Editing Lin Qiuwu (section)

== Ideas ==

Lin Qiuwu's writings represent one of the most sustained attempts in early twentieth-century Chinese Buddhism to synthesize Marxist historical materialism with Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy, rather than simply choosing one framework over the other.<ref>Jones (2000), "Buddhism and Marxism in Taiwan," p. 92.</ref> He accepted the Marxist critique that religion, including devotional Pure Land Buddhism, had historically functioned as an "opiate of the masses," teaching the poor to defer their hopes to a paradise in the afterlife and thereby reconciling them to earthly oppression.<ref>Brons, Lajos (2022). ''A Buddha Land in This World: Philosophy, Utopia, and Radical Buddhism''. punctum books, p. 96.</ref> Rather than discard Pure Land imagery as reactionary, however, Lin redefined it. Drawing on the Marxist formula "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs," he argued that this vision of a classless, self-sufficient society was precisely what Buddhism had always meant by the "Pure Land of Utmost Bliss" (極樂淨土), and that it had to be constructed here on earth, through class struggle, rather than sought in a world to come.<ref>Jones (2000), "Buddhism and Marxism in Taiwan," pp. 94–95.</ref> He termed this goal the "Pure Land in this world" (現世淨土), a formulation he appears to have coined independently of, and on different philosophical grounds from, the reformer [[Taixu]]'s roughly contemporaneous notion of a "Pure Land in the human world" (人間淨土), which drew instead on Kang Youwei's Confucian utopianism.<ref>Brons (2022), ''A Buddha Land in This World'', p. 95.</ref>

A second pillar of Lin's synthesis was his reinterpretation of bodhisattva practice. Where much traditional Pure Land piety deferred active compassion until a future life spent cultivating supernatural powers, Lin insisted that the bodhisattva's vow to save all beings had to be enacted immediately, in the present society; he described the bodhisattva who took up this task as "the vanguard of social reform" (社會革命的前衛).<ref>Jones (2000), "Buddhism and Marxism in Taiwan," pp. 96–97.</ref> At the same time, he sought to justify his continued religious vocation to secular Marxist allies by arguing that Buddhism, properly understood, was less a religion than a rational philosophy that had accumulated unnecessary religious trappings over time.

The most distinctive and metaphysically ambitious element of Lin's thought was his doctrine of "one Buddha" (一佛), adapted from Nukariya Kaiten's teaching and rooted in the Tiantai (天台) and Huayan (華嚴) traditions' visions of the interpenetration of all phenomena.<ref>Jones (2000), "Buddhism and Marxism in Taiwan," pp. 98–99.</ref> On Lin's reading, since all sentient beings share a single, undivided Buddha-nature, humanity forms one interdependent whole, comparable to a single social body in which each person's strength sustains all the others.<ref>Brons (2022), ''A Buddha Land in This World'', p. 95.</ref> The philosopher Yang Huinan (楊惠南), in the most detailed textual study of this doctrine, has argued that Lin used it as a philosophical account of the origin of class society itself: social classes and the exploitation they enable arise from a mistaken, dualistic view of the self that obscures this underlying unity, so that a Buddhist-style awakening to "non-duality" would, in principle, dissolve the very basis of class antagonism.<ref>Yang Huinan (楊惠南) (1991). "臺灣革命僧－證峰法師（林秋梧）的「一佛」思想略探" [Taiwan's Revolutionary Monk: An Outline of Ven. Zhengfeng (Lin Qiuwu)'s "One Buddha" Thought]. In: ''當代佛教思想展望'' [An Overview of Contemporary Buddhist Thought]: 45–74. Taipei: 東大, pp. 55–60.</ref> This idealist strand of Lin's thought, Yang and Jones both note, sat uneasily with orthodox Marxism, which allows no room for a purposive metaphysical ground of being of this kind.<ref>Jones (2000), "Buddhism and Marxism in Taiwan," p. 104.</ref>

Politically, Lin's synthesis led him to a distinctive, non-violent position within the broader field of contemporary Marxist and anti-colonial thought. He explicitly excluded armed struggle and revolutionary violence from his program, framing the Buddhist path to social transformation as one of "no resistance that is nonetheless great resistance" (大抵抗主義), achieved by awakening the dormant faith and solidarity of the oppressed rather than by force of arms.<ref>Jones (2000), "Buddhism and Marxism in Taiwan," p. 95.</ref> This commitment to non-violence, along with his explicitly idealist metaphysics, made his position awkward for doctrinaire Marxists even as it proved comparatively easy to integrate into the broad and long-developed tradition of Chinese Buddhist philosophy.<ref>Jones (2000), "Buddhism and Marxism in Taiwan," pp. 103–104.</ref> Lin's political vocabulary was, in any case, not exclusively Marxist: his essays repeatedly invoke Sun Yat-sen's ''Three Principles of the People'' (三民主義) and the Nationalist party theorist Dai Jitao (戴季陶), a mixture of influences the historian Jiang Canteng attributes to Lin's contacts in Xiamen and to older Cultural Association allies such as Chiang Wei-shui, and which places Lin closer, on this point, to contemporaries such as Taixu, who likewise sought to reconcile Buddhism with the Three Principles, than to any single Marxist orthodoxy.<ref>Jiang Canteng (江燦騰) (1996). ''臺灣佛教百年史之研究 1895–1995'' [Researches in One Hundred Years of Taiwan Buddhist History]. Taipei: 南天書局, pp. 193–194.</ref>

Alongside this theoretical work, Lin pursued a practical, modernizing reform agenda within Taiwanese Buddhism. According to a six-point summary distilled by his biographer Li Xiaofeng, Lin's program called for opposing superstition and belief in the supernatural in favor of rationality; requiring monastics to possess broad learning and lofty social ideals; opposing rigid, unreflective adherence to the monastic precepts; advocating women's liberation and gender equality; condemning sycophancy toward the powerful among monastics; and unifying Taiwanese Buddhism institutionally.<ref>Jiang Canteng (1996), ''臺灣佛教百年史之研究'', pp. 189–190, summarizing Li Xiaofeng (1991), ''台灣革命僧林秋梧''.</ref> He campaigned against what he considered superstitious and wasteful rituals such as the Ghost Festival and the Yogic Release of the Flaming Mouths (瑜伽焰口),<ref>Brons (2022), ''A Buddha Land in This World'', pp. 95–96.</ref> denounced the Taiwanese Sangha's passivity and ignorance under colonial rule in stinging terms — warning that idle, unlearned monastics invited being dismissed as mere "genteel beggars" and "parasites" — and, in his lectures on the ''Sūtra of the Resolute Woman'' (堅固女經), argued for women's equal capacity for enlightenment and bodhisattva practice.<ref>Jiang Canteng (1996), ''臺灣佛教百年史之研究'', p. 189.</ref> His single most controversial reform position held that clerical celibacy and vegetarianism were disciplinary conventions rather than doctrinal essentials, and that monastics should therefore be free to marry and to eat meat; he defended this view, which closely followed the personal example of his own teacher Nukariya Kaiten — one of the first Sōtō Zen priests to abandon clerical robes for lay dress and to marry — as a rational, temperate acceptance of natural human desire rather than an endorsement of license.<ref>Jiang Canteng (1996), ''臺灣佛教百年史之研究'', pp. 192–193.</ref> Lin summed up his own combative, egalitarian self-image in verse: "having realized in a single thought the fearless Dharma of the Tathāgata, I vow to join the weak and small in struggle against the powerful" (體解如來無畏法,願同弱小鬥強權).<ref>Quoted in Jiang Canteng (1996), ''臺灣佛教百年史之研究'', p. 189.</ref>