Chapter One　Buddhist Modernism: Rewritten for the Examiner¶

At the end of the previous essay, Meiji Buddhism entered free competition. This essay watches the entire Buddhist world being forced to do the same thing in the same century. In the nineteenth century, Buddhism's various copies met the same pressure almost simultaneously: Western warships, missionaries, and Orientalist scholarship. Ceylon was in British hands, China in the shadow of the treaty ports, Japan in the wake of the Black Ships, and Tibet at the edge of the great powers' rivalry. Behind the pressure stood a new examiner. His criteria no longer asked whether something was the Buddha's word, but whether it was scientific, rational, progressive. The rewriting in this essay's title means the revisions these copies made to themselves to pass his examination. Textbooks call this period the Buddhist revival. This volume reads it by the rule of the four questions: revival in name, rewriting in fact. What must be counted is what was rewritten, who held the pen, what the examiner gained, and who bore the costs.

Essay Thirteen recorded the Meiji shock; now add the other two. Ceylon's began with a debate. At the great Panadura debate of 1873, Guṇānanda publicly defeated the Methodist minister. The news crossed the ocean to New York and brought Olcott of the Theosophical Society. What followed was unexpected. An American colonel designed a catechism, a Buddhist flag, and a network of Buddhist schools for Ceylonese Buddhism; the catechism's form came directly from Christian doctrinal manuals. Dharmapāla followed, founding the Mahā Bodhi Society, launching the campaign to reclaim Bodh Gaya, and sharing the Chicago platform with Shaku Sōen in 1893. Scholars gave this revival an apt name, Protestant Buddhism: reshaping itself in Protestantism's image to resist Protestantism, centered on laypeople and texts, stripping away ritual and emphasizing preaching.¹ China's crisis began with temple property. Zhang Zhidong's Exhortation to Learning advocated using temple property to establish schools. Repeated campaigns followed under the Republic. Temple estates became education funds there for the taking. Huichang's logic took on the name of the new learning; this time, the desired asset was school buildings instead of copper. In public opinion, the charges of superstition and parasitism were taken as settled, with the New Culture and antireligious movements taking turns applying pressure. Self-rescue began in a scripture press. Yang Wenhui's Jinling Buddhist Press printed books for forty years and recovered long-lost Yogācāra commentaries from Japan (Essay Eleven, Chapter One). Late in life, he established the Jetavana Academy, where monastics and laypeople studied together. The two subsequent routes of Chinese Buddhist modernization, scholarly and institutional, Ouyang Jingwu and Taixu, came from this one school.² The routes' divergence and the ensuing controversy are the next chapter's subject. This chapter first examines the way of rewriting they shared with Ceylon and Japan.

There were three strokes of rewriting. First, replacing the criterion: the standard of orthodoxy changed from provenance to agreement with science. D. T. Suzuki presented Zen as pure experience beyond all religions; Dharmapāla called Buddhism an atheistic psychological science; Taixu taught that Buddhist Dharma and science complemented each other. The customs of Essay Nine, Chapter Two checked the translator; the new examination checked whether a teaching could pass the lecture hall and laboratory. Second, textualism. The Pali Text Society was founded in 1881, and the category of early Buddhism was itself a nineteenth-century scholarly invention. The call to return to original texts shared the structure of Protestantism's ‘scripture alone.’ Each tradition competed to elevate its oldest textual stratum as its essence and demote a millennium of commentaries and rituals to later additions.³ The qualification must be stated at once, lest this be read out of context: the nineteenth century invented the category and tools, not the question. What counts as the Buddha's word, what as true Dharma? This dispute had never ceased in two thousand years. The First Council itself disputed the roster; India had eight hundred years of apologetic literature; China had customs and scripture catalogs. This entire volume records that dispute. Two things were new: philology made the oldest layer something that could actually be identified, while the equation ‘oldest equals authentic’ was the Protestant import. An old question, a new criterion: all this essay's rewriting occurs at the level of criteria. Third, deritualization. Rites for the dead, Dharma assemblies, protective charms, and ritual efficacy were condemned by reformers within the tradition as superstition; seated meditation and philosophy were promoted to its essence. Notice what the three strokes make together: a new doctrinal classification, ranking high and low, deep and shallow, and judging most practices in one's own tradition expendable. The difference was that, for the first time, the criterion came from outside the religion.⁴ As the rules require, let this be explicitly marked: what follows is this volume's conjecture, the claim in this chapter's title. Modernist Buddhism is a defense rewritten for the examiner, accepting the criteria of science and reason before proving itself qualified. Ceding criteria goes deeper than ceding doctrine: a changed doctrine can be changed back, but once criteria have been handed over, every doctrine remains forever under review. First record the sober half in full. Rewriting saved lives: schools, publishing, and organization preserved Buddhism's people and property through a century of colonialism and revolution. Aligning criteria was not entirely submission, either. Buddhism's own discourse of direct realization did have real affinities with modernity. The Kālāma Sutta was held up as a warrant for free thought, though the text's original context was much more qualified than the slogan.⁵

