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== III. Buddhist Lay Practitioners and Marxism ==

In the history of twentieth-century Chinese Buddhism, a number of highly active lay Buddhist practitioners (居士) stand out. These lay Buddhists were believers in Buddhism, yet were also caught up in the turbulent intellectual currents of their era; brought together by circumstance, they tended to focus on comparing and reconciling contemporary thought with Buddhist doctrine. Marxism, as the dominant ideology of twentieth-century China, could not fail to leave its mark on the lives and beliefs of lay Buddhists — especially from the 1930s and 1940s onward, as, with the advance of the Chinese revolution, Marxism's influence extended increasingly to a number of lay Buddhists, for whom reconciling Marxism with Buddhist faith became a matter of pressing concern. A number of lay Buddhists, represented by Wang Xiaoxu (王小徐), You Zhibiao (尤智表), [[Wen Guangxi]] (温光熹), Su Yuanlei (苏渊雷), and [[Chen Mingshu]] (陈铭枢), generally held that Buddhism and Marxism harbored no fundamental contradiction, and could be reconciled, or even unified.

With regard to the relationship between Buddhist thought and Marxism, lay Buddhists broadly displayed four distinct orientations: first, the view that Marxist thought falls short of Buddhist thought, held by Wang Xiaoxu and Tang Ying (汤瑛), among others; second, the view that Marxism and Buddhism are of equal standing, held by You Zhibiao, Su Yuanlei, and others; third, the integration of Marxist and Buddhist thought into a new Buddhist theoretical system, represented by Wen Guangxi and Chen Mingshu; and fourth, the critical inheritance and development of Buddhism under Marxist guidance.<ref name="fourthorientation">The article does not, in fact, go on to discuss this fourth orientation.</ref> Each is discussed below in turn.

First, Wang Xiaoxu, a lay Buddhist renowned for harmonizing science and Buddhism, took a deep interest both in scientific progress and in the spread of Marxist philosophy. On the one hand, Wang Xiaoxu held that the fundamental question of Buddhism was precisely the most influential scientific method then current in the social sciences — dialectics. The Buddhist worldview, he argued, can be summarized in the half-verse "All conditioned things are impermanent, subject to arising and ceasing" (诸行无常，是生灭法), which accords with the dialectics of Hegel and Marx, and with Plekhanov's dictum that "dialectics is the method of observing phenomena in their occurrence, development, and annihilation." On the other hand, although Hegel and Marx were the forefathers of dialectics, their dialectics remained incomplete; Buddhism, three thousand years earlier, represented a thoroughgoing dialectic. Hegel's dialectics attended not only to change in the object of knowledge, but to change in knowledge itself; Marx transformed Hegel's idealist dialectics into a materialist one, applying it to the study of human beings within the social sciences, and revealing that all political, economic, and legal principles once considered fixed in fact change together with the conditions of human life. Marx's dialectics, however, remained incomplete, because Marx could not carry his own principle through to its conclusion. Marx's dialectic held that "an affirmative understanding of existing things simultaneously contains within it an understanding of their inevitable negation" — a proposition that was, for the bourgeoisie and its apologists, "a source of anguish and terror."<ref name="marxplekhanov">The Plekhanov quotation most likely derives from either ''The Development of the Monist View of History'' or ''Fundamental Problems of Marxism''. The Marx quotation that follows paraphrases the well-known closing passage of the Afterword to the second German edition of ''Capital'', Vol. 1, in which Marx states that dialectics, in its rational form, is "a scandal and abomination to bourgeoisdom." The wording given here follows Wang Xiaoxu's own Chinese paraphrase, as rendered by Li Guangliang, rather than any standard English translation of Marx.</ref> Yet Marx could not apply this same principle to the proletariat and to his own ideal society, communist society; indeed, he was prepared to pay the price of prolonged, worldwide conflict to secure the one exception to his own dialectic — communism.

