T h e S C I E N C E o f C H I N E S E B U D D H I S M

E R I K J . H A M M E R S T R O M

Early Twentieth-Century Engagements

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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 reli-gion” 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 con-clusion that “science and religion” refers to some important issue in our

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

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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 relation-ship 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 rela-tionship 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 interac-tion, 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 reli-gion and science in history. They have questioned the simplistic histori-cal 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 rela-tionship between science and religion. With some exceptions, their work has focused almost exclusively on science and Christianity in the West.

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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 interac-tion 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 his-tory. 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.

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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, sci-ence 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 math-ematics and astronomy, since the late Ming dynasty (1368–1644). But it was not until the late nineteenth century that Western learning (xixue

) 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 mili-tary power precipitated a crisis among China’s governing intelligen-tsia. 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

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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 author-ity 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 Chi-nese 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 ele-ments 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 Bud-dhists 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.

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When Buddhists wrote on science, they were not responding to a tra-dition already established in society; rather, they were actively partici-pating 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 commu-nity of professional scientists, in their extension of the meaning of science to talk about social and cultural issues, and nonscientists who used sci-ence 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 (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 lay-people, 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 aware-ness of the cultural authority of science.

The invocation of scientific terms and scientific ideas in one’s writ-ings 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 disagree-ment 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

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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 sophisti-cated discourses about national salvation, cultural reform, and the libera-tion of the people. Many thinkers of the mid-1910s to early 1920s rejected Chinese tradition in favor of modern, Western philosophy, political sys-tems, 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 rensh-engguan ) 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 philoso-phy. 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 direc-tion 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

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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 reli-gion, 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 super-stitious 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

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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 struc-ture. 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 separ-ateness 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 sci-ence 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 time. As a result, although Chi-nese Buddhists’ engagement with science may have had some similarities to that of Buddhists from other countries, the discourses they produced were specific to China.

In this study I show how Chinese Buddhists’ approaches to science were shaped by the context of the 1920s and early 1930s, a time when science as an ideological entity was discussed widely in literate Chinese society. The majority of these discussions did not focus on the truth of certain ideas about the natural world, such as evolution or the function-ing of the nervous system, so much as on the implications of scientific ideas for the values and goals of human life and society. Or, to use the categories of the day, the discussions of science and human values that took place owed much to the two discursive fields of Lebensanschauung13

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and Weltanschauung, which were translated into Chinese as renshengguan (philosophy of life) and yuzhouguan or, less commonly,

shijieguan (both meaning “worldview”). These concepts, derived from German philosophy, became important modes of thought in China from the 1920s, just as they had come to pervade all of European thought by the early twentieth century.14

Not only were these terms widely used in China during the 1920s and 1930s, they are also useful for us here, because they remind us that when Buddhists wrote about science as a whole, they were concerned with more than issues of truth. Too often in the popular imagination the encounter between science and religion is understood as a clash between competing truth claims. When it came to truth claims about the natural world, there was little in science that Chinese Buddhists actually cared to refute. In fact, there were a number of claims made in modern science that Buddhists identified as having been predicted in the Buddhist scrip-tures. Such examples were only ever one part of a larger project, how-ever. This project was the use of modern terms and concepts to articulate a Buddhist modernism that could take its place as an important element of Chinese society. Though not always stated explicitly, the working out of such a Chinese Buddhist modernism often took place within the dis-cursive field of philosophies of life.

The current study takes its cues from these dominant concerns and is organized according to the general features exhibited by a philosophy of life in China during the third and fourth decades of the twentieth century. I hope I will be forgiven for enumerating these features in a manner remi-niscent of Clifford Geertz’s famous definition of religion.15 A philosophy of life includes (1) a theory about human origins within the world, which is connected to (2) claims about the objective ontological and subjective epistemological status of human beings. Out of this status, (3) ethical sys-tems are deduced, which are linked to (4) ideas about self-cultivation and the proper ends of a life well lived, both for the individual and society. It can be seen from this list that a philosophy of life is heavily value laden. The ethical implications of science were just as important as any truth claim promoted in its name. For Buddhists, the most pressing issues in the discussion of science and Buddhism were not about the relative truthful-ness of either but about how and in what way each could help individual humans and all of humanity. Thus, when Buddhists discussed the theory

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of evolution, for example, they were not as concerned with debating its factuality as they were with the ethical and societal implications of social evolutionism (often mistakenly referred to as “social Darwinism”).

