Kexue, or science, captured the Chinese imagination in the early twentieth century, promising new knowledge about the world and a dynamic path to prosperity. Chinese Buddhists embraced scientific language and ideas to carve out a place for their religion within a rapidly modernizing society.
Examining dozens of previously unstudied writings from the Chinese Buddhist press, this book maps Buddhists' efforts to rethink their traditions through science in the initial decades of the twentieth century. Buddhists believed science offered an exciting, alternative route to knowledge grounded in empirical thought, much like their own. They encouraged young scholars to study subatomic and relativistic physics while still maintaining Buddhism's vital illumination of human nature and its crucial support of an ethical system rooted in radical egalitarianism. Showcasing the rich and progressive steps Chinese religious scholars took in adapting to science's rising authority, this volume offers a key perspective on how a major Eastern power transitioned to modernity in the twentieth century and how its intellectuals anticipated many of the ideas debated by scholars of science and Buddhism today.
- Table of Contents
- Introduction: Literature as the Mirror of Modernity
- 1. On the Advantages of Being a Barbarian
- 2. Literature and the Moral Imaginations of Modernity
- 3. The Two Histories of Literary Culture in Bengal
- 4. A Strange Love of Abstractions: The Making of a Language of Patriotism in Modern Bengali
- 5. Tagore and Transformations in the Ideals of Love
- 6. The Poetry of Interiority: The Creation of a Language of Modern Subjectivity in Tagore's Poetry
- 7. Laughter and Subjectivity: The Self-Ironical Tradition in Bengali Literature
- 8. Reading a Song of the City: Images of the City in Literature and Films
- 9. The Art of Despair: The Sense of the City in Modern Bengali Poetry
- 10. The Invention of Private Life: A Reading of Sibnath Sastri's Autobiography
- 11. The Second Mahabharata
- Index
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