[You can read Buddhadharma’s review of Buddhist Masters of Modern China: The Lives and Legacies of Eight Eminent Teachers, edited by Benjamin Brose, here.]
For hundreds of years, China was at the center of the Buddhist world. Clerics from central Asia and India went there to teach, translate, and study. Monks from Korea, Japan, and Vietnam made long and arduous journeys to study under eminent Chinese masters at thriving monasteries. Those intrepid travelers went on to transmit the teachings and traditions of China to their homelands. The entire edifice of East Asian Buddhism rests on foundations laid in China, but you wouldn’t necessarily know that today.
In the United States and Europe, the Buddhist traditions that have put down the deepest roots have all come from elsewhere. We know about Tibetan Buddhism, of course, through charismatic teachers like the Dalai Lama and Chögyam Trungpa. Zen came to the United States via Japan, first through the writings of D. T. Suzuki and later with the efforts of monks like Nyogen Senzaki and Shunryu Suzuki; and by way of Vietnam and the pioneering work of Thich Nhat Hanh. The monks Seungsahn and Samu Sunim brought Korean Seon to North America in the 1970s. The vipassana techniques that underly the modern mindfulness movement originated with prominent Southeast Asian monks and laypeople, men like Mahasi Sayadaw and S. N. Goenka. Their Western disciples continue to maintain, transmit, and adapt their teachings for larger and larger audiences today. While many Chinese monks have come to the West to offer instruction and establish places of practice, they have mainly addressed their teachings to Chinese-speaking disciples and devotees. None have attracted sizable numbers of Western students. Chinese monks and nuns rarely feature in the pages of popular Buddhist magazines in the United States, and their teachings are seldom published by mainstream presses. It is a conspicuous absence. I have been studying Chinese Buddhism for about thirty years now. When I tell people what I do, I am often met with the same incredulous response: “They have Buddhism in China?”
“Men and women, monastic and lay, worked diligently to both preserve the traditions they had inherited from their ancestors and ensure that those teachings would remain intact and accessible long into the future. Chinese Buddhism, far from being in its death throes, was in fact undergoing a kind of rebirth.”
The confusion is understandable. At the first high-profile introduction of Buddhism to the United States—the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893—Chinese Buddhists were absent. There were representatives of Japanese Zen and Pure Land traditions. The Sri Lankan monk Anagarika Dharmapala impressed the audience with his eloquent presentation of core Buddhist principles; he would go on to preside over the first Buddhist initiation conducted in the United States. Those in attendance at the Parliament debated the value and veracity of the then novel Buddhist teachings, but they would not hear from any Chinese monks. Discussions of Chinese Buddhism came instead from Confucian officials and Christian missionaries. The news was not good. Pung Kwang Yu, the official Chinese representative to the Parliament, informed his American audience that although Buddhism claimed the greatest numbers of “believers” in China, it was merely a heterodox sect whose superstitious practices were promoted by an uneducated clergy. The Presbyterian minister William Alexander Parsons Martin concurred. The Buddhist “priesthood [in China],” he announced, “has lapsed into such a state of ignorance and corruption that in Chinese Buddhism there appears to be no possibility of revival.” There were no representatives of the Chinese clergy in Chicago, in other words, because there were no serious Buddhists left in China.
Christians had a professional interest in disparaging the competition, and there is a long and lively tradition of missionaries in China denigrating Buddhist teachings in terms such as “the parasitic smut and worm dust of the East.” But even Japanese Buddhists seem to have given up hope on their counterparts in China. D. T. Suzuki visited mainland China in the 1930s. He would later report that although “there are still many Zen monasteries in China, it seems to have ceased to be a living spiritual force, as it once was, in the land of its birth. Apparently, Japan is the only place on earth where Zen is still kept alive.” The Japanese Zen tradition that Suzuki so effectively championed in the United States first developed in China, and from there it was introduced to Japan in the thirteenth century. According to Suzuki and many of his compatriots, once Chan was established as Zen in Japan, it was refined into a purer, more perfect form. Thereafter, they surmised, Chan began to ossify and lose its vigor in China, devolving into a weak and dissipated form. China was once a great Buddhist empire, according to a line of thought that would be inherited and embraced by Western Zen converts, but that was a very long time ago. There is a certain amount of cultural chauvinism in such assessments, of course.
Japan was laying the groundwork for an invasion of China at the time of Suzuki’s visit, and reports of cultural stagnation helped to justify the coming occupation. And yet, people in China did not necessarily disagree with these critiques. The early twentieth century was a tumultuous time on the continent. The two-thousand-year-old imperial system had just collapsed, and a nascent Republican government was struggling to assert control and suppress a proliferation of powerful warlords. China’s economic and political sovereignty was embattled on multiple fronts. After two devastating “Opium Wars,” when England forced Chinese authorities to allow British merchants to flood the Chinese market with the drug, China had to not only pay humiliating reparations but also grant Western merchants and missionaries the right to travel, trade, and proselytize wherever they pleased. The flood of foreigners that followed brought new ideas—from Christianity to evolution, democracy, capitalism, Marxism, scientific atheism, public education, and pragmatic philosophy—and sparked urgent debates about China’s future. Russia was annexing territory in the north. Japan occupied Korea, Taiwan, and Manchuria. The French were in Southeast Asia, and the British controlled India and Hong Kong. With the United States in the Philippines, China was essentially surrounded by colonial powers. (A cartoon from this period shows Queen Victoria of England, Wilhelm II of Germany, Nicholas II of Russia, the French Marianne, and the Meiji emperor hungrily slicing up China as if it were an apple pie.) The Chinese people were in a dangerously vulnerable position, and they knew it. They did not yet have the resources to compete economically or militarily with the West or Japan. Their age-old traditions, the very basis of their collective culture, seemed to be failing them. If they wanted to avoid colonization and subjugation, they would have to modernize as quicky as possible.
