The Heritage of Taixu

Abstract

Much scholarly attention has been devoted to the way the Chinese intellectual world tried to formulate an answer to the challenge posed by European modernity, as well as to the way European political thinking (nationalism, socialism, communism, anarchism) impacted traditional Chinese political thinking. In contrast, very little attention has been devoted to the way these same political philosophies also influenced the Chinese Buddhist answer to European modernity. This article discusses the ways in which the ‘reform of Buddhism’ proposed by the famous Venerable Taixu (1889–1947) was shaped by both the political and military events that determined the history of China in the first half of the twentieth century, and by his genuine determination to modernize Buddhism.