science and Philosophy of Life.

Born in Fuzhou, Lin, like many of his generation of educated elites, studied in Japan, concentrating on law and economics at Tokyo Imperial University. He returned to China in 1907 and, after the founding of the Republic, joined the Ministry of Education led by Cai Yuanpei 蔡元培 (1868–1940). He later took a dual appointment in the departments of Philosophy and Economics at Beijing University, where he taught throughout the 1920s and 1930s.¹⁷ Lin was part of the circle of prominent New Culture intellectuals in Beijing that included his friend Hu Shi and other contributors to Science and Philosophy of Life. Lin was also a devout Buddhist.

Buddhism influenced Lin’s life in a number of ways: he used Buddhist themes in his poetry, practiced meditation, participated in Buddhist study groups and lectures in Beijing, and maintained an acquaintance with the notable reformist monk Taixu 太虛 (1890–1947). In 1912, less than a month after the death of the Chan master Jichan 寄禪 (1852–1912), Lin wrote a short poem lamenting the loss of this eminent figure. Eight years later, after he had already begun teaching at Beijing University, Lin wrote another poem, titled “Sitting Alone While Burning Incense” (Fenxiang duzuo 焚香獨坐), about meditating outside his freshly swept room. The poem uses several Buddhist images, the most evident one being the term “unimpeded self” (zizai shen 自在身), a reference to a mind devoid of defilements.18 While this poem suggests that Lin engaged in some form of meditation, his practice of Buddhism also included other forms of learning. He attended two lecture series given by Taixu in the capital in 1919 and in 1921.¹⁹ At these lectures, Lin would have mingled with a number of the city’s most prominent lay Buddhist intellectuals, including the noted lay Buddhist scholar Han Qingjing 韓清淨 (1884–1949), as well as his associates Zhu Feihuang 朱芾煌 (b. 1877) and Jiang Weiqiao 蔣維喬 (1873–1958). Lin may also have been part of the Faxiang Research Group (Faxiang yanjiuhui 法相研究會) organized by Han and Zhu in 1921, and he had definitely become a participant by 1927, when it was renamed the Three Periods Study Association (sanshi xuehui 三時學會). As with other Buddhist intellectuals of the time, the members of this group placed a special emphasis on the study of Buddhist Consciousness Only thought;²⁰ indeed, Lin’s writings on science and psychology appear to have been influenced by this philosophy.

Aside from the Three Periods Study Association, Lin maintained other connections in the Buddhist community. Having met Taixu in the capital in 1919, Lin continued his acquaintance with him over the years, exchanging letters with him and visiting him on Mount Lu 廬山 in 1937.²¹ Lin remained involved in Chinese Buddhism even into the last decade of his life. In 1950, after the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, Lin joined Juzan 巨贊 (1908–1984), Zhao Puchu 趙樸初 (1907–2000), and others as a founding member of the new, quasi-governmental Chinese Buddhist Association (Zhongguo Fojiao xiehui 中國佛教協會).²²

Lin was both a Buddhist intellectual and a member of the New Culture intelligentsia of Beijing. He demonstrated the overlap that existed between these circles usually thought of as so distinct. Lin’s contribution to Science and Philosophy of Life was important, regardless of his religious affiliation. However, understanding his study of Buddhism clarifies why he adopted certain positions. To this end, it is important to appreciate a few of the fundamental issues at stake in the discussions to which Lin contributed.

The articles eventually collected in Science and Philosophy of Life contained discussions of various philosophical issues important in the early 1920s. Although the authors whose works fill its pages did not always agree on the grounds for their debates, there are certain themes that emerge as central to their discussions. They discussed the definition of science, the nature of the scientific method, the philosophy of science, and the relationship between science and ethics. One area of much disagreement concerned the limits of the knowledge produced by and contained in science. Although everyone agreed in general that science was the application and result of the scientific method, they disagreed on the limits of that method. Empiricism thus emerged as an important theme. Many writers accepted the idea that knowledge flowed automatically from the application of a single scientific method rooted in the observation and measurement of phenomena.23 For Ding Wenjiang and his group, though, the scientific method became the ultimate technique for the apprehension of truth,²⁴ one whose universal application should brook no limitation. Lin was highly critical of this attitude.

