Chen Mingshu

⚠  Provisional Entry  ⚠ This article provides an overview compiled by the editorial team, but it is explicitly slated for future expansion and revision by a dedicated specialist. See discussion page for further information.

Chen Mingshu (陳銘樞/陈铭枢, courtesy name Zhenru 真如; 1889–1965) was a senior Nationalist general, provincial governor, and cabinet minister who became one of the most systematic of the twentieth-century Chinese Buddhist-Marxist synthesizers. A veteran of the 1911 Revolution and the Northern Expedition's "Iron Army," he commanded the 19th Route Army's 1932 resistance to Japan at Shanghai, co-founded the anti-Chiang Fujian Rebellion of 1933, and later helped found the Beijing-aligned Revolutionary Committee of the Chinese Kuomintang (民革). In a rapid sequence of essays published in 1950–1953 in Xiandai Foxue (現代佛學), a journal whose publishing house he directed, Chen argued that a fully awakened Buddhist practitioner was thereby "unconditionally a hundred percent Marxist-Leninist," on the grounds that the bodhisattva's total self-abnegation for others was already, in substance, the stance of a revolutionary fighter. Despite this accommodation—and despite a private 1957 letter to Mao Zedong that praised Mao's proposed retirement from the state chairmanship while bluntly criticizing his temperament—Chen was purged as a "rightist" later that year and died in 1965, to be posthumously rehabilitated after the Cultural Revolution.

Biography

Chen was born on October 15, 1889, in Xiaxiong village, Hepu County, Guangdong (a Hakka-majority area near the Guangxi border; the county was later transferred to Guangxi). His father was a Qing-dynasty licentiate who taught school, and Chen's own account of his childhood describes severe poverty, an abusive stepmother, and a near-fatal untreated eye ailment. In 1906 he entered the Guangdong Huangpu Army Elementary School and joined the Tongmenghui, adopting the sobriquet "Zhenru" (真如, "suchness") after encountering the term through Tan Sitong's Renxue. He went on to the Nanjing Army Fourth Middle School and Baoding Military Academy and took part in the 1911 Wuchang Uprising as a student-soldier under Huang Xing, meeting Sun Yat-sen in Nanjing on January 1, 1912. In 1913, back in Guangzhou for the anti-Yuan Shikai "Second Revolution," he was jailed after a bomb plot against the warlord Long Jiguang was discovered; he was bailed out through a schoolmate's family pharmacy.

Through the 1920s Chen rose within the Guangdong armies of Chen Jiongming and then the National Revolutionary Army, commanding units that, alongside those of Deng Yanda, Ye Ting, and Zhang Fakui, helped defeat Wu Peifu's forces during the Northern Expedition, earning his corps the nickname "Iron Army." He served as Governor of Guangdong from 1928 to 1931, when he resigned amid the Chiang–Hu Hanmin crisis. In late 1931 he was named Acting President of the Executive Yuan (December 15–28, 1931), then Vice President of the Executive Yuan and Minister of Communications; as Shanghai Garrison Commander he directed, with Jiang Guangnai and Cai Tingkai, the 19th Route Army's month-long resistance to the Japanese attack on Shanghai in the January 28 Incident of 1932. Chen's own account of the crisis describes Chiang privately proposing, that autumn, that the two of them become sworn brothers in the manner of the "Peach Garden Oath" (桃園結義) of the Romance of the Three Kingdoms; Chen refused him to his face, telling Chiang that as head of state what the country needed from him was open governance and sound policy, not a private bond among a few.

Starting in 1930, while still Guangdong's governor, Chen personally financed the takeover of the Shanghai-based Shenzhou Guoguang Press, a cultural-publishing house founded in 1901. Under the editorial direction of Wang Lixi and, initially, Huang Jusu, the press shifted from reprinting classical painting albums toward Marxist and left-wing publishing, translating Marx, Engels, and Lenin and running the influential journal Dushu Zazhi (讀書雜誌), whose "Debate on Chinese Social History" (中國社會史論戰) became one of the major intellectual controversies of the early 1930s. The press was raided and its provincial branches shut down after the collapse of the Fujian Rebellion, survived in reduced form through the Sino-Japanese War, and continued publishing after 1949 with state support; in 1953, following his own study of the Party's transition-period program, Chen proactively requested its nationalization, completed in 1954.

