Toward a Modern Chinese Buddhism: Taixu's Reforms (review)

Many defining characteristics of contemporary Buddhism in Chinese social settings were inspired by Taixu, the reformist monk who lived in the first half of the twentieth century. These include engaged Buddhism, ecumenism and interfaith dialogue, proselytizing and charity, Buddhist seminaries, and layperson empowerment. Yet discussion of him in a work for English-reading audiences has tended to be piecemeal and superficial. Don Pittman's book-length intellectual biography of Taixu helps remedy this. It examines the massive corpus of Taixu's works, his activities over the years, and the reactions of his contemporaries in their attempts to sketch Taixu's ideas, their historical context, and links to Buddhist theology.

Taixu embodied a Buddhist variant of the concern in Chinese intellectual life at the beginning of the twentieth century to respond to the dizzying changes and challenges posed by the quickening flow of Western institutions and ideas into China. Within the Sangha this was expressed in a concern for how Buddhism could meet the challenge of Christianity, which was gaining converts through aggressive proselytizing and charity and threatening to marginalize Buddhism. Buddhism's emphasis on salvation through retreat from the world led many Chinese intellectuals to see Buddhism as irrelevant to contemporary concerns and even a cause for the backwardness and passivity of Chinese culture compared to the dynamic, "modern" West. Taixu was one of the small minority in the Sangha who sought to revive Buddhism by reworking the theology to fit contemporary needs and by borrowing from Christianity.

His reform efforts were squarely in the mode of Chinese intellectuals who saw themselves as using Western institutions to "modernize" China while rejecting the ideas and values they were seen as harboring. Taixu admired the capacity of Christianity to organize and motivate believers. He attributed this to its associations and its rituals which, through fellowship, inspired followers with the belief that Christianity was a universal religion. However, he completely rejected Christian theology because he felt that it wrongly emphasized the dependence of humanity on god, the idea of the eternal soul, and the belief that salvation comes from God alone. His modernizing efforts adapted such Christian institutions as social welfare, modern schools, proselytizing, and lay participation, but for attaining salvation he focused on Buddhist theology.

He rationalized Buddhist theology in an approach that Pittman terms "ethnical piety." Taixu interpreted the visionary dimensions of truth in Buddhism as norms for this-worldly behavior. He held that the Buddhist ideal of emptiness could be achieved not by renouncing this-worldly concerns but rather through selfless engagement with social and political realities. Not only could the path to salvation be found in becoming a monk or nun but it could be trod by any layperson who followed Buddhist precepts in daily life. Taixu also maintained that a "pure land" of everlasting peace and contentment would come about if people the world over observed Buddhism. This approach rested not so much on Taixu's original thinking but rather on his creative recovery of the relatively neglected Weishi (conscious-only) tradition in order to emphasize practical engagement and multiple paths to boddhisatvahood.

Taixu's ideas provoked much controversy among his contemporaries. Fellow monks felt that the Buddhism advocated by him with its emphasis on this-worldly activity was not genuine Buddhism, while intellectuals dismissed him as a religious utopian. Furthermore, his peripatetic travels and personal fame in China and abroad, as well as his close contacts with members of the political elite, led many to see him as a publicity hound. But Pittman maintains that Taixu was misunderstood. He cultivated elites because of the reality that a revitalized Sangha would need approval by those who held political power. His foreign travels were efforts to proselytize and engage others in interfaith dialogue. For example, Pittman cites Taixu's trip abroad in 1939-1940 as a representative of the Nationalist government, which expected him to enlist foreign support for China's war of...