Lin’s contribution to Science and Philosophy of Life, “On Reading Mr. Ding Zaijun’s Metaphysics and Science” (Du Ding Zaijun xiansheng de Xuanxue yu kexue 讀丁在君先生的《玄學與科學》), was first published in Shishi xinbao (時事新報) in 1923. Lin began his essay by critiquing Ding Wenjiang’s view that science can serve as an overarching system of truth. He referenced one of the lectures given by John Dewey in China wherein the American pragmatist philosopher had argued that, ever since Kant and Hegel, the possibility of a systematic philosophy had become impossible. Lin cited this in order to claim that Ding’s notion that science is a system of thought that can be used to reject other systems of thought was mistaken. In making claims that it could, Ding displayed a devotion to science, Lin argued, that was the same as a devotion to religion. Indeed, he twice accused Ding of acting like a “Pope,” making pronouncements about reality by fiat and holding to a dogmatic view of truth. Lin stated that all religions, with the exception of Buddhism, reject other systems of thought, such as philosophy and science.25 He did not elaborate on why he excluded Buddhism, a topic that he mentioned would better be discussed elsewhere. The rhetorical weight of Lin’s critique is best understood in the context of the antireligious fervor that was sweeping through the ranks of Beijing’s young intellectuals. For his part, Lin sought to highlight the dangers of any kind of monodevotionalism, be it to Allah or to science. Indeed, he even wrote that Ding was like Muhammad building his kingdom with a raised sword.²⁶

Having assailed Ding’s general attitude with these comments, Lin proceeded to a discussion of what was meant by “science” and the scientific method. Lin was deeply skeptical of the idea that either was a monolithic entity. Lin referenced the German philosopher and scientist Wilhelm Wundt’s (1832–1920) division of the sciences into three types: exact mathematical sciences, objective natural science, and subjective “spiritual science” (by which Wundt meant the human sciences, such as hermeneutics, phenomenology, and psychology).²⁷ Lin also referred to the German debate about whether to include certain fields—such as history and anthropology—under the heading of science. Lin’s point in raising these examples was that “science” was neither as simple nor as clear an entity as Ding had made it out to be.²⁸ In other words, Lin resisted the simple taxonomy of knowledge that Ding had set forth and sought instead to leave open the conversation about how knowledge should be classified.

Lin added further nuance to the concept of science by delinking science and the scientific method. He argued that there was more to science than simply its method; the scientific method was not tantamount to science. Just as science was not a clearly coherent entity, there was no one scientific method. If there were, Lin noted facetiously, we could use the methods of geometry to paint and make music, and call art and music geometry; and we could use the methods of mathematics in radio, and just call radio science and math.29 Here Lin’s examples are evidence of his limited knowledge of science, in that mathematics is necessary in electrical engineering; and, in fact, Lin fully admitted his lack of understanding of science at the end of the article.³⁰ However, he stood by his larger point that different disciplines utilize methods specific to those disciplines to answer the questions that they pose. Hence, science is more than simply a method. Lin again asked, if science were simply a method, then would not Christian Science, British Spiritualism, or the supernatural research carried out by Inoue Enryō 井上圓了 (1858–1919) in Japan also be considered legitimate sciences since they used scientific methods?³¹ It is not entirely clear whether Lin believed these practices to be legitimate sciences;³² however, given the rhetorical context of these statements, he seemed to be making the point that because the possibility existed that groups like Christian Science may utilize the methods of science but not be scientific, “science” cannot be entirely equated with its methods. Once again, Lin resisted scientism by undercutting Ding’s classification of science as a special kind of activity rooted in a specific methodology.

For Ding Wenjiang, the scientific method was defined by its deep practice of empiricism. But Lin disputed the claim that science was entirely empirical, stating that even the scientific method relied on certain assumptions and unproven ideas.33 Lin and other contributors to Science and Philosophy of Life thus adopted a fairly narrow understanding of “empirical” as the observation of phenomena with the human senses. While this allowed for the inclusion of data gained through the use of telescopes and microscopes, some of the authors, Lin included, considered other phenomena discussed in science as outside the scope of empiricism. Lin cited the shift in physics from an atomic view to a subatomic one as an example of science moving away from strict empiricism; he argued that in discussing electrons, scientists had already moved into the realm of supersensory phenomena. By discussing such supersensory phenomena, scientists seemed to have broken from their stated commitment to rigorous empiricism.³⁴ What this meant for Lin was that the rules about what was and was not science were not as hard-and-fast as Ding asserted. Just as Lin felt that Ding’s uncompromising standard of empiricism was not being universally applied within science, he also wondered how empirical scientists could reject the sensations felt during dreams as legitimate data about the world.³⁵ As Lin understood it, the scientistic worldview Ding promoted accepted only those truths that were gained as objective experience through the senses; yet this view was far too limited to deal with the reality of human experience of the world, which he considered subjective in nature and deeply connected to human psychology.

Lin Zaiping, Zhang Junmai, and others argued that those who supported scientism failed to see that science could never provide the ethical and aesthetic foundations necessary for a healthy society. What was required instead of slavish devotion to science alone was “philosophy of life.” In the talk that set off the flurry of exchanges captured in Science and Philosophy of Life, Zhang placed great emphasis on subjectivity, while painting science as simply objective in nature. The relative values of objectivity and subjectivity, as well as the possibility of subjectivity, were key themes to which many of these authors returned. Very much in accord with this, Lin took up a topic of great interest in the wider debates in his discussions of subjectivity focused on Ding’s reductionist approach to psychology.

