Introduction, Excerpt from "A Modern Buddhist Bible: Essential Readings from East and West"
by Donald S. Lopez, Jr.
2002
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--Buddhadasa, Excerpt from "A Modern Buddhist Bible: Essential Readings from East and West", by Donald S. Lopez, Jr.
B. R. Ambedkar, Excerpt from "A Modern Buddhist Bible: Essential Readings from East and West", by Donald S. Lopez, Jr.
-- Modern Buddhism: So New, So Familiar: Modern Buddhism—with its roots in colonial Asia—claims to return to the essence of the Buddha’s teachings. Has a new sect emerged?, by Donald S. Lopez Jr.
Contents
• Introduction vii
• Helena Petrovna Blavatsky 1
• Sir Edwin Arnold 6
• Henry Steel Olcott 15
• Paul Carus 24
• Shaku Soen 35
• Dwight Goddard 49
• Anagarika Dharmapala 54
• Alexandra David-Neel 59
• D. T. Suzuki 68
• W. Y. Evans-Wentz 78
• T'ai Hsu 85
• B. R. Ambedkar 91
• Lama Govinda 98
• R. H. Blyth 106
• Mahasi Sayadaw 116
• Shunryu Suzuki 127
• Buddhadasa 138
• Philip Kapleau 146
• William Burroughs 154
• Alan Watts 159
• Jack Kerouac 172
• Ayya Khema 182
• Sangharakshita 186
• Allen Ginsberg 194
• Thich Nhat Hanh 201
• Gary Snyder 207
• Sulak Sivaraksa 211
• The Dalai Lama 217
• Cheng Yen 227
• Fritjof Capra 236
• Chogyam Trungpa 244
• Glossary 255
• Acknowledgments 265
Introduction
By 7 a.m. on the morning of 26 August 1873, a crowd of some five thousand had gathered around a raised platform especially constructed for the occasion in the town of Panadure outside Colombo in Ceylon (Sri Lanka). The platform was divided in two. One side had a table covered in white cloth and adorned with evergreens. This was the side occupied by the Christian party and their spokesman. The other side of the platform was more richly decorated and filled by some two hundred Buddhist monks and their spokesman. A debate was to take place over the next two days, with sessions from 8 to 10 each morning and 3 to 5 each afternoon, each speaker being given one hour to speak in both the morning and afternoon sessions. A journalist described the scene:
Larger crowds may often be seen in very many places in Europe, but surely such a motley gathering as that which congregated on this occasion, can only be seen in the East. Imagine them all seated down and listening with wrapt [sic] attention to a yellow robed priest, holding forth from the platform filled with Budhist [sic] priests, clergymen, and Singhalese clad in their national costume, and your readers can form some idea -- a very faint one indeed - of the heterogeneous mass that revelled in a display of Singhalese eloquence seldom heard in this country.1
The coastal areas of Ceylon had been conquered by the Portuguese in the early sixteenth century and Roman Catholic missions were soon established. The Portuguese were supplanted by the Dutch in 1636, who were in turn supplanted by the British, who brought the entire island under their control in 1815. Under the British, a number of Protestant missions were established in the nineteenth century, seeking to convert the Buddhist populace to Christianity, and they achieved a certain degree of success. In 1862 a Buddhist monk named Gunananda had founded the Society for the Propagation of Buddhism and established his own printing press, publishing pamphlets attacking Christianity. A number of Wesleyan converts responded in both speeches and in print. And so in 1873 a public debate between Gunananda and a Christian representative, the Reverend David de Silva, was arranged.2
Each of the parties sought to demonstrate the fallacies of the other's sacred scriptures. The Reverend de Silva spoke first, making extensive references to the Pali scriptures that declare that there is no soul, that the person is only the aggregation of various impermanent constituents. According to Buddhism, then, human beings have no immortal soul and are 'on a par with the frog, pig, or any other member of the brute creation'.3 Furthermore, if there is no soul there can be no punishment for sin and reward for virtue in the next life. Hence, 'no religion ever held out greater inducements to the unrighteous than Buddhism did'.4
The Buddhist monk Gunananda then rose to speak. He was described by the Ceylon Times (presumably partial to the Christian faction) as 'a well-made man of apparently forty-five or fifty years, rather short, very intellectual looking, with eyes expressive of great distrust, and a smile which may either mean profound satisfaction or supreme contempt.'5 He began by stating that Reverend de Silva's knowledge of Pali was clearly deficient. It was therefore not surprising that he had misunderstood the Buddha's teachings on the nature of the person. He explained that in fact, according to the Buddhist doctrine of rebirth, the person reborn was neither precisely the same as nor different from the person who had previously died. He then turned to the shortcomings of Christianity, noting that in Genesis God regrets having created man and in Exodus instructs the Hebrews to mark their doors with blood so that he will know which houses to pass over as he kills the firstborn of the Egyptians. He concluded that neither of these appears to be the deed of an omniscient god.
