The Science of Chinese Buddhism: Early Twentieth-Century Engagements

THE SCIENCE OF CHINESE BUDDHISM

Sheng Yen Series in Chinese Buddhist Studies

THE SHENG YEN SERIES IN CHINESE BUDDHIST STUDIES

Chün-fang Yü, series editor

Following the endowment of the Sheng Yen Professorship in Chinese Buddhist Studies, the Sheng Yen Education Foundation and the Chung Hua Institute of Buddhist Studies in Taiwan jointly endowed a publication series, the Sheng Yen Series in Chinese Studies, at Columbia University Press. Its purpose is to publish monographs containing new scholarship and English translations of classical texts in Chinese Buddhism.

Scholars of Chinese Buddhism have traditionally approached the subject through philology, philosophy, and history. In recent decades, however, they have increasingly adopted an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on anthropology, archaeology, art history, religious studies, and gender studies, among other disciplines. This series aims to provide a home for such pioneering studies in the field of Chinese Buddhism.

Michael J. Walsh, Sacred Economies: Buddhist Business and Religiosity in Medieval China

Koichi Shinohara, Spells, Images, and Maṇḍalas: Tracing the Evolution of Esoteric Buddhist Rituals

Beverley Foulks McGuire, Living Karma: The Religious Practices of Ouyi Zhixu (1599–1655)

Paul Copp, The Body Incantatory: Spells and the Ritual Imagination in Medieval Chinese Buddhism

N. Harry Rothschild, Emperor Wu Zhao and Her Pantheon of Devis, Divinities, and Dynastic Mothers

ERIK J. HAMMERSTROM

Columbia University Press

New York

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E-ISBN 978-0-231-53958-6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hammerstrom, Erik J.

The science of Chinese Buddhism: early twentieth-century engagements / Erik J. Hammerstrom.

    pages cm.—(The Sheng Yen Series in Chinese Buddhist Studies)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-17034-5 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-231-53958-6 (electronic)

1. Buddhism and science—China—History—20th century. 2. China—Intellectual life—20th century. I. Title.

BQ4570.S3H36 2015

294.3'3650951—dc23

2014038237

A Columbia University Press E-book.

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COVER IMAGE: detail of engraving, Paris, 1861; hand-colored. antiqueprintstore.com

COVER DESIGN: Noah Arlow

References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

This book is dedicated to

my wife Aimee,

and to the Js and Gs (you know who you are),

thank you for everything.

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

1    The Historical Context

2    Views on the Physical Universe

3    Empiricism and Means of Verification

4    The Nature of Mind

5    Ethics, Science, and Society

6    Science and Self-Cultivation

Epilogue

Notes

Glossary

Bibliography

Index

PREFACE

THIS BOOK IS A WORK of intellectual history. I wrote it because I am interested in how religious people think about the truth claims of their traditions in light of modern science. My focus is on what Chinese Buddhists thought about science in the first part of the twentieth century, a time when the social and intellectual realms in China were changing dramatically. My goal was to explain why Buddhists wrote what they wrote, and why they wrote it when they wrote it. I do not explain how you should think about the relationship between science and Buddhism (however you interpret these two terms) or which one is right. There are plenty of other books out there that address those issues. Likewise, I do not consider here how well these Buddhists actually understood the science they were talking about, and I am not concerned with judging whether their ideas hold any water. Certainly I have assumed their ideas made some logical sense, at least to them, and I have tried my best to report those ideas as accurately as possible. I have also tried to take advantage of the historical and cultural distance between these writers and me to try to see the bigger picture, the dominant themes in their work of which they may not have been aware, and the place of their ideas within the longer arcs of Chinese and global history.

The student of modern East Asian history will note that I have said very little here about Japan. This was a conscious choice, and one that I believe reflects the facts of the time. The people of Japan studied Euro-American ways of thinking and doing earlier and more deeply than the people of China, and it is undeniable that Japanese thinkers served China as an important translator, a cultural window, if you will, onto the world of Western thought in the 1890s and 1900s. But few of the big ideas discussed in this book date from the period of Japan’s greatest influence on Chinese thought. One sees the inklings of some of these in the late 1890s, but it is not until the middle of the 1920s that Chinese Buddhists developed most of their discourses about modern science. By this point, Chinese people’s access to Euro-American thought was direct and regular, and its impact was clear as intelligent Chinese dove eagerly into the latest scientific and philosophical works. Euro-American thought loomed large: China’s earliest science societies, formed in the 1910s and 1920s, were dominated by Chinese scientists who studied in America. Bertrand Russell, John Dewey, and Hans Driesch all lectured in China in the early 1920s, inspiring many in the May Fourth generation; and the theories of Henri Bergson, William James, and J. R. Watson also had a deep influence on many. All of this is not to say that one could not examine the parallels and connections that might have existed between Chinese and Japanese Buddhist discourses on science. Indeed, I would be delighted to read the results of such an investigation. However, given that one of this book’s main claims is that most Chinese Buddhists’ discussions of science happened between the mid-1920s and the early 1930s, it is not strictly necessary to look to Japan to understand what occurred in China.