The notion that the scientific method could provide answers to questions about all the phenomena of the world, even mental and emotional phenomena, was the driving factor behind discussions of the nature of human consciousness and psychology. These discussions generally formed around the question of whether or not the workings of the human mind were completely determined according to laws of cause and effect (yinguolü 因果律). Supporting the worldwide turn toward materialist and mechanistic behaviorist psychology, the proponents of scientism argued that human psychology followed specific rules of cause and effect, which, once understood, could provide complete explanations for the behavior and feelings of human beings without need for the positing of subjectivity and subjective values of the types advocated by Zhang and others. It was for this reason that psychology was frequently invoked in the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates. Arguments over modern psychology were not limited to the contributors to Science and Philosophy of Life; similar discussions prompted lay and monastic Buddhists associated with the Wuchang school, in which Taixu played a guiding role, to write a number of articles in the mid-1920s in which they used Consciousness-Only thought to criticize behaviorist psychology.36

Although his criticisms of mechanistic psychology were not overtly Buddhist, Lin wrote certain passages that reflect the influence of Buddhism on his thinking. As with all Ding’s critics, Lin was skeptical of Ding’s reduction of human psychology to physiological reactions, a position based on the assumption that there was a uniform objective reality. Lin argued that when looking at a bookcase, there are both objective and subjective aspects. He held that the color of the bookcase is in some sense produced by the reaction in our sense organs. Because our experiences of phenomena are thus always based on both subjective and objective factors, it is difficult to posit purely objective hypotheses about the natural world. One can see hints here of a view of perception derived from Consciousness-Only thought, a Buddhist philosophical school holding that cognition of an object occurs through the interaction of that which perceives (jianfen 見分) and that which is perceived (sefen 色分). Lin’s articulation of this understanding of perception, however, is couched in the language of the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates rather than that of Buddhist scripture.³⁷

Lin also raised several questions about modern psychology that would be taken up by other Buddhists in the next two years. He pointed out that neither Ding nor the entire field of mechanistic psychology had been able to explain certain psychological phenomena. The two questions that were commonly picked up later by Buddhists were What is memory? and Do we have subjective existence when we are not sensing anything? Answering these questions from the standpoint of Consciousness-Only, members of the Wuchang school argued that memory is synonymous with the karmic “seeds” (zhongzi 種子, Skt. bīja) that exist in consciousness, and that the interactions of the various levels of consciousness are the content of much of what we label “subjective experience.”³⁸ Once again, Lin did not directly mention Buddhist doctrine in this context, but it seems likely that the specific questions he raised about the limits of psychology were inspired by his study of Buddhism.

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

As already mentioned, Lin likened Ding Wenjiang’s devotion to science to that of a religious believer. He said that all religions, with the exception of Buddhism, reject other systems of thought. Lin’s idea that Buddhism was unlike all other religions was not atypical of Buddhists of his day, nor was it atypical of Lin’s own opinions. At the end of the same section in which he criticized Ding’s dogmatic faith in science, Lin stated that Buddhism teaches people to abandon attachments to self and to dharmas, but that Ding was attached to science in the hopes that it could be used to improve the hearts of human beings. This faith in science seemed unconvincing to Lin.40 Lin’s invocation of Buddhism does not fit smoothly within the overall flow of his argument; yet this is precisely the kind of brief comment that reveals the ideas running through his mind: when reaching for an example of negative aspects of human psychology, he looked beyond the examples given by Ding and Zhang in their writings to what Buddhism upheld as at the root of human problems.

The third time Lin mentioned Buddhism was as part of his argument against Ding’s idea that the sheer fact of being a scientist would guarantee that one would also be a moral paragon for society. This and similar arguments demonstrate that Ding and the proponents of scientism were still concerned with questions of personal conduct and the public duty of scholars that had occupied Chinese thinkers since the time of Confucius. For Ding, it was science, a xue 學, that was best suited to molding ethical citizens in a modern China. Lin commented that such a claim could not but destroy Asian culture. Even though science could be used to do good, this did not mean that it was impossible for scientists to go astray. Lin asserted that Indian Buddhist thought was fundamentally concerned with liberating people into a realm without hindrances and without limits, and that it could be regarded as one of humanity’s precious spiritual traditions. Still, he acknowledged that its superior qualities did not prevent its giving rise to what he referred to as the Chan Buddhism of lifeless meditation and wild speculation.41 Lin was likely not making a wholesale criticism of Chan per se; as mentioned, Lin showed great respect for the Chan master Jichan. Rather, his target was certain types of Chan discourse. The more salient point here is that Lin chose to include such praise for Buddhism. Even so, he was careful to use language acceptable among his peers in Beijing, referring to Buddhism as “Buddhist thought” (Fojiao sixiang 佛教思想), which, with the neologism sixiang, identified Buddhism as a system of philosophical thinking on a par with Western philosophy. Lin did not develop his views on Buddhism further in this essay but implied that it could be just as useful a resource as science for assisting in the reform of humanity. In the highly charged and secularized intellectual environment of Beijing’s New Culture thinkers, this was not a minor point to assert.

