Taixu

• 1. Introduction

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  Taixu once told an audience that a single drop of water contains eighty four thousand microbes. He offered that as proof that worlds exist within worlds too small to see. Taixu was a Buddhist monk in China, a modernist who wanted to remake Buddhism using ideas borrowed from far beyond Buddhism itself. Why did a monk raised inside monastery walls end up drawn into revolutionary politics? What made him question the existence of God instead of simply preaching doctrine? And how did a movement meant to renew Chinese Buddhism end up crushed by decades of war?

• 2. Great Emptiness

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  Lǚ Pèilín was his birth name, given to a boy born in Haining, in Zhejiang province, on the 8th of January 1890. Both his parents died while he was still a child, so his grandparents raised him instead. At sixteen he was ordained into the Linji school of Chan Buddhism at Xiao Jiuhua Temple in Suzhou. Soon after his ordination, he received the Dharma name Taixu, meaning Great Emptiness. In 1909 he traveled to Nanking and joined the Sutra Carving Society, an organization founded by the lay Buddhist Yang Renshan. That contact with Yang Renshan placed Taixu inside a circle of reform-minded lay Buddhists for the first time.

• 3. Revolution And Retreat

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  Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, Tan Sitong and Zhang Taiyan were among the political writers whose work reached Taixu and turned his mind toward reforming Buddhism. In 1911, while in Guangzhou, he made contact with revolutionaries plotting to overthrow the Qing dynasty. He took part in some of their secret activities. In his own Autobiography, he later described his thinking as resting on what he called 'Mr. Constitution', the Republican Revolution, Socialism and Anarchism. Reading Zhang Taiyan's essays 'On Establishing Religion,' 'On the Five Negatives' and 'On Evolution,' he came to see Anarchism and Buddhism as close companions. He viewed that pairing as a possible advance beyond Democratic Socialism. After the Republic of China was established, he founded the Association for the Advancement of Buddhism. Resistance from conservative Buddhists meant it lasted only a short time. Taixu could not win over the wider Buddhist community. He was also shaken by the outbreak of the First World War and by the suffering he saw in China. In response, he withdrew into seclusion on Putuoshan for three years, starting in October 1914. That retreat marked a turning point: from it emerged the blueprint for reorganizing Chinese Buddhism itself.

• 4. Reimagining The Sangha

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  By 1930, according to history of religion professor Don A. Pittman, Taixu had reduced his vision of the monastic order to twenty thousand monastics. Of those, five thousand would be students, twelve thousand would be bodhisattva monastics and three thousand would serve as elders. Within that group of twelve thousand bodhisattva monastics, five thousand were meant to spread the Dharma through public preaching and teaching. Three thousand would administer Buddhist educational institutions, and fifteen hundred would carry out charitable and relief work. A further fifteen hundred would instruct within the monastic educational system, and one thousand would take part in cultural affairs. Taixu framed this reorganization as a step toward building a Pure Land, not in some distant cosmology but here in the present world. Pure Land Buddhism was already widely practiced in China at the time. Pittman described this as a break from mainstream Buddhist practice. Rather than relying on the merit of distant bodhisattvas, Taixu wanted ordinary people to transform this earthly world into a pure land. He believed that transformation would come through their own dedicated, sacrificial work. That same impulse to translate old ideas into new terms would soon lead him to put Buddhist doctrine side by side with modern science.

• 5. Science And Buddhism

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  Taixu once argued, in one of his boldest essays, that Buddhist Sutras had already anticipated modern physics. 'Space is endless and the number of worlds is infinite,' he wrote, 'for all are in mutual counterpoise like a network of innumerable beads.' He drew a direct line between that image and the scientific claim that space is infinite and has no true center. Yet he refused to treat science as the final word on reality. No amount of scientific knowledge, he insisted, could carry a person all the way to enlightenment. 'Scientific knowledge can prove and postulate the Buddhist doctrine,' he wrote, 'but it cannot ascertain the realities of the Buddhist doctrine.' He titled that essay 'Science and Buddhism.' In it, he also named two culprits he believed blocked real scientific progress. The first was 'the superstition of God or the restriction of the ego,' and the second was 'the superstition of reality.' Closed minded belief in those superstitions, he argued, kept people from seeing past their own assumptions. 'Science therefore, can never be the main support of Buddhism,' he wrote, 'although it may act as a valuable auxiliary.' He added that 'much may be expected from uniting the two methods of investigation.' He summed up the relationship bluntly: 'Scientific methods can only corroborate the Buddhist doctrine, they can never advance beyond it.' That same refusal to let outside systems overrule Buddhist doctrine would soon be tested by a very different foreign tradition.

• 6. Borrowing From Christianity

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  While traveling in Europe, Taixu watched Christian charitable organizations at work and wanted to bring that same organizational style into a reformed Buddhism. He put those methods into practice through groups such as the Bodhi Society and the Right Faith Society. Both were lay organizations built to provide charity to the sick, the poor and the misfortunate. Still, he was sharply critical of Christian philosophy itself. He believed it was incompatible with modern science, and said it had failed to stop economic depression in Europe and the two World Wars. Western critics returned the criticism, calling Taixu naive and ill-informed about Christian thought. One dismissed his Lectures in Buddhism as, in his words, 'a rambling, incoherent, amateurish talk.' That same critical distance did not stop him from sitting down with clergy of other faiths to compare notes on faith itself.

• 7. Debating God

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  A conversation with a Catholic archbishop pushed Taixu to write about the need for interreligious dialogue in China. 'All religions should be regulated in order that they conform to the situation in China,' he wrote, 'there should be no overt rejection of Catholicism.' For Taixu, different religions could cooperate and learn from one another if they approached each other with open minds. He even folded some Christian methods, including pastoral training and revival style preaching, into his own Buddhist practice. His boldest move went further still: he openly challenged the existence of God. During his three years of self-confinement after a failed reform attempt, he wrote a long reflection. Among his questions: 'Who is God? Is He made of matter or not?' He pressed the point with a barrage of questions. What came before God's birth? How could an all-powerful being have a beginning? And how could a benevolent creator have made cruelty, ignorance and sin? Taixu argued there was no rational basis for believing in God, and treated that same skepticism as part of his wider case against superstition. That skepticism did not stop Taixu from spending his life trying to build one concrete thing: a Pure Land here on earth.

• 8. An Unfinished Pure Land

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  Don Pittman examined these reform efforts at length in his book 'Toward a Modern Chinese Buddhism.' Among them was Taixu's attempt to make Pure Land Buddhism a lived reality, not a distant promise. In his own writing, Taixu asked a direct question. How hard could it really be to turn an impure China into a Chinese pure land? All it took, he argued, was people using their minds to produce pure thoughts and working hard at good deeds. 'All persons have this force of mind,' he wrote. Since everyone possessed the capacity, or benneng, to create a pure land, he believed everyone could vow to build one and work to achieve it. He treated this as the core of his life's work. His goal was to end suffering by bringing the Pure Land into the present world, not leaving it for the next one. He pursued that goal through many channels, including his reorganization of the Sangha. Most of the institutions he built toward that end did not survive him. Economic and political turmoil, wars and revolutions, and eventually the communists, dismantled much of what he had tried to create. Taixu died in March 1947 at the Jade Buddha Temple in Shanghai. Among the disciples he left behind were Yin Shun (1906-2005) and Dongchu (1907-1977), who carried pieces of his reform vision into the decades that followed.