The six chapters of this study are meant to lead the reader through the common elements of the modern philosophies of life developed by Chinese Buddhists as they grappled with science. It begins with a general discussion of the history of the translation of modern science in nine-teenth and early twentieth-century China and how this was spurred on by the political and social situation of the time. The challenge of Western expansion, which resulted in China’s semicolonial status at the end of the nineteenth century, caused many members of the Chinese literati to study Western science and technology in greater depth than had been the case in prior centuries. The aim of chapter 1 is to show that the ideologi-cal remaking of Chinese society that took place in the 1920s and early 1930s drove scientists, Buddhists, and many others to invest a great deal of energy in debating the nature and scope of science.

In order to properly frame a Buddhist philosophy of life, it is impor-tant to see how that philosophy of life fits within a view of the physical universe, how it fits within a worldview. Chapter 2 explains that Chinese Buddhists, like their coreligionists in other parts of the colonized world, worked to reconcile the geocentric, flat-earth cosmology described in Buddhist scripture with modern astronomy. It was important for Bud-dhists to make such interventions in order to deflect the criticism that their tradition was unscientific because of its geocentrism. While they agreed with the veracity of modern views of the universe, Buddhists strongly opposed materialism, and the remainder of this chapter shows how Buddhists used subatomic and relativity physics to argue against materialism in favor of their preferred metaphysical view, which was rooted in Consciousness-Only (Weishi )16 thought.

The nature of the physical universe was of interest to Chinese Bud-dhists, but they were generally more concerned with the activities of the human beings within the world than with cosmic mechanics. Two of the primary issues at stake in all Chinese discussions of science in the 1920s were epistemology and the nature of the human mind, which are discussed in chapters 3 and 4. Chapter 3 shows that while Buddhists did not generally disagree with the contents of science (i.e., the facts that are discovered about the workings of the natural world), they did disagree

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with the claims made by the proponents of scientism that science was the only, or even best, method for attaining knowledge about the world. Buddhists drew from a number of traditional doctrines to challenge the supremacy of scientific empiricism. One of the more nuanced ways this was done was by means of the analytic tools of classical Buddhist logic. Buddhist thinkers usually agreed that empiricism was essential, arguing that Buddhism and science shared a similar emphasis on the verifica-tion of theories, but Buddhists felt their tradition allowed access to a higher empiricism, one not bounded by the limitations of the ignorance that commonly blinkers human reason. As an example of this higher empiricism, a number of authors pointed to the supersensory powers that advanced practitioners of meditation are said to acquire.

Chapter 4 follows Buddhists’ use of Consciousness-Only thought in the dialogue on mind, subjectivity, and psychology (as both a con-cept and a discipline) taking place in China during the 1920s. Buddhists deployed the notion of karmic “seeds” described in Consciousness-Only thought to answer a question then facing the psychological community: how to explain memory and instinct. The chapter concludes by describ-ing Buddhists’ rejection of one author’s reductive materialist reading of Consciousness-Only thought using modern physiology. This serves as a case study of how consensus was reached among members of the Bud-dhist community around issues of Buddhism and science during the late 1920s and early 1930s.

