INTRODUCTION

JAN KIELY AND J. BROOKS JESSUP

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

Historical scholarship has until recently paid little attention to the Buddhist presence in the social, cultural, and political arenas of modern China. The tendency is not specific to Buddhism but rather symptomatic of a general marginalization of Chinese religion by historians of the modern period that has remained remarkably persistent across successive generations of scholarship. Whether the perspective has been Western impact or China centered, modernization or revolution, civil society or hegemonic state, political ideology or everyday life, social structures or discursive shifts, most research has tended to presume a predominantly secular Chinese modernity. Such consistent marginalization of religion in the agenda for the historical study of twentieth-century China stands in particularly striking contrast to the high priority it has long held among scholars of imperial China, as well as in scholarship on other parts of Asia in the modern period. One reason for this exceptional undercurrent of historiographical secularism is undoubtedly the ideological atheism of the Communist movement that claimed victory in 1949 and the antireligious violence it unleashed less than a generation later in the Cultural Revolution. Moreover, the assault on China’s religious heritage in the second half of the twentieth century was in many ways a culmination of, rather than a departure from, earlier manifestations of modern secularism in the first half of the century, such as the late Qing New Policy movement to convert temples into schools, the May Fourth rejection of divine authority, and the Nationalist state campaigns against superstition. In other words, historiographical secularism in scholarly research has derived its longevity in part from the apparent triumph of an empirical secularism in portions of the historical record emphasized by certain narratives influential among both Chinese and Western scholars.

Recently, however, the explosive revitalization of Chinese religious activity during the past few decades in the People’s Republic of China, as well as in Taiwan and Hong Kong, has rapidly raised the visibility of religion in the modern period as a whole. A new body of religious studies scholarship has emerged to challenge long-standing social scientific assumptions of secular modernity.6 Recent work by such scholars as Vincent Goossaert and Xun Liu on Daoism, David Palmer and David Ownby on redemptive societies, Adam Chau and Thomas Dubois on local village religion, Lian Xi and Daniel Bays on indigenous Christianity, and others has raised new questions about how Chinese religious life has changed and adapted, rather than simply declined, under modern conditions.⁷ This scholarship has sought primarily to trace the transformation of religious traditions, communities, practices, and institutions under the impact of modern ideologies and social processes such as the spread of nationalism, the growth of the capitalist economy, and the rise of the secular state. Particular emphasis has been placed on the role of the state in redrawing the boundaries of legitimate religious activity according to newly imported categories of modern governance, including “religion” (zongjiao 宗教) and “superstition” (mixin 迷信).⁸ By bringing to light such religious phenomena as sprawling redemptive societies, urban self-cultivation markets, and refashioned temple festivals, this scholarship has begun to map out a vast and shifting religious landscape in the modern period that went virtually unrecognized until quite recently.

The study of modern Chinese Buddhism, although rarely integrated with this religious studies scholarship, has also been centered primarily on the transformation and reinvention of religious traditions and has recently been spurred by their heightened visibility in China today.9 Beginning with the classic studies by Holmes Welch,¹⁰ most scholars have focused on aspects of the so-called Buddhist revival of the Republican era, in which elite monks and laypersons attempted to defend Buddhist institutions from their detractors and reform them in ways relevant to modern social conditions.¹¹ Subsequent work by Don Pittman, as well as research by Eyal Aviv, Erik Hammerstrom, and Justin Ritzinger, among others, has taken an intellectual-history approach to this subject by examining how important Buddhist thinkers of the era reinterpreted Buddhist doctrinal traditions, often in response to modern ideologies like anarchism or scientism.¹² Other scholars, including Francesca Tarocco, Jan Kiely, Gregory Scott, and Brooks Jessup, have highlighted the innovative results of Buddhist participation in mechanized printing, modern songwriting, and other new cultural and social practices that were concentrated in twentieth-century Chinese cities.¹³ The work of Xue Yu and James Carter has emphasized that such adaptations of Buddhist traditions, whether through intellectual discourse or cultural production, were often shaped by the demands of modern nationalism, and Gray Tuttle has demonstrated that Han Buddhist nationalism found a particularly important political relevance by facilitating the incorporation of Tibet into the Chinese nation-state.¹⁴ At the same time, Raoul Birnbaum has shown Buddhist practice traditions to have had an altogether different kind of relevance as a source of vital authenticity for individuals to meet the existential challenges of living in modern society.¹⁵

The legacy of these Republican-era Buddhist adaptations and innovations is particularly prominent in the international Buddhist organizations of contemporary Taiwan, which have been the subject of much recent research.¹⁶ Meanwhile, we are beginning to gain a clearer understanding of the post-Mao-era Buddhist revitalization in the People’s Republic of China from the fieldwork-based studies of anthropologists and sociologists like Gareth Fisher, Ji Zhe, Dan Smyer Yü, and Alison Denton Jones.¹⁷ Nevertheless, much work remains to be done throughout this burgeoning yet still nascent field of study, particularly in exploring underresearched periods such as the War of Resistance through the Mao era; social groups, including women and non-Han minorities; and geographic areas beyond the urban centers of China proper. Future research should also shed light on connections and comparisons with non-Buddhist religious traditions in China, as well as with the global Buddhist modernisms of other parts of the world and in overseas Sinophone communities.

Although the present volume contributes to redressing some of these issues, its main goal is to build on existing scholarship by pushing beyond the limitations of the religious studies framework to highlight some of the new vantage points that the study of Buddhism opens on modern Chinese history as a whole. Its contributors include specialists in religions of modern China, premodern Chinese Buddhism, and modern Chinese history, all of whom are pioneering new research to recover the dynamic and creative roles played by Buddhists and Buddhism in modern China from the early twentieth century to the present.18 Grounded in fresh archival and other primary sources, as well as ethnographic fieldwork, the resulting chapters assembled here are case studies that share more than an interest in related subject matter. They clarify in detail formative processes and distinctive endeavors not just vital to the making of particular forms of modern Chinese Buddhism and Buddhist experience but also revealing of significant, long overlooked consequential Buddhist presences, interventions amid, and contributions to the historical development of China after 1900. While attentive to major discursive, social-economic structural shifts and political change, and indebted to the recent state-centered approach to studying the restructuring of modern religion in China, the authors take as their starting points particular individuals, institutional and social communities, and their projects, practices, expressions, and narratives. From this level of empirical grounding, they reconstruct the crucial generative significance adhering to the production and circulation of, investment in, and commitment to social-cultural meaning in the contexts of particular times and places.

RETHINKING BUDDHIST “REVIVALISM”

Buddhism at the dawn of the twentieth century in China was not a single institutionally or conceptually unified, or even thoroughly coherent, entity. Rather, just as for Liang Qichao, it was a deeply historically and socially integrated array of conceptual, institutional, and customary cultural resources, some of which were ordered by various sects, ordination lineages, monastic codes, monasteries, temples, and textual traditions. Out of the voluminous Buddhist textual sources of scriptures, chants, and ritual texts came sophisticated philosophical forms of rhetoric, logic, dialectics, metaphysics, and ethics, as well as theories of universalism and transcendence. Flowing not just from texts but also through artistic and dramatic expression and ritual practice were the Buddhist concepts of cosmic cycles, karmic cause and effect, reincarnation, and salvation. Similarly widely circulated were images and narratives of supernatural beings—Buddhas, arhats, bodhisattvas, Māra, asuras, and so forth—most of whom were popularly thought of as gods (shen 神), as well as their spiritual realms, notably the Pure Land and the Buddhist hells. Much of Buddhism was experienced through ritual practices of recitation, self-cultivation, and vegetarianism and known through a panoply of rites (especially of repentance, protection, and the “white rites” for the dead). Well known were the numerous Buddhist festival days in the annual calendar and empire-wide and regional geographies of sacred space, notably sacred mountains, to which many traveled on pilgrimage. And, during more than a millennium, Buddhism had interacted with popular cults as well as the classical Confucian tradition and organized Daoism and was also woven thoroughly into the finest and most prevalent forms of cultural production (including art, architecture, theater, and literature). Moreover, despite suffering suppression at times, it was a religious tradition (jiao 教) often supported by social elites and appropriated by the imperial state as a means of reinforcing legitimacy. In all its guises, Buddhism was present at nearly all levels of Chinese life, often as a creative, dynamic element.19