And so the debate continued on into the afternoon and into the following day, with Gunananda being declared the winner by the acclamation of the multitude. This was not the first time that Buddhists and Christians had debated the primacy of their respective faiths. In 1550 the Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier had discussed the dharma with a Zen abbot in Japan. Around 1600 Matteo Ricci was denouncing Buddhism, in Chinese, to Buddhist monks in China. And in 1717 another Jesuit, Ippolito Desideri -- living in the great monastery of Sera, outside Lhasa, in Tibet - was debating with monks the doctrine of rebirth and whether there can be creation without God. However, these three Jesuits were missionaries whose missions would ultimately fail; these lands and the souls who inhabited them would not be conquered and converted by Europe and its church. But Ceylon in the nineteenth century was a British colony, and Gunananda's denunciation of Christianity had strong, and far-reaching, ramifications. Regardless of what the intentions of the participants had been, the debate at Panadure marked the beginning of modern Buddhism.
What is this form of Buddhism, and in what sense is it modern? The relation between classical Buddhism and what I refer to as modern Buddhism is more than a matter of simple chronology or a standard periodization into the primitive, classical, medieval, premodern and modern. Certainly, modern Buddhism shares many of the characteristics of other projects of modernity, including the identification of the present as a standpoint from which to reflect upon previous periods in history and to identify their deficiencies in relation to the present. Modern Buddhism rejects many of the ritual and magical elements of previous forms of Buddhism, it stresses equality over hierarchy, the universal over the local, and often exalts the individual above the community. Yet, as will be clear in what follows, modern Buddhism does not see itself as the culmination of a long process of evolution, but rather as a return to the origin, to the Buddhism of the Buddha himself. There is certainly criticism of the past, but that critique is directed not at the most distant Buddhism, but at the most recent. Modern Buddhism seeks to distance itself most from those forms of Buddhism that immediately precede it, that are even contemporary with it. It is ancient Buddhism, and especially the enlightenment of the Buddha 2,500 years ago, that is seen as most modern, as most compatible with the ideals of the European Enlightenment that occurred so many centuries later, ideals embodied in such concepts as reason, empiricism, science, universalism, individualism, tolerance, freedom and the rejection of religious orthodoxy. Indeed, for modern Buddhists, the Buddha knew long ago what Europe would only discover much later. Yet what we regard as Buddhism today, especially the common portrayal of the Buddhism of the Buddha, is in fact a creation of modern Buddhism. Its widespread acceptance, both in the West and in much of Asia, is testimony to the influence of the thinkers whose words are collected here.
These considerations seem to preclude such mundane matters as identifying the precise dates at which periods begin and end. For the purposes of this anthology, however, modern Buddhism comprises the period from 1873 to 1980. The former is the date of the famous debate in Ceylon between Gunananda and Reverend de Silva. The latter date is more arbitrary, chosen in large part to provide a vague line of demarcation between the modern and the contemporary. It will be clear that the concerns of modern Buddhism, although developing more than a century ago, extend to the present. Yet, without the advantage of a certain hindsight (itself a characteristic of modernity), it is often difficult to judge the ultimate influence of figures who have appeared most recently. Therefore, in an effort to limit the scope of this book, I have reluctantly decided to exclude those authors whose rise to stature in contemporary Buddhism has occurred after 1980.
Like all religions, Buddhism has evolved over the centuries, and that evolution has moved at a rapid pace and in myriad directions in the last two centuries, during which traditional Buddhist societies encountered modernity (often through the route of colonialism). During the same period European and American scholars began to translate Buddhist texts into Western languages, thus making Buddhism available to a large reading public. Interest in Buddhism increased even further in the second half of the last century, when, as a result of the political upheaval caused by the Vietnam War and the Chinese invasion of Tibet, large Buddhist populations (including Buddhist monks) emigrated to the West.
