Science and Buddhist Modernism in Early 20th Century China: The Life and Works of Wang Xiaoxu 王小徐

Journal of Chinese Religions 39 (2011) 1 Science and Buddhist Modernism in Early 20th Century China: The Life and Works of Wang Xiaoxu 王小徐 ERIK J. HAMMERSTROM Pacific Lutheran University Introduction1 It is well known that modern science played a central role in informing and influencing Chinese modernities of the early 20th century. The impact of the ideological use of scientific rationalism and scientism 2 on the development of modern discourses about religion, superstition, and the state is widely appreciated.3 These discourses about religion, science, and superstition, which informed the policies of the Qing and Republican governments, as well as the anti-superstition campaigns of the 1920s, had profound, real world implications for religion in China. At the root of disagreements over how and when to use these three terms was a negotiation about the nature of modernity in China.4 For many thinkers in China 1 This article grew out of a paper presented at the 2009 Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies. I am thankful for all those who commented on it there. Earlier drafts of this article were read by Jeremy Rapport, Beverley Foulks McGuire, and Gregory Adam Scott. My thanks go out to each of them for their suggestions, as well as to two anonymous reviewers whose careful comments have helped me clarify my thinking here. I received various forms of support during the writing this article. Research and writing was begun while I was a Fulbright Fellow in Taiwan and a visiting scholar at Dharma Drum Buddhist College in Jinshan. The article was completed while I was working on my dissertation with the support of a Sheng Yen Education Foundation Fellowship. I would also like to thank the good people at the Needham Research Institute, where I completed my research. 2 Scientism is the belief that all aspects of human life, including the mental, emotional, aesthetic, and moral, can be known only through science, and that science can provide ultimate answers to the nature of reality and the best ways to organize and manage human life. The major work on the subject of scientism in China continues to be Kwok, Scientism in Chinese Thought. For a recent analysis of Kwok’s work in the context of current scholarly thinking on this topic, see Shen, “Murky Waters.” 3 The tensions between categories of religion and superstition in the political realm during the Nanjing Decade (1927-1937) have been admirably studied in Nedostup, Superstitious Regimes, and more generally in Goossaert and Palmer, The Religious Question in Modern China. 4 Although not entirely new, the category of “superstition” (mixin 迷信) was used in novel ways in China in the early 20th century. Much recent scholarship has shown how this category was mobilized, in 2 Journal of Chinese Religions “science” began to serve as the preeminent sign of the modern, especially after the mid 1920s.5 “Science” was identified with rationality, progress, and national strength; while “superstition” signified the opposite of these things. Given the effects of falling on the wrong side of this divide, it was imperative for anyone with intellectual commitments–be they religious, philosophical, or otherwise–to find ways to articulate those commitments using this common ideological language. My goal here is to begin a discussion of the ways in which one loose group in Chinese society, Buddhists, dealt with the rhetoric of scientific rationalism that rose rapidly in prominence in the Chinese intellectual world during the first decades of the 20th century. I approach this topic by examining the life and works of Wang Xiaoxu (18751948 ),6 a lay Buddhist and one of China’s first great modern scientists, who made significant contributions to the development of Chinese Buddhist discourses about science and the relationship between Buddhism and science. This article is comprised of two interlocking parts, each of which contains an argument about the development of Wang’s type of Buddhist modernism. Here, I write about both the life and the works of Wang Xiaoxu, and each of these two aspects of the man tells us something about developments in religious discourse in the Republican period. First, Wang’s life illustrates the way in which historical developments in China, of both political and...