In November 1933 Chen joined Li Jishen and the 19th Route Army leadership in founding the short-lived "Fujian People's Government" against Chiang Kai-shek, heading its Culture Committee; after its defeat in early 1934 he went into exile in Hong Kong and Europe. He was received in Moscow on a Comintern-organized visit in 1936, helped organize an overseas Chinese anti-Japanese league in Paris, and after returning to China chaired the Chinese branch of the International Anti-Aggression Congress in Hankou in 1938, sharing a platform with Soong Ching-ling, Mao Zedong, and Feng Yuxiang. In 1943 he co-founded the Three People's Principles Comrades Alliance with Tan Pingshan, which merged in 1948 with the GMD Democratic Promotion Association to form the Revolutionary Committee of the Chinese Kuomintang (民革/RCCK). Around the 1949 transition he helped persuade several Nationalist officials toward defection, attended the first CPPCC session, and was elected to the new Central People's Government Council, later holding posts including Central-South regional vice-chairman and standing member of the CPPCC and NPC.

In 1952, when Mao Zedong harshly criticized the scholar Liang Shuming in a public session, Chen defended Liang on the spot and was criticized within the RCCK for it. In 1950 he sent Mao a set of essays proposing that dialectical materialism and Mahāyāna Buddhism were philosophically compatible. Mao's brief reply of June 12, 1950 was noncommittal: he wrote that he had only skimmed the piece and could not study it closely enough to offer an opinion, but felt some of its points needed further reconsideration, and apologized for the delay in replying. During the 1957 rectification campaign Chen spoke candidly at several forums and, on May 18, privately urged Mao—who had floated retiring as state chairman—to follow through, comparing him favorably to George Washington and Bismarck, while also admonishing him for four faults: grandiosity (好大喜功), volatility (喜怒無常), over-reliance on biased reports (偏聽偏信), and contempt for classical culture (輕視古典). The letter became central evidence in his subsequent denunciation; Chen was labeled a "rightist" and stripped of his posts, though he retained his CPPCC seat. Mao himself referred to Chen's criticisms twice more in public, at the January 1958 Supreme State Conference and the July 1959 Lushan Conference, without naming him the first time. He was rehabilitated in 1979, after the fall of the Gang of Four. Chen suffered a fatal heart attack on May 15, 1965, during an RCCK meeting celebrating China's second nuclear test.

Ideas

This section is entirely based on secondary literature and the very small set of writings by Chen that is currently available to us. If and when more of his writings become available, significant expansion/revision is expected.

Chen described his own project as studying Buddhism through the method of dialectical materialism rather than treating either system as exclusively true. He argued that correctly analyzed, Buddhist doctrine resolves into a series of dialectical unities—mind and no-mind, self and no-self, the relative and the absolute—culminating in the selfless practice of the bodhisattva path. Because the bodhisattva's complete self-forgetting for others was already, in substance, the stance of a Marxist-Leninist fighter, Chen held that any properly awakened Buddhist was thereby "unconditionally a hundred percent Marxist-Leninist" (百分之百的馬列主義者), while cautioning that Marxism-Leninism should not be treated as an exclusive doctrine, since truth itself was one and universal.

Across the 1940s, this synthesis can be seen taking shape in progressively more explicit terms. A recurring theme across his lecture texts is the fusion of Buddhist "vow-power" (願力) with sustained revolutionary commitment, and a self-description, in a 1944 lecture at the China Inner Studies Institute, of his own worldview as a trinity: "Reality is my perspective, Confucianism is my footing, Buddhism is my master." In the same lecture, he surveyed Confucian, Daoist, and Buddhist metaphysics side by side, arguing that Confucianism and Daoism both converge on a single highest principle (the "Great Ultimate," 太極, or "the Way," 道) reached through introspection, but that Buddhism goes a step further by refusing to rest even in that unity, since any posited absolute remains, from the standpoint of emptiness (空), a subtle form of attachment. Chen also insisted that Buddhist teaching was inherently progressive and creative rather than cyclical, criticizing Song- and Ming-era Buddhists for treating the doctrine as static, and read the bodhisattva's practice of saving others before oneself—prioritizing enemies over friends, the foolish over the wise—as the doctrinal root of the "four immeasurables" (四無量心) and thus of radical self-abnegation in the service of others.