The first major question the examiner raised was a philological test of the Buddha's word itself: Mahāyāna was not spoken by the Buddha. Arrange the cases by region. Japan came first. Tominaga Nakamoto's Words after Emerging from Meditation of 1745 (Essay Thirteen, Chapter Two) read the canon in accumulated layers through his theory of accretion. It drew concerted attack. Musō Monnō wrote A Refutation of Words after Emerging from Meditation against him, and Tominaga remained on record as a slanderer of the Dharma long after his death. A hundred and fifty years later, Murakami Senshō restated the claim on historical grounds and left the clergy that year. His two-line solution—not the Buddha's word, yet Buddhism—became common sense within a generation. China's debate was fierce from the outset. Mochizuki Shinkō advocated Chinese composition of the Awakening of Faith. Liang Qichao's An Examination of the Mahāyāna Awakening of Faith, published in 1924, set off the domestic debate. Ouyang Jingwu and Wang Enyang of the Chinese Institute of Inner Learning judged the work spurious on doctrinal grounds. Wang denounced its defenders' doctrinal classification as ‘recklessly indulging private inclinations’ and ‘speaking like non-Buddhists.’ Taixu answered with doctrinal classification, placing the Awakening of Faith high in his own ranking of schools. Lü Cheng followed with the Hundred Falsities of the Śūraṅgama; a reply from within the Buddhist community came in the Refutation of the Hundred Falsities of the Śūraṅgama. Shoupei and Wang Enyang battled for years. The Śūraṅgama dispute recorded in Essay Nine, Chapter Two resumed here. Theravāda felt no anger: this was already its own position. India had no scene of confrontation, for Buddhism was dead there. While it lived, however, authenticity had been a standing question; eight hundred years of apologetic literature produced only treatises, not trauma.⁶

Why did the same test provoke such different reactions in four places? This volume writes its answer as a formula: intensity of anger equals the extent of roof sharing multiplied by the degree of atrophy in the muscles for judging authenticity. The roof means a premise shared by all; the muscles mean the capacity to judge authenticity. Examine the two factors separately. The first: in China, ‘all are the Buddha's word’ was a premise shared by everyone (Essay Ten, Chapter One). There was no separate school to retreat into; shaking that premise shook everyone. From Kamakura on, Japan's schools stood apart: historical scholarship had its domain, sectarian learning its own. Murakami's two-line solution had somewhere to go, so initial anger subsided within a generation. The second: China did possess the capacity to judge authenticity, but for a thousand years it had been permitted to apply it only outside the canon. The catalogs checked apocrypha outside the canon, not Mahāyāna within it (Essay Nine, Chapter Two). Doctrinal classification could rank higher and lower; scripture catalogs could check translators. For a millennium, no legitimate genre could inquire into the authenticity of Mahāyāna inside the canon. When modern philology pointed inward, the system had no genre with which to respond, and anger became the only response. The defenders' weapons showed the atrophy. Placing the Awakening of Faith at a high rank was a doctrinal-classification habit, rewriting ‘wrong’ as ‘shallow.’ ‘If it is Buddhist Dharma, it is the Buddha's word’ was a modern return of quantifier reversal (Essay Four, Chapter One). Dating was answered with ranking because ranking was the only skill practiced. That itself testified to atrophy. The sentence left in Essay Ten, Chapter One is borne out here: the atrophy of the capacity to judge authenticity would become visible only a thousand years later, and its visible form would be thunderous rage. Record the coexisting factors honestly too. Historical investigation of founders provokes anger in any religion; the historical Jesus dispute was equally fierce. Republican nationalism intensified it, binding the question of authenticity to the cause of national salvation. This formula's distinctive contribution is not to explain anger's existence, but the genre of the response: why China's answers took the form of doctrinal classifications and doctrinal tracts, with no equivalent historical and textual inquiry for so long.⁷

English key: “The anger formula.” Intensity of anger = degree of a shared roof × atrophy of the capacity to examine authenticity. The horizontal axis is the degree of a shared roof; the vertical axis is atrophy of the “authenticity muscle.” Both run from low through medium to high. India is at the lower left: authenticity was a standing question, producing treatises rather than trauma. Japan is at the middle: initial anger is metabolized within a generation, with membership divided into separate compartments; its dotted arrow slopes down to the right. China is at the upper right: anger lasts longest because there is nowhere to retreat beneath the common roof. The Southern tradition is low on the vertical axis and to the right of the horizontal midpoint: no anger, because this is already its own position.