In these troubled times, Buddhism was seen by many as a root cause of the nation’s most pressing problems rather than a source for solutions. What was the point of maintaining premodern—some would say archaic—traditions like monastic Buddhism in the modern era? China needed social services, political reform, new technologies, economic resources, industry, and defense capabilities. It didn’t need legions of monks sitting in meditation and chanting dharani. In an age-old slate of critiques, reprised from past government repressions of the sangha, Buddhist clerics were deemed obstinate impediments to progress. They consumed resources but produced nothing of economic value. They were little more than “rice buckets” who owned extensive buildings and properties yet did not contribute to the material welfare of their communities. Monks were accordingly likened to viruses and parasites infecting the body politic. They taught their followers outmoded ideas about gods and ghosts. They emphasized future rewards—better, heavenly rebirths in far-off utopian pure lands—over practical solutions in the here and now. For many people in positions of power in China, Buddhist clerics and their teachings had become irrelevant at best, destructive at worst. They belonged to a bygone era and had no place in a modern nation.
In such a hostile and unforgiving environment, it is tempting to take Christian missionaries and Japanese observers at their word and conclude that Chinese Buddhism had entered a kind of death spiral. But that would be a mistake. It is often in times of extraordinary instability and tension that creativity and innovation come to the fore. So it was that during the first half of the twentieth century, a generation of monastics and laypeople were at the vanguard of a vigorous and transformative Buddhist movement in China. Often described as a great revival, it was a pivotal era for Buddhist thought and practice on the continent. Men and women, monastic and lay, worked diligently to both preserve the traditions they had inherited from their ancestors and ensure that those teachings would remain intact and accessible long into the future. Chinese Buddhism, far from being in its death throes, was in fact undergoing a kind of rebirth. Many of the clerics who took up the task of revitalization were closely connected to one another. They studied together, trained in many of the same monasteries, belonged to the same organizations, frequently collaborated, and occasionally debated with one another. While they shared similar struggles and triumphs, their responses to the challenges they faced were by no means uniform. Their visions of what constituted authentic Buddhist practice, likewise, were diverse and occasionally at odds. Some monastics sought a return to what they saw as the fundamentals of Buddhist training. The problem, according to these clerics, was not that the Buddhist tradition was outmoded but rather that too many monks and laypeople lacked the requisite rigor and self-control to attain results. A greater fidelity to the tradition was needed. Indeed, many Buddhists thought the problems facing China stemmed from a pervasive moral decline and the collective negative karma it generated.
In their efforts to purify themselves, it was common for eminent monks and nuns to focus on a single, relatively simple practice— investigating a “critical phrase” (huatou), reciting the Buddha’s name (nianfo), studying a single sutra—and to encourage their disciples to similarly immerse themselves completely in one cultivation technique. This stripped down, back-to-basics approach called for a return and recommitment to the essential principles— morality (sila), meditation (samadhi), and wisdom (prajna)—that had formed the core of Buddhist practice for millennia. One needed to first discipline one’s body by adhering to the precepts. Only then could one’s mind be tamed and brought to bear on objects of contemplation that generated the wisdom that led to liberation.
While some monks and nuns devoted themselves to shoring up the foundations of traditional Buddhist institutions and practices, others worried that the old ways had not all aged well. Those ancient foundations, they felt, were not built to withstand the pressures of modern life. What was needed was not a renewed commitment to past precedents but a new vision better suited to the current reality. The most active and influential champion of this reform-oriented approach was the monk Taixu. For Taixu and his allies, Chinese Buddhism had reached an inflection point. The ideal of Buddhist clerics who focused only on self-cultivation and awakening without concern for the machinations of politics or the ever-shifting currents of cultural and social norms was no longer tenable. As members of communities and as citizens of the nation, monastics were obligated to take more active roles in society. Rather than prioritizing liberation for themselves in a distant pure land, they would commit themselves to building a pure land here on earth for the emancipation of all people. The goal was not to transcend the world but to transform it.
The diverging visions of prominent clerics inevitably led to heated debates and occasionally erupted into outright conflict, but, overall, the vast majority of monastics did not view different approaches as necessarily exclusive. Most struck a utilitarian balance between respect for tradition and embrace of innovation. For all their disagreements, monks, nuns, and laypeople were united in their devotion to the Dharma and shared the same goal of protecting and preserving the Buddhist tradition in a time of extraordinary precarity.
From the introduction to Buddhist Masters of Modern China: The Lives and
Legacies of Eight Eminent Teachers, edited by Benjamin Brose (Shambhala, 2025). Excerpted by permission of the publisher.