This did not abruptly cease in 1900, nor did it wither away because of the rise of foreign imperialist encroachment, the collapse of the Qing dynasty and the imperial system, the incipient formation of the modern Chinese state, the emergence of new forms of capitalism and industrialization, or the spread of secularist and materialist discourses associated with modernity. Yet the late imperial lineage society, as John Lagerwey points out in reference to the work of David Faure, “contributed mightily to the impression received by Westerners … that Buddhism and Daoism were degenerate and that China was ‘Confucian’”²⁰ It was many of the offspring of lineage elites, often educated abroad, in Christian missionary schools and the new secondary schools and universities, who turned against both Confucian culture and the religious traditions, seeming, from a certain perspective, to be completing a march toward Chinese secular modernism. Against this backdrop, it is little wonder that the burgeoning religious activism that has been called the Buddhist revival caught the eye of Karl Ludvig Reichelt and, later, of Holmes Welch and continues to appear to scholars today as the most visible portion of twentieth-century Chinese Buddhism.²¹

The contributors to this volume maintain no illusions that what has often been gathered under the label “Buddhist revival” constituted a single, coherent movement, let alone was representative of all that was significant about Buddhism in the modern era. Still, we devote much attention to revivalist projects of clerics and laity, in large part because the social, cultural, and political dynamism evident therein has so long been ignored.22 The reconstruction era following the mid-nineteenth-century Taiping-war cataclysm, especially in the Lower- and Mid-Yangzi regions, was accompanied by major projects of monastery and temple reconstruction and construction and Buddhist scripture recovery and reproduction. From around 1900, there began to appear a remarkable number of prominent monks and lay devotees, who led and inspired reforms of Buddhism, new religious enthusiasm, and engagement with society and politics at the moment of China’s dramatic and turbulent formation as a nation-state. Impelled and influenced by Protestant Christian missionary activism and models of modern religion, and the example of Japanese Buddhists as well, some of the Buddhist revivalists were among the most successful religious leaders in establishing organizations, structures, and self-definitions of organized religion in negotiation with Republican government authorities and thus succeeding in rendering Buddhism the Chinese religion most “legible” to the modern state.²³ In the first decade of the twentieth century when the imperial state abandoned the civil service examination system and began to relinquish some of its prerogatives with respect to religion, Buddhist activists launched new seminaries, charitable primary schools, and orphanages.²⁴ Then, with the founding of the Republic in 1912 came new national-level Buddhist associations for the protection of Buddhist interests, vigorous religious movements led or inspired by clerics, a proliferation of lay-devotee associations, the rise of a modern Buddhist press, and wide-ranging philanthropic enterprises.

This Buddhist activism was unquestionably central to the religious boom of the early Republic and the conceptual and organizational transformative fashioning of a prominent public Buddhism, in part negotiated with an emerging modern state incipiently seeking to reorder society. In the course of making new forms and new places for themselves as Buddhists in an emerging modern Chinese society, these Buddhists, this volume contends, contributed actively to key processes of both social-cultural and political development in the making of modern China.

FORMATION OF SOCIAL COMMUNITIES

The lack of attention and significance scholars have accorded to these Buddhist developments has seemingly had much to do with standpoints formed in relation to much more than a simple indifference to religion. Not just contrasting analytical approaches but also differences in geographic and thematic focus as well as reliance on different kinds of historical documents have resulted in widely varying assessments of the Buddhist revival. For instance, even though the most impressive recent studies to illuminate civic social-welfare projects in Shanghai during the first half of the twentieth century acknowledge the involvement of Buddhist individuals and institutions, they assign them little significance in the larger story of civic activism.25 This contrasts sharply with the studies by some of the scholars represented in this volume, which have demonstrated that the Buddhist contribution to such civic activism in Shanghai and beyond matches, and in some cases surpasses, that of native-place, Christian, and internationally sponsored groups.²⁶ Meanwhile, from the distinct perspective of his study of the Shanghai Daoist-modernist Chen Yingning, Xun Liu describes the same Buddhist revivalism as a “tremendous success” involved in “daring engagement with the new and modern” and attaining a “dominance of religious discourse in the public sphere.” In Liu’s Shanghai, as in Ryan Dunch’s Republican-era Fuzhou, Buddhists represent the endogenous religious tradition most fully organized and influential in the discursive realm and in civic social-welfare and educational-enterprise activism to a level competitive with foreign-backed Christian movements.²⁷

A remarkable generation of clerical leaders and their monastic communities has a prominent place in this story, most notably the monks Jichan, Yekai, Dixian, Yinguang, Hongyi, Taixu, Tanxu, Yuanying, Xuyun, and Juzan.28 Yet it is increasingly evident that much of the Buddhist contribution to shaping new forms of urban civic organization and social activism, print and mass media culture, social-cultural identities and forms of expression, and broader discursive and political formations came from those in the new lay associations. Elite laymen were at the forefront of Buddhist educational, philanthropic, social-welfare, and print-media projects. Representing a new means of assembling and mobilizing urban elites for social action and, in many cases, successfully negotiating with state authorities, the lay associations, many termed householder groves (jushilin 居士林), forged connections with one another across regions and throughout the nation as well as vertical linkages between coreligionists of different socioeconomic and educational backgrounds. At the heart of this was a project of social-community formation—something for which Buddhists had long been known in China because of their monastic communities, lay devotion societies, and communities of clerics, worshippers, and patron donors formed around temples and monasteries.²⁹ As the work of Brooks Jessup shows, where we once least suspected it in China’s most cosmopolitan, modernized city, Shanghai, the lay Buddhist elite and their associations rose to become among the most formidable forces of Chinese civic leadership in the city in the first half of the twentieth century.³⁰ Accounting for the social meaning invested by modern elites into this consequential project of Buddhist activism alters the historical image of Republican Shanghai. When taken together with recent work on redemptive societies and Christian and Daoist organizations, it affirms the significance of the religious dimension to the history of urban modernity in twentieth-century China.

These urban-based Buddhist associations and communities, moreover, further constituted themselves and extended their reach through participation in wider webs of Buddhist networks linking clerics and laity of many sorts throughout the country. The common term “Buddhist circles” (jie) aptly fits R. Keith Schoppa’s designation of such Republican-era “subcultures” as “coalescences of many networks and groups based on a variety of personal connections and usually linked to other subcultures by individuals.”31 Indeed, leading figures of the Buddhist circles, such as Wang Yiting, Xiong Xiling, and Nie Yuntai, participated in a bewildering array of different kinds of Buddhist and non-Buddhist networks.³² Moreover, as with nonreligious groups, early Republican Buddhist revivalists pursued their social linkages, community formation, and public expression through their own publishing enterprises. So, even as they continued a tradition in which textual reproduction was a vital act of religious ritual practice and propagation, Buddhist activists vigorously built up their own flourishing print culture centered in and adopting the technologies and stylistic forms of China’s modern mechanized publishing center of Shanghai. Along with Christian-originated ventures, Buddhist publishers and editors had a leading part in the significant contribution of religious groups to the formation of modern Chinese print culture in the first half of the twentieth century.³³

QUESTS FOR CULTURAL MEANING

Underlying these new forms of community- and social-network formation were exercises in cultural positioning and identity construction aimed at engaging with and finding a place in the dramatic changes of the day so often associated with modernity. As much as continuities in modes of subject formation remain evident and Buddhist revivalists often reveled in “tradition,” many Shanghai lay Buddhists were among the most conspicuous of the many trying to figure out how to live meaningful Buddhist lives relevant to an emerging modern China. Even as twentieth-century Buddhist-conversion narratives often reveal long-standing tropes of inspiration, such as profound realizations brought on by reading scriptures, serious illness or other personal trauma, and dreams and visions, the assumption of Buddhist identities often had much to do with concerns born of a turbulent era of dramatic transformation. The quest for ethical values, ritual and spiritual-cultivation practices, and transcendent meaning in a chaotic world, while still living a public existence in the new urban order, often led to Buddhism.