The Buddhism encountered today, both in Asia and the West, is very much the product of this historical evolution. The starting point of that evolution would seem to be with the founder of Buddhism, the Buddha himself, a yogin who wandered with his followers through northern India more than two millennia ago. Yet it is difficult to describe his original teachings, for none of the words traditionally attributed to the Buddha were written down until some four centuries after his death. Over the centuries Buddhists have sought to represent his original teachings and true intentions in an effort to secure the acceptance of a wide variety of developments in Buddhist thought and practice. During the past two centuries, Buddhist thinkers from across Asia and the West began to describe a Buddhism that transcends the concerns of locale and sect. This version of Buddhism, what I refer to as modern Buddhism, although hardly monolithic, has a number of characteristics (discussed below) that have been widely accepted around the world.
Despite the importance of the thinkers, both Asian and Western, who have created and developed modern Buddhism, their writings have not heretofore been gathered into a single volume. Some of the major figures in the evolution of modern Buddhism are not well known in the West, or have been forgotten. The works of others, although widely read, have not been presented in the context of the evolution of modern Buddhism. This book is the first to present some of the major works of modern Buddhism in a single anthology.
Several features of the debate in Ceylon bear identification as we begin to sketch the contours of modern Buddhism. First, Gunananda was clearly an educated monk, who not only knew h is own scriptures but had studied the Bible as well. The leaders of the various modern Buddhist movements in Asia would be drawn from the small minority of learned monks, and not from the vast majority who chanted scriptures, performed rituals for the dead and maintained monastic properties. Second, the Buddhism that was portrayed in the debate, and in modern Buddhism more generally, tended to be that of technical doctrine and philosophy, rather than that of daily practice. Buddhism was portrayed as an ancient and profound philosophical system, fully the equal of anything that had developed in the Christian West. Indeed, Buddhism came to be portrayed -- whether that portrayal was made in Sinhalese, Chinese or Japanese -- as a world religion, fully the equal of Christianity in antiquity, geographical expanse, membership and philosophical profundity, with its own founder, sacred scriptures and fixed body of doctrine.
But before considering the characteristics of modern Buddhism in more detail, it is important not to lose sight of the more direct historical effects of the 1873 debate in Ceylon. Five years later an embellished account of the debate, entitled Buddhism and Christianity Face to Face, was published in Boston by James M. Peebles. It was read by Colonel Henry Steel Olcott, a journalist and veteran of the American Civil War. In New York in 1875, Olcott and Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, a Russian emigre, had founded the Theosophical Society, whose goals were 'to diffuse among men a knowledge of the laws inherent in the universe; to promulgate the knowledge of the essential unity of all that is, and to determine that this unity is fundamental in nature; to form an active brotherhood among men; to study ancient and modern religion, science, and philosophy; and to investigate the powers innate in man.' The Theosophical Society arose as one of several responses to Darwin's theory of evolution during the late nineteenth century. Rather than seeking a refuge from science in religion, Blavatsky and Olcott were attempting to found a scientific religion, one that accepted the new discoveries in geology and archaeology while proclaiming an ancient and esoteric system of spiritual evolution more sophisticated than the physical evolution described by Darwin.
Madame Blavatsky claimed to have spent seven years in Tibet as an initiate of a secret order of enlightened masters called the Brotherhood of the White Lodge, who watch over and guide the evolution of humanity, preserving the ancient truths. These masters, whom she called 'mahatmas' ('great souls'), Jived in Tibet but were not themselves Tibetan. In fact, the very presence of the mahatmas in Tibet was unknown to ordinary Tibetans. These masters had once lived throughout the world but had congregated in Tibet to escape the onslaught of civilization. The mahatmas had instructed her in the ancient truths of the mystic traditions, or Theosophy, which she also referred to as 'Esoteric Buddhism', of which the Buddhism being practised in Asia, including Tibet, was a corruption.
Throughout her career, she (and later, other members of the society) claimed to be in esoteric communication with the mahatmas, sometimes through dreams and visions, but most commonly through letters that either materialized in a cabinet in Madame Blavatsky's room or that she transcribed through automatic writing. The mahatmas' literary output was prodigious, conveying instructions on the most mundane matters of the functions of the Theosophical Society, as well as providing the content of the canonical texts of the society, such as A. P Sinnett's Esoteric Buddhism (1885) and Madame Blavatsky's The Secret Doctrine (1888). Despite its unlikely beginnings, the Theosophical Society would play a profound role in the formation of modern Buddhism.
