Bringing Buddhism into the Classroom: Jiang Qian’s 江謙 (1876–1942) Vision for Education in Republican China

Journal of Chinese Religions 39 (2011) 33 Bringing Buddhism into the Classroom: Jiang Qian’s 江謙 (1876-1942) Vision for Education in Republican China BEVERLEY FOULKS MCGUIRE University of North Carolina-Wilmington At the end of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) and beginning of the Republican period (19121949 ), reformers identified modern education as one of the means of transforming China into a modern nation. Following the establishment of a national school system in 1904 and the abolition of traditional civil service examinations in 1905, there were a series of dramatic changes in education that continued throughout the Republican period.1 Scholars have noted how secular nationalists identified education as a tool for remaking the people and targeted certain religious groups as impeding the construction of the nation, insisting that “religion” (zongjiao 宗教) be stripped of “superstition” (mixin 迷信).2 However, as Rebecca Nedostup suggests, the vagueness of what constituted “superstition” meant it frequently became used as a means rather than an end, creating a volatile atmosphere in which all social collectives could be viewed as politically suspect.3 A corollary of the state’s obsession about categorizing and representation was that associations–especially religious ones–had to present themselves as supporting the state and performing a social service in the hopes of escaping condemnation. Some Buddhists participating in education reform successfully catered to state interests by proposing curriculum that supported party ideology and citizen training.4 However, more often than not, education reformers posited an adversarial relationship between Buddhism and education. Some sought to revive the “temple property for schools” (miaochan xingxue 廟產 興學) campaign that called for Buddhist temples to be converted into modern schools and Buddhist property used to support education plans, while others condemned certain Buddhist 1 For example, between 1912 and 1931 there were no less than ten different Ministers of Education, three major revisions of school regulations, and repeated attempts to reform the curriculum. Curran, Educational Reform in Republican China, 125. 2 Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation, 32-36; Nedostup, Superstitious Regimes, 5-8. 3 Nedostup, Superstitious Regimes, 28. 4 Nedostup cites the example of the Yangzhou monk Keduan 可端 who, in his summer 1927 application before the Executive Council on Education, wrote that his “citizen monk” students would promote Buddhism but also realize the Three People’s Principles, and he was lauded for promoting “pure, orthodox Buddhism.” Nedostup, Superstitious Regimes, 44. 34 Journal of Chinese Religions associations as impeding the process of modernization by promoting “superstition.” While Duara and Nedostup have shown how charges of “heterodoxy” or “promoting superstition” were often levied to mask the state’s perception of such groups as social or political threats, nevertheless in modernization discourse, Buddhism and education were often pitted against each other. Of those individuals who sought to reconcile the two, Jiang Qian (zi 字, courtesy name, Yiyuan 易園) appeared to be an ideal candidate. Jiang played prominent roles locally in Jiangsu provincial educational circles and nationally in debates about “national language” (guoyu 國語). He began as an administrator for the influential education reformer Zhang Jian 張謇 (1853-1926) at his Nantong Normal School (Nantong shifan xuexiao 南通師範學校) and later became president of the Nanjing Higher Normal School (Nanjing gaodeng shifan xuexiao 南京高等師範學校), an early predecessor of Nanjing University. Jiang resigned as president in 1919 after suffering from illness, but he continued to maintain a presence in education circles by giving lectures at teacher-training schools and corresponding with education administrators.5 After converting to Buddhism during his illness, Jiang tried a variety of strategies and organizational means for implementing his vision of bringing Buddhism into primary school classrooms in the 1920s and 1930s. He initially established a lay Buddhist association but later formed a study group (xuehui 學會) to promote Buddhist and Confucian values in the curriculum and pedagogy of modern primary schools. Given that Jiang had ties with prominent education reformers and incorporated Confucianism at a time when the KMT government’s “New Life Movement” (xinshenghuo yundong 新生活運動) was promoting the Confucian tradition as a means of spiritual and moral renovation, one may have predicted his educational project would be a success. Instead, it failed. How might one explain the failure of someone so well connected in education circles, whose aligning of Buddhist and Confucian instruction was so...