As a first book, this work is the product of many years of study, writing, and rewriting. Along the way I received many kind assurances and much economic support. Without these, this book would never have come to be. Research was carried out with financial support from the Sheng Yen Education Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Indiana University. I was also supported by the U.S. government through the Fulbright Scholar program. This program is essential for the future of the United States within an increasingly globalized world, and it is my hope that it will continue to support the students and scholars who contribute to our engaging with the rest of the world through learning and cultural exchange, rather than merely through economic trade and military action. I was fortunate to be able to use all of this funding to do research and to write at several warm-hearted institutions with gracious staffs. These included Dharma Drum Buddhist College in Taiwan; the Needham Research Institute in Cambridge, United Kingdom; and a little coffee shop in Hamilton, Montana.

Along the way I was helped by many more people than I can list here. First, I would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers who provided important suggestions on an earlier version of this book. Thank you to my friends in graduate school, Brad, Brian, Diane, Geoffrey, Jonathan, Joy, Michael, and the Nicoles, for the many hours of stimulating conversation and merry music making. Thank you to the teachers who trained me, especially Stephen Bokenkamp and Robert Campany. Thank you to my dissertation advisers, especially the irrepressible Aaron Stalnaker and the meticulous Chuck Jones. Thanks to my many partners in crime, Beverly Foulks McGuire, Brooks Jessup, Justin Ritzinger, and especially Gregory Adam Scott. Thanks to my excellent colleagues at Pacific Lutheran University for their remarkable collegiality. If Sukhāvatī existed for a teacher-scholar, it would look much like PLU. Finally, many thanks to my family, especially my parents and my wife, Aimee, without whom life would be so much less.

Finally, a note on some conventions used in this book. I have used pinyin throughout (which I suppose hardly needs stating in the twenty-first century); the one exception is the name of the well-known Chinese intellectual Hu Shih. Also, in this book I discuss a Buddhist school of thought known by many names, which I refer to as Consciousness-Only. It is a complex philosophical system of many components, but the primary philosophical premise upon which it is based was of central importance for early twentieth-century Chinese Buddhists. To differentiate this premise from the school of thought, I refer to the former using lowercase letters. Thus, for example, the Consciousness-Only school is based on the premise that all phenomena are consciousness-only. This is, of course, not a distinction that exists in Chinese, which has no capital or lowercase letters, but it is a distinction I think is important for this study.

Erik Hammerstrom

Cascadia

Liqiu 立秋, 2014

Introduction

The extensive application of science is one of the main characteristics of Chinese thought in the twentieth century. Since the late Qing dynasty [1644–1911], science has served as a symbol of and a call for liberation, as well as an objective criterion for all social and cultural reform.

—WANG HUI

DURING THE 1920S AND EARLY 1930s, dozens of articles and monographs devoted to the topic of science and Buddhism appeared in the rapidly growing Buddhist press of China. The subject of science and Buddhism was mentioned and discussed in passing in dozens of articles on other subjects as well. Buddhists rejected materialism and critiqued the social evolutionism associated with science even as they championed heliocentrism and the need for the empirical verification of all truth claims, even Buddhist ones. Why did Buddhists in China feel compelled to write these things about science and Buddhism? Why did they invest so much energy in the topic, and why did they say what they said? This book aims to answer these questions.

Ask someone her opinion of science and religion and it is unlikely you will get an apathetic response. She may decline to answer your question, especially if you do not know each other well or are in polite company—at a dinner party, for example. But even if she does not answer your question, it is likely that she will have an opinion on the subject, and it will probably be quite strongly held. If you search for science and religion on the Internet or on the website of any major bookseller, you will find no shortage of people willing to tell you what you should think about the relationship between these two things. All of this supports the conclusion that science and religion refers to some important issue in our world. Since the late nineteenth century, people have understood science and religion to be specific things whose relationship must be defined. The details of this relationship have fired the imaginations of academics and laypeople, it has led to the consumption of much paper and caffeine, and it has ruined many a pleasant dinner party. The question of the relationship between science and religion can do all of these things because it connects to some of the most important questions we ask of ourselves as human beings: How does one know the world? What beliefs about the world are justified? What is the value of subjective experience? How should one act as a human here on planet Earth?