By 1878 Blavatsky and Olcott had shifted the emphasis of the society away from the investigation of psychic phenomena towards a broader promotion of a universal brotherhood of humanity, claiming affinities between Theosophy and the wisdom of the East, specifically Hinduism and Buddhism. Inspired by Olcott's reading of the account of Gunananda's defence of the dharma, they were determined to join the Buddhists of Ceylon in their battle against Christian missionaries. Thus they sailed to India, arriving in Bombay in 1879, where they proclaimed themselves to be Hindus. The following year they proceeded to Ceylon, where they both took the vows of lay Buddhists. Blavatsky's interest in Buddhism remained peripheral to her Theosophy. Olcott, however, enthusiastically embraced his new faith, being careful to note that he was a 'regular Buddhist' rather than a 'debased modern' Buddhist, and decried what he regarded as the ignorance of the Sinhalese about their own religion. As one of the founding figures of modern Buddhism, he identified his Buddhism with that of the Buddha himself: 'Our Buddhism was that of the Master-Adept Gautama Buddha, which was identically the Wisdom Religion of the Aryan Upanishads, and the soul of the ancient world-faiths. Our Buddhism was, in a word, a philosophy, not a creed.'6
Olcott took it as his task to restore 'true' Buddhism to Ceylon and to counter the efforts of the Christian missionaries on the island. In order to accomplish this aim, he adopted many of their techniques, founding the Buddhist Theosophical Society to disseminate Buddhist knowledge (and later assisted in the founding of the Young Men's Buddhist Association) and publishing in 1881 The Buddhist Catechism, modelled on works used by the Christian missionaries. Olcott shared the view of many enthusiasts in Victorian Europe and America, who saw the Buddha as the greatest philosopher of India's Aryan past and regarded his teachings as a complete philosophical and psychological system, based on reason and restraint, as opposed to ritual, superstition and sacerdotalism, demonstrating how the individual could live a moral life without the trappings of institutional religion. This Buddhism was to be found in texts, rather than in the lives of modern Buddhists of Ceylon, who, in Olcott's view, had deviated from the original teachings.
This would not be his only contribution to modern Buddhism. In 1885 the British government agreed to Olcott's demand that Wesak, the day conveniently marking the Buddha's birth, enlightenment and passage into nirvana, be observed as a national holiday in Ceylon. To mark the occasion, the Buddhist flag (which Olcott had helped to design) was unfurled. The person chosen to raise the flag was Gunananda, who twelve years before had participated in the debate that brought Olcott to Ceylon. Raising a Buddhist flag over Ceylon had obvious symbolic meanings for the anti-colonial movement. However, Olcott hoped it might also serve as a symbol under which all Buddhists could unite, like the cross in Christianity. In 1885 he set out on the grander mission of healing the schism he perceived between 'the Northern and Southern Churches' -- that is, between the Buddhists of Ceylon and Burma ('Southern') and those of China and Japan ('Northern').
Olcott was referring to the division of the Buddhist world into what is known as the Theravada and the Mahayana. After the death of the Buddha, a number of sects developed in India, distinguished formally by the particular rendition of the monastic code they followed. One of the sects that was established in Ceylon, the Sthaviravada ('Tradition of the Elders' in the Sanskrit language), evolved into the Theravada ('Tradition of the Elders' in the Pali language), eventually becoming the orthodox form of Buddhism throughout Southeast Asia many centuries later. In India, some four centuries after the Buddha's death, a movement arose that came to be known as the Mahayana ('Great Vehicle'), which offered a different conception of the Buddha and of the path to enlightenment. In the mainstream (that is, non-Mahayana) traditions of India, the Buddha had passed into nirvana upon his death, never to return, although his relics remained as potent sources of blessing. In the Mahayana, the Buddha who appeared on earth was but a physical manifestation of an eternally enlightened being, one of thousands who populated the universe to deliver all beings from suffering. According to some schools of the Mahayana, all beings were destined to follow the path of the bodhisattva and become a buddha. In the mainstream schools, the traditional goal was to become an arhat, one who works to destroy the bonds of birth and death in order to pass into nirvana at death. The arhat was disparaged in much Mahayana literature for his limited aspiration and deficient compassion, and labelled as a follower of the Hinayana ('Vile Vehicle' or 'Base Vehicle'; often euphemized in English as 'Lesser Vehicle').