The multiple ways that a wide range of figures drew upon the thick layers of existing cultural resources to come to live various kinds of modern Buddhist lives in twentieth-century China have recently been elaborated in studies by James Carter on the northern clerical leader Master Tanxu, Raoul Birnbaum on Master Hongyi, Geremie Barmé on the prominent cartoonist and writer Feng Zikai, and Paul Katz on the Shanghai business leader, philanthropist, and painter Wang Yiting.34 These narratives reveal prominent Buddhist lives being lived at the pinnacle of Shanghai’s “golden age of the bourgeoisie,” at the heart of a significant source of May Fourth radicalism, and in the circles of modernist Shanghai-based cultural figures and editors.³⁵ Some were clearly not turning to Buddhism as a refuge but rather as a rich moral-spiritual source to fuel not just social and cultural but also political activism. Indeed, in his autobiography, the well-known military officer and political figure Chen Mingshu recalls that his turn toward Buddhism as a Guangdong Army officer and self-identified revolutionary in Guangzhou and Nanjing during the spring and summer of 1922 came at a time when “studying Buddhism had become fashionable; many revolutionaries talked about and made a big deal out of Buddhism.” Chen describes radical military officers and revolutionaries joining well-known scholars at lectures on Buddhism by Ouyang Jian in a period when they were also much interested in the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates (discussed by Erik Hammerstrom in this volume), Marxism, and other outflows of the New Culture.³⁶

At the other end of the political spectrum, it has long been noted that many early Republican militarists (“warlords”) claimed to support Buddhism and, especially after falling from power, sought repentance, karmic renewal, or public self-justification as avid lay devotees. The major militarist Duan Qirui even went so far as to refer to his fellow warlords as “reincarnated asura kings, here to fulfill the great kalpa,” suggesting that the death and destruction they wrought was integral to the cosmic Buddhist process.37 Certainly it comes as no surprise that the celebrated “righteous assassin” Shi Jianqiao, studied by Eugenia Lean, so readily planned her revenge attack in 1935 on the retired militarist Sun Chuanfang at the most reliable site of his public appearances—the Tianjin Buddhist householder grove where he performed his regular devotions. More remarkable, perhaps, is Shi Jianqiao’s subsequent conversion to Buddhism, for which she became a visible spokeswoman. Then, there was the Nationalist military internal security chief Dai Li, surely a figure fearsome beyond any warlord, who, as Frederic Wakeman has shown, befriended Buddhist clerics and privately practiced Buddhist self-cultivation.³⁸ Meanwhile, before urban cinema audiences, just a year before her tragic suicide in 1935, the film star Ruan Lingyu appeared in Sea of Fragrant Snow (Xiangxuehai 香雪海) as a good young wife and mother who, keeping her vow to the Buddha for the safety of her family, leaves them to become a nun. Later recalling how he had mockingly questioned Ruan about her vegetarian meals and burning incense before Buddhas while filming on location at Putuoshan Island and at Xiyuan Monastery in Suzhou, the director Fei Mu recorded her timeless response: “Director Fei, don’t laugh at me. I know you don’t believe in Buddhas. In fact, I don’t really believe in Buddhas; this is just a way in which I place hope in something, really hope that there are gods who can protect me, make it so I can live on peacefully and happily.”³⁹ These examples of notable variations in modern Chinese Buddhist expressions of identity and affinity leave much to be fathomed; indeed, the ground of the deeply personal, private histories of elite lives lived in Buddhist ways has only begun to be excavated.

BUDDHISM IN LOCAL SOCIETY

Much more research is also needed in many more parts of China to explore the multiple forms of Buddhism among the populace after 1900, a subject that only a few chapters in this volume touch upon.40 Such studies must push beyond the common elite-nonelite division that presumes that Buddhism in local society was lost within an undifferentiated mass of syncretic religion and ceased to have any significant social-cultural function. Although cases of Maitreyan millenarian groups, wandering mendicant monks, hereditary local temples, lay vegetarian and recitation societies, Pu’an exorcistic rituals, Mulian opera performances, as well as common Buddhist rites and festivals may have been dismissed as anachronisms and seem little changed since late imperial times, they surely also inhabited the twentieth century and so interacted with and had a part in the dynamics of historical change in their settings. The great centers of Chinese Buddhist monasticism—Wutaishan, Emeishan, Jiuhuashan, Tiantaishan, Putuoshan—as well as regional and even county-level sites of Buddhist worship have their own histories of encountering, and surviving or not, China’s turbulent twentieth century that mattered greatly to those inhabiting and oriented toward them. When we zoom into microregions within rural counties, moreover, we often find Buddhisms not fused indistinguishably in local religious tradition but, as in chapter 8, woven deeply into local society with distinct sacred geographies and a social presence clearly evident. For instance, in the area of Baiyangyuan (白楊源) in She county (歙縣) in southeastern Anhui studied by Wu Zhengfang and introduced by John Lagerwey and Wang Zhenzhong, the institutional and ritual roles of Buddhist temples and monasteries, Guanyin halls, periodic reconsecration ceremonies for Guanyin statues, annual Jiao ritual processions of Guanyin, and specially organized pilgrimages to distant Buddhist mountains were not merely prominent features of local life in the first half of the twentieth century; they were central to local social-cultural political competition and relationships between lineage groups and to translineage community solidarity in the face of drought and epidemic. And they were not untouched by elite reformist winds, state ordering projects, and the vicissitudes of social and political transformations. Yet animating such religiosity, much as with the everyday urban religiosity expressed by the Shanghai starlet Ruan Lingyu, was often an amorphous desire for a sense of successful living, peace, stability, and social-personal completion captured in the idea of good fortune. As Wang Zhenzhong distills it, “What really concerned them was basic attitudes in life: a heart of compassion and a causal system of just rewards.”⁴¹

Of course, much of what obscures and shapes our attempts to perceive Buddhism in local society derives from modern state and elite reformist projects, which officially or in public national culture delegitimized and legitimized various forms and expressions of religiosity. Much work remains to be done throughout China to disentangle the official account from actual conditions. Cases of reformist zealotry could, in different situations, reflect either moribund or dynamic local religious culture, and the successful establishment of apparently reformist organizations in localities may pose more questions than it resolves. A cautionary example, for instance, comes from early-Republican Daozhen county, Guizhou, where the new branch of the Buddhist association not only took little interest in reforming “superstitious” elements in local Buddhism but actually provided “Buddhist certificates” to local folk Daoists, granting them legitimacy before the Republican state.⁴²

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

ENGAGEMENT WITH MODERN IDEOLOGIES

Many lay Buddhist activists in Shanghai and other urban centers were engaging in projects of “tradition invention,” reproduction, and representation that were inextricable from a larger quest to make themselves relevant as Buddhists to a time and place infused with the aura of a dawning new age of the modern. This was closely related to their communal attempts to establish a legitimate social position and extend their influence. Mistaking style for substance, the contemporary English observer John Blofeld wrote of Republican lay Buddhists that they “cling to the Chinese past more than almost any other group of educated people.”44 There was also in the same period a group of prominent self-consciously modernist Buddhists. These included progressive clerics like Taixu and his reformist followers, including those interested in advancing gender equality through new education for nuns and the socially and politically radical figures like Juzan, devoted to building a Chinese Buddhism aligned with their perception of modernity.⁴⁵ Much has been made of the contention between conservatives and reformers in twentieth-century Chinese Buddhism. However, it is increasingly clear that both sides innovated and adapted a range of positions from which to engage the major discourses that took on such importance in an age of dramatic political, cultural, and social change. These were not discussions that Buddhists confined to their own circles. Indeed, there was considerable Buddhist engagement with broader intellectual debates about modern philosophy and science. The Buddhist intellectual Ouyang Jian sought to distill a Buddhist “consciousness-only” philosophy commensurate with modern Western epistemology, while Liang Shuming, Feng Youlan, Xiong Shili, Mou Zongsan, and even virulent anti-Buddhists like Hu Shi attempted to place Buddhist thought in the newly Western-modeled discipline of Chinese philosophy and draw from a new “Buddhology” inspiration for distinctive modern Chinese philosophical departures.⁴⁶ Recognizing the voices of Buddhist intellectuals in the halls of such New Culture discussions, as Erik Hammerstrom does in his chapter of this volume, should leave us wary of too easily typifying the New Culture intellectual movement as flatly secular and dully materialist in all its guises, or accepting that this rising intellectual discourse was the sole product of its most lucid advocates.