Much has been written in the last century and a half about the relationship between one thing called science and another called religion. Laypeople and experts of all types have made claims about how the two interact.¹ Leaving aside the constructed nature of the two categories, we can say that probably the most popular understanding of their interaction, at least in my home, the United States, is that science and religion fundamentally conflict with each other. This conflict thesis, popularized at the end of the nineteenth century in the writings of the chemist John William Draper and Cornell University’s first president, Andrew Dickson White, continues to have a strong impact on thinking about science and religion.² Its supporters point to the trial of Galileo and the rejection of Darwinian evolution as disputes that occurred between science, as a whole, and religion, also as a whole, and they argue that such conflicts are inevitable when any religion is confronted with the truth of science. On the other side, there have been those who have claimed that science and religion are in accordance or that they occupy separate realms of human endeavor (e.g., the making of fact vs. the making of meaning) and that conflict arises only when one or the other has overstepped its proper boundaries.³

Over the last few decades, historians and scholars of religion have trained a critical gaze upon the issue of the relationship between religion and science in history. They have questioned the simplistic historical narratives told by the supporters of the conflict thesis, and they have delved deeper into the philosophical claims of both sides. Their findings have added much-needed historical rigor to the discussion of the relationship between science and religion. With some exceptions, their work has focused almost exclusively on science and Christianity in the West. The result of this has been, at least in the Anglophone world, that a large portion of humanity has been neglected. In this book I will try to add a little to the work that has already been done on the history of the interaction of science and religion by turning my sights to a different religion and a different part of the world. Just as the interaction of Christianity and modern science cannot be reduced to a narrative of conflict, twentieth-century Chinese Buddhists took a varied approach to thinking about how their tradition might relate to the recently introduced category of science. Buddhist faith commitments are often quite different from those of Christians, and this led to differences in how they thought about scientific truth claims. If one is going to make any broad statements about science and religion, it is necessary to take into account these other voices. I draw extensively on Sinophone documents—monographs, journal articles, and newspaper stories—to shed light on how Chinese Buddhists used the idea of science to describe and locate their tradition, especially during the heady years of the 1920s.

While little has been written on the interactions of Asian religion and modern science from a historical point of view,⁴ this does not mean the question of the relationship between Buddhism and science has been ignored. The last two decades have witnessed an outpouring of English-language works on Buddhism and science, but these have been written almost exclusively from the perspective of contemporary Buddhists (most of them from the West), who have argued philosophically for their views on what the relationship between science and Buddhism ought to be. This is not the goal of the current study, which is a work of intellectual history. My aim is to give those who ponder the question of science and religion, but who may not read Chinese, access to the processes by which religious thinkers operating in a different cultural and historical milieu articulated what they themselves felt to be the relationship between their tradition and the increasingly dominant discourse of modern science. But this book is more than simply another entry in the field of science and religion studies, because Buddhist discussions of science also tell us a great deal about the intellectual history of China as a whole during a period in which it was undergoing the swiftest philosophical and cultural changes it has ever witnessed. The very idea of science loomed large over all of these changes, casting its less-than-lifelike shadow across the face of Chinese culture.

Why Science? A Compelling Discourse

As the noted scholar and public intellectual Wang Hui reminds us in the quotation at the start of this chapter, an idealized notion of science served as the foundation for the rhetoric of cultural reform, liberation, and national strength that dominated twentieth-century Chinese thought.⁵ By science, neither he nor I refer to a particular body of knowledge or an institutionalized set of practices aimed at establishing that knowledge. In China, especially in the first three decades of the twentieth century, science stood for something far greater. It served as an ideological entity, a reified concept referring to an epistemology and a set of cultural values, all of which had political implications. It was, in other words, the very sign of modernity. To study it made the individual modern, and to possess it made the nation strong. At first, science was seen as inalienable from Western culture, which was itself inalienable from modernity, but this shifted as the idea of science as a universal discourse took root in China in the 1910s and 1920s. During those years, the association of science with Western culture weakened, but the notion of science as the sine qua non of modernity remained.