In descriptions of Buddhism from Olcott's day (and long after) one sometimes encounters the term 'Southern Buddhism' to describe the Buddhism of Ceylon, Thailand, Cambodia, Burma, Laos and parts of Vietnam, and the term 'Northern Buddhism', used in reference to China, Japan, Korea, Tibet and Mongolia. It was often said that Southern Buddhism is Theravada and Northern Buddhism is Mahayana. This is not historically accurate. Theravada has been the dominant school of Buddhism in most of Southeast Asia since the thirteenth century, with the establishment of the monarchies in Thailand, Burma, Cambodia and Laos. Prior to that period, however, many other strands of Buddhism were also widely present, including other mainstream sects, in addition to Mahayana and tantric groups. The great monument at Borobudur in Java reflects Mahayana doctrine and there are reports of Indian monks travelling to Sumatra to study with Mahayana and tantric masters there. Buddhist Bengal exerted a strong influence from the ninth to thirteenth centuries, and Sanskrit Mahayana and tantric texts were donated to Burmese monasteries as late as the fifteenth century. It was only after the demise of Buddhism in India that the Southeast Asian societies looked especially to Ceylon for their Buddhism, where the Theravada had become the orthodoxy.
Just as Southeast Asian Buddhism was not always Theravada, so 'Northern Buddhism' was not always Mahayana. The monastic codes practised in China, Japan, Korea and Tibet all were derived from the Indian mainstream orders. Furthermore, several of these orders flourished in Central Asia (including parts of modern-day Iran and Afghanistan), whence Buddhism was first introduced into China via the Silk Route. Recent scholarship has also suggested that the lines of doctrine and practice long thought to divide Theravada and Mahayana are not as sharply drawn as once imagined. Rather than being a popular (and largely lay) revolution against the Theravada, the Mahayana is seen as a variation on mainstream practices, divided largely over which texts are accepted as the word of the Buddha. As a seventh-century Chinese pilgrim observed about India, 'those who worship bodhisattvas and read Mahayana sutras are called the Mahayana, while those who do not do this are called the Hinayana'.
Yet in the five hundred years since the demise of Buddhism in India, contact between Theravada monks and Mahayana monks had been limited, and to the extent that each had any knowledge about the other, it tended to fall into stereotypes presented in their texts. The Theravadins perceived the followers of the Mahayana as worshippers of non-Buddhist deities who kept inauthentic monastic vows and revered inauthentic texts. Those from Mahayana traditions regarded the Theravadins as practitioners of the Hinayana who sought enlightenment only for themselves and who lacked access to the complete (and more advanced) teachings of the Buddha.
Olcott believed that a great rift had occurred in Buddhism 2,300 years earlier and that if he could simply persuade representatives of the Buddhist nations to agree to his list of 'fourteen items of belief' (he also referred to them as 'Fundamental Buddhistic Beliefs'), then ir might be possible to create a 'United Buddhist World'. Olcott thus travelled to Burma and Japan, where he negotiated with Buddhist leaders until he could find a formulation to which they could assent. He also implored them to send missionaries to spread the dharma. His fourteen principles were sufficiently bland as to be soon forgotten even by those who had agreed to them. But Olcott was again shown to be prescient, for many others would later attempt not only to reduce the essence of Buddhism to a single book, as Olcott had done in his Buddhist Catechism, but to reduce it further to a series of propositions, as he had also attempted to do. Olcott was also the first to try to unite the various Asian forms of Buddhism into a single organization, an effort that bore fruit long after his death when the first world Buddhist organization, the World Fellowship of Buddhists, was founded in 1950.
In the end, however, Olcott's expression of his beliefs led to another schism. He incurred the wrath of Sinhalese Buddhist leaders when he mocked their belief in the authenticity of the precious tooth relic of the Buddha at Kandy by stating that it was in fact a piece of deer's horn. Shortly afterwards the monk who had certified the authenticity of Olcott's catechism found seventeen answers that were 'opposed to orthodox views of the Southern Church' and withdrew his certification. (Certification was restored after Olcott made revisions to a subsequent edition of the catechism, although he refused to endorse the traditional view that the Buddha was eighteen feet tall.) Even here, Olcott presages a common characteristic of modern Buddhism, which tends to see Buddhism as above all a system of rational and ethical philosophy, divorced from the daily practices of the vast majority of Buddhists, such as the worship of relics, which are dismissed as superstitious.