In Wang Xiaoxu's view, only Buddhism represents a fully consistent dialectic. Dialectics holds that there is no abstract truth; yet all philosophers and scientists nonetheless attempt to derive laws from their objects of study, and such laws are inevitably abstract, and so inevitably violate dialectics. This holds not only for philosophy and science in general, but for dialectics itself, which cannot avoid self-contradiction — which is why philosophers and scientists, Marx included, cannot escape the incompleteness of their own dialectics. A fully consistent dialectic can be described in neither language nor concept; this is the Buddhist "non-discriminating wisdom" (无分别智). Though it can be described in neither language nor concept, non-discriminating wisdom is no mere name — it can be attained through the practice of countless dharma-gates (法门), and it alone can grasp reality as it concretely is.

In his "Discussion with a Certain Layman on His Writings on the Materialist Dialectics of the Sixth Patriarch" (与某居士论其所撰六祖唯物辩证法), Tang Ying wrote:

:The Dharma encompasses both mundane and supramundane teachings, and materialist dialectics is one of the wholesome dharmas of the mundane world. Its teachings are of use for thought at the level of "phenomenology," but fail to reach the ultimate reaches of "ontology." Otherwise, try discerning the stages beyond the eighth ground (八地)<ref name="bhumi">The eighth of the ten bodhisattva grounds (bhūmi) in Mahayana doctrine, traditionally called the "Immovable Ground" (不动地).</ref> — see if you can. When the five aggregates of clinging are empty, there is neither a mind that realizes nor a dharma that is realized; at such a time, tell me: the law of the unity of contradictions, the law of the transformation of quantity into quality, the law of the negation of the negation, thesis–antithesis–synthesis, and all the rest — where are they to be placed?

In the ''Anti-Dühring'', Engels states:

:Dialectics is the science of the general laws, or the laws of development, of nature, human society, and thought… Dialectical thinking grasps things within the flow of motion — occurrence, existence, development, annihilation — rather than in a static state; it observes phenomena within the intricate and far-reaching connections of all beings, rather than treating phenomena as isolated, unrelated, and fixed.<ref name="engelsnote">Translated here from the Chinese as quoted by Tang Ying, rather than from the original German or a standard English translation of the ''Anti-Dühring''.</ref>

Tang Ying commented on this passage:

:Reading this passage, Engels's view of things is no different from the Buddhist view of birth, abiding, change, and annihilation. Is not occurrence "birth"? Is not existence "abiding"? Is not development "change"? Is not annihilation "annihilation"? Engels's talk of "observing phenomena in their connections," of "not treating phenomena as isolated," "not as unrelated to one another," "not as fixed" — this, too, is no different from the Buddhist view that "all phenomena arise from causes and conditions" (诸法因缘生), that "no phenomenon arises in isolation" (法不孤起), that "all phenomena are mutually interpenetrating" (诸法相即), and that "all conditioned things are impermanent" (诸行无常). The difference is that Engels only "grasps things" between the perceiving aspect and the perceived aspect (见分相分), whereas the Buddha goes further, negating this very duality of perceiver and perceived, advancing to seek the self-witnessing aspect (自证分) and the witness of the self-witnessing aspect (证自证分), directly attaining the essence, from which function then arises — establishing virtue, expounding the teaching, delivering all beings widely, or returning by vow to appear in the guise of a philosopher, a scientist, or a Communist Party member, in order to expound the Dharma. The Buddha benefits others through his intrinsic, unassuming virtue, with no need to make his accomplishments known. The attainments of the Buddha and of Engels therefore differ, owing to the difference in what each has realized, in their root and branch, their scope, their manifest and hidden aspects, their reality and semblance — as plainly as the sun and moon set side by side. (19)

Secondly, You Zhibiao, Su Yuanlei, and others held that dialectical materialism and Buddhist dialectics illuminate one another. In his "Dialectics in Buddhism" (佛法中之辩证法), You Zhibiao stated that philosophers who understood only metaphysics and mechanical materialism, without understanding the dialectical materialist conception of history, could not understand Buddhism; only those who understood relativity and dialectics could truly understand it, since Buddhist prajñā (般若) corresponds to relativity in science and to dialectics in philosophy, being the best available method for explaining the vivid, living dynamism of the universe and of human life. To understand dialectics is to understand that every doctrine and ideology is merely an ideology reflected out of a given era and environment, rather than a fixed law:

:According to the theory of relativity in modern science, matter possesses no absolute, true, and unchanging substance. Further, according to the most progressive dialectical-materialist conception of history in modern philosophy, every doctrine of thought is merely an ideology reflected out of the economic environment of a given era — where, then, are there any fixed, unchanging doctrines? I therefore say that the Buddha's teaching does not conflict with progressive modern science and philosophy; rather, progressive modern science and philosophy are providing a thoroughgoing commentary upon it. Anyone who truly understands relativity and dialectics will, on reading the Diamond Sutra, deeply appreciate this supreme, profound, and subtle Dharma. (20)

New Democracy, socialism, and the instruments of the state are, accordingly, all instances of what Buddhism calls "remedial teaching adapted to circumstance" (对治悉檀)<ref name="siddhanta">对治悉檀 renders one of the four ''siddhānta'', or modes of exposition, described in the Mahāprajñāpāramitā-śāstra: teaching tailored as an antidote to a particular affliction or circumstance, rather than as an absolute or final truth.</ref> — not metaphysical theories detached from concrete reality.

In his article "Mahāyāna Buddhism and New Materialism" (大乘佛法与新唯物论),<ref name="n21discrepancy">The article's own note 21 (see below) gives the title of this piece as 〈大乘佛法与马恩哲学〉 ("Mahayana Buddhism and the Philosophy of Marx and Engels"), which does not match the title given here in the body text. The discrepancy is present in the source and has not been resolved here.</ref> Su Yuanlei undertook a systematic comparison of Marxist philosophy and Buddhism. He held that the Buddha appeared in the world on account of "the one great matter" (一大事因缘), whereas the philosophy of Marx and Engels is a product of historical development; yet in their shared aspiration to save and deliver humanity, their methods of observing change and examining phenomena, and their spirit of sacrifice and struggle, the two share considerable common ground. Equality, freedom, liberation, and happiness, all oriented toward the interests of the masses and pursued through self-criticism; phenomena and principle mutually unobstructed, each dharma reflecting every other — the two, on this view, complement, complete, and encompass one another, both being necessary to the age. Su Yuanlei explained the points of convergence between Buddhism and the philosophy of Marx and Engels from three angles: worldview, social view, and outlook on life.

As to worldview: the philosophy of Marx and Engels rests on two fundamental pillars, dialectics and materialism, which together form dialectical materialism. Methodologically, this philosophy adopted Hegel's dialectics while stripping away its mystical trappings, while its understanding of the world's essence carried Feuerbach's materialism a step further. In brief, dialectics uncovers the laws governing things through their "connections," "processes," "changes," and "contradictory development," thereby overcoming the defects of "isolation," "fragmentation," "fixity," and "monotonous repetition" — no different, on this view, from the Buddhist concepts of dependence upon another (依他), dependent origination (缘起), the four characteristics (四相), and the eight negations (八不).<ref name="eightnegations">The "eight negations" (八不) are the eight rejected extremes — of birth and extinction, permanence and impermanence, identity and difference, coming and going — set out in the opening verse of Nāgārjuna's ''Mūlamadhyamakakārikā'' and foundational to Sanlun/Madhyamaka thought in China.</ref> Nothing stands in isolation, nor does any phenomenon arise on its own; ignorance and contradiction, birth-and-death and change, endless dependent origination and contradictory development, all convey the same meaning. Materialism's claims that "the objective world is knowable," that "subjective reflection involves selection," and that "what is verified in practice is truth" arrive, by a different road, at the same destination as the Mahayana view, which does not deny objective existence but regards only subjective attachment as illusory. Su Yuanlei wrote:

:Concepts are a reflection of matter, not its source; thought is the highest form taken by the motion of matter. Hence "tortoise hair and rabbit horns" never existed to begin with, and "flowers in a mirror, the moon in water" are, in the end, illusions. Buddhism holds that all phenomena arise from causes and conditions, and are manifestations of consciousness alone; hence development through the "transformation of the basis" (转依) cannot succeed without the unity of subject and object, and the correspondence of knower and known. What conventionally seems to exist does not truly exist; true emptiness is not mere nothingness. This accords precisely with the dialectical development of phenomenon and essence, sensation and reason — with the philosophy of Marx and Engels, which seeks essence out of phenomena and moves from relative to absolute truth, deeply consonant with the Buddhist path from conditioned to unconditioned phenomena, from illusory appearance to the realization of true reality. (22)

