Lin Qiuwu

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Lin Qiuwu (林秋梧; 1903–1934), who took the Buddhist name Zhengfeng (證峰) upon his ordination, was a Taiwanese Buddhist monk, Sōtō Zen-trained scholar, and Marxist social activist active during the period of Japanese colonial rule (1895–1945). Ordained at Kaiyuan Temple (開元寺) in Tainan in 1927 and later trained at Komazawa University (駒澤大學) in Tokyo, Lin fused historical-materialist class analysis with Mahāyāna Buddhist philosophy, most notably in his effort to reinterpret the Pure Land as a this-worldly, classless society to be built through non-violent struggle rather than a realm to be reached after death. Active as a lecturer, journalist, and organizer in the Taiwan Cultural Association (台灣文化協會) and allied labor and political groups, he is remembered today as Taiwan's "revolutionary monk" and as an early precursor of engaged, "human-realm" Buddhism (人間佛教) on the island. He died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-two, only seven years after his ordination.

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). 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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"). 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).

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. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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. 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.

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). 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. 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. 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. 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.

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. 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. 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.

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. 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), 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. 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. 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).

Writings

• (1928). 〈為臺灣佛教熱叫!!〉 [An Ardent Cry for Taiwanese Buddhism]. 《南瀛佛教》 6.6: 50–53. [An early reform tract arguing that Taiwanese Buddhism could not simply emphasize rebirth in the afterlife while ignoring social reality; it anticipates his later notion of a "this-worldly" Pure Land.]
• (1929). 〈我們為甚麼主張台灣佛教的統一〉 [Why We Advocate the Unification of Taiwanese Buddhism