In Differentiating the Pearl from the Fish-Eye, Eyal Aviv offers an account of Ouyang Jingwu (1871-1943), a leading intellectual who revived the Buddhist scholastic movement during the early Republican period in China. Ouyang believed that authentic Indian Buddhism was an alternative to the prevalent Chinese Buddhist doctrines of his time. Aviv shows how Ouyang’s rhetoric of authenticity won the movement well-known admirers but also influential critics. This debate shaped modern intellectual history in China and has lost none of its relevancy today.

The three-volume project 'Concepts and Methods for the Study of Chinese Religions' is a timely review of the history of the study of Chinese religions, reconsiders the present state of analytical and methodological theories, and initiates a new chapter in the methodology of the field itself. The three volumes raise interdisciplinary and cross-tradition debates, and engage methodologies for the study of East Asian religions with Western voices in an active and constructive manner. Within the overall project, this volume addresses the intellectual history and formation of critical concepts that are foundational to the Chinese religious landscape. These concepts include lineage, scripture, education, discipline, religion, science and scientism, sustainability, law and rites, and the religious sphere. With these topics and approaches, this volume serves as a reference for graduate students and scholars interested in Chinese religions, the modern cultural and intellectual history of China (including mainland China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Chinese communities overseas), intellectual and material history, and the global academic discourse of critical concepts in the study of religions.

Yogacara is one of the most influential philosophical systems of Indian Buddhism. Competing traditions of Yogacara thought were first introduced into China during the sixth century. By the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368), however, key commentaries of this school had ceased being transmitted in China, and it was not until the end of the nineteenth century that a number of them were re-introduced from Japan where their transmission had been uninterrupted. Within a few short years Yogacara was being touted as a rival to the New Learning from the West, boasting not only organized, systematized thought and concepts, but also a superior means to establish verification. This book accomplishes three goals. The first is to explain why this Indian philosophical system proved to be so attractive to influential Chinese intellectuals at a particular moment in history. The second is to demonstrate how the revival of Yogacara thought informed Chinese responses to the challenges of modernity, in particular modern science and logic. The third goal is to highlight how Yogacara thought shaped a major current in modern Chinese philosophy: New Confucianism. Transforming Consciousness illustrates that an adequate understanding of New Confucian philosophy must include a proper grasp of Yogacara thought.

Confucian Iconoclasm proposes a novel account of the emergence of modern Confucian philosophy in Republican China (1912–1949), challenging the historiographical paradigm that modern (or New) Confucianism sought to preserve traditions against the iconoclasm of the May Fourth Movement. Through close textual analyses of Liang Shuming's Eastern and Western Cultures and Their Philosophies (1921) and Xiong Shili's New Treatise on the Uniqueness of Consciousness (1932), Philippe Major argues that the most successful modern Confucian texts of the Republican period were nearly as iconoclastic as the most radical of May Fourth intellectuals. Questioning the strict dichotomy between radicalism and conservatism that underscores most historical accounts of the period, Major shows that May Fourth and Confucian iconoclasts were engaged in a politics of antitradition aimed at the monopolization of intellectual commodities associated with universality, autonomy, and liberty. Understood as a counter-hegemonic strategy, Confucian iconoclasm emerges as an alternative iconoclastic project to that of May Fourth.

While phenomenology and Yogacara Buddhism are both known for their investigations of consciousness, there exists a core tension between them: phenomenology affirms the existence of essence, whereas Yogacara Buddhism argues that everything is empty of essence (svabhava). How is constructive cultural exchange possible when traditions hold such contradictory views? Answering this question and positioning both philosophical traditions in their respective intellectual and linguistic contexts, Jingjing Li argues that what Edmund Husserl means by essence differs from what Chinese Yogacarins mean by svabhava, partly because Husserl problematises the substantialist understanding of essence in European philosophy. Furthermore, she reveals that Chinese Yogacara has developed an account of self-transformation, ethics and social ontology that renders it much more than simply a Buddhist version of Husserlian phenomenology. Detailing the process of finding a middle ground between the two traditions, this book demonstrates how both can thrive together in order to overcome Orientalism.