For all his criticism of scientism, Lin did not reject science itself. Lin felt it important to be clear that he disagreed with the claim that science was morally bankrupt and that it inherently led to struggle, killing, and war. The application of science needed to be controlled, and it should not be used by greedy businesspeople to make money or for violence or to kill others.⁴² These comments are a useful reminder that despite what Ding Wenjiang, Hu Shi, and others claimed, the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates were not about science but about defining the limits of the category of science. Lin could not accept the establishment of science as the sole arbiter of truth and values for the nation; but he did feel that it was valuable and should hold an important place in China. This attitude was shared by other thinkers who opposed the proponents of scientism. Despite their differences, there was a lot of ground that figures like Ding Wenjiang and Lin Zaiping shared with one another. The articles in Science and Philosophy of Life share a commitment to the idea of science and to many of the modern taxonomies of knowledge implicit in the discipline. Such notions were also adopted by other Buddhists writing at the time who have not normally been included as participants in the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates.

One of the main projects of modernity has been the ever-increasing compartmentalization of human life and activity and the cognitive shift implied in this subdivision of these larger wholes into smaller pieces. For example, industrialization is, in part, the process by which the work of production is reduced to specific steps, which can be repeated and amplified to great scales. This type of division and specialization also occurred in other realms, including government and science. One can look at the emergence in the middle of the nineteenth century of chemistry and physics as independent fields of study, with their own methods and objects of study, as indicative of this process of individuation.43 Wang Hui has pointed out that the adoption of science in China was not simply the process of adopting a suite of methodologies for the production of knowledge and assenting to the knowledge thus produced; it also entailed the assumption of a new schema for classifying all knowledge. Establishing in China clearly defined divisions of the institutions of knowledge, which placed them in coherent disciplines classified according to a universally adopted rubric, was an implicit element of the education reforms carried out in the first decades of the twentieth century, and this followed a process Chinese intellectuals had already begun in the late nineteenth century.⁴⁴ This move toward a new classification of knowledge was also a key component of the New Culture and May Fourth Movements.

This classification operated on two levels. At a lower taxonomic rank,⁴⁵ various scientific disciplines, such as geology, biology, and physics, were placed alongside one another as subtypes of science. At a higher taxonomic rank, such distinctions disappeared and science as a whole was placed alongside religion and philosophy. The lower-level classificatory schema explicit in science was accepted with little serious emendation in China. The latter type of classification, however, was much debated during the 1920s: What counted as religion, what as philosophy, and what as science? And which was better for doing what in society? As shown in the preceding discussion of Lin Zaiping, questions such as these were central to the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates.

The best early examples we have of this drive to inculcate in the Chinese people this new ordering of knowledge are found in textbooks. To note just one example, in 1885 the British missionary Joseph Edkins (1823–1905) completed his translation into Chinese of Harry Roscoe’s updated Science Primers. These came out the following year in China as Primers of Western Learning (Xixue qimeng 西學啓蒙), becoming a popular introduction to science. Devoted to an overview of Western learning, the first book in this series features Edkins’s careful division of Western learning into twenty-three subsciences. This list included categories new to China, such as chemistry, physics, and physiology.46 Certainly scholars in China had pondered some of the questions studied in these disciplines before the late nineteenth century, but what Edkins introduced was a modern schema for dividing knowledge into discrete fields. Such classification remained a theme in science textbooks published in China and became more prevalent with the education reforms of 1905 that saw modern science identified as a key component of the curriculum.⁴⁷

Naming and delimiting the proper new boundaries of the disciplines of knowledge were central to Chinese modernity, and, as such, they were underlying themes in the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates. In one sense, the hegemony of the modern classification of knowledge was accepted by all the participants in these discussions. They did not always agree which fields should be counted within the total schema, but they generally assented to its basic contours. As Wang Hui argues, even the efforts to establish ethics and aesthetics as legitimate fields of knowledge by Zhang Junmai and those allied with him served only to reinforce the claims of universality made by the proponents of scientism as they merely supported the idea that only those forms of learning that could be listed as subcategories of the overarching category “science” were deemed legitimate. Thus, although certain aspects of the future shape of Chinese modernity were very much up for debate, such as the relative significance of materialism, by the mid-1920s most intellectuals had accepted the value of Western classifications of knowledge. This was not limited to the contributors to Science and Philosophy of Life.