Olcott left one further legacy. Authority in Buddhism is often a matter of lineage, traced backwards in time from student to teacher, ideally ending with the Buddha himself. If one were to imagine a lineage of modern Buddhism traced forwards in time, one might begin with Gunananda (who clearly saw himself as representing the original teachings of the Buddha) to Colonel Olcott, to a young Sinhalese named David Hewaviratne, better known as Anagarika Dharmapala (1864-1933).
Hewaviratne was born into the small English-speaking middle class of Colombo. His family was Buddhist; at the age of nine he sat with his father in the audience of the Panadure debate, cheering for Gunananda. But like many middle-class children, he was educated in Catholic and Anglican schools. He met Blavatsky and Olcott during their first visit to Ceylon in 1880 and was initiated into the Theosophical Society four years later. In 1881 he changed his name to Anagarika Dharmapala ('Homeless Protector of the Dharma') and, although remaining a layman until late in life, wore the robes of a monk. In 1884, when Blavatsky departed for the Theosophical Society's headquarters in Adyar, India, after a subsequent visit to Ceylon, Dharmapala accompanied her. Upon his return to Ceylon, he became Colonel Olcott's closest associate, accompanying him on a trip to Japan in 1889. In 1898 he worked with Olcott to found the short-lived Dravidian Buddhist Society, dedicated to converting (or, according to Dharmapala, 'returning') the untouchables of south India to Buddhism. Clearly more political than Olcott in both Ceylon and India, he declared that 'India belongs to the Buddhas'.
In 1891, inspired by Edwin Arnold's account of the sad state of the site of the Buddha's enlightenment and by his own trip to the site that year, he founded the Maha Bodhi Society, whose aim was to wrest Bodh Gaya from Hindu control and make it a place of pilgrimage for Buddhists from around the world. Dharmapala achieved international fame after his bravura performance at the World's Parliament of Religions, held in conjunction with the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. His eloquent English and ability to quote from the Bible captivated the audience as he argued that Buddhism was clearly the equal, if not the superior, of Christianity in both antiquity and profundity, noting, for example, its compatibility with science. While in Chicago, he met not only the other Buddhist delegates to the parliament, such as the Japanese Zen priest Shaku Soen, but American enthusiasts of Buddhism, including [url=x]Paul Carus[/url].
The lineage of modern Buddhism was passed to China, when Dharmapala stopped in Shanghai in 1893 on his journey back from the World's Parliament of Religions, where he met Yang Wen-hui (1837- 1911). Yang was a civil engineer who had become interested in Buddhism after happening upon a copy of The Awakening of Faith, an important Mahayana treatise. He organized a lay society to disseminate the dharma by carving woodblocks for the printing of the Buddhist canon (a traditional form of merit-making). After serving at the Chinese embassy in London (where he met Max Muller, editor of the 'Sacred Books of the East' series, and his Japanese student Nanjo Bun'yu), he resigned from his government position to devote all of his energies to the publication of Buddhist texts.
Accompanying Dharmapala to Shanghai was the famous Baptist missionary Reverend Timothy Richard, who had also attended the parliament in Chicago. After an unsuccessful attempt by Dharmapala to enlist Chinese monks into the Maha Bodhi Society, Reverend Richard arranged for him to meet Yang Wen-hui. Yang did not think it possible for Chinese monks to go to India to assist in the cause of restoring Buddhism in India, but he suggested that Indians be sent to China to study the Buddhist canon. Here, we note another element of modern Buddhism. Dharmapala felt that the Buddhism of Ceylon was the most pure and authentic version of the Buddha's teachings and would have rejected as spurious most of the texts that Yang had been publishing. Yang, on the other hand, felt that the Buddhism of China was the most complete and authentic, such that the only hope of restoring Buddhism in India lay in returning the Chinese canon of translated Indian texts (including many Mahayana sutras) to the land of their birth. The ecumenical spirit found in much of modern Buddhism does not preclude the valuation of one's own form of Buddhism as supreme.
