Editing Lin Qiuwu (section)

== Biography ==

Lin Qiuwu was born on August 2, 1903, in a small alley of Huayuan-ding (花園町; roughly today's Gongyuan Road) in Tainan (臺南).<ref name="li1991-p7">Li Xiaofeng (李筱峰) (1991). ''台灣革命僧林秋梧'' [Taiwan's Revolutionary Monk Lin Qiuwu]. Taipei: 自立晚報社文化出版部, p. 7.</ref> His father, Lin Chengwu (林成武), was an illiterate itinerant fruit peddler who, by family recollection, entertained his children with tales of Daoist immortals descending to earth to right wrongs on behalf of the poor; his biographer suggests these stories may have left a mark on Lin's lifelong sympathy for the dispossessed.<ref>Li (1991), ''台灣革命僧林秋梧'', pp. 7–8.</ref> His mother, Yang An (楊安), was orphaned as a young child and raised by relatives before marrying at seventeen; Lin, her first child, was effectively raised as an only son after two younger brothers died in infancy.<ref>Li (1991), ''台灣革命僧林秋梧'', p. 8.</ref> He entered Tainan's First Public School (第一公學校) in 1911 and, alongside his Japanese-language schooling, studied classical Chinese privately for several years.<ref>Li Xiaofeng (1991), ''台灣革命僧林秋梧''.</ref> In 1918, he tested into the Taiwan Governor-General's Office Language School (臺灣總督府國語學校), which was renamed Taihoku Normal School (臺北師範學校) the following year; it was one of the few institutions of higher education open to ethnically Chinese Taiwanese under colonial rule.<ref>Jones (2000), "Buddhism and Marxism in Taiwan," p. 85.</ref> As a student, Lin secretly read and circulated the banned magazine ''Taiwan Youth'' (臺灣青年), met the physician-activist Chiang Wei-shui (蔣渭水) in 1921, and, following a graduation trip to Japan during which he purchased contraband literature on new political thought, joined the newly founded Taiwan Cultural Association (臺灣文化協會).

In February 1922, Lin was detained in connection with student unrest at his school; although he was released after a few weeks, he was expelled shortly before graduation, only days before his class was to receive its diplomas.<ref>Li (1991), ''台灣革命僧林秋梧'', pp. 27–43.</ref> Barred from a teaching career and kept under continuous police surveillance, he worked for a Japanese trading firm in Kobe from late 1922 until his return to Taiwan in 1923. In the spring of 1924, he traveled to Xiamen, where he reportedly attended Xiamen University and taught at Jimei Middle School (集美學校), a school associated with anti-Japanese Taiwanese student networks; his surviving essays from this period were published under a pseudonym.<ref>Jones (2000), "Buddhism and Marxism in Taiwan," pp. 87–88.</ref> While in Xiamen, he also began frequenting Buddhist temples, an interest that would shape the rest of his life. The death of his mother in the summer of 1925 brought him back to Tainan, where he soon resumed activism, delivering political lectures for the Taiwan Cultural Association's touring lecture and film program from late 1925 through 1927 and cultivating a close friendship with Abbot Deyuan (得圓和尚) of the Kaiyuan Temple.

When the Taiwan Cultural Association split along ideological lines in 1927, Lin surprised his political associates by presenting himself to Deyuan for ordination as a Buddhist monk, taking the Dharma name Zhengfeng ("realizing the summit").<ref>Jones (2000), "Buddhism and Marxism in Taiwan," pp. 89–90.</ref> Deyuan, himself a modernizer concerned with protecting the temple's property and prerogatives against Japanese encroachment, arranged for Lin to study at Komazawa University in Tokyo, a Sōtō Zen institution, where from 1927 to 1930 he studied under the historian and modernist priest Nukariya Kaiten (忽滑谷快天). During these years, living, by his own account, on a strict regimen of "two meals a day," Lin began publishing extensively on Buddhist reform and social questions in venues such as ''South Seas Buddhist'' (南瀛佛教), ''Chung Tao'' (中道), and ''Taiwan Minpao'' (臺灣民報).<ref>Li Xiaofeng (1991), ''台灣革命僧林秋梧''.</ref>

Lin returned to Taiwan in April 1930, touring Korea en route, and took up a post as lecturer at Kaiyuan Temple and instructor for the South Seas Buddhist Association (南瀛佛教會). He simultaneously threw himself into secular political organizing, joining the Taiwan People's Party (臺灣民眾黨), the Taiwan Federation of Labor Friends (臺灣工友總聯盟), and the Chikan Young Workers Association (赤崁勞動青年會). In the summer of 1930 he led a campaign, organized with the Chikan association, against the Ghost Festival (普渡) as wasteful "superstition," and that September he confronted colonial authorities and local elites in a dispute over Kaiyuan Temple's property and religious authority.<ref>Li Xiaofeng (1991), ''台灣革命僧林秋梧''.</ref> In October 1930, together with comrades Zhuang Songlin (莊松林), Lin Zhan'ao (林占鰲), and Lu Bingding (盧丙丁), he founded and edited ''Red Path News'' (赤道報), a Chinese-language journal that Japanese authorities soon judged subversive; two of its issues were banned outright and only two of its five issues survive.<ref>Jones (2000), "Buddhism and Marxism in Taiwan," p. 91.</ref> In January 1931, a mock election organized by ''Taiwan Minpao'' returned Lin as "Tainan City Councilor." He continued writing prolifically on Buddhist reform and social questions, and continued his involvement with the Kaiyuan Temple's internal affairs, until August 1934, when he fell ill with tuberculosis. He died on October 10, 1934, at the age of thirty-two by Chinese reckoning; his ashes were placed in a pagoda at Kaiyuan Temple that he had designed himself.<ref>Jones (2000), "Buddhism and Marxism in Taiwan," p. 91.</ref>