Modernity with Chinese characteristics: a Buddhist analogy

From Buddhist sutras to solar panels, China’s long record of transformation is part of global history (image generated by AI)

Talk of China innovating a new stage of human progress and modernity reminds me of the history of Chinese Buddhism. Like China’s history of modernity, the ‘Buddhist Transmission' also saw an initial rejection of challenging foreign ideas, then adaptation and, finally, remarkable innovation. China’s ultimate embrace of Buddhism was so thorough that French Sinologist, Jacques Gernet, wrote that  ‘Buddhism has been one of the basic elements in the formation of the Chinese world. Its intrusion both enriched and overturned religious, philosophical, literary, and artistic traditions.’ What is more, novel Chinese forms of Buddhism later took root across Asia, just as Chinese modernity now appears poised to reshape the world. Extending the comparison to the export of Chinese influence also underlines, for those still not paying attention, China’s consistent centrality to global history.

Kaiser Kuo recently discussed how a guest on his Sinica Podcast, the Columbia University historian, Adam Tooze, put his finger on something Kuo has often felt but not fully articulated. Professor Tooze called China ‘the defining political reality of our time’ and the ‘master key’ to understanding modernity. Tooze claimed that China is the ‘biggest laboratory of organised modernisation that has ever been or ever will be.’ Kuo suggested that this would mean recasting the West’s history of industrial modernity as simply a preface to something much larger.

Tooze and Kuo mean that China is reshaping the substance of modernity. And doing it through an astonishing embrace and dominance of renewable energy such that China is creating a new form of carbon-free industrial modernity. But China is not only refashioning its economy and energy systems. It will also control the technologies needed for the rest of the world’s green transition too.

That is awkward for many. It suggests that Western preeminence has gone and that our future, carbon-free economies will depend on Chinese technology. Worse, it questions (again) the assumed superiority of liberal democracy.

All of which resonates with my long-held thought: how far might China’s relationship with western modernity mirror the earlier history of Buddhism’s arrival and subsequent efflorescence in China.

In both cases, an alien package of ideas arrived at China’s door (Buddhism from the Indian subcontinent via varied Asian trade routes) and posed a fundamental challenge to many tenets of Chinese civilisation. In the mid-nineteenth century, the modern West shook the idea of Chinese centrality and special status within East Asia’s international order. The wide-ranging derision of Chinese culture by patronising western actors was backed up by the many new and advanced technologies they brought with them. Similarly, when Buddhism entered China in the 1st century CE, it conflicted with the social ethics of Confucian order like filial piety. The monastic ideal encouraged celibacy and departure from family life, undermining China’s practice of ancestor worship. Buddhist metaphysics and its speculations about existence, karma and rebirth were also radically different to Confucianism, which was wholly focused on matters of this life. As a result, traditional society strongly resisted Buddhism, just as Western modernity also met great opposition in China.

The history of Buddhism’s adaptation to China was a contested process. This mirrored how, in the 19th century, ideas from the west were adopted cautiously within a discourse of ‘self-strengthening’ and ti-yong; certain foreign knowledge was welcomed to strengthen China (yong), but China’s cultural essence (ti) was protected. Similarly, translators explained key Buddhist concepts in Chinese terms. For instance, initially, the Daoist concept wu (non-being) was used to render śūnyatā (emptiness). In this way, Buddhism became digestible to the Chinese. Over time Chinese Buddhism even advanced a reinterpretation of filial piety. It became the case that an individual Buddhist’s practice and discipline could realise the salvation of their own parents from the cycle of karma. This was deemed a higher filial act than the mundane daily respect for parents demonstrated under Confucian codes. The rituals of ancestor worship also took on a Buddhist colour, with sutras commissioned and chanted for the deceased. This merger of foreign and Chinese was repeated in the 20th century with the adaptation of modern ideologies, such as ‘Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought’ and ‘Socialism with Chinese Characteristics’.

In time transmission became innovation as Buddhism in China manifested new directions. Between the 6th-8th centuries, Chinese scholars undertook creative reorganisations of Buddhist knowledge. For example, the great body of sutras, or Buddhist scriptures, were catalogued into novel hierarchies of importance and their relevance for practice explained. Tang Dynasty (618-907) scholars forged a new metaphysical worldview in which all matter was interdependent. The innovative Chan school also emerged with radical ideas about enlightenment gained in unorthodox ways outside scriptural study. Buddhism became both firmly integrated with popular culture but also central to the high-art and literature of the Tang. Great monastic institutions evolved with broad social functions and a major influence over political ideology.

But it was not only the sophistication of Chinese Buddhism but its influence beyond China that parallels the potential trajectory of Chinese modernity which Tooze and Kuo have discerned. Korean, Japanese and Vietnamese culture was profoundly shaped by the Buddhism of China, particularly Chan, which in its derivative Japanese version is known in the West as Zen.

The idea that China has, after a traumatic period of resistance and experimentation, absorbed western modernity, adapted it for China’s own purposes, and is now innovating and even exporting new modes of modernity is compelling. Whether this is precisely what is happening remains to be seen; and India might also be capable of experiments with modernity at an unprecedented scale (Africa too). The comparison I make here can also be criticised in several ways. Not least, western modernity arrived with great violence, the timeline for the Buddhist transmission was much more prolonged, and ‘modernity’ itself is a very problematic term. But there does seem to be a similar dynamic at work here. With both Buddhism and modernity, China absorbed a body of alien ideas and over time refashioned these into a uniquely sophisticated Sinicised form. The question now is how far might Chinese modernity reshape the world, as Chinese Buddhism did centuries ago?