A modernity predicated upon the acceptance of new classifications of knowledge centered on science can be seen clearly in Buddhist works from the 1920s onward. In articles on Buddhism and science in the Buddhist press of the 1920s, many Buddhist writers not only thought it necessary to define science but also expressly identified it as a class of learning (xue 學) akin to philosophy (zhexue 哲學), which was also a newly defined and much-debated category in China. The idea that science was a type of learning was a point easily made. It was supported by the very etymology of the modern Chinese word for “science,” kexue 科學, which, following its introduction around 1900, eventually replaced such previously used terms as bowu 博物 and gezhi 格致.48 In defining science, Buddhists followed another tendency common at the time: they split the word kexue into its parts in order to identify science as a branch of learning (xue) concerned primarily with the classification (ke) of fields of knowledge. More than one Buddhist writer followed the pattern established in Edkins’s Primers and other early translations by pointing out that science was made up of a number of subfields, such as chemistry (huaxue 化學), physics (wulixue 物理學), and psychology (xinlixue 心理學). Reference to such scientific disciplines by Buddhist writers became commonplace by the 1920s, just a few decades after they had been adopted and defined in Chinese.⁴⁹

Although Buddhists were willing to accept the subdivision of the monolithic entity science itself into multiple fields, classification at a higher taxonomic rank was subject to much debate. What constituted or fell within the purview of science and what means of knowing could exist outside it, such as in philosophy or religion, were central issues during the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates. For Buddhist intellectuals writing at this time, one of the most pressing issues they faced was the need to clarify the relationship of something called Buddhism to the fields of philosophy, science, and religion. Was Buddhism one type of religion? Or did it exist as its own category, at the same level as religion and philosophy. In adopting modern taxonomic schemas, Buddhists had to strike a careful balance. Even as they accepted the categories of science, philosophy, and religion, they were compelled to differentiate their tradition from those other categories, particularly in light of the “antireligion” (fei zongjiao 非宗教) movement of the 1920s.⁵⁰

As Vincent Goossaert and David Palmer have shown, members of the May Fourth Movement sought not simply to abolish superstitious practices such as spirit possession and fortune-telling, nor to simply confiscate the property of wealthy temples; their goal was the reformation of society along modern, secular lines, and their target, “religion,” was an abstraction of unclear definition. Their concept of “religion” was still associated primarily with monotheistic religions in general and Christianity in particular. The association of Christianity with foreign colonialism and with antievolutionary views of nature was strong in China, and these factors led to a series of severe anti-Christian campaigns from 1922 onward.51 Because these campaigns were carried out under the banner of “antireligion,” it became incumbent upon religious believers, such as Buddhists like Lin Zaiping, to place themselves outside the category of religion.⁵² Classification had consequences in Republican China. Although they disputed and debated the place of Buddhism within these schemas, Buddhists did adopt a number of elements of the modern classification of knowledge in their writings, thereby extending the reach of those ideas.

In order to assess the manner in which Chinese Buddhists adopted modern classifications of knowledge, one can consider the writings of Buddhist intellectuals of the mid-1920s at the peak of the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates. Buddhist intellectuals dealt with these schemas in three ways. First, they consented to, and even promoted, the notion that knowledge about the world was divided into specific disciplines, each dedicated to a certain class of phenomena, such as geology, astronomy, and zoology. Second, they attempted to create a place for science within Buddhism, and thus a place for Buddhism in modern China, by mapping modern sciences onto certain traditional Indian disciplines of knowledge. Finally, they contested the elements of the modern discourse that identified Buddhism as just another entry in the taxon “religion.”

The acceptance of modern classifications of scientific disciplines can be seen in two important works by the prolific monk Taixu. The first of these, titled “The Buddha Dharma and Science” (Fofa yu kexue 佛法與科學), is one of the most influential statements about the relationship between Buddhism and science to appear in print in China in the 1920s and 1930s. This piece was originally one of several talks that Taixu gave at Dalin 大林 Temple on Mount Lu in the summer of 1923 as part of the first meeting of the World Buddhist Federation (shijie Fojiao lianhe hui 世界佛教聯合會).53 The article popularized the notion that certain discoveries of science had been predicted in Buddhist scriptures. For instance, Taixu held that the Buddha had observed both microscopic life and the vastness of space with its many stars and planets. These became common points emphasized by Buddhists when arguing for the lack of contradiction between science and Buddhism.⁵⁴

Influential among Buddhist intellectuals, Taixu’s article is an example of a Buddhist attempt to participate in the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates in the broad sense. Delivered in mid-1923 when many of the articles of the debate appeared in print, the title of Taixu’s talk echoed the titles of both Ding Wenjiang’s critique of Zhang Junmai’s views, “Metaphysics and Science” (Xuanxue yu kexue 玄學與科學), and Liang Qichao’s “Philosophy of Life and Science” (Renshengguan yu kexue 人生觀與科學). On a deeper level, he tackled some of the same themes discussed in other works from the debates, including the definition and limits of science. Taixu’s definition of science contained six parts and was predominantly concerned with its empirical nature. Most significantly, Taixu built his definition on the notion that science was based on the careful and orderly division of things into classes, and that each new class of learning is dedicated to the study of the phenomena in its particular class.⁵⁵ Science, in his view (as for its proponents), was predicated upon the methodical division of fields of study into specialized disciplines.

