Practice and Understanding in Modern Chinese Pure Land Buddhism

Abstract

The present paper aims to contribute to the ongoing scholarly discussion about the impact of Western concepts on the modern East Asian understanding of Buddhism. Previous studies on the intellectual and cultural history of Chinese Buddhism in China’s Republican (1911–1949) period suggest that the newly imported distinctions between religion and philosophy, and reason and faith, were instrumental in creating a new secular discourse that favoured the doctrinally orientated Buddhist traditions (notably Consciousness-only/Yogācāra) and belittled the more practical and devotional Buddhist currents (especially Pure Land Buddhism). While those observations pertain to the views of secular elites, a much more complex picture emerges from the confessional literature of the Republican period, for example Buddhist journals. As the present paper demonstrates, while some followers of the movement of ‘Consciousness-only studies’ were indeed critical of Pure Land devotionalism, they did not necessarily problematise it by appealing to the newly introduced Western conceptual framework.
The first part of the present paper reexamines the devotional model of Pure Land practice associated with the influential Republican-era monk Yinguang. It argues that Yinguang’s lukewarm attitude towards intellectual approach to Buddhism was itself based in his particular interpretation of traditional Buddhist thought – especially the scholastic distinction between ‘principle’ and ‘phenomena’, and the Sinitic Buddha-Nature thought, which prioritises practical and non-conceptual wisdom over discursive knowledge. In the second part the paper turns to the critique of popular Pure Land piety undertaken by the lay Consciousness-only scholar Tang Dayuan, who opted for including doctrinal study in the practice of Pure Land Buddhism. Whereas Tang’s arguments for this case refer to the increasingly globalised and Westernised intellectual scene of Republican China, his reformist postulates mainly target the aforementioned exegetical and doctrinal assumptions that were shared by Yinguang and other Pure Land preachers. For example, Tang appears to sideline the dichotomy of principle (insight) and phenomena (practice) and opts instead for a unified standard of Pure Land practice grounded in doctrinal understanding. At the same time, he adduces Consciousness-only scholasticism to argue for a broader and more nuanced understanding of Buddhist wisdom, which includes discursive and communicable knowledge. In these respects Tang’s critique reveals a continuity between late imperial and modern Buddhist thought, both in terms of underlying concerns and the concepts that were used to articulate them.