Thomé H. Fang, Tang Junyi and Huayan Thought: A Confucian Appropriation of Buddhist Ideas in Response to Scientism in the Twentieth Century by King Pong Chiu (review)

This book is a lightly revised version of the author’s 2014 dissertation (available online). It analyzes the way in which two important twentieth-century Chinese philosophers applied one of the most “Chinese” forms of Buddhist thought to the issues of modernity. The author covers a topic that has not been studied before in English, providing a useful introduction to the context and thought of both of its main subjects, whom he treats not simply as “Neo-Confucians,” but as more complex thinkers (p. 13).

Chiu employs three categories of analysis in this work. First, as the title indicates, his main concern is to explain and assess the way in which each thinker used Huayan 華嚴 thought to rebut the claims of scientism, in particular, the belief that “… quantitative natural science is the only valuable part of human learning and the only source of truth” (p. 31). The rise of scientism in China in the early twentieth century was intimately linked to China’s semi-colonial status vis-à-vis the West, and had a major impact on the fortunes of traditional modes of Chinese thought. Chiu provides useful context for this process, and clearly explains what was at stake for Thomé H. Fang (Fang Dongmei 方東美, 1899–1977) and Tang Junyi 唐君毅 (1909–1978) in their meditations on Huayan thought.

Chiu’s second category of analysis is the traditional Chinese philosophical concepts of ti 體 (which he defines as “state” or “condition,” p. 26) and yong 用 (function). He spends less time on this topic than on the topic of scientism, and much of his ti/yong-based analysis occurs in the book’s final chapter. This reviewer was somewhat confused by Chiu’s analysis here, especially given that it did not seem to add much to the good critical analysis he provides without it. The final analytic category that Chiu employs in this book, which receives less attention than either of the other two, is that of “Chinese hermeneutics” (Zhongguo quanshi xue 中國詮釋學). Although his discussion of this is rather brief, Chiu provides a useful introduction to the idea, which has received a fair bit of attention by Chinese thinkers in the past decade. Chiu invokes this idea mainly to highlight the vitality and dynamism of Chinese thought in response to issues associated with modernity (pp. 78–79).

The structure of this book is clear at the levels of both chapters and sections. He generally first supplies historical and intellectual context before summarizing the thought of a figure, and concludes with a critical assessment of that thought. Chapters 1 and 2 introduce the scope of the study and the historical and intellectual context for both scientism and Huayan thought. His summary of Huayan is particularly well done, given its complexity. He draws from a range of good scholarship on the subject to cover the development of its primary components in a clear manner.

Chapters 3 and 4 form the heart of the book. Chapter 3 discusses the elder figure, Thomé H. Fang. Fang was highly prolific, but, as Chiu notes, his thought was not entirely systematic. Fang used Huayan thought to develop a “transcendent-immanent metaphysics” that has as its aim the achievement of “comprehensive harmony.” Fang’s philosophy was synthetic, and he had a vision of a grand organic harmony that included beauty, creativity, and the mental realm of human beings, which he felt were omitted within the rational materialism of scientism. Tang Junyi made more explicit use of Huayan ideas about the relationship between different ideologies by invoking the doctrinal classification scheme (panjiao 判教) of Huayan. In chapter 4, Chiu explains that Tang was probably inspired by Fang, and that like him he sought to harmonize all “valuable intellectual traditions” as well as their “relative...