Chapter Two　Humanistic Buddhism: Chinese Buddhism's Self-Rescue¶

The previous chapter counted the shared strokes of rewriting. This chapter examines how Chinese Buddhism rewrote itself. Chinese Buddhism under the Republic faced three pressures. The first was temple property. The threat of converting temples into schools was constant: temple estates were the readiest education funds, and when campaigns broke out in the provinces, temples became school buildings. The second was public opinion: the two charges of superstition and parasitism, pressed in turn by the writings of the New Culture Movement and the slogans of the antireligious movement. Every charge was aimed precisely at the form established in Essay Eleven. Scripture and repentance rites were superstition; deliverance of the dead was business; exemption from labor service and withdrawal from the world were parasitism; mountain seclusion was passivity. Every arrangement that had sustained survival for a thousand years became a count in the indictment under the new criteria. The third pressure was example. Christianity stood opposite with schools, hospitals, YMCAs, and periodicals, demonstrating what a modern religion looked like.¹

The two routes of self-rescue were named in Essay Eleven, Chapter Two and the previous chapter. Both came from Yang Wenhui's school. Here we examine what each changed. The scholarly route was Ouyang Jingwu and the Chinese Institute of Inner Learning: return to Xuanzang, reorganize doctrinal learning through Faxiang Yogācāra, and rebuild the capacity for judging authenticity with Buddhist logic and philology. Laypeople held the teaching chairs. The three-layer curve of the literati in Essay Eleven, Chapter Two reached its endpoint here: the center of doctrinal study passed entirely to the laity. Their judgments that the Awakening of Faith and Śūraṅgama were spurious, recorded in the previous chapter, were this route's natural result. To rebuild the capacity for judging authenticity, one first had to clear spurious texts out of the canon. The institutional route was Taixu: three great revolutions in doctrine, the religious community's organization, and its property. The Wuchang Buddhist Academy was established in 1922, the same year as the Institute of Inner Learning. One south, one north, two programs of self-rescue began together. Taixu's rewriting had a programmatic verse of his own: ‘Only the Buddha commands my reverence; fulfillment lies in human character. When the human is perfected, Buddhahood is attained: this is called true reality.’ From deliverance of the dead to human life, from mountains to the human world, from the next life to this one: reforming monastic dress, reorganizing the clergy, establishing schools and periodicals. What they imitated is visible at a glance in the three institutions opposite: schools, hospitals, and YMCAs.² Record the conflict between the routes too. The Institute of Inner Learning judged the Awakening of Faith spurious; Taixu ranked it high. Two wings of the same self-rescue took opposite sides over authenticity. The previous chapter's formula said that the genre of the response shows where the capacity for judging authenticity lies. This internal dispute is the formula's best illustration.

After Taixu's death, Yinshun gave Humanistic Buddhism its definitive form. He took Taixu's Buddhism for Human Life a step further, grounding it in ‘The buddhas, the world-honored ones, all arise in the human world; they are not attained through heaven.’ He judged divinization Buddhism's decline and established the practice of human bodhisattvas as the correct path. Volume Two's appendix has discussed his thought separately. Here we record only its aspect in the history of transformation: Yinshun's doctrinal classification made orientation toward the human world the criterion, effectively supplying a doctrinal basis for Taixu's reforms.³ The postwar results came in Taiwan: Tzu Chi, Fo Guang Shan, Dharma Drum; hospitals, universities, television stations, and transnational volunteer networks. Taixu's vision was realized across the strait, and Southeast Asia and Chinese communities worldwide changed in turn. Humanistic Buddhism became Chinese Buddhism's most successful self-rewriting of the twentieth century. This half is a record of achievement; it need not be discounted.⁴

As the rules require, let this be explicitly marked: what follows is this volume's conjecture, the claim of this chapter's subtitle. Humanistic Buddhism's underlying impetus is shame: the need to prove its innocence after the charges of superstition and parasitism struck home. First record the sober half in full. Orientation toward the human world already had roots in Mahāyāna; the bodhisattva path's concern with this life was no invention. The reforms' achievements saved religious property, talent, and Buddhism's social reputation. All are entered openly. The conjecture identifies the selectivity. Its list of achievements is as conspicuous as its list of silences. Supernormal powers ceased to be discussed; ritual efficacy was demoted; the next life was mentioned less; escape from saṃsāra was hardly raised as a goal. These were precisely the items that made the examiner frown. A reform in the name of the human world quietly set aside everything in Buddhism that did not belong to that world. The silence becomes clearer along this volume's long arc. Essay Eleven, Chapter Three said that China had handed the verification of liberation over to Pure Land, deferring it to the deathbed. Humanistic Buddhism took another step and removed the verification of liberation from the agenda. Read by Volume Two's two registers: the side of therapeutic effects in this life is filled to the brim, while scarcely anyone attends to the side of cessation anymore.⁵

The upper branches distinguish two routes from Yang Wenhui: Ouyang Jingwu’s rescue through scholarship and Taixu’s rescue through reform of the Buddhist community. Their disagreement concerns the authenticity of the Awakening of Faith. The placement of the two lists beneath those branches does not assign the list of achievements exclusively to Ouyang and the list of silences exclusively to Taixu. Chapter 2 uses both lists to assess the same reform, Humanistic Buddhism.

The six achievements are running schools, providing medical care, disaster relief, environmental protection, preserving Buddhist institutional property, and vindicating Buddhism’s social reputation. The four items no longer raised are supernormal powers, miraculous efficacy, the afterlife, and renunciation. The struck-through tags are the accusations of superstition and parasitism imposed on Buddhism by its modern examiners. “Reputation verified” concerns the reform’s public vindication; it does not say that social achievements verify cessation. The closing line concerns liberation’s displacement from the agenda.

To close: Humanistic Buddhism rewrote Chinese Buddhism as a religion able to enter modern public life. Education, medicine, disaster relief, environmental protection—it was present in all of them. The cost was that soteriology was set aside still further, so far that it was no longer even treated as a question, because people had stopped talking about it. Across the Pacific, another rewriting went further: it gave up religious identity altogether and brought just one technique to market. The next chapter concerns the mindfulness industry.

References¶