Early in 1924, several months after giving his lecture at Mount Lu, Taixu wrote an essay directly addressing the issues raised in the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates. Titled “The Science of the Philosophy of Life” (Renshengguan de kexue 人生觀的科學), it was published as a monograph in 1925 by Taidong Books, which had published Philosophy of Life Controversy that same year. In his essay, Taixu responded specifically to the arguments made by Zhang Junmai, Ding Wenjiang, and other contributors to Science and Philosophy of Life. This represented an unabashedly Buddhist reaction to the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates. Taixu outlined his understanding of what a philosophy of life should be and how it was not contrary to science. He then devoted nearly a third of his piece to defining the fields of religion, science, and philosophy in relation to one another. Science, he held, was a process of experience, analysis, hypothesis, and experiment. He also argued that science should be based on a class-by-class analysis of phenomena, though, he felt, some of its modern proponents (presumably Ding and his cohort) upheld an overly narrow, limiting understanding of science and its categories of analysis. As in his earlier “The Buddha Dharma and Science,” Taixu placed a great deal of emphasis on sensory experience (ganyan 感驗), establishing it as the key concept around which his arguments about the differences between various fields in the sciences revolved.56

Another example of Buddhist acceptance of the classification schemas of modern knowledge was the 1925 article “We Ought to Use the Methods of Science to Arrange Buddhist Theories” (Ying yong kexue zhi fangfa yi zhengli Foxue shuo 應用科學之方法以整理佛學說), written by the monk Manzhi 滿智 (dates unknown), who worked closely with Taixu in the 1920s and 1930s and was among the first students at the latter’s Wuchang Buddhist Seminary.57 Manzhi argued that science could help in the study of Buddhism precisely because of the orderly classification of knowledge that it represented. He began his article by emphasizing the multiplicity of schools and scriptures that existed in Chinese Buddhism and the difficulty that this embarrassment of riches had posed, and continued to pose, to the Buddhist community.⁵⁸ Thereupon, he argued that Buddhists could and should begin to use science to classify and organize the Buddhist canon. He noted that, just as the masters of old had studied the canon according to schemas centered on specific teachers or specific texts, contemporary people should use the “scientific method” to divide and edit the body of scripture to form a new canon. He even provided a sample list of the divisions of this new canon, each of which would be identified with a modern field of study.⁵⁹ Most of these fields had been introduced in China only in the previous half century; geography, biology, geology, hygiene, religious studies, sociology, politics, law, ethics, physical education, physical science, anthropology, medicine, math, and engineering were all included. His list suggests that Manzhi was attempting to show off his erudition by mentioning as many of the new fields of study as he could. Manzhi’s essay is clear evidence of the degree to which some Buddhists had begun to internalize and propagate modern taxonomies of knowledge. In convincing the Buddhist audience for which he was writing of the value of science for Buddhists, Manzhi took it as a given that science contained many branches and that reclassifying Buddhist ideas and texts according to these branches would naturally provide a greater understanding of Buddhism.

Yet, although Manzhi thought science useful, he made it clear that he did not accept scientistic claims of the omniscience of either science or the scientific method for discovering truth about the world. Science, he observed without further comment, has its limits.⁶⁰ He also took pains to explicitly domesticate the sciences he wanted to use in Buddhist studies. He did this by prefacing each term in his list with the phrase “Buddhacized” (Fohua 佛化). Thus, hygiene became “Buddhacized hygiene” (Fohua weishengxue 佛化衛生學), and sociology became “Buddhacized sociology” (Fohua shehuixue 佛化社會學). Exactly what Manzhi meant by these terms is not clear, but it is evident that he accepted that the classificatory schema of science could make Buddhist scripture more accessible. For Manzhi, then, science was not the ultimate arbiter of truth, but the modern disciplines of knowledge that it included were a path toward greater understanding. Manzhi worked from the premise that Buddhists should adopt the specialized approach to knowledge present in science. Others, such as Taixu and the Beijing-based Buddhist layman Liu Xianliang 劉顯亮 (dates unknown), argued that science, and some of its subdivisions, had already been present in Buddhism.

