Editing Chen Mingshu (section)

== Ideas ==

{{Gray Banner|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.<ref>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〉 [Marxism's View of Buddhism and Buddhism's View of Marxism].</ref> 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."<ref>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 (reprinted in ''民國佛教期刊文獻集成'' [Minguo Foxue Qikan Wenxian Jicheng] vol. 99, pp. 12–14), a lecture delivered November 15, 1944 at the China Inner Studies Institute (支那內學院) on the anniversary of the birthday of "the late teacher" (先師), i.e. Ouyang Jingwu.</ref> 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.<ref>哲學與佛法一瞥 [A Glimpse into Philosophy and the Buddhadharma], ''覺群報'' no. 53 (undated, but internal evidence dates it to 1947), p. 4.</ref> 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.<ref>禪宗 [The Chan School], ''覺有情'' 9.6 (June 1948): 434–36, at 435.</ref>

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).<ref>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) (August 1949): 2–3, thesis 5.</ref> 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.<ref>Chen Mingshu, 法喜集 [Dharma-Joy Collection], ''現代佛學'' 1.3 (November 1950), quoted in Li Guangliang 李廣良 (2001).</ref>