Humanistic Buddhism

• 1. Introduction

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  Humanistic Buddhism carries a Chinese name that translates as 'Buddhism for the Human World,' and its central argument is both simple and radical: religious practice belongs among the living, not the dead. For much of Chinese Buddhist history, monks were called upon primarily to perform funeral rites and rituals for departed souls. By the end of the Qing dynasty, monks who made their livelihood this way formed the majority of the monastic class. A reformer named Taixu looked at this situation and decided it represented a fundamental distortion of the Buddha's original purpose. What did Taixu believe Buddhism should actually be doing? Who carried his ideas forward after him? And how did a philosophical argument born in early twentieth-century China reshape entire religious institutions across Taiwan and beyond?

• 2. Taixu and the Reform Impulse

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  Taixu was a Buddhist modernist activist and thinker, and the vocabulary he chose for his movement was itself an argument. His early formulation, 'Buddhism for Human Life,' placed the characters for 'human' and 'life' at the front of the name deliberately. Those two characters encoded his criticism of the Buddhism he saw around him: a tradition that had drifted toward preoccupation with spirits and ghosts on one side, and funeral services on the other. He wanted to correct both tendencies at once.

  Taixu also used a second term, 'Buddhism for the Human World,' which eventually became the more widely adopted phrase. At first the two were largely interchangeable. One of his disciples, Yin Shun, later sharpened the distinction by using 'humanistic Buddhism' specifically to criticize what he called the 'deification' of Buddhism, a tendency he saw as another distortion widespread in Chinese practice. Yin Shun developed these ideas in articles and books that gave the movement its doctrinal foundation.

  The historical rupture that brought these ideas to their widest audience came from politics rather than philosophy. When the Nationalist government was defeated by the Chinese Communist Party in the Chinese Civil War, Yin Shun and other disciples of Taixu relocated to Taiwan. It was in Taiwan, among religious leaders who had originally come from mainland China, that 'humanistic Buddhism' became the standard term. The tradition Taixu started found its institutional home far from where it began.

• 3. Six Principles, One Aim

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  Humanistic Buddhism rests on six core concepts: humanism, altruism, spiritual practices as part of daily life, joyfulness, timeliness, and the universality of saving all beings. These are not simply abstract values but a framework for reorienting what religious life looks like day to day. The movement draws its philosophical grounding from the life of Sakyamuni Buddha himself, who achieved Buddhahood while bound in an earthly, human form. If the Buddha accomplished awakening as a person living in the world, the argument runs, then Buddhist practice cannot be something reserved for remote or otherworldly contexts.

  The aim that follows from these principles is to reconnect practice with ordinary life. Humanistic Buddhism explicitly concerns itself with the material world, not solely with liberation from it. Daisaku Ikeda, head of the Soka Gakkai new religious movement, described the core of this orientation as insisting that human beings exercise their spiritual capacities without limit, combined with an 'unshakable belief in their ability to do this.' Soka Gakkai International teaches that the Lotus Sutra leads all people toward Buddhahood and that 'ordinary human beings are in no way different or separate from one another.' The movement also regards interfaith dialogue and the study of non-violence as expressions of humanistic Buddhist teaching.

• 4. The Ritual That Changed

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  Emperor Zhu Yuanzhan issued his Buddhist Orders in 1391, and one consequence rippled through Chinese Buddhism for centuries afterward. Those orders created three formal categories of monks: meditation monks, teaching monks, and yoga monks. The yoga monks were assigned responsibility for performing rituals on behalf of the dead. Over time, this division calcified into a class of monks-on-call who earned their living through funeral and memorial services. After the Ming dynasty, penance for the dead spread further, gradually displacing older rituals centered on meditation. The spread of tantric Buddhism following the Yuan dynasty added another current pushing in the same direction, because that tradition placed strong emphasis on ritual practice.

  By the end of the Qing dynasty, monks-on-call made up a majority of the sangha, the monastic class. This is the landscape Taixu and his successors were reacting against. Humanistic Buddhism does not reject ritual; it reframes it. The movement's understanding of death is that it is not an ending but the beginning of a new life, and so rituals at life's close should focus on comforting the dying individual and those who love them, rather than performing services primarily for the benefit of the deceased's soul.

• 5. Taiwan's Four Great Mountains

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  Yin Shun provided the doctrinal backbone for humanistic Buddhism in Taiwan, but he was not particularly active in social or political life. A younger generation took up that work. Four figures became known collectively as the Four Heavenly Kings of Taiwanese Buddhism: Hsing Yun, Sheng-yen, Wei Chueh, and Cheng Yen. Each headed one of the Four Great Mountains, or major monasteries, that anchor humanistic Buddhism in Taiwan. These are Fo Guang Shan, Dharma Drum Mountain, Chung Tai Shan, and Tzu Chi.

  Fo Guang Shan, founded by Hsing Yun in the 1960s, became one of the most prominent humanistic Buddhist organizations in present-day Taiwan. Its Recitation Teams travel to hospitals and hospice care facilities, assisting the dying and their families in performing humanistic Buddhist ritual. The organization also holds ceremonies celebrating marriage and the happiness of married couples, which have drawn participants worldwide. Hsing Yun himself wrote two works that shaped these practices: 'Rites for Funerals,' which outlines the Dharmic elements of end-of-life ritual with attention to the living participants, and 'The Etiquettes and Rules,' which frames traditional Buddhist practice through a humanistic lens.

• 6. Women and Ordination

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  Hsing Yun, who lived from 1927 to 2023, held conservative views on gender roles. He published articles advising men on maintaining a household and advising women on providing companionship and pleasing their husbands. He did not advocate forcing women out of the workforce, but he cautioned men about potential household problems if women were not at home. These positions placed him at odds with the changing realities of women's lives in Taiwan and China, where women had established a solid presence in the workforce.

  The record on women's ordination tells a more complicated story. In 1998, 136 women from a variety of Buddhist traditions were ordained into the Fo Guang Shan tradition in China. Taiwan had made ordination available to Buddhist nuns for centuries before that. The gap between Hsing Yun's published views on domestic gender roles and the tradition's formal inclusion of women through ordination reflects a tension that humanistic Buddhism has not fully resolved. The movement's identity is built around serving the living in all their circumstances, and how that principle applies to the women within the tradition itself remains an open question in its ongoing development.