As to social view: Marxism takes as its mission the abolition of class division and of the system whereby human beings exploit one another, advocating "service to the masses" and "labor as creation," so as to realize a communist society of "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need." This is no different in spirit from the Buddhist notions of "the equality of all classes," of "regarding all sentient beings as one's only child" (众生一子想), and from the strict monastic discipline expressed in the saying "a day without work is a day without food." Worldly people often fault Buddhists for failing to engage in productive labor, but this is merely a defect of later, degenerate followers; true Buddhism does not impede productive activity — as shown by the example of Chan Master Baizhang (百丈), who would not eat without working, of the Sixth Patriarch Huineng, who pounded rice, and of "Huang the Blacksmith" (黄打铁), who worked at the forge, none of whom was thereby prevented from being a first-rate thinker. Su Yuanlei argued that finding ways to involve monastics in productive labor, and to establish monastic regulations to this effect, so as to leave no grounds for such criticism, was a matter of real urgency.

As to outlook on life: Marxism places great weight on theoretical construction, so as to acquire the weapons of ideological critique — hence the saying, "without revolutionary theory, there is no revolutionary action" — and it further calls for self-examination through work, learning from the masses, strict discipline, obedience to organization, and sacrifice in struggle, all in the hope of building an earthly paradise. This may be likened to the Buddhist spirit of taking compassion and wisdom as the foundation of learning, of vanquishing the heterodox and manifesting the orthodox, of vigorous and fearless advance, together with the practice of remaining close to the masses, never departing from sentient beings, sacrificing oneself to teach the Dharma, and entering prison to deliver others. In Su Yuanlei's view, the nobility of character and the great vow-power of Communists display precisely the spirit of "being first to bear the world's sorrows and last to enjoy its pleasures," and of "if I do not enter hell, who will?" — truly the mark of a Mahayana disposition.

Third, Wen Guangxi and Chen Mingshu attempted to combine Marxism and Buddhism to build a new Buddhist theoretical system. [[Wen Guangxi]] set out his "new Buddhism" systematically in essays such as "What to Do" (做什么), "Does a Socialist Society Still Need Buddhism?" (社会主义的社会还要不要佛法), "How to Resolve Our Ideological Problems" (怎样搞通我们的思想问题), and "The General Trend of World Culture and the Future of Buddhism" (世界文化大势与佛学前途). This "new Buddhism" was, in his conception, a socialist Buddhism combined with Marxist philosophy — a Buddhism promoting the spirit of "farming Chan" (农禅精神)<ref name="nongchan">农禅, "farming Chan," refers to the tradition, traced to the Tang-dynasty monastic code attributed to Baizhang, of combining manual agricultural labor with Chan practice within the monastery.</ref> in step with social production, and a scientific, popular, national Buddhism in the service of the broad mass of the people. Wen Guangxi held that Buddhism, too, is one of the ideological forms erected upon a socioeconomic base, and that, as society develops, Buddhism must inevitably pass from an old form into this new one; whether the new Buddhism could be established at all depended on its relation to Marxism, which he explained under three headings.

(1) New Buddhism and materialist philosophy. Wen Guangxi held that Buddhism is not only not a Western-style idealism, but in fact possesses the very spirit of modern dialectical materialism. The "mind" (心) and "consciousness" (识) spoken of in Buddhism's doctrines that "the three realms are mind-only" (三界唯心) and "the myriad dharmas are consciousness-only" (万法唯识) are not the mind, will, or concept discussed in Western idealism, but rather a single term encompassing both mind and matter. Western idealism reaches, at most, the sixth consciousness (perhaps as far as the perceiving aspect of the seventh), while materialism corresponds to the first five consciousnesses; in Buddhism, however, "mind" refers to the eighth consciousness, the storehouse consciousness (阿赖耶识), which contains within it all sentient beings and their physical worlds and is the root of the first seven consciousnesses, becoming, once consciousness is transformed into wisdom, the perfect and wondrous mind. Moreover, Buddhism itself acknowledges that "mind is originally unborn, but arises in dependence on circumstance," which is to say that it is, in truth, biased toward neither matter nor mind.