Yang and Dharmapala seem to have begun a correspondence that lasted over the next fifteen years, in which they agreed on the importance of spreading Buddhism to the West. Towards that end, Yang collaborated with Reverend Richard in an English translation of The Awakening if Faith, and in 1908 established a school to train Buddhist monks to serve as foreign missionaries, with Yang himself serving on the faculty, perhaps the first time in the history of Chinese Buddhism that monks had received instruction from a layman. Yang's contact with figures such as Muller and Dharmapala had convinced him that Buddhism was a religion compatible with the modern scientific world.
The situation faced by Buddhist monks in China was different from that in Ceylon. The challenge came not so much from Christian missionaries, although they were also a strong presence in China, but from a growing community of intellectuals who saw Buddhism as a form of primitive superstition impeding China's entry into the modern world. Buddhism had periodically been regarded with suspicion by the state over the course of Chinese history, and such suspicions were intensified in the early decades of the twentieth century (especially after the Republican revolution of 1911) when Buddhism was denounced both by Christian missionaries and by Chinese students returning from abroad imbued with the ideas of Dewey, Russell and Marx. In 1898 the emperor had issued an edict ordering many Buddhist temples (and their often substantial land holdings) to be converted into secular schools. Although the order was rescinded in 1905, a number of Buddhist schools and academies for the training of monks were founded at monasteries in an effort to prevent the seizure of the property and the establishment of secular schools. The monastic schools set out to train monks in the Buddhist classics, who would in turn go out in public and teach to the laity (as Christian missionaries did). Yang's academy was one such school. Although most were short-lived, they trained many of the future leaders of modern Buddhism in China, who sought to defend the dharma through founding Buddhist organizations, publishing Buddhist periodicals and leading lay movements to support the monastic community. One of the students at Yang's school was the monk T'ai Hsu [Taixu], later to become one of the most famous Chinese Buddhists of the twentieth century. New organizations included the Buddhist Pure Karma Society, founded in 1925 in Shanghai, which ran an orphanage and a free outpatient clinic, sponsored public lectures on Buddhist texts, published the Pure Karma Monthly and operated radio station XMHB, 'The Voice of the Buddha'. The Chinese Metaphysical Society was founded in 1919 in Nanjing. Originally intended for laymen, monks were later allowed to attend, on the condition that they not meditate, recite the Buddha's name, or perform services for the dead. Here Buddhism was presented as a philosophy rather than a religion, and the emphasis was placed not on the recitation of the scriptures (sutras) but on the study of the scholastic treatises, especially those of the Fa-hsiang school, regarded as a form of Buddhist Idealism. For many who participated in these groups, the support and study of Buddhism served as a means of maintaining their Chinese identity during a period of sometimes chaotic social and political change.7
An important characteristic of modern Buddhism, especially in contrast to some early forms, has been the active and visible role of women. Women have contributed to modern Buddhism in a number of domains, but no issue has been more important, perhaps, than the question of the ordination of women as nuns. The Buddha is reported to have asserted that women are capable of following the path to enlightenment, but had only grudgingly permitted the founding of an order of nuns. He is said to have established an additional set of rules for nuns (including the rule that the most senior nun must always defer to the most junior monk) and to have predicted that as a consequence of his allowing women to enter the order, his teaching would only remain in the world for five hundred years. If he had not admitted women, he predicted, it would have lasted for one thousand years. Yet an order of fully ordained nuns was established and it eventually spread to Sri Lanka, Burma, China, Vietnam, Korea and Japan. However, it was difficult for this order to survive periods of social upheaval; the rules of discipline required that ten fully ordained nuns be present to confer ordination on a new nun, after which she was required to have a second ordination ceremony at which ten monks must be present. The order of nuns died out in Sri Lanka around the end of the tenth century. As a result of a protracted war with a king from southern India, Buddhist institutions were devastated to the point that there was no longer the requisite number of monks to provide for the ordination of new monks. The Sri Lankan king brought monks from Burma to revive the order of monks, but he did not make similar efforts for the order of nuns. Thus, although the order of nuns survives in China, Korea and Vietnam, it has died out in the Theravada countries of Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia.