Science was important in China during the opening years of the twentieth century because it represented both modernity and strength. People in China had been studying Western sciences, particularly mathematics and astronomy, since the late Ming dynasty (1368–1644). But it was not until the late nineteenth century that Western learning (xixue 西學) was reflected upon in a systematic way, and a concerted effort was made to study it in China. The presence of foreign colonial troops on Chinese soil and China’s general inability to match foreign military power precipitated a crisis among China’s governing intelligentsia. Members of this class argued for varying degrees of adoption of Western learning, as well as varying degrees of governmental reform. China’s loss in the First Sino-Japanese War of 1895 to a country long considered inferior was particularly shocking, and it led to an increase in the translation and teaching of modern science. From the last decade of the nineteenth century onward, thinkers increasingly emphasized the role that science and the technological advances to which its study led should play in the modernizing nation-state of China. For these reasons, the importance of science in Chinese education continued to grow during the first half of the twentieth century, and so too did its cultural cachet.

China’s Buddhist population was well aware of the growing authority of science, and it became a compelling discourse for some of them. I use the expression compelling discourse for a number of reasons. An older approach to studying Chinese-Western interactions viewed Chinese engagement with modern thought as a process of stimulus-response in which modernity and the West act and China and Chinese thinkers merely react. In this approach, it is imagined that modernity and elements of modern thought, such as science, are foisted upon a passive subject who can only accept them. Justin Ritzinger has termed this the push model of modernity. I prefer to think of modernity, as he does, in terms of both push and pull.⁶ Discourses such as science were compelling to many Chinese thinkers, including Buddhists. They found themselves compelled to talk about science, both by internal drives and questions and by the external forces of their social, cultural, and even legal contexts. Modernity was not entirely forced upon China’s Buddhists, but it was not entirely their choice to engage with it either.

In considering the question of science and Buddhism in China, we should not imagine that in writing about science as they did, these Buddhists were outsiders to an established discussion being had by other, authoritative individuals. Science was a fluid thing in China in the early twentieth century, as it was in the rest of the world, and its authority was not controlled, or even represented, by a single group. Many of the approaches Buddhists took to discussing modern science were created in the 1920s, when much of science was in flux both in China and elsewhere. For example, although evolutionary theory was discussed in China from the start of the twentieth century, Darwin’s works were not translated into Chinese until 1919. Relativity, which shook the classical Newtonian assumptions of science as a whole, was first discussed in China in 1921. Modern psychology was not yet a well-developed discipline anywhere in the world, and although the proton was discovered in 1920, the neutron was not known of until 1933. Parallel to this, on the philosophical front, the definition of science and the role it would play in the formation of modern China were the subjects of heated debates in the early and mid-1920s, especially among intellectuals who did not actually know very much about its actual practice.

When Buddhists wrote on science, they were not responding to a tradition already established in society; rather, they were actively participating in the process by which a new tradition was formed through the translation of modern science in China. Thus, we should acknowledge that these Buddhists were part of what Wang Hui refers to as the community of scientific discourse. Wang includes within this group both the community of professional scientists, in their extension of the meaning of science to talk about social and cultural issues, and nonscientists who used science to talk about issues unrelated to science.⁷ Buddhists were very much active participants in this community, and some, such as the electrical engineer and lay Buddhist Wang Xiaoxu 王小徐 (1875–1948), knew a lot more about science than many of their secular counterparts. There were many other Buddhists, ordained or otherwise, who, though scientific laypeople, also contributed to the translation of science in China.

These Buddhists were compelled to write about science for reasons both internal and external to their tradition. Sometimes they studied and wrote about science for personal reasons: they found modern science to be fascinating and exciting, and despite some current stereotypes to the contrary, their religious faith proved no hindrance to their study of science. More often, the writings studied here reflect deeper concerns about questions of value and truth. Some Buddhists did see in science a language of universal, or at least near-universal, truth. When Buddhists wrote that Darwin’s discoveries had given the lie to the Christian belief in a creator god, denied by Buddhism since its early days in India, this was more than mere cultural strategy. Buddhists believed it and may have found it refreshing to find their beliefs supported in this new discourse. In this, as in other cases, Chinese Buddhists demonstrated a keen awareness of the cultural authority of science.

The invocation of scientific terms and scientific ideas in one’s writings was a valuable form of cultural capital, especially after the 1910s, and Chinese Buddhists knew it. This was particularly important because of major shifts occurring in how religion was understood in China. During the 1910s, and increasingly during the 1920s, there was heated disagreement over what religion was and whether it was compatible with the modern nation-state being constructed after the demise of the imperial system in 1911. The new categories of science and religion were discussed in conjunction with a third category—superstition—to form a complex of ideas that intellectuals used to judge virtually all traditional philosophies and practices. In these judgments, the word superstition signified that which was the opposite of science and thus modernity. For China to be strong, it had to abandon backward superstition and embrace science. In these discussions, religion usually occupied an ill-defined middle ground between the two poles of science and superstition.