That Buddhists and Buddhism also had a role in advancing discourses of nationalism and “the project of nation-building” corresponds well with Prasenjit Duara’s observations about traditionalist religious “redemptive societies” and their alternative narratives of the nation.47 One impetus for this came with the quest for a new source of public morality sufficiently authentic and authoritative to serve as a basis for the “national character” of a new, modern Chinese citizenry that can be traced to Liang Qichao, Zhang Taiyan, and Cai Yuanpei’s interest in Buddhism in the years just after 1900; and it remained a theme decades later for figures like the senior Nationalist official Dai Jitao.⁴⁸ Activist monks, moreover, early on made a point of linking their progressive religious reformism with support for the project of national “awakening.” Some, like Zongyang, Qiyun, Quefei, and Tieyan, joined the revolutionary struggle against the Qing dynasty. Citizenship training and instruction in patriotism became part of the curriculum in reformist seminaries. Moreover, as Xue Yu has shown, increasing numbers of Buddhist monks during China’s long war of attrition with Japan formulated Buddhist theories to support a patriotic war of resistance.⁴⁹ James Carter’s study of Master Tanxu has provided the greatest insight into a Buddhist figure whose quest for ethical and spiritual revival in an era of nationalism and the birth of the Chinese nation-state in contention with foreign imperialism made of him a “cultural patriot.” Detailing the complexities and ambiguities of Tanxu’s endeavor amid the last stage of foreign-concession imperialism and Japan’s invasion and establishment of occupation client states, Carter concludes, “Buddhism could be a component of Chinese nationalism: both categories were adaptive and flexible.”⁵⁰ This point holds for, among others, Juzan and even Master Yinguang and his group, whose advocacy of nationalism within the vast, universal transcendent moral vision of Buddhism theoretically produced a form of it dedicated, above all, to religious ethical and spiritual values and so not to the triumph of nation-state power as an end in itself.⁵¹ This qualified, alternative notion of nationalism could not survive the total, multisided war of the 1930s and 1940s, let alone the Communist revolution, when, especially retrospectively, service to the nation and “the people” could be expressed only through the triumphant party-state. Moreover, in the course of events, Buddhist claims to the ethereal and transcendent often became fodder for messy, mundane politics.

ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MODERN STATE

Buddhists and Buddhism can be found in all kinds of politics and, particularly as a consequence of the massive midcentury transformations of war and revolution, finally had their twentieth-century experience inextricably linked to the rise of the modern Chinese state. Even as patterns of imperial-era state-Buddhist relations were not forgotten after 1900, there were a striking number of notable Buddhists who, as scholars from Holmes Welch onward have observed, immediately arose to engage the new Republican state on the new political terms taking shape in the early twentieth century. This included the founding of national Buddhist associations as well as provincial and subprovincial Buddhist organizing in order to negotiate with government officials primarily for the protection of Buddhist institutional properties and interests.52 At least in some parts of China, the Buddhist activists’ reforms and political interchanges with authorities produced an image of religion, as Rebecca Nedostup has put it, that was “state-legible” and so vitally redefining of state-society relations.⁵³ In addition, significant collaboration between Buddhist leaders and the state occurred in two other realms: political relations between the Chinese central government and the great Tibetan Buddhist–dominated border regions (Tibet, Qinghai, Inner Mongolia) and diplomacy with Asian nations maintaining strong Buddhist traditions. The long history of Buddhist religiously based relations between Beijing and Tibet, Gray Tuttle has shown, provided a starting point for modern Chinese-Tibetan relations evolving amid the changing contexts of newly arising categories and forms of the nation, the state, and the relationship between state and religion. In this arena as well as that of the new realm of international relations, Buddhism offered much that was useful to the modern state in all its twentieth-century forms.⁵⁴

There is much to explore in the seemingly multiple and varied forms of Buddhist and modern-state collaborations in the twentieth century. An increasing amount of evidence is revealing the numerous cases in which prominent monks, lay devotees, and government officials from the highest to the lowest ranks in the Republican era sought one another out, formed close personal relationships, and joined together on religious, charitable social-welfare, and governmental projects. The ranks of senior officials included fervent lay Buddhists, and many a former official, upon retirement, took a leading role in lay Buddhist associations and, in some cases, became monks. Even decidedly non-Buddhist Chinese political leaders often had close influential Buddhist family members, including Chiang Kai-shek (Jiang Jieshi) and Mao Zedong, both raised by Buddhist mothers.55 Jan Kiely’s account of the Buddhist movement in Zhejiang and Jiangsu prisons in the 1920s shows lay Buddhist local and provincial officials, local elites, and the powerful Shanghai lay associations studied by Jessup cooperating to raise funds, implement a Buddhist version of rehabilitative education, and expand and extend modern penal reform in the name of social order and Buddhist salvation.⁵⁶ This is hardly the only such case in which partnerships between lay Buddhist elites and the government reveal these religious elites to have been the more creative, well-organized party, exhibiting considerable social autonomy, leadership, and a capacity to raise resources and mobilize participation in large-scale, sustained enterprises. Buddhist revivalist activism was not simply reacting to an activist modern state; nor were these religious reformists seemingly much interested in resisting the state. Indeed, as long as the state did not seek to destroy their core religious practices and institutions, as had occurred initially in the early Nationalist period, Buddhist elites appear not to have been overly concerned with Buddhism’s subjection to state supervision and regulation. Moreover, advancing their own organizational and religious reformist agendas even as they supported state-building initiatives did not appear to strike them as an inconsistent or problematic stance. This experience in the Republican era, indeed, conditioned the Buddhist revivalist encounter after 1949 with the Maoist Communist state.

Even left-wing clerics like Juzan expected the new Communist state to be true to its publically moderate pronouncements and invitations to participate in the construction of the “New China.” A rationally reconstructed China, these Buddhists seem to have thought, would be consistent and welcoming of a rationalized Buddhism cleansed of the historical detritus of “superstition” and “feudalism” and devoted to a moral vision of equality, justice, and service to the nation. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) seemed to be drawing upon legitimating Buddhist resources in the manner of previous regimes and inviting Buddhist leaders to partner with them. In fact, however, these Buddhists were experiencing a new mode of revolutionary governance that dealt with them in accordance with Mao’s wartime reformulation of Marxist-Leninist “united front” theory, which linked CCP alliance with “bourgeois” forces to the eventual “struggle” of, and so discipline and transformation of, these allies.57 As the chapters in this volume by Xue Yu and Jan Kiely show, while Buddhist leaders in Beijing were co-opted to lead the diminishing of religion in the name of religion while affirming the ultimate truth and absolute authority of the CCP and its ideology, in local society Buddhists were brought into a party-directed program in the name of revolution that reduced the economic and social basis of institutional Buddhism. Although even this diminished and docile form of state-managed Buddhism suffered severely under the violent iconoclasm of the Cultural Revolution, it nevertheless survived to become the baseline for the party’s return to a united front approach to governing religion after the late 1970s.

Therefore, even as the contemporary religious effervescence in which various kinds of modern Chinese Buddhism have again burst forth in Chinese society has been commonly associated with the demise of the revolutionary state, the Buddhism of the long Reform Era bears the stamp of its initial reconstruction by the CCP state. It is little wonder, then, that much of the scholarship on contemporary Chinese Buddhism remains so centrally concerned with the state.⁵⁸ However, with the expansion of market-economic and social forces as well as increasing openness to regional and global interchange of all kinds, on a scale beyond the grasp of even a security state as massive as the one that exists in China today, the Buddhist story is already increasingly drawing our attention, as in Gareth Fisher’s research and recent studies of Taiwan, back to the social communal level and individual experience. Nevertheless, as our perspective shifts in relation to our context, we should keep in mind, as this volume suggests, the history of how a socially vital Buddhist activist movement contributed so readily to strengthening and, eventually, collaborating with a modern state that carried out the most thorough suppression of Buddhism in Chinese history.

STRUCTURE OF THE BOOK

This book is divided thematically and chronologically into three parts. Part 1 explores the Buddhist engagement with key aspects of the emerging Chinese modernity of the early twentieth century. Its three chapters show that by positioning themselves as participants in the modern city, debates about science, and the publishing industry, various types of Buddhists contributed to the production of significant new forms of sociocultural identities, communities, and discourses. Brooks Jessup’s chapter on the World Buddhist Householder Grove shows how early Republican urban Buddhist elites positioned themselves so deliberately and distinctively within the cosmopolitan setting of China’s most modern city. Closely examining the construction of the social space of the householder grove and the social practices pursued within it, Jessup reveals a striking motivational dynamic to this new kind of lay association that not only supported the rise of Buddhist social elite influence in Shanghai but also became a model for numerous similar associations that proliferated in cities and towns across China. In effect, these lay elites turned to Buddhism and collective ventures in its name inspired by an ambivalence toward the modern commercial, consumer-, and leisure-oriented aspects of Republican Shanghai society and a simultaneous strong desire to be moderns on their own terms. Their project of ethical-cultural positioning elevated probity and decorum of a distinctly modern disciplined form that, nonetheless, harbored at its core not a disguised secularism but a pulsating religiosity expressed in collective ritual and unmitigated supernaturalism. Moreover, even as they were much engaged with so many of the complexly layered sectors of Shanghai society and governance, these influential lay elites were committed to an ethical vision inhering in their salvationist beliefs that guided their comportment and social action and so asserted their social stance in cultural-ethical (and so critical) contrast to other elites and, indeed, to much of the society that surrounded them.