In tracing the place of women in the lineage of modern Buddhism, Dharmapala again played a role, albeit indirectly. As mentioned above, in 1891 he had founded the Maha Bodhi Society, with the aim of uniting Buddhists from around the world and restoring Bodh Gaya (then under Hindu control) as a sacred centre and place of pilgrimage for all Buddhists. Dharmapala did not live to see this latter goal achieved; Bodh Gaya would not be returned to Buddhists until after India gained its independence from Britain in 1947. But in the decades that followed, Dharmapala's dream was realized, and Bodh Gaya became again a meeting place for Buddhists from across Asia, a place where a Buddhist woman from Thailand could meet a Chinese nun from Taiwan.
Voramai Kabilsingh was born near Bangkok, Siam (Thailand), in 1908, the youngest of six children. She was educated at a Catholic school and later worked as a teacher in a girls' school. She married a politician in 1942 and gave birth to a daughter in 1944. After undergoing surgery in 1955, Kabilsingh developed a strong interest in Buddhism and the practice of meditation, starting a monthly Buddhist magazine that same year. In 1956 she received the eight precepts of a Buddhist layperson, shaved her head and began to wear robes that were light yellow in colour. The order of nuns had never been established in Thailand, and the only Buddhist vocation for women has been that of the mae ji, women who shave their heads and wear white robes and keep some of the vows of a novice, although they are not ordained and have no official status in the Buddhist community. Typically coming from rural backgrounds and with little formal education, mae ji, in many cases widows and women without family support, do not occupy a high status in Thai society. They often live in temple compounds, where they receive food in exchange for cooking and cleaning duties, while others living elsewhere have to beg for their food.
Kabilsingh did not fall into this category and hence created a new one for herself, wearing robes that were neither the white colour of the mae ji or the dark ochre of the monks. The local Buddhist authorities lodged a protest against her, claiming that a woman wearing a yellow robe defiled the monastic order. However, Kabilsingh was exonerated because the shade of yellow that she wore was not permitted for monks. In 1957 she purchased land and constructed the first Thai Buddhist temple for women. She also founded an orphanage and a school. Because the order of nuns in the Theravada tradition had become extinct many centuries before, she was told that it was impossible for her to receive full ordination. Undaunted, she travelled to India and to Bodh Gaya, the site of Buddha's enlightenment, and prayed to the Buddha himself for ordination.
Bodh Gaya is a place of pilgrimage for Buddhists from around the world, and while she was there Kabilsingh met a Chinese Buddhist nun. The lineage of fully ordained Buddhist nuns had been introduced to China in the fifth century BCE, by a delegation of nuns from Sri Lanka, in fact. Since then, the order of nuns had died out in Sri Lanka but had continued in China, thriving also in Taiwan after the Communist revolution. But because Chinese nuns were adherents of the Mahayana, the Theravada monks of Thailand did not consider the Chinese ordination lineage of nuns to be authentic.
In 1971 Kabilsingh and her daughter (who had researched the origins of the Chinese lineage during her graduate study in Canada) travelled to Taiwan, where she received full ordination as a Buddhist nun, perhaps the first Thai woman in history to do so. Upon her return to Thailand, she continued the traditional merit-making deeds of a Buddhist laywoman, such as presenting offerings of food and robes to monks and having Buddha images made for temples. She also engaged in more modern charitable activities, such as providing food, clothing and books to impoverished schoolchildren. In addition, she did things that Thai Buddhist women had not done in the past, performing some of the traditional roles of a monk, such as teaching the dharma and giving instruction in meditation. Despite her fame, she has not been accepted as a member of the Thai order, many of whose members consider her simply a mae ji.8
In 1868 in Japan, the shogun was deposed and the emperor restored to power. One of the first acts of his new Meiji government was to establish Shinto as the state religion, with the emperor as its head priest. Prior to this time, Buddhism had effectively become the state religion of Japan with each household required by law to be registered at a nearby Buddhist temple. Shinto and Buddhist deities had been worshipped together, but now Buddhist images had to be removed from Shinto shrines and Buddhist monks were prohibited from performing rituals there. The new policies represented not only the creation of state Shinto but a suppression of Buddhism with such slogans as 'Exterminate the buddhas and destroy Shakyamuni (the Buddha)'. Buddhism was regarded as a foreign religion and hence not purely Japanese, as Shinto was considered to be. Over four thousand Buddhist temples were eliminated and thousands of monks were returned to lay life; many were drafted into the imperial army. In some parts of Japan the new policies sparked riots that had to be suppressed by the authorities.