In an essay probably written in 1947, responding to Zhang Dongsun's Thought and Society (1946), Chen argued that Mahāyāna Buddhism resolves what he called "a problem idealism and materialism have failed to solve for thousands of years": the relation between the knowing subject (能) and the known object (所). Since either could be designated "real" only at the other's expense, he argued, neither could be ultimately real, and genuine reality was reachable only by abandoning the subject-object framework altogether, illustrated through the mutually dependent, non-fixed nature of the being/non-being (有/無) pair. The following year, in a chapter of his book Ten Lectures on Buddhism serialized in Jueyouqing, Chen glossed the Linji school's "three mysteries" (三玄) doctrine as equivalent to "thesis, antithesis, synthesis" in "modern philosophy" (現代哲學)—a term commonly used at the time as guarded language for Marxism—illustrating it with the same Diamond Sūtra "A, non-A, therefore named A" formula he would apply to his own name the following year in the letter to Mao described below.

In his 1949 letter to Mao, this pattern became explicit. Chen offered a sophisticated reading of the doctrine that "the three realms are mind-only" (三界唯心): far from asserting Western-style idealism, he argued, this teaching identifies "mind" as precisely the subjective attachment that must be dissolved to reach objective truth. He illustrated the point by adapting the Diamond Sūtra's tetralemma to his own name: "what is called Chen Mingshu is not Chen Mingshu; this is named Chen Mingshu" (所謂陳銘樞，即非陳銘樞，是名陳銘樞). He mapped the same three-phrase structure onto the Marxist thesis–antithesis–synthesis triad, treated Buddhist momentary arising-and-ceasing as continuous with dialectical contradiction, and read the doctrine of "no permanent self" as grounding both a rejection of caste hierarchy and a critique of the idea of a creator god: since everyone can become Buddha, he argued, Buddhism is at once pluralist, monist, and "no-ist" depending on emphasis. Ethically, he took the formula "nothing possessed, nothing attainable" (無所有，不可得) as the operative principle of selfless revolutionary action.

The following year, in the inaugural volume of Xiandai Foxue itself, Chen restated the project in near-programmatic terms, describing himself as "an advocate of studying Buddhist doctrine through the methodology of dialectical materialism — the new philosophy" (以辯證唯物論——新哲學的方法論去研究佛學的倡導者), and analyzed the whole structure of Buddhist doctrine as a series of six dialectical unities: mind and no-mind, self and no-self, mind and self, the relative and the absolute, affliction (煩惱) and awakening (菩提), and, via the doctrine that phenomena lack any fixed self-nature, identity itself.

Writings

Chen's most important writings were published in the journal 《現代佛學》 (Xiandai Foxue). None of the issues of this journal are available to us right now. If and when these become available, this section (as well as the "Ideas" section) will be updated.