In the early twentieth century, Chinese Buddhists sought to strengthen their tradition through publications, institution building, and initiatives aimed at raising the educational level of the monastic community. In The Huayan University Network, Erik J. Hammerstrom examines how Huayan Buddhism was imagined, taught, and practiced during this time of profound political and social change and, in so doing, recasts the history of twentieth-century Chinese Buddhism. Hammerstrom traces the influence of Huayan University, the first Buddhist monastic school founded after the fall of the imperial system in China. Although the university lasted only a few years, its graduates went on to establish a number of Huayan-centered educational programs throughout China. While they did not create a new sectarian Huayan movement, they did form a network unified by a common educational heritage that persists to the present day. Drawing on an extensive range of Buddhist texts and periodicals, Hammerstrom shows that Huayan had a significant impact on Chinese Buddhist thought and practice and that the history of Huayan complicates narratives of twentieth-century Buddhist modernization and revival. Offering a wide range of insights into the teaching and practice of Huayan in Republican China, this book sheds new light on an essential but often overlooked element of the East Asian Buddhist tradition.

Modern Chinese history told from a Buddhist perspective restores the vibrant, creative role of religion in postimperial China. It shows how urban Buddhist elites jockeyed for cultural dominance in the early Republican era, how Buddhist intellectuals reckoned with science, and how Buddhist media contributed to modern print cultures. It recognizes the political importance of sacred Buddhist relics and the complex processes through which Buddhists both participated in and experienced religious suppression under Communist rule. Today, urban and rural communities alike engage with Buddhist practices to renegotiate class, gender, and kinship relations in post-Mao China. This volume vividly portrays these events and more, recasting Buddhism as a critical factor in China's twentieth-century development. Each chapter connects a moment in Buddhist history to a significant theme in Chinese history, creating new narratives of Buddhism's involvement in the emergence of urban modernity, the practice of international diplomacy, the mobilization for total war, and other transformations of state, society, and culture. Working across an extraordinary thematic range, this book reincorporates Buddhism into the formative processes and distinctive character of Chinese history.

In Thomé H. Fang, Tang Junyi and Huayan Thought, King Pong Chiu discusses Thomé H. Fang and Tang Junyi, two of the most important Confucian thinkers in twentieth-century China, who appropriated aspects of the medieval Chinese Buddhist school of Huayan to develop a response to the challenges of ‘scientism’, the belief that quantitative natural science is the only valuable part of human learning and the only source of truth. As Chiu argues, Fang’s and Tang’s selective appropriations of Huayan thought paid heed to the hermeneutical importance of studying ancient texts in order to be more responsive to modern issues, and helped confirm the values of Confucianism under the challenge of ‘scientism’, a topic widely ignored in academia.

Mou Zongsan (1909-1995) was such a seminal, polymathic figure that scholars of Asian philosophy and religion will be absorbing his influence for at least a generation. Drawing on expertise in Confucian, Buddhist, Daoist, and modern Western thought, Mou built a system of New Confucian philosophy aimed at answering one of the great questions: What is the relationship between value and being? However, though Mou acknowledged that he derived his key concepts from Tiantai Buddhist philosophy, it remains unclear exactly how and why he did so. In response, this book investigates Mou s buddhological writings in the context of his larger corpus and explains how and why he incorporated Buddhist ideas selectively into his system. Written extremely accessible, it provides a comprehensive unpacking of Mou s ideas about Buddhism, Confucianism, and metaphysics with the precision needed to make them available for critical appraisal.

This book presents a multi-sited ethnographic study of the global development of the Taiwanese Buddhist order Fo Guang Shan. It explores the order’s modern Buddhist social engagements by examining three globally dispersed field sites: Los Angeles in the United States of America, Bronkhorstspruit in South Africa, and Yixing in the People’s Republic of China. The data collected at these field sites is embedded within the context of broader theoretical discussions on Buddhism, modernity, globalization, and the nation-state. By examining how one particular modern Buddhist religiosity that developed in a specific place moves into a global context, the book provides a fresh view of what constitutes both modern and contemporary Buddhism while also exploring the social, cultural, and religious fabrics that underlie the spatial configurations of globalization.