Editing Taiwan (section)

== Radical Buddhism in Taiwan ==

Explicitly left-wing or anti-colonial currents within Taiwanese Buddhism are historically rare, and the conditions that made them possible existed only briefly. Under Qing rule, no comparable synthesis had reason to emerge, since organized Marxist and socialist thought had not yet reached the island. The most fertile period was the Japanese colonial era, when rising Taiwanese cultural and political nationalism — expressed through bodies such as the Taiwan Cultural Association (臺灣文化協會, founded 1921) — intersected with Marxist, anarchist, and socialist ideas circulating among Taiwanese students in Japan and mainland China.<ref>Jones, Charles B. (2000). "Buddhism and Marxism in Taiwan: Lin Qiuwu's Religious Socialism and Its Legacy in Modern Times". ''Journal of Global Buddhism'' 1: 82–111, pp. 85–88.</ref> Beyond Lin Qiuwu, the clearest evidence of Buddhist sympathy for Marxist social ideals in this period is a 1925 speech by the eminent monk Shanhui (善慧, 1881–1945) to Taixu's East Asian Buddhist Conference in Tokyo, in which Shanhui praised the egalitarian society promised by Marxism and proposed Buddhism as a nonviolent means of achieving it; unlike Lin's sustained doctrinal synthesis, however, Shanhui's remarks amounted to little more than an acknowledgment of Marxism's contemporary appeal.<ref>Jones (2000), "Buddhism and Marxism in Taiwan," p. 105.</ref>

=== Lin Qiuwu ===
{{Main|Lin Qiuwu}}
Lin Qiuwu, ordained as the monk Zhengfeng (證峰) in 1927, was Taiwan's most significant radical Buddhist figure and remains its principal claim to a place in the history of Buddhist Marxism. A student of the modernist Sōtō priest Nukariya Kaiten at Komazawa University, Lin argued that the Pure Land should be understood not as a realm to be reached after death but as a classless society to be built in this world through non-violent class struggle, and that bodhisattva compassion demanded immediate, this-worldly social action rather than deferral to a future life of supernatural power. His most philosophically ambitious contribution was a doctrine of the unity of all beings in a single "one Buddha" (一佛), which he used to explain the origin of class society itself in a delusive, dualistic view of the self. Lin combined this synthesis with practical activism: political organizing, journalism, campaigns against "superstitious" ritual, and advocacy for women's equality. He died of tuberculosis in 1934 at the age of thirty-two, only seven years after his ordination.

=== Martial Law (1949-1989) ===
After 1949, the KMT's imposition of martial law and the accompanying "White Terror" foreclosed nearly all Marxist or left-wing political activity on the island, Buddhist or otherwise, for four decades, and the conservative, mainlander-dominated BAROC had neither the interest nor the latitude to entertain social radicalism.<ref>Jones (1999), ''Buddhism in Taiwan'', p. xvi.</ref> The large lay organizations that expanded rapidly after 1987, chiefly Tzu Chi and Fo Guang Shan, remained wedded to a charitable, apolitical model of ''renjian fojiao'' that treated welfare work and personal cultivation as sufficient ends in themselves.

=== Buddhist Activism in the Early 1990s ===
A distinct and explicitly political current emerged in the early 1990s in direct reaction against this quietism. Its mouthpiece was the journal ''Buddhist Culture'' (佛教文化), founded around 1990 and edited by Li Zhenglong (李政隆), whose opening editorials argued that Tzu Chi-style charity work was insufficient and that Buddhists should instead engage actively with environmental protection, socioeconomic reform, and cultural change. Li explicitly held up the social engagement he saw in Christianity, to which he himself converted a few years later, as a model Buddhism had failed to match.<ref>Brons, Lajos (2022). ''A Buddha Land in This World: Philosophy, Utopia, and Radical Buddhism''. punctum books, pp. 93–94.</ref> In a symposium reported in that journal, the philosopher Yang Huinan (楊惠南) — who also produced the standard scholarly study of Lin Qiuwu's "one Buddha" thought — distinguished this "organic" model of liberation, attentive to the interdependence of sentient beings and requiring state action, from the "mechanical," individually focused model he associated with organizations such as Tzu Chi.<ref>Brons (2022), ''A Buddha Land in This World'', pp. 94–95.</ref> It was in the pages of this same journal, and in Yang's academic writing, that the nearly forgotten Lin Qiuwu was rediscovered and presented as a precedent for a genuinely socially and politically engaged Buddhism, in contrast to the charitable but non-political mainstream.<ref>Brons (2022), ''A Buddha Land in This World'', p. 95.</ref> The movement proved short-lived, and no comparably explicit fusion of Buddhism with left-wing politics has since taken hold in Taiwan on a comparable scale.