(2) New Buddhism and class struggle. New Buddhism, too, speaks of class, and stands with the majority of the oppressed classes in violent struggle against the minority; yet Buddhism's adoption of a class standpoint is a matter of necessity, a teaching of skillful means suited to circumstance. Buddhism's ultimate ideal remains the abolition of class and the unification of human society.

(3) New Buddhism and society. New Buddhism is a practical Buddhism, one that not only conforms to the ideological system of modern culture but also penetrates the masses and grasps living reality, working "toward the improvement and reform of the lives of the broad masses of the people in society." Buddhism depends upon the masses and serves socialist society:

:Buddhism should be placed outside the temple gate and within society, taking the vast, impoverished masses as its object, rather than becoming an object of enjoyment or idle pastime for a leisured class — still less a religious relic of the old order that obstructs historical progress, as diagnosed by dialectical materialism. ("What to Do")

[[Chen Mingshu]], a distinguished general of his generation, was also a scholar of Buddhism with profound and distinctive views. In the early 1950s he successively published "The Basic Essentials of Buddhism, and the Methods of Studying and Practicing It" (佛学底基本要义和研究它的方法与实践它的规律), "My Views on Chan" (我的禅观), "Analyzing the Theoretical System of Buddhist Thought through Materialist Dialectics" (用唯物辩证法来分析佛学理论体系), and "On the Two Absolute Meanings of Buddhist Practice" (论佛家实践底两种绝对意义). Chen Mingshu described himself as "an advocate of studying Buddhist thought using dialectical materialism — the method of the new philosophy." (Chen Mingshu, "Collection on the Bliss of the Dharma" (法喜集), ''Modern Buddhist Studies'' (现代佛学), Vol. 1, No. 3.) On the one hand, he argued vigorously against any characterization of Buddhist thought as idealist; on the other, he absorbed the theory of praxis from Marxist philosophy to construct a new, practice-oriented Buddhism, whose essentials were threefold.

(1) Buddhist thought arises from practice: it is a theory explaining how human life progresses from "sensory perception" through "rationality" and on to "awakened awareness." Analyzed through materialist dialectics, the basic theoretical system of Buddhist thought consists of the unity of mind and no-mind, the unity of self and no-self, the unity of mind and self, the unity of the relative and the absolute, the unity of affliction and enlightenment, and — proceeding from the theory of non-substance and the unity of opposites — an ultimate identity.

(2) The greatest and most thoroughgoing expression of Buddhist practice is "Bodhisattva conduct" (菩萨行): complete selflessness in the service of others, regarding the lives of the masses as one's own. It is thus entirely natural to stand on the ground of Bodhisattva conduct and be, at the same time, a Marxist–Leninist fighter; indeed, every Buddhist of right understanding and right view is, unconditionally, one hundred percent a Marxist–Leninist — a claim made strictly from the standpoint of conscious understanding and practice, in conformity with worldly truth.

(3) The Dharma exists within the world; it breaks through worldly appearances, and separated from reality it ceases to be the Dharma. The Dharma is teaching alone, aimed at resolving the problem of birth and death; it does not itself supply detailed theories for transforming the actual world, or for building the social, economic, political, and legal structures needed to resolve the practical problems of human life. Yet the former cannot be separated from the latter — to do so would be to abandon the Dharma — and the Dharma must, moreover, actively and thoroughly adapt itself to the latter. In the modern era, only Marxism has, in practice, supplied the theory and the laws governing this latter domain: "only Marxism-Leninism can thoroughly resolve the question of a genuinely happy and equal life for the whole of humanity." Chen Mingshu also noted that, while Marxism-Leninism carries the authority to transform the world into truth, goodness, and beauty, it ought not to be treated as an exclusive doctrine, since truth is one, universal, unfolding without end, and encompassing of all things.