• (1928.05). 〈最近佛教之弓蛇：陳李二軍長通電〉 [The Recent "Bow-and-Snake" Affair in Buddhism: A Circular Telegram from Generals Chen and Li]. 《海潮音》. [Co-signed with Li Jishen; an early instance of institutional Buddhist activism, protecting temples from military requisition.]
• (1939.12). 〈南川遊化特輯：我的佛教觀〉 [My View of Buddhism]. 《海潮音》 20.12: 535–36. [Lecture at the Nanchuan Buddhist Study Society; a pre-Marxist statement of Chen's Buddhism, defending the faith's compatibility with wartime resistance and criticizing both clerical corruption and the vogue for Tibetan Esoteric shortcuts; useful as a baseline against which to read his later dialectical-materialist essays.]
• (1947). 〈哲學與佛法一瞥〉 [A Glimpse into Philosophy and the Buddhadharma]. 《覺群報》 no. 53 (undated; internally dated to 1947 via a reference to Zhang Dongsun's 《思想與社會》, 1946), p. 4. [A direct engagement with the idealism/materialism (唯心論/唯物論) dispute, arguing Mahāyāna Buddhism resolves it by abandoning the subject-object framework altogether.]
• (1944). 〈中國哲學思想與佛法一瞥〉 [A Glimpse into Chinese Philosophical Thought and Buddhism]. 《文教叢刊》 1.1 (n.d.): 4–6. [Record of a November 15, 1944 lecture at the China Inner Studies Institute (支那內學院); source of the "trinity" self-description and the Confucian/Daoist metaphysical comparison discussed in the "Ideas" section.]
• (1944). 〈禪學活的義路序〉 [Preface to "The Living Path of Meaning in Chan Studies"]. 《文教叢刊》 1: 65–68. [Chen's preface to another author's Chan-studies work, with an afterword by Wang Enyang 王恩洋, the Yogācāra scholar.]
• (1948.06). 〈禪宗〉 [The Chan School]. 《覺有情》 9.6: 434–36. [Chapter 8 of Chen's book 《佛學十講》 (Ten Lectures on Buddhism), serialized here in advance of the book itself; glosses the Linji "three mysteries" doctrine as equivalent to a "modern philosophy" thesis–antithesis–synthesis triad—see Ideas section.]
• (1944.12). 〈堅持佛徒崗位〉 [Holding the Buddhist's Post]. 《海潮音》.
• (1948.07). 〈佛學十講自序〉 [Author's Preface to Ten Lectures on Buddhism]. 《覺有情》. [Preface to a lecture series delivered in May 1948 at National Guizhou University at the request of the Marxist-trained historian Hu Ziying; states Chen had studied Buddhism for 36 years. 〈禪宗〉, above, is Chapter 8 of this same book, serialized the previous month.]
• (1949.01). 〈我的佛法觀〉 [My View of the Buddhadharma]. 《弘化月刊》.
• (1949.08). 〈陳銘樞先生致毛主席論佛法書〉 [Mr. Chen Mingshu's Letter to Chairman Mao on the Buddhadharma]. 《覺訊月刊》 3(8): 2–3. [Ten numbered theses arguing Buddhism and dialectical materialism are compatible; see "Ideas" section.]
• (1950.08.31). 〈現代佛學社緣起〉 [Origins of the Modern Buddhist Society]. 《覺有情》 11.8: 23. [Founding manifesto of the publishing house behind 《現代佛學》, directly corroborating Xue Yu's (2009) institutional account. The sixteen listed founders are 巨贊, 李濟深, 陳銘樞, 趙樸初, 喜饒嘉措, 謝無量, 林志鈞, 葉恭綽, 張釛, 李一平, 方子藩, 周楓, 廣法, 李明揚, 沙彥濤, and 陳蓮生 — independently confirming Juzan's (巨贊) co-founding role, per Xue Yu (2009).]
• (1950.12). 〈佛學的新義自序〉 [Preface to the New Meaning of Buddhist Studies]. 《弘化月刊》.
• (1950.09.15). 〈佛學的要義和研究它的方法與實踐它的規律（上）（下）〉 [The Essential Meaning of Buddhist Studies and the Method of Researching and the Rule of Practicing It]. 《現代佛學》, 1950.09.15 / 1950.10.15.
• (1950.11.15). 〈法喜集〉 [Dharma-Joy Collection] (recurring column). 《現代佛學》 1.3 (co-signed with geologist Li Siguang); 《現代佛學》, 1951.04.15 (co-signed with Xiao Fusi). [In the first installment, Chen described himself as an advocate of studying Buddhism through the methodology of dialectical materialism, and set out a six-part dialectical reading of Buddhist doctrine — see "Ideas" section, sourced via Li Guangliang (2001), who quotes this piece directly; the original issue itself has not yet been independently obtained.]
• (1951.01.15). 〈世間相的認識 and 人生實踐的真諦〉 [Understanding Worldly Appearances and the True Meaning of Life's Practice]. 《現代佛學》 (reprinted in 《普門學報》, 2009).
• (1951.03). 〈研究佛法的方法〉 [Methods for Studying the Buddhadharma]. [This text is listed in some sources as written by Chen and published in 《淨宗月刊》, 1951.03. However, it has not been found in that issue of that journal, nor in any other available issue from that journal.]
• (1951.04.15). 〈我的禪觀〉 [My View of Chan]. 《現代佛學》.
• (1951.06.15). 〈佛教徒當前任務與展望〉 [The Present Tasks and Prospects of Buddhists]. 《現代佛學》.
• (1951.07.15). 〈對現代佛學的新希望〉 [New Hopes for Modern Buddhist Studies]. 《現代佛學》.
• (1951.08.15). 〈用唯物辯證法來分析佛學理論體系〉 [Using Dialectical Materialism to Analyze the Theoretical System of Buddhist Studies]. 《現代佛學》.
• (1951.09.15). 〈論佛家實踐的兩種絕對義〉 [On Two Absolute Meanings of Buddhist Practice]. 《現代佛學》.
• (1951.12.15). 〈談自我教育〉 [On Self-Education]. 《現代佛學》.
• (1952.06.15). 〈結合「批判儒家思想」的自我檢討〉 [Self-Criticism Combined with "Critiquing Confucian Thought"]. 《現代佛學》. [A thought-reform self-criticism document.]
• (1952.08.15). 〈論主觀主義與主觀能動性〉 [On Subjectivism and Subjective Initiative]. 《現代佛學》. [Engages directly with Mao's own vocabulary of "subjective initiative" from "On Practice" and "On Contradiction."]
• (1952.12.15). 〈中蘇友好，世界和平為實現人間極樂世界而奮鬥〉 [Sino-Soviet Friendship and World Peace: Striving to Realize a Pure Land on Earth]. 《現代佛學》.
• (1953.05.15). 〈迎接中國佛教協會成立會勝利召開〉 [Welcoming the Successful Convening of the Founding Meeting of the Buddhist Association of China]. 《現代佛學》.
• (1953.07.15). 〈愛國主義與現代佛學〉 [Patriotism and Modern Buddhist Studies]. 《現代佛學》.
• (1953.04). 〈《現代佛學》的過去和將來〉 [The Past and Future of Xiandai Foxue]. 《現代佛學》.
• (1957.03.13). 〈論惠能六祖禪〉 [On the Chan of the Sixth Patriarch Huineng]. 《現代佛學》. [Chen's last known publication, appearing just before the Anti-Rightist purge.]
• (1957). 〈"神州國光社"後半部史略〉 [A Brief History of the Latter Half of the Shenzhou Guoguang Press]. 《文史資料選輯》 (CPPCC National Committee). [Chen's own retrospective account of the press he financed and directed from 1930; a condensed version of the material in Chapter 8 of his memoir.]