In 1920s China, locating science within the Buddhist tradition provided the benefit of giving Buddhists an intrareligious justification for studying and promoting science. More important, it also provided evidence to those outside Buddhism, especially to critics of religion, that Buddhism was suitably distant from superstition and thus suitably modern for the citizens of the nation. Both Taixu and Liu Xianliang stressed the importance of science for Buddhists, and each encouraged Buddhists to study and promote science for the good of both Buddhism and the world.⁶¹ These were not absolute claims; both men declared that science was limited in some fundamental ways, but both used modern schemas of knowledge in their promotion of science to Buddhist audiences.

The claim that science could be found in the Buddhist scriptures required the mapping of modern classifications of knowledge onto traditional Buddhist ones. In making the case that Buddhists should study science, each man found modern science in the Buddhist canon by identifying it with the “five arts” (wuming 五明, Skt. pañca-vidyā) of ancient India, which are mentioned many times in Buddhist scripture. Liu cited the Gaṇḍavyūha Sūtra, generally treated as a chapter of the Avataṃsaka Sūtra (Huayan ru fajie pin 華嚴入法界品) in China, which is the tale of the youth Sudhana’s travels in search of enlightenment.62 Taixu, for his part, glossed wuming as “the five sciences of ancient India” and gave a modern equivalent for each.⁶³ He also argued that Buddhism teaches the usefulness of the scientific method itself. Upon attaining enlightenment, a bodhisattva should promote the scientific method among all sentient beings. The reason given was that science can help dispel “deluded sentiments” (miqing 迷情). Although Taixu stopped just short of stating that science is the opposite of superstition, this common understanding lies beneath the surface of his comment.⁶⁴

By equating specific modern sciences with terms discussed in the Buddhist tradition, Liu Xianliang and Taixu sought to domesticate science for Buddhist use. In their view, science was neither new nor foreign; it was important not only as an inherent component of the Buddhist scriptural tradition but also for Buddhist soteriology. Showing that science was central to Buddhism rendered it safe for Buddhist use. By adopting this approach, these Buddhists were engaged in the conceptual remaking of their own tradition according to the dictates of Chinese modernity, but they were also remaking the modern in such a way that Buddhism was a part of it. Not only did Liu’s and Taixu’s statements show that Buddhism overlapped with modern categories but also their words enacted a change in the taxonomical location of certain components of Buddhism. By 1923, the value of the five arts was no longer derived solely from their appearance in the Buddhist canon; they now drew their legitimacy equally from the extent to which they could be made to match normative categories of Chinese modernity drawn from the discourses of science.

By the 1920s, some Buddhist writers were thus quite comfortable adopting aspects of a modern taxonomy of knowledge. Yet, for the reasons discussed, they were less willing to allow Buddhism itself to be so easily classed, particularly as a subdivision in the category of religion. This can be seen in an article by Liu Xianliang published September 10, 1923. Liu drew from a commentary on the Gaṇḍavyūha Sūtra to make the general argument that Buddhist youth ought to study science and that the “new youth” of Beijing (i.e., members of the May Fourth generation) needed to study Buddhism. He began the essay by acquiescing to the taxonomical demands of the day, offering his thoughts on the place of Buddhism with respect to the fields of not only religion and philosophy (as Ouyang Jingwu had done) but also science. “You can say that it [Buddhism] is philosophy, that it is science, that it is religion; you can also say that it is not religion, philosophy, or science.”65 In other words, Liu was aware of the demands of classification, but he refused to let Buddhism be easily subsumed within any one of the new categories of knowledge. He alluded to the fact that one line of argument common in China at the time claimed that as science was becoming more prevalent, it was pushing religion out of the way. Liu felt that the label “religion” was too narrow for Buddhism. Although he did not elaborate on what he meant, Liu stated that people who thought Buddhism was just religion or philosophy simply did not understand Buddhism. Liu thus questioned the utility of any of the categories of science, religion, and philosophy to encompass Buddhism, but such was their discursive power that he did not question the categories themselves.

Expanding the catchment area for the term “Science and Philosophy of Life Debates” provides a new window through which to view the role of science in 1920s Chinese intellectual history beyond Hu Shi, Ding Wenjiang, Zhang Junmai, and the other thinkers usually studied. It has allowed me to reveal the impact of modern classifications of knowledge on Buddhists who were writing at the time but whose voices have largely not been considered relevant. Just as all sides of the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates took the modern classifications of knowledge as a given, so too did some influential Buddhist intellectuals. And just as the limits of science and the scientific method were the subject of disagreement by those whose works were included in Science and Philosophy of Life, it was also a common theme for those whose thematically related works were not.