While Buddhists were interested in debating what the world is, how we know it, and how the mind works, their discussions of science also reflected their commitment to ethical behavior and the ending of suf-fering. In other words, they were concerned both with knowing the world and with how people should behave in that world. Chapter 5 deals with Buddhists’ thoughts on social evolutionism, the social ethic they believed was engendered by science. Social evolutionism became popular in Chinese political and intellectual discourse starting in the last decade of the nineteenth century. The notion that groups compete violently with one another for survival, with the strong defeating or simply destroy-ing the weak, was generally accepted in China by 1920, although not by Chinese adherents of anarchist socialism or Buddhism. Buddhists rejected social evolutionism because of the violence to which it seems to lead. Identifying it as the ethical position of materialist science, Buddhists

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repeatedly reminded their readers about the devastation of World War I in Europe and the horrendous methods for killing (created by science) employed there. In analyzing Buddhists’ critiques of social evolutionism, several observations can be made. Few Buddhists rejected Darwinism or evolution in the broader sense; rather, they rejected what they took to be a prescriptive ethic not a descriptive theory. The evolution of species was a fact few disputed, but they felt that violent conflict between groups was not unavoidable and suggested society be built instead upon the radical egalitarianism promoted in Buddhist scripture.

Although Buddhists rejected materialism and championed the empiri-cism of their tradition as superior to that of science, it would be difficult to label the Buddhists whose work is examined here as antiscience. Some even considered the study of science to be part of the Buddhist path. Chap-ter 6 describes this idea within a larger discussion of the impact science had on how Buddhists talked about spiritual self-cultivation. A number of authors pointed to the Mahāyāna “six perfections” as the core of Buddhist practice, but they argued that people should also study science as part of their Buddhist practice. Equating various modern sciences to the five traditional Indian arts (wuming ) described in the Buddhist canon, they said that the Buddha had advised the aspiring bodhisattva to study mathematics, logic, and philology. The Buddha maintained that these arts were important not only for one’s own personal spiritual advancement but also as tools to be used to decrease the suffering of others.

Meditation is one of the six perfections, and Buddhist discussion of meditation sometimes used explicitly scientific language. Chapter 6 ends with a study of a book published in 1932 in which the author claimed that Buddhist meditation leads to the production of an organic compound in the body he described as “super adrenalin.” He also argued, in a manner that will be familiar to anyone who is aware of recent neuroscientific investigations of meditation, that scientists should conduct experiments on meditators, including using X-ray machines to study their brains, in order to understand the physiological effects produced during medita-tion. While few of these ideas caught on, they are representative of the many ways that Buddhists’ discussions of ethical and spiritual cultiva-tion were influenced by science. Such efforts were not limited to Bud-dhists, and they shared many ideas with those around them. Indeed, one of the primary assumptions of this work is that one cannot understand

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Buddhists’ discussions of science merely as reactions of one coherent ide-ological tradition to the challenges posed by the truth claims of another ideological tradition. Rather, what I attempt to show here are just some of the complex causes and conditions, to borrow the Buddhist terminol-ogy, that led certain Buddhists to articulate their modern philosophies of life in novel ways, using the resources provided in Buddhist language and thought as well as the language and thought of modern science and Western philosophy.

Sources for This Study and Their Authors

I have depended on a number of written sources to investigate Buddhist views on and uses of science in the early twentieth century. The earliest of these date from the last decade of the nineteenth century, while the latest are from the early 1950s. Despite this range, this study is primarily based on the analysis of writings that appeared in the Buddhist periodi-cal press between 1923 and 1932. The new print culture that developed in China in the early twentieth century was unprecedented and has been studied in several recent works.17 New technologies and improved means of transportation and communication gave China’s new Buddhist pub-lishing houses the ability to reach an audience much wider than was reached fifty years earlier. Increased literacy among the general popula-tion led to greater demand for written material, and this affected the Buddhist world. Scriptural reprints, monthly and semimonthly journals, Buddhist newspapers, and new monographs on a variety of topics from the introductory to the highly technical were distributed by train to the many bookstores spread throughout China.

In order to provide a broad account of the development of Buddhist discourses on science, I have tried to examine and reference the greatest possible range of material from the Buddhist press and have consulted many types of written media, including newspaper and journal articles, lecture transcripts, monographs, and publication notices.18 My goal here is to describe the ways that the widest range of literate Buddhists used scientific language and compared their tradition with something called “science” during the first half of the twentieth century. Rather than focus solely on the works of the usual “great men” of modern Chinese Buddhist history, such as the monk Taixu (1890–1947) or his lay Buddhist