Scholars have recently shed light on the cultural and legal processes by which religion was defined and controlled in early twentieth-century China.⁸ These studies have demonstrated the contested nature of the very term religion. Arguments about the category of religion were especially fierce during the 1920s, when new legal and economic steps taken to disestablish institutional religion were justified by increasingly sophisticated discourses about national salvation, cultural reform, and the liberation of the people. Many thinkers of the mid-1910s to early 1920s rejected Chinese tradition in favor of modern, Western philosophy, political systems, and most importantly here, science. Not everyone agreed with the more radical thinkers, however, and rather than see this period as one of unidirectional advancement toward a scientific materialist worldview from which religion was absent (the secularization thesis), one should acknowledge the multiple competing voices that spoke on and disagreed about these issues.

Some of these disagreements became important cultural events in their own right. Perhaps the most important of these in the context of the present study was the science and philosophy of life (kexue yu renshengguan 科學與人生觀) debates of 1923, in which a number of primarily Beijing-based intellectuals argued in print about the proper boundaries of science, the authority of subjectivity, and the veracity of stimulus-response models of human psychology. Though neither group formed a united camp, there were basically two sides in this debate. On the one hand, there were those who valued subjective experience and looked to the work of Henri Bergson (1859–1941) and German idealist philosophy. On the other, there were the supporters of scientism, a mechanistic materialist doctrine that holds that all that is knowable is knowable by science and that science has the power to provide meaning and direction in society, culture, and even art. The popularity of the scientistic viewpoint in early twentieth-century China formed a major part of the context for Buddhists’ discussions of science.⁹ Proponents of dogmatic scientism had little patience for religion, which they did not differentiate from superstition.

Superstition as a modern category came under attack in China at the start of the twentieth century, but the term superstition, like religion, was ill defined during the first decades of the century. Because of this, it was incumbent upon religious persons to define their traditions in such a way as to not be seen as superstitious. To be defined as superstitious meant that one became viewed as a hindrance to the growth and even the survival of the nation; and as such, the material bases for one’s tradition—temples, land, and artifacts—could be confiscated by those in power. This happened in China repeatedly throughout the pre-Communist period, but it intensified during several major antireligion movements that occurred in the 1920s. It is no coincidence, then, that the most productive period for Chinese Buddhist discourses on science began directly after the science and philosophy of life debates and ran for the next decade, coinciding with both of the major antireligion campaigns and leading into the middle of the relative calm of the Nanjing Decade (1927–1937).

The period between 1923 and 1932 was thus an important one, and one of the central historical claims of this study is that ideas about the relationship between science and Buddhism hinted at during the late 1890s were fully developed in the 1920s into forms that endured through the 1940s. This study, then, is part of a recent trend toward emphasizing the importance of the 1920s in modern Chinese history.¹⁰ Buddhists who chose to talk about science during this period were compelled to do so by their own desires to explain the relationship between Buddhist doctrine and science, both of which made claims of universality, but they were also compelled by the times in which they were living.

Buddhist Philosophies of Life

This book presents an intellectual history of the development of Chinese Buddhists’ attitudes toward and uses of science and scientific language in the period between 1923 and 1932. While I account for ideas that appeared earlier, notably late nineteenth-century interpretations of traditional Buddhist cosmology, most of the works cited here were published during this decade, when Chinese Buddhists developed various ways of talking about science, which they deployed in different combinations. There was no single Buddhist discourse on science in China.

A study such as this naturally requires an organizing narrative structure. In rendering Chinese Buddhists’ discussions legible, I do not claim that all Chinese Buddhists were talking about science in the same way or that they all shared a common agenda. Donald Lopez has done an admirable job of using primarily Anglophone sources to trace the global emergence of something he calls the Buddhism and Science discourse,¹¹ by which he means the argument made by some Buddhists that Buddhism and science are inherently compatible. He describes how this argument developed in the West and in countries colonized by the West over the last century and a half. Several other scholars have written in the same vein, discussing how this particular argument developed in China.¹² What these scholars do not mention is that Buddhists did not write only to demonstrate noncontradiction between Buddhist doctrine and the facts and methodologies of science. Many also sought to maintain the separateness of Buddhism from science, as well as its superiority over it. There were those who pursued other lines of discussion beyond either of these options as well. The ideas of the noncontradiction of Buddhism and science and the ultimate superiority of Buddhism over science lay within a set of clustered discourses Buddhists drew on when invoking science. Examining how this cluster of discourses developed in China makes clear that there were certain patterns to the ways in which Chinese Buddhists engaged with science and that these patterns were influenced by the wider intellectual climate in China at the