Edited by Benjamin Brose, a scholar of Buddhism in China who has written several comprehensive studies on Chinese Buddhist history, this new volume from Shambhala is a timely addition to the publication house’s impressive collection of intellectually enriching and critically informed volumes. While these books are obviously not monographs or simple imports of academic journal articles, in Buddhist Masters of Modern China (Shambhala 2025), the authors included are some of the most prominent names in the study of Chinese Buddhism today: Guo Gu, Benjamin Brose, Justin Ritzinger, Raul Birnbaum, Charles B. Jones, Beata Grant, Erik Hammerstrom, and Jason Protass.
The publisher does not talk down to its readers—it respects them enough to value the need for a range of books from authors in the academic tradition of Buddhist Studies. Each author—eight in total—focuses on a Chinese Buddhist master who made significant and diverse contributions to the reformation and revival of Chinese Buddhism. Each author eloquently describes the life and work of the monastic, before offering a translated text, such as a letter or a Dharma talk written or given their subject.
The lives of the masters studied in this book—Xuyun (1839–1959); Laiguo (1881–1953); Taixu (1890–1947), Hongyi (1880–1942), Yinguang (1862–1940), Benkong (1900–69) (the only bhikshuni in the volume); Changxing (1896–1939); and Jichan (1852–1912)—span easily from the mid-to-late imperial period of the Qing and the warlord era, to the War of Resistance and World War Two and even the dawn of the People’s Republic. They also cover the entire breadth of Chinese Buddhist practice, from vegetarianism to the bodhisattva vows, from Tiantai to Pure Land. Poetry, monastic life, art, death, consciousness, war—almost no subjects escape the interest of these watchful and Dharma-passionate monastics.
The book celebrates these masters as having in general made several core contributions: firstly, the dilapidated state of monasteries throughout the countryside of China, which during the early 20th century remained an overwhelmingly agricultural nation, reflected an institutional and intellectual decay of the Vinaya as applied in the daily lives of monks and laypeople. The monks and nuns, in their own way, took radical steps to make Vinaya a cornerstone of Buddhism’s good faith and reliability. Secondly, there was a careful marriage of inherited wisdom and philosophical revitalization, which resulted in varying degrees of reworkings of traditional Buddhist doctrines that were seen to be more applicable to the everyday life of Chinese people.
Finally, by the Late Qing and leading into the Republican period, even after the fall of China’s last imperial house, there was an acute transformation at all levels of Chinese society. The best description of these seismic changes remains in William Rowe’s China’s Last Empire: The Great Qing (Cambridge 2003, 273–75). The consequences of the Late Qing’s developments led to a full transformation of the Buddhist laity and their needs by the fall of China’s final dynasty and the emergence of the Republic. Many of these Buddhist believers, who would have fitted neatly into Rowe’s sociological categories, became a formalized, ritualized body of laity. They were conscious and proud of their “religious affiliation” in a way that had hitherto not been prominent in Chinese society before the modern articulation of “religion” as a separate sphere of life with a specific set of beliefs and doctrinal adherence. This transformation was never far from these monastics’ minds. The monastics, therefore, set into motion unprecedented trends, such as the shift from reliance on rural elites to appealing to a modern, educated, urban audience, as well as a serious adoption of mass media like journals, the press, and even music.
The book serves two important reminders, which can also serve as a corrective to more extreme evaluations about the state of Chinese Buddhism. One such extreme is that Chinese Buddhism was moribund and dilapidated, and was dragged kicking and screaming into the modern era. The reality is that the Buddhist masters in this volume all identified serious issues within their home tradition, to the point that dramatic rethinking of what it meant to be a Buddhist was needed. Yet their responses and ideas—and most importantly, the example of their lives—constituted one of the most vibrant and important reforms of Chinese Buddhism at any point in history.
There was an acutely sensitive self-reflection and self-awareness on part of these masters, even as they preached a powerful “relational” attitude to the suffering world and an unstable China for their followers. Many of them had their own opinions about the preaching of Dharma. Some like Hongyi were naturally more charismatic and were called to grapple seriously with the issues plaguing Chinese Buddhism—such as broken ordination lineages—while others like Xuyun or Yinguang preferred to follow the old way of monastic seclusion, but the spirit of the times thrust them into the spotlight. Masters like Taixu laid the foundation for critical concepts like humanistic Buddhism, influencing masters like Yinshun, Cheng Yen, and Hsing Yun. New perspectives and exegeses of the tradition cover the entire range of Buddhist richness, from fidelity to the Vinaya and meditation and other forms of practice to philosophical concepts and theological teachings like the Pure Land and Buddha-nature.
Buddhist Masters of Modern China is essential reading for those that wish to understand the thinking behind some of the most important minds in the evolution of Chinese Mahayana Buddhism. The contributors’ excellent gathering and translation of these monastics’ legacies, many of them little-known or unheard of in English, will be particularly valuable to those that wish to understand the modern development and reforms of one of Buddhism’s largest and most influential traditions.
References
Benjamin Brose (ed.). 2025. Buddhist Masters of Modern China. Boulder, Colorado: Shambhala Publications.
William T. Rowe. China’s Last Empire: The Great Qing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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