During the decade of the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates, Buddhist writers accepted and promoted many elements of the modern classification of knowledge, including a valorization of empiricism. Although they were generally resistant to the idea that Buddhism was merely another religion, they did accept the categories of science, religion, and philosophy generally and even sought to map some of those categories onto elements of traditional Buddhist learning. They also promoted the idea of the subdivisions within science, sharing this view with their peers among the “community of scientific discourse.” Through their participation in this community in the 1920s, Buddhist intellectuals were as active as their non-Buddhist peers in remaking the epistemic landscape of China, even as they altered the course of this remaking by resisting and redefining the propagation of new ideas about knowledge.

7. I have adopted this term from Wang Hui (“Discursive Community”), who uses it to indicate “a social community that uses scientific discourses that are distinctly different from the everyday language of its era” (84). Wang is not referring to the (then tiny) community of practicing scientists but to the range of thinkers and writers who used scientific terminology and scientific ideas in a wide variety of discourses outside science. It is in this latter sense that I use the term.

12. The first version, published in two volumes by Shanghai’s Dongya shuju, came out in December 1923. It contained twenty-nine articles along with prefaces by such notables as Hu Shi and Chen Duxiu. This was titled Kexue yu renshengguan 科學與人生觀 [Science and philosophy of life] and has become the standard version. Two years later, a nearly identical collection of articles was produced by Shanghai’s Taidong Books, this time as Renshengguan zhi lunzhan 人生觀之論戰 [The philosophy of life controversy]. This version included a preface written by Zhang Junmai instead of those by Hu and Chen. Both versions have been reprinted many times (though the former title has come to be used for both versions) even as recently as 2007.

20. Consciousness Only (weishi 唯識) is a school of Buddhist philosophy that takes as its primary object of inquiry the nature of consciousness and perception and the origin of delusion. Owing to its perceived systematicity, it experienced a revival among Buddhist intellectuals in the early twentieth century. For a detailed study of the causes for this revival and the forms it took, see John Makeham, ed., Transforming Consciousness: Yogācāra Thought in Modern China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

21. Taixu, “Ji Zaiping xiansheng han” 寄宰平先生函 [A letter sent to Mr. Zaiping], Haichaoyin 8, nos. 11–12 (January 2, 1928), reprinted in Minguo Fojiao qikan wenxian jicheng 民國佛教期刊文獻集成 [Collection of Republican-era Buddhist periodical documents], edited by Huang Xianian 黃夏年, 209 vols. (Beijing: Quanguo tushuguan wenxian suowei fuzhi zhongxin, 2006) (hereafter MFQ), 169:245–46; Lin Zaiping, “Lin Zaiping jushi han” 林宰平居士函 [A letter from layman Lin Zaiping], Haichaoyin 9, no. 1 (February 11, 1928), reprinted in MFQ, 169:367; Lin Zaiping, “Lin Zhijun xiansheng lai shu” 林志鈞先生來書 [A letter from Mr. Lin Zhijun], Haichaoyin 18, no. 8 (August 15, 1937), reprinted in MFQ, 197:333.

33. This critique would become common among Chinese Buddhists when writing about science. It was popularized several years later in the Buddhist writings of Wang Xiaoxu 王小徐 (1875–1948), an electrical engineer and founding member of Academia Sinica. See Erik Hammerstrom, “Science and Buddhist Modernism in Early 20th Century China: The Life and Works of Wang Xiaoxu,” Journal of Chinese Religion 39 (2012): 1–32; Erik Hammerstrom, “A Buddhist Critique of Scientism,” Chung-Hwa Buddhist Journal 27 (July 2014): 35–57.

52. Probably the most famous early example of a sustained attempt to deal with this question was Ouyang Jingwu 歐陽竟無, “Fofa feizongjiao feizhexue er jin shi suo bixu” 佛法非宗教非哲學而今時所必須 [The Buddha dharma is not religion, not philosophy, and it is what we need today], in Xiandai Foxue daxi 現代佛學大係 [Modern Buddhist studies series], ed. Lan Jifu 藍吉富, 51:59–75 (Taipei: Mile chubanshe, 1984).

57. Shi Yupu 釋育普 [Manzhi], “Ying yong kexue zhi fangfa yi zhengli Foxue shuo” 應用科學之方法以整理佛學說 [We ought to use the methods of science to arrange Buddhist theories], Haichaoyin 10 (December 5, 1925), reprinted in MFQ, 163:295–98. On Manzhi, see Yu Lingbo 于凌波, Zhongguo jindai Fomen renwu zhi 中國近代佛門人物志 [Biographical almanac of modern Chinese Buddhism] (Taipei: Huiju, 1999), 5:244–48.

59. This identification is made clear by the fact that all the examples of section headings ended with the word xue 學, which was a common way to mark modern disciplines of learning. The practice of adding xue to create terms for new forms of study dates back to the translation of texts by Western missionaries in China. See Lydia H. Liu, Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity—China, 1900–1937 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 350.