Set against the backdrop of broader intellectual discussions of Buddhism and Buddhist intellectual debates about modern philosophy and science, Erik Hammerstrom’s chapter examines the participation of Buddhist intellectuals in the most visible, central forums of the Science and Philosophy of Life Debates of the early 1920s that were so defining of the main modern intellectual current flowing out of the New Culture Movement. This was neither a matter of religious figures commenting on notable secular intellectual controversies within their own religious circles nor a generalized adaptation of modernist discourses; rather, Hammerstrom specifically presents evidence of Buddhist intellectuals thoroughly adopting and promoting modern scientific taxonomies of knowledge and pointedly valuing scientific empiricism. Hence, in an era when science represented, perhaps above any other single term, the ideal of modernity, these Buddhist intellectuals energetically joined in the production of the prevalent discourse of science in modern China. Doing so, moreover, in ways that drew on Buddhist thought, appropriated science for Buddhist projects, and contested absolutist epistemological claims for science, Buddhists tempered, complicated, expanded, and deepened the modern Chinese discourse on science even as they advanced it.

Taking us deeply into the inaugural period of the new Buddhist print culture, Gregory Scott’s chapter on the earliest modern Buddhist periodicals illuminates a founding process for a new genre critical to a range of Buddhist circles for decades, even well into the 1950s. Based on close examination of three pioneering Buddhist periodicals of the early twentieth century, Scott offers the first detailed account of these journals that became the models for the subsequent proliferation of Buddhist periodicals from the 1920s onward. He strikingly shows how certain Shanghai-based Buddhists embraced this new form of media in an era when such journals have so often been presumed to represent the apparent modern secularism of early Republican politics and the New Culture Movement. Each periodical, Scott demonstrates, was particularly oriented to the respective projects of internal and public constitution of Buddhist associations, communication to link up Buddhist social networks, and to communicate with and make claims before a general public. In the process, these Buddhists gained a platform from which to assert their religious identity in broader public discourse on questions of culture, tradition, and modernity.

Part 2 turns to the Buddhist presence in modern politics amid the dramatic expansions of state power through war and revolution in the middle decades of the twentieth century. The three chapters demonstrate how at the levels of diplomacy, ideology, and social reform, various Buddhist objects, ideas, individuals, communities, and institutions became meaningfully implicated in modern state-building projects, whether as allies to be utilized or as obstacles to be dismantled. Benjamin Brose’s chapter relating the remarkable story of the Xuanzang relic discovered near wartime Nanjing takes us on a tour of midcentury state and Buddhist roles in the marshaling of the value of Buddhist religious practices for various state and Buddhist community relational cultural politics. The repeated ceremonial dividing and donating of the relic, he shows, were part of the wartime Japanese occupation and Wang Jingwei collaborationist regime politics of projecting cultural unity and pacification as well as the postwar politics of cultural diplomacy involving the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the Republic of China (on Taiwan), Japan, and India. In moments of apparent dissonance between the secular view of the relic as valued cultural artifact and the religious view of it as a numinous object, potential tension was diffused by ceremonial division of the relic. However, Brose shows that without faith in its supernatural value the relic would have been a currency too weak to support projects of interstate cultural politics. The repeated reinterpretations and deployments of the relic for political purposes thus coincided with a persistent sense of its numinous quality, revealing how the cultural and political capital of Buddhism could be both an asset and a liability to the modern secular state.

Xue Yu’s chapter offers the most detailed account to date of how the national Buddhist leaders who stayed in China in 1949 to support the revolution attempted to meet the CCP on its all-important ideological ground to identify shared values and a compatible vision of social change. Amid their highly involved and creative attempts to discuss Buddhism and Marxism together remained the shards of earlier arguments for reforming and rationalizing Buddhism, notably the efforts discussed by Hammerstrom to relate Buddhism to science. Yet the seeming true believers, like Juzan, sought primarily to establish compatibilities and commonalities with Marxism, as if to imply that Marxism was the current manifestation of the dharma in the moment. Even such willing intellectual capitulation, however, was not to be tolerated by the CCP. Hence, as Xue Yu demonstrates, the ideological discussions in the Buddhist press of the early 1950s became so constrained by the CCP that they constituted not an act of collaboration but rather a participation in the total subjugation of Buddhism to Marxism, even to the point of renouncing the core elements of the Buddhist faith. In this situation, the theoretical webs spun by Buddhist writers in state-controlled journals calling for Marxism to “save Buddhism” appear as tragically desperate efforts to retain some space for Buddhism in Communist China that, in fact, contributed to its rapid dismantling.

Jan Kiely’s chapter on Suzhou of the early PRC is the first detailed, archivally based study to illustrate how the suppression of institutional Buddhism in the early PRC was actually carried out. As Kiely shows, the campaign records of the early 1950s reveal the persistence, despite the long years of war and revolution, of a rich Buddhist institutional culture, much of which had come to flourish, first, after the Taiping war in the form of a neighborhood temple Buddhism deeply embedded in local society and, second, during the Republican era, as centrally part of a Pure Land revival movement with mass appeal. The vibrancy of this multilayered urban Buddhist culture is revealed by the fact that the CCP revolutionary state deemed it significant enough to crush. It did so primarily by undercutting the economic basis of Buddhist institutions, radically reducing them in number and form. The Buddhism that remained was sanitized and placed in the service of the party-state. It was this form of state Buddhism that was subjected to the brutal assaults of Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution and that was abruptly resuscitated by the state in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Part 3 picks up this thread of revitalization in the post-Mao era with ethnographic accounts of contemporary Buddhist practices, particularly among social groups left marginalized by the period’s economic reforms. The two chapters point to how in both urban and rural settings different kinds of practiced Buddhisms and diverse Buddhist values, beliefs, and rituals give shape and meaning to social communities and identities in China today. Gareth Fisher’s chapter studies the formation of textual communities among contemporary lay Buddhists. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, Fisher identifies Buddhist communities oriented around texts that, if resonating in some respects with the early periodicals discussed by Scott, represent primarily propagation texts reproduced in a variety of high- and low-tech forms. The manner in which different communities formulate moralities of textual exchange, in particular, argues Fisher, reveals much about the different kinds of people drawn to each community, a division he identifies as inhering in moral judgments and breaking along lines of social class often manifested in differing educational levels. In the course of illuminating a variety of religious communities and suggesting a new approach to the sociological study of Chinese religion, Fisher introduces several representative figures involved in making for themselves distinct lived Buddhist identities in relation to their perceived moral-cultural position in modern society. Thus, even as Fisher’s informants all consider themselves Buddhists, their distinctive aims, approaches, and orientations result in their engagement with different kinds of Chinese Buddhisms.

Neky Cheung, in chapter 8, brings our attention to yet another distinctive kind of self-identified Buddhists through her ethnographic research in the predominantly Hakka rural communities of Ninghua county in western Fujian province. Focusing on the ritual of “receiving prayer beads” (jiezhu), a long-standing and still prevalent practice initiating older women and some men into lay Amitabha Buddha (Amituofo) recitation groups, Cheung reveals one rural variant of a grassroots local Buddhism that successfully traversed the suppressions and restrictions of the twentieth century precisely because Buddhist clerical and state authorities did not consider it part of mainstream Buddhism. That they still actively practiced the jiezhu ritual, however, shows not only the great value placed in Buddhist practice, identity, and recitation communities in this area but also how this Buddhist rite serves as a cultural resource with which women enhance their social standing and subject position in a male-dominated society. So even though the ritual appears in certain aspects to reinforce patriarchy, it has long been turned by menopausal women and their families into a therapeutic rite of passage celebrating the postreproductive-age woman, giving her an occasion to honor herself, fortifying matrilineal family ties, and establishing meaningful bonds of friendship between women “Buddhist friends.”

RECOVERING BUDDHIST CHINA

As the title of this book suggests, this project to “recover Buddhist China” in the modern era is, in part, an attempt to counter the historiographical omission, obscuration, and marginalization of Buddhists and Buddhism in the dominant historical narratives of Chinese history since 1900. In this, the contributors to this volume are joining with the broader enterprise “to return,” as Vincent Goossaert and David Palmer have put it, “religion to the center of modern Chinese history.”59 Yet, while asserting Buddhist significance, pervasiveness, and influence, much of which is most clearly evident in particular elite-articulated forms, this study does not take modern Chinese Buddhism to be a discrete entity defined primarily by its most articulate elite proponents in response to modern state-ordering initiatives; nor does it consider Buddhists all to be of a single kind. There were, rather, multiple kinds of Chinese Buddhism made up of an array of cultural elements before and after 1900, none of which stood outside the dynamics of historical change. Indeed, the more we open our eyes to the range of different kinds of Buddhism and Buddhists that proliferated, the more the Buddhist social-cultural historical presence becomes visible. Discovering a pervasive Buddhist presence in twentieth-century China, however, should not be overstated on its own merits, nor should we be satisfied with inscribing into the historical narrative “Buddhism was here” and leaving it at that. Rather, the focus on the specific, contextualized Buddhist presence and participation in notable historical processes in this volume offers a lens through which we can detect a different timbre and even different dimensions of the twentieth-century Chinese historical experience.

This volume points to a formative Buddhist role in the definition, development, and expansion of the terrain of modern China’s social culture as well as its political culture and governmental regime. Moreover, close examination of these Buddhist contributions complicates and, indeed, moves us beyond rigid analytical dichotomies of state-society and tradition-modernity to perceive richly textured and finely detailed images filled with overlapping and interchanging features. Furthermore, in considering what Buddhist social endeavor inhered in, and what inspired Buddhist imaginings and actions, these studies take seriously religiosity as a matter of producing value and meaning among the historical actors involved. Appreciating the social-historical context is vital to this, but it also means paying close attention to the particular religious cultural resources and forms adopted and situated at the center of many Buddhist lives. There is often a wariness accompanied by diffident expressions of analytical distance by scholars of religion concerned to avoid taking religious claims at face value or, worse, becoming apologists for religious agendas. Yet overly sterile assessments of religious valuing risk presenting just another variation in common social meanings, the undifferentiated effect of which rings hollow. Therefore, although critical analysis of primary empirical evidence in specific cases is the shared methodological standard for this volume, the contributors also identify the special kinds of knowledge formation, aesthetic and intellectual affinities, emotional connections, and commitments forged through dynamic interactions with specifically Buddhist texts, rites, practices, and institutions. Directed at core ethical principles, personal transformation and spiritual renewal, transcendence and the metaphysical, and matters of life and death, such interactions were often invested with a deeply abiding existential meaning not easily dislodged. This is not reducible to the concept of faith, though the range of Buddhists and non-Buddhists, including many with elite, secular modern educations, who believed in karma, supernatural phenomena or whose conversions to Buddhism hinged on the perception of a spiritual experience is striking. The twentieth century is well known for the rising discourses of secularism; but in China, as in many parts of the world, it was also an age of much instability, chaos, mass destruction, and violence that led many to seek deeper meanings within themselves, in past traditions of wisdom, and beyond surface realities. We might better recognize this Buddhist pursuit of meaning as a powerful orientation that was widely recognized, trusted, and associated with authenticity in the eyes of those inside and outside their communities and that also, albeit along with other, parallel motivations, repeatedly spurred Buddhists to social action. Much remains to be done to test and examine variations of this evidence, but there are surely many indications that we have only begun to appreciate the cultural dynamism of Buddhism in China’s modern history and its continuing relevance today as a rich source of social, political, and cultural creativity.

NOTES

    1.  Some notable examples include Zhang Taiyan, Liang Qichao, Tan Sitong, Xia Zengyou, and Di Baoxian. See Sin-wai Chan, Buddhism in Late Ch’ing Political Thought (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 1985); Viren Murthy, The Political Philosophy of Zhang Taiyan: The Resistance of Consciousness (Leiden: Brill, 2011).

    2.  Noriko Mori, “Liang Qichao, Late-Qing Buddhism, and Modern Japan,” in The Role of Japan in Liang Qichao’s Introduction of Modern Western Civilization to China, ed. Joshua A. Fogel, 222–46 (Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, 2004).

    3.  Ibid. For representative studies of global Buddhist modernism, see David L. McMahan, The Making of Buddhist Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Donald S. Lopez Jr., ed., A Modern Buddhist Bible: Essential Readings from East and West (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002); Donald S. Lopez Jr., ed., Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism Under Colonialism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). For Buddhist modernism in Meiji Japan, see James Edward Ketelaar, Of Heretics and Martyrs in Meiji Japan: Buddhism and Its Persecution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Judith Snodgrass, Presenting Japanese Buddhism to the West: Orientalism, Occidentalism, and the Columbia Exposition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Kathleen M. Staggs, “‘Defend the Nation and Love the Truth’: Inoue Enryō and the Revival of Meiji Buddhism,” Monumenta Nipponica, 38, no. 3 (1983): 251–81.

    4.  On Liang Qichao and the concept of national citizenship, see Joshua A. Fogel and Peter G. Zarrow, eds., Imagining the People: Chinese Intellectuals and the Concept of Citizenship, 1890–1920 (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 1997).

    5.  Liang Qichao 梁啓超, “Lun Fojiao yu qunzhi zhi guanxi” 論佛教與群治之關係 [On the relationship between Buddhism and governing society], in Yinbingshi heji 飲冰室合集 [Collected works from the Yinbing Studio], 10:45–52 (Taipei: Zonghua shuju, 1960).

    6.  Vincent Goossaert and David A. Palmer, The Religious Question in Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); Mayfair Mei-hui Yang, ed., Chinese Religiosities: Afflictions of Modernity and State Formation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); Yoshiko Ashiwa and David L. Wank, eds., Making Religion, Making the State: The Politics of Religion in Modern China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009); Adam Yuet Chau, ed., Religion in Contemporary China: Revitalization and Innovation (London: Routledge, 2011); Paul R. Katz, Religion in China and Its Modern Fate (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2014).

    7.  Vincent Goossaert, The Daoists of Peking, 1800–1949: A Social History of Urban Clerics (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2007); Xun Liu, Daoist Modern: Innovation, Lay Practice, and the Community of Inner Alchemy in Republican Shanghai (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2009); David A. Palmer and Xun Liu, eds., Daoism in the Twentieth Century: Between Eternity and Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012); David A. Palmer, Qigong Fever: Body, Science, and Utopia in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); David Ownby, Falun Gong and the Future of China (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); David A. Palmer, Paul R. Katz, and Wang Chien-chuan, “Introduction: Redemptive Societies in Cultural and Historical Contexts,” Minsu quyi 173 (September 2011): 1–12; Adam Yuet Chau, Miraculous Response: Doing Popular Religion in Contemporary China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005); Thomas David Dubois, The Sacred Village: Social Change and Religious Life in Rural North China (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 2005); Lian Xi, Redeemed by Fire: The Rise of Popular Christianity in Modern China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); Daniel H. Bays, ed., Christianity in China: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); Ryan Dunch, Fuzhou Protestants and the Making of a Modern China, 1857–1927 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).

    8.  Rebecca Nedostup, Superstitious Regimes: Religion and the Politics of Chinese Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2010); Shuk-Wah Poon, Negotiating Religion in Modern China: State and Common People in Guangzhou, 1900–1937 (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2011); Prasenjit Duara, “Knowledge and Power in the Discourse of Modernity: The Campaigns against Popular Religion in Early Twentieth-Century China,” Journal of Asian Studies 50, no. 1 (February 1991): 67–83.

    9.  For example, see Hung-yok Ip, ed., Buddhist Activism and Chinese Modernity, special issue, Journal of Global Buddhism 10 (2009).

  10.  Holmes Welch, The Practice of Chinese Buddhism, 1900–1950 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967); Welch, The Buddhist Revival in China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968); Welch, Buddhism under Mao (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972). Welch’s scholarly contributions to the field are currently being reassessed by the collaborative project Revisiting the Revival: Holmes Welch and the Study of Buddhism in Twentieth-Century China.

  11.  This has been the focus of research by Chinese scholars as well. For example, see Chen Bing 陳兵 and Deng Zimei 鄧子美, Ershi shiji Zhongguo Fojiao 二十世紀中國佛教 [Twentieth-century Chinese Buddhism] (Beijing: Minzu chubanshe, 2000); Deng Zimei 邓子美, Zhongguo jindaihua yu chuantong Fojiao 中國近代化與傳統佛教 [Chinese modernization and traditional Buddhism] (Nanjing: Huadong shifan daxue chubanshe, 1994); Gao Zhennong 高振農, Fojiao wenhua yu jindai Zhongguo 佛教文化與近代中國 [Buddhist culture and modern China] (Shanghai: Shanghai shehui kexue chubanshe, 1992); Q. Edward Wang, ed., Buddhism in Modern China, special issue, Chinese Studies in History 46, no. 3 (spring 2013).

  12.  Don A. Pittman, Toward a Modern Chinese Buddhism: Taixu’s Reforms (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 2001); Chan, Buddhism in Late Ch’ing Political Thought; Erik J. Hammerstrom, “Buddhists Discuss Science in Modern China (1895–1949)” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 2010); Justin Ritzinger, “Anarchy in the Pure Land: Tradition, Modernity, and the Reinvention of the Cult of Maitreya in Republican China” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2010); Eyal Aviv, “Differentiating the Pearl from the Fish Eye: Ouyang Jingwu (1871–1943) and the Revival of Scholastic Buddhism” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2008); Murthy, Political Philosophy of Zhang Taiyan; L. Rongdao Lai, “To Revitalize Buddhism and Save the Nation: Buddhist Education in Republican China” (PhD diss., McGill University, 2013).

  13.  Francesca Tarocco, The Cultural Practices of Modern Chinese Buddhism: Attuning the Dharma (London: Routledge, 2007); Jan Kiely, “Spreading the Dharma with the Mechanized Press: New Buddhist Print Cultures in the Modern Chinese Print Revolution, 1865–1949,” in From Woodblocks to the Internet: Chinese Publishing and Print Culture in Transition, circa 1800 to 2008, ed. Cynthia Brokaw and Christopher A. Reed, 185–210 (Leiden: Brill, 2010); Gregory Adam Scott, “Conversion by the Book: Buddhist Print Culture in Early Republican China,” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2013); James Brooks Jessup, “The Householder Elite: Buddhist Activism in Shanghai, 1920–1956” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2010).

  14.  Xue Yu, Buddhism, War, and Nationalism: Chinese Monks in the Struggle against Japanese Aggressions, 1931–1945 (New York: Routledge, 2005); James Carter, Heart of Buddha, Heart of China: The Life of Tanxu, a Twentieth-Century Monk (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Gray Tuttle, Tibetan Buddhists and the Making of Modern China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007).

  15.  Raoul Birnbaum, “Master Hongyi Looks Back: A Modern Man Becomes a Monk in Twentieth-Century China,” in Buddhism in the Modern World: Adaptations of an Ancient Tradition, ed. Steve Heine and Charles S. Prebish, 75–124 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Raoul Birnbaum, “Buddhist China at the Century’s Turn,” China Quarterly, no. 174 (June 2003): 428–50.

  16.  Charles Brewer Jones, Buddhism in Taiwan: Religion and the State, 1660–1990 (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 1999); Richard Madsen, Democracy’s Dharma: Religious Renaissance and Political Development in Taiwan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); André Laliberté, The Politics of Buddhist Organizations in Taiwan, 1989–2003: Safeguarding the Faith, Building a Pure Land, Helping the Poor (New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004); Julia Huang, Charisma and Compassion: Cheng-Yen and the Buddhist Tzu Chi Movement (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009); Stuart Chandler, Establishing a Pure Land on Earth: The Foguang Buddhist Perspective on Modernization and Globalization (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 2004); Elise Anne DeVido, Taiwan’s Buddhist Nuns (Albany: SUNY Press, 2010).

  17.  Gareth Fisher, From Comrades to Bodhisattvas: Moral Dimensions of Lay Buddhist Practice in Contemporary China (Honolulu: University of Hawai`i Press, 2014); Dan Smyer Yü, The Spread of Tibetan Buddhism in China: Charisma, Money, Enlightenment (London: Routledge, 2012); Ji Zhe, “Buddhism in the Reform Era: A Secularized Revival,” in Chau, Religion in Contemporary China, 37–38; Alison Denton Jones, “A Modern Religion? The State, the People, and the Remaking of Buddhism in Urban China Today” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2010).

  18.  The volume originated from the Buddhists and Buddhism in the History of Twentieth-Century China workshop held at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, May 30–31, 2012.

  19.  John Lagerwey, China, a Religious State (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2010), 10–13, 30; see also Cheu Hock-Tong, ed., Buddhism in Chinese Culture (Selangor, My.: Pelanduk, 2000).

  20.  Lagerwey, China, 51.

  21.  Karl Ludvig Reichelt, The Transformed Abbot, trans. G. M. Reichelt and A. P. Rose (London: Lutterworth, 1954); Karl Ludvig Reichelt, Religion in Chinese Garment, trans. Joseph Tetlie (London: Lutterworth, 1951).

  22.  On Buddhist activist “vitality,” see Hung-yok Ip, “Buddhist Activism and Chinese Modernity,” special issue, Journal of Global Buddhism 10 (2009): 145–92.

  23.  Goossaert and Palmer, Religious Question, 56, 79–83; Pittman, Toward a Modern Chinese Buddhism, 44–45; Ketelaar, Of Heretics and Martyrs, 167; see also Welch, Buddhist Revival; Chen and Deng, Ershi shiji Zhongguo Fojiao; Birnbaum, “Master Hongyi Looks Back”; Nedostup, Superstitious Regimes.

  24.  Chen and Deng, Ershi shiji Zhongguo Fojiao, 36, 479–80.

  25.  Nara Dillon, “The Politics of Philanthropy: Social Networks and Refugee Relief in Shanghai, 1932–1949,” in At the Crossroads of Empires: Middlemen, Social Networks, and State-Building in Republican Shanghai, ed. Nara Dillon and Jean C. Oi, 179–205 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008); Janet Y. Chen, Guilty of Indigence: The Urban Poor in China, 1900–1953 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). See also Zhou Qiuguang 周秋光, Jindai Zhongguo cishan lungao 近代中国慈善论稿 [Essays on modern Chinese philanthropy] (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 2010).

  26.  Brian J. Nichols, “Resourceful Compassion: Buddhist Monks, a Transnational Network, and an Orphanage” (paper presented at the Buddhists and Buddhism in the History of Twentieth-Century China workshop, Chinese University of Hong Kong, May 30–31, 2012); Xue, Buddhism, 30; Jan Kiely, “For Whom the Bells Ring and the Drums Beat: Pure Land Buddhist Refugee Relief Activism in Wartime Shanghai, 1937–1945” (paper presented at the Conference in Honor of Frederic Wakeman Jr., University of California at Berkeley, May 6, 2006); Jan Kiely, The Compelling Ideal: Thought Reform and the Prison, 1901–1956 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 51–52, 123–60, 184–85; Jessup, “Householder Elite.”

  27.  Liu, Daoist Modern, 55, 246–47; Dunch, Fuzhou Protestants, 190.

  28.  Birnbaum, “Master Hongyi Looks Back”; Birnbaum, “Buddhist China”; Pittman, Toward a Modern Chinese Buddhism; Xue, Buddhism; Carter, Heart of Buddha.

  29.  Susan Naquin, Peking, Temples, and City Life, 1400–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), xxxi, 90; see also Chun-fang Yü, The Renewal of Buddhism in China: Chu-hong and the Late Ming Synthesis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981); Timothy Brook, Praying for Power: Buddhism and the Formation of Gentry Society in Late Ming China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 1994)

  30.  Jessup, “Householder Elite.”

  31.  R. Keith Schoppa, Blood Road: The Mystery of Shen Dingyi in Revolutionary China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 23.

  32.  Kuiyi Shen, “Wang Yiting in the Social Networks of 1910s–1930s Shanghai,” in Dillon and Oi, At the Crossroads, 45–64; Zhou, Jindai Zhongguo cishan lungao; Zhou Qiuguang, Xiong Xiling yu cishan jiaoyu shiye 熊希齡與慈善教育事業 [Xiong Xiling and philanthropic educational enterprises] (Changsha: Hunan jiaoyu chubanshe, 1991).

  33.  Kiely, “Spreading the Dharma.”

  34.  Carter, Heart of Buddha; Birnbaum, “Master Hongyi Looks Back”; Geremie Barmé, An Artistic Exile: A Life of Feng Zikai (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Kang Bao [Paul R. Katz] 康豹, “Yige zhuming Shanghai shangren yu cishan jia de zongjiao shenghuo—Wang Yiting” 一個著名上海商人與慈善家的宗教生活—王一亭 [The religious life of a renowned Shanghai businessman and philanthropist: Wang Yiting], in Cong chengshi kan Zhongguo de xiandaixing 從城市看中國的現代性 [An urban perspective on Chinese modernity], ed. Wu Renshu 巫仁恕, Lin Meili 林美莉, and Kang Bao 康豹 [Paul R. Katz], 275–96 (Nankang: Institute of Modern History, Academia Sinica, 2010).

  35.  On the “golden age of the bourgeoisie,” see Marie-Claire Bergère, The Golden Age of the Chinese Bourgeoisie, 1911–1937, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); see also, on the Zhejiang First Normal School, Wen-hsin Yeh, Provincial Passages: Culture, Space, and the Origins of Chinese Communism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

  36.  Chen Mingshu 陈铭枢, Chen Mingshu huiyilu 陈铭枢回忆录 [Memoirs of Chen Mingshu], ed. Zhu Zongzhen 朱宗震 (Beijing: Zhongguo wenshi chubanshe, 1997), 26–27.

  37.  Liu Shanwei 刘善伟, “Junfa mianmianguan” 军阀面面观 [Perspectives on warlords], Wenshi yuekan 12 (2009): 33; we are grateful to Kum-Hoon Ng for this reference. See Kum-Hoon Ng, “The Emergence of a New Demonic: The Case of The Unofficial History of the Female Transcendent” (research seminar paper, Chinese University of Hong Kong, May 17, 2013), 46. On warlord Buddhists, see J. B. Pratt, The Pilgrimage of Buddhism (New York: Macmillan, 1928), 380.

  38.  Eugenia Lean, Public Passions: The Trial of Shi Jianqiao and the Rise of Popular Sympathy in Republican China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); Frederic Wakeman Jr., Spymaster: Dai Li and the Chinese Secret Service (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 9.

  39.  Shen Ji 沈寂, Yidai yingxing Ruan Lingyu 一代影星阮玲玉 [First-generation film star Ruan Lingyu] (Shanghai: Shanghai shudian chubanshe, 1999), 167.

  40.  See chapters 6, 7, and 8.

  41.  John Lagerwey, “Ethnographic Introduction,” and Wang Zhenzhong, “Historical Introduction,” trans. John Lagerwey, in Baiyangyuan: Huizhou chuantong cunluo shehui 白杨源： 徽州传统村落社会 [Baiyangyuan: Huizhou traditional village society], by Wu Zhengfang 吴正芳 (Shanghai: Fudan daxue chubanshe, 2011), 8–12, 19, 31. On grassroots Buddhism, see Tam Wai Lun, “Exorcism and the Pu’an Buddhist Ritual Specialists in Rural China,” in Exorcism in Religious Daoism: A Berlin Symposium, ed. Florian C. Reiter, 137–50 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2011).

  42.  Huang Jianxing, “Research on Shijiao: The Ritual Traditions of Fashi in South China” (PhD diss., Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2013), 43, and Hu Jianguo 胡建国, Wunuo yu wushu 巫傩与巫术 [Witchcraft and sorcery] (Hainan: Hainan chubanshe, 1993), 238. On the question of official and elite perceptions of local Buddhists, see chapter 8 in this volume.

  43.  Susan Daruvala, Zhou Zouren and an Alternative Chinese Response to Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2000), 47–48; Shen, “Wang Yiting in the Social Networks”; Julia F. Andrews and Kuiyi Shen, A Century in Crisis: Modernity and Tradition in the Art of Twentieth-Century China (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1998); Tarocco, Cultural Practices; Walter B. Davis, “Wang Yiting and the Art of Sino-Japanese Exchange” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 2008).

  44.  John Blofeld, The Jewel in the Lotus: An Outline of Present Day Buddhism in China (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1948), 59.

  45.  Pittman, Toward a Modern Chinese Buddhism; Yuan Yuan, “Chinese Buddhist Nuns in the Twentieth Century: A Case Study in Wuhan,” Journal of Global Buddhism 10 (2009): 375–412.

  46.  Thierry Meynard, The Religious Philosophy of Liang Shuming: The Hidden Buddhist (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 26; Guy S. Alitto, The Last Confucian: Liang Shu-ming and the Chinese Dilemma of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979); Fung Yu-lan, A History of Chinese Philosophy, trans. Derk Bodde (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953); Jason Clower, The Unlikely Buddhologist: Tiantai Buddhism in Mou Zongsan’s New Confucianism (Leiden: Brill, 2010); Aviv, “Differentiating the Pearl.”

  47.  Prasenjit Duara, “Religion and Citizenship in China and the Diaspora,” in Yang, Chinese Religiosities, 53–54; Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 221–22; Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).

  48.  Rebecca Nedostup, “Ritual Competition and the Modernizing Nation-State,” in Yang, Chinese Religiosities, 106; Gregory Adam Scott, “The Buddhist Nationalism of Dai Jitao,” Journal of Chinese Religions 39 (2011): 55–81; Tuttle, Tibetan Buddhists.

  49.  Chen and Deng, Ershi shiji Zhongguo Fojiao, 476–81; Pittman, Toward a Modern Chinese Buddhism, 73; Xue, Buddhism; L. Rongdao Lai, “The Rise of Citizenship Consciousness among China’s Student-Monks, 1911–1949” (paper presented at the Buddhists and Buddhism in the History of Twentieth-Century China workshop, Chinese University of Hong Kong, May 30–31, 2012).

  50.  Carter, Heart of Buddha, 193; 54, 62, 83, 86, 108; see also James Carter, “Buddhism, Resistance, and Collaboration in Manchuria,” Journal of Global Buddhism 10 (2009): 193–216

  51.  Jan Kiely, “The Charismatic Monk and Chanting Masses: Master Yinguang and His Pure Land Revival Movement,” in The Making of Saints in Modern and Contemporary China: Profiles in Religious Leadership, ed. David Ownby, Ji Zhe, and Vincent Goossaert (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

  52.  Vincent Goossaert, “Republican Church Engineering: The National Religious Associations in 1912 China,” in Yang, Chinese Religiosities, 215–17; Xue, Buddhism, 28–29; Welch, Buddhist Revival; Nedostup, Superstitious Regimes.

  53.  Nedostup, Superstitious Regimes, 124–26.

  54.  Carter, Heart of Buddha, 121; Tuttle, Tibetan Buddhists; José Ignacio Cabezón, “State Control of Tibetan Buddhist Monasticism in the People’s Republic of China,” in Yang, Chinese Religiosities, 261–91; Amy Holmes-Tagchungdarpa, “Imagining Borderland Tibetan Buddhism in Republican China: Zhang Xuebuen’s Tibetan Photographs, Travel Logs and Ethnographic Writings as Transmitters of Cultural Contact from the Western Frontier” (paper presented at the Buddhists and Buddhism in the History of Twentieth-Century China workshop, Chinese University of Hong Kong, May 30–31, 2012); Goossaert and Palmer, Religious Question, 155.

  55.  Carter, Heart of Buddha, 70–71, 109, 115, 147; Xue, Buddhism, 114; Huang Xianian 黃夏年, ed., Taixu ji 太虚集 [The collected works of Taixu] (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1995), 60, 331–32; Nedostup, Superstitious Regimes.

  56.  Kiely, Compelling Ideal, chap. 4.

  57.  David E. Apter and Tony Saich, Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 209.

  58.  David L. Wank, “Institutionalizing Modern ‘Religion’ in China’s Buddhism: Political Phases of a Local Revival,” in Ashiwa and Wank, Making Religion, 126–50; Yoshiko Ashiwa, “Positioning Religion in Modernity: State and Buddhism in China,” ibid., 43–73; Ji Zhe, “Secularization as Religious Restructuring: Statist Institutionalization of Chinese Buddhism and Its Paradoxes,” in Yang, Chinese Religiosities, 233–60.

  59.  Goossaert and Palmer, Religious Question, 5.