Secondary Literature in English

(none)

Secondary Literature in Chinese

• Zhang Lifan 章立凡 (2007). 〈《陳銘樞上毛澤東書》讀後〉 [Reading "Chen Mingshu's Letter to Chairman Mao"]. 《隨筆》 (1): 74–83. [The most detailed and carefully footnoted account of the 1957 letter and its political context, including Mao's own later public references to it; also covers Chen's 1950 Buddhist correspondence with Mao and his 1952 defense of Liang Shuming. (archived)]
• Li Guangliang 李廣良 (2001). 〈馬克思主義的佛教觀和佛教的馬克思主義觀〉 [The Marxist View of Buddhism and the Buddhist View of Marxism]. 《佛學研究》 10. [The main secondary source for the content of Chen's dialectical-materialist Buddhist essays; situates him alongside other lay Buddhist-Marxist synthesizers of the period. Directly quotes Chen's self-description and six-part dialectical framework (see Ideas and Writings sections) and his "unconditionally a hundred percent Marxist-Leninist" formulation, and groups him with Wen Guangxi as the two lay writers who went furthest in building a genuinely new, synthetic Buddhist system rather than merely drawing analogies between the two. (archived)]
• San Mu 散木 (2001). 〈一九五七年前後的陳銘樞〉 [Chen Mingshu Around 1957]. 《博覽群書》 (2): 41–45. [Companion piece to the entry below; covers the 1950 Mao correspondence and Chen's Buddhist circle and institutional activities (founding the Buddhist Association of China, restoring Lingyin Temple). (archived)]
• Ye Yonglie 葉永烈 (2000). 《反右派始末》 [The Full Story of the Anti-Rightist Campaign]. Xining: Qinghai People's Publishing House. [Contains a dedicated section (pp. 391–396) reproducing 1957 denunciation-campaign material against Chen, including further excerpts of his letter to Mao not preserved elsewhere.]

How to Cite This Article

Brons, Lajos (2026). "Chen Mingshu". The Radical Buddhism Project. Version of 5 August 2026. http://radicalbuddhism.net/wiki/Chen_Mingshu.