Abstract
While Marx believes he has advanced the cause of critique by accepting its repudiation of religion as given and then applying it to other historical impediments to human emancipation, the real effect of his efforts at breaking down socially efficacious illusions is to restore us to the scene of religion. Destroying the false ideas that keep us apart and make us view one another as competitors or worse leads us to recognise the challenges of building community. This is the problematic of many religions and in his chapter Shields shows that it creates an immediate affinity between Marx’s problematic and that of political Buddhism in early twentieth-century China. Within 40 years of Marx’s passing thinkers around the world were already identifying points of connection between them, even notwithstanding the overt atheism of Engels and Lenin.
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Notes
- 1.
I have published extensively on the nexus of Buddhism and socialism in modern Japan; see, e.g. Shields (2017). Rather than repeat or summarise that work, for the purposes of this chapter I focus on China, while noting some of the similarities and differences between Buddhist socialism in China and Japan during this period.
- 2.
According to Dong (2016), the first appearance of the name “Marx” in Chinese was a brief reference in The Globe newspaper on 15 February 1899. It is worth noting that, despite the eventual victory of a Marxist-inspired political revolution in 1949, until at least the mid-1920s, a few years after the founding of the Chinese Communist Party, Marx was little read, and even among progressives, not particularly influential in China.
- 3.
See Tian (2005, p. 53).
- 4.
Krebs (1998, p. 35).
- 5.
Ma spent several years in Japan (1902–1903), where he met Sun Yatsen and no doubt encountered Japanese progressives associated with the Heimin Shimbun. In addition to selections from Marx’s Grundrisse and Darwin’s Origin of Species, he would go on to translate works by Byron, Mill and German polymath Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919). See Pusey (1983) on the role played by Darwin in modern Chinese thought and culture.
- 6.
See Zarrow (1990, pp. 196, 209): “The years from the Revolution of 1911 through the 1920s were the heyday of Chinese anarchism, especially from the New Culture movement of the mid-1910s to about 1925.”
- 7.
- 8.
See Hong (1991, p. 11).
- 9.
The Chinese Communist Party was established in July 1921, while the Japanese Communist Party was founded exactly a year later, in July 1922. Both countries were preceded by the United States, whose Communist Party was formed in May 1919. Ishikawa (2002, p. 33) argues that, in fact, the CCP was modeled explicitly after the USCP.
- 10.
Ishikawa (2002, p. 28).
- 11.
Zarrow (1990, p. 3).
- 12.
Zarrow (1990, pp. 12–13).
- 13.
Incidentally, these are aspects shared as well by modern Buddhism—at least as interpreted by the New Buddhist Fellowship in Japan during this same period (1899–1915); see Shields (2017, Chapter 3).
- 14.
An influential thinker and writer who can lay claim to be author of China’s first (modern) utopia: Datong shu (Book of the Datong), Kang advocated “the abolition of nations and the establishment of a world parliament, public housing, vegetarianism, equality, and indeed, eventually, universal Buddhahood” (Zarrow 1990, p. 19).
- 15.
Arguably the most influential thinker on the next generation of young activists, Tan developed an idealistic philosophy rooted in Buddhism, Western science as well as the ideas of Ming period Neo-Confucian reformer Wang Yangming (1472–1529)—who had emphasised, in Chan/Zen but also plausibly Marxist fashion, the fundamental connection between (true) knowledge and (effective) practice.
- 16.
Already a well-known philologist, critic and revolutionary, during a three-year imprisonment from 1903 to 1906 Zhang Binglin (aka Zhang Taiyan) began to study and implement Buddhism in his revolutionary work.
- 17.
There were several other figures of this period associated with both Buddhism and revolutionary activities, including ordained Buddhist monk Huang Zongyan (1865–1921) and the iconoclastic poet and artist Su Manshu (1884–1918).
- 18.
As can be seen on the table above, Kropotkin’s Conquest of Bread was published in Chinese in 1906, and excerpts appeared soon after in the anarchist journal Natural Justice.
- 19.
By 1905 there were an estimated 8000 Chinese students in Japan.
- 20.
At the risk of being overgenerous, one way of reading this is that, whereas the Japanese kokusui and kokugaku sought a deeper, earlier, indigenous “unity”, Chinese national learning looked to an earlier diversity of thought (and authority) that had been codified and made rigid by a single, dominant, school, rujia.
- 21.
Krebs (1998, p. 30).
- 22.
Krebs (1998, p. 6).
- 23.
- 24.