The defenders’ two weapons are the doctrinal-classification reflex, “rewrite wrong as shallow,” and quantifier reversal, “if it is Dharma, it is buddhavacana”—the Buddha’s word. These are labeled evidence of atrophy. The closing line reads: “Customs inspects smuggling, not the state religion.”

The multiplication and plotted positions are the chapter’s internal analytical device, not measured quantities. The accompanying text acknowledges the general sensitivity of research into religious founders and the additional force of Republican-era nationalism. It assigns the formula a particular task: explaining the form of the response, rather than supplying the sole explanation for the existence of anger.

A pair of ineffective arguments also runs through the debate, and they bring it to a close. Theravāda's favored argument—‘the Buddha is also an arhat’—was tested in Essay Four, Chapter Three: against Chinese Buddhism it achieves almost nothing. Chinese Buddhism has a matching argument: without the Mahāyāna movement, Buddhism would have died in the second century CE; Greater and Lesser Vehicles stand to each other as lips to teeth—lose the lips, and the teeth grow cold. Consider it at three levels. Historical fact: the census in Essay Four, Chapter Four already showed that the mainstream in the seventh century remained the schools. Death in the second century has no basis. Theravāda, still alive today without depending on Mahāyāna, stands across the table: the argument's audience is its refutation. Essay Eight supplies a stronger point. Buddhism died out precisely where Mahāyāna was strongest, while distributed traditions without a Mahāyāna movement survived. Reading this as ‘Mahāyāna saved Buddhism’ reads survivorship bias backward. Record the valid half: without Mahāyāna there would be no Chinese Buddhism. That is true. But its subject is Chinese Buddhism, not Buddhism. Calling our own branch the Buddhist whole switches the scope. Structure: this argument's criteria are survival, population, and market, while the other side's are the Buddha's word and the meaning of Dharma. Showing evidence of wide circulation to an audience for whom popularity does not prove truth is like showing Mahāyāna the old equation of attainments. Both answer a question the other side has already withdrawn. Theravāda's own sutta collection predicts that counterfeit Dharma will flourish and the drum's pegs will decay. In that prophetic scheme, wide circulation is bad news instead.⁸ Function: like ‘the Buddha is also an arhat,’ these claims really serve to secure one's own legitimacy internally, while their users mistake them for arguments against outsiders. Each side holds an ineffective argument and takes it for its strongest. What is valid in the lips-and-teeth claim must also be recorded. In India it was true, but as a community of shared fate, living together under a common Vinaya: when the walls fell, all perished together. It was not mutual doctrinal aid. In different lands, separate survival; in the same land, shared death. Survival followed institutions and geography, not Vehicle.

Finally, add the most thorough rewriting, which also answers a question left open in Essay Eight. Under ‘Why was there no revival?’ the report on Buddhism's death left a list of conditions. Restarting required external input; external input required local demand; local demand required a population identifying itself as Buddhist. In Nagpur in 1956, Ambedkar met all three at once. Hundreds of thousands of people whom the caste system had consigned to untouchability and denied personhood needed a non-Hindu identity: the demand. Monks from Ceylon and Burma attended as witnesses: the input. The conversion ceremony itself created that population at a stroke. His way of meeting the conditions was rewriting. His Navayāna explicitly rewrote karma and rebirth: rebirth was still allowed, but only in the sense that the four elements disperse at death and recombine; the transmigration of a soul and past karma reaching into future lives were both denied. Buddhism was rewritten as a rational program of social liberation, and the criterion for joining changed from awakening to equality.⁹ India's revival finally arrived, as a rewritten version. This closes the chapter exactly: under modernity's examination, a tradition unwilling to rewrite itself cannot qualify for resurrection. The three strokes of rewriting and the one debate are now counted. The Chinese version was the most fully organized and made the deepest changes; the next chapter examines it separately.

References¶