Zarrow (1990, p. 216). A distinction opened up within early Chinese socialists between “narrow” (Ch. xiayi) and “broad” (Ch. guangyi) paths: essentially, narrow (or free) socialists held closer to anarchism, while broad socialists were more eclectic, embracing various forms of social democracy, “state socialism”, and other progressive hybrids. Taixu saw himself very much in the narrow (i.e. anarchist) camp, and helped form the Socialist Party (Ch. Shehui Dang) in October 1912 as a splinter group from the broadly inclined Chinese Socialist Party (Ch. Zhongguo Shehui Dang) founded by Jiang Kanghu in 1911 (and favoured by Sun Yatsen); see Krebs (1998, p. 77).
- 25.
Zarrow (1990, pp. 25, 217).
- 26.
See Krebs (1998, p. 56).
- 27.
Krebs (1998, p. 27).
- 28.
- 29.
Like the Japanese New Buddhists, “Zhang Taiyan and Taixu sought to establish ‘a religion without a god’ (washen lun), by which they meant to remove superstition and retain spiritual power based on clear understanding and personal commitment” (Krebs 1998, p. 96).
- 30.
Kōtoku gave a lecture in 1907 to the Chinese anarchists in Tokyo which relied heavily on Kropotkin but also emphasised that anarchist revolution had to be internationally rather than nationally minded; and yet at the same time, Asian anarchists must begin with a sense of pan-Asian solidarity before reaching out to others.
- 31.
- 32.
See Krebs (1998, p. 95). This in direct contrast to political leaders such as Yuan Shikai (1859–1916)—and later, Mao Zedong—who sought to confiscate religious properties, which would be controlled by the state.
- 33.
See Krebs (1998, p. 98) for insightful remarks on how to understand “secularization” in the context of late-Qing China.
- 34.
See Kołakowski (2008, p. 183).
- 35.
See Martin (2008, p. 317).
- 36.
Kołakowski (2008, p. 183).
- 37.
Marx, “Jewish”, pp. 152–154.
- 38.
Marx “Jewish”, p. 168.
- 39.
This is best summarised in the famous quote from Marx’s Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law (“Religion is the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet found himself or has already lost himself again…”), which sets the famous “opiate” condemnation in a broader context, and hints at subtleties often ignored in Marx’s perspective on religion vis-à-vis politics and criticism. MECW 3: 175–176.
- 40.
One of the only Marxist thinkers to take up this issue in earnest was Karl Korsch (1886–1961), who saw it as the very essence of Marxism. See, e.g. his Marxismus und Philosophie (1923).
- 41.
Kołakowski (2008, p. 1035).
- 42.
See Krebs (1998, p. 57).
- 43.
Given that all major “successful” socialist revolutions of the twentieth century were statist in nature, this resistance assured that anarchists would fall out of the historical record, despite the significance of their role in Russia and (especially) China.
- 44.
See Zarrow (1990, pp. 211, 223).
- 45.
See Krebs (1998, p. 193) for a discussion of the personal intellectual journey of Shifu from Buddhism to and through anarchism—a path linked by “his conviction that belief and action were inseparable.”
- 46.
Zarrow (1990, p. 240).
- 47.
- 48.
Krebs (1998, p. 89).
- 49.
One unresolved complication here was the question of self-sacrifice. Generally, suicide is a taboo within classical Buddhist understanding, due to the suffering that is caused by doing harm to oneself as a sentient being. And yet, both the Jātakas and various Mahāyāna scriptures provide examples of the Buddha and bodhisattvas sacrificing themselves (or at least, their bodies) for others. Tan Sitong pushed the model of the bodhisattva for the “self-sacrificing patriots” of his day and played his own part by dying as a martyr after the failure of the Hundred Days Reform of 1898. Shifu, as well, “was moved by the bodhisattva ideal as he prepared to sacrifice himself in an assassination plot”, while Taixu believed that anarchism “encouraged self-sacrifice and would help people escape their respective hells into the heaven of equality, liberty, and happiness” (Zarrow 1990, p. 216).
- 50.
See, e.g. Sunkara (2019, p. 48).
- 51.
See, e.g. Faure (2009, p. 99).
- 52.
Ambedkar (2001, p. 237).
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Shields, J.M. (2022). Buddhist Socialism in China, 1900–1930: A History and Appraisal. In: Kirkpatrick, G., McMylor, P., Fadaee, S. (eds) Marxism, Religion, and Emancipatory Politics. Marx, Engels, and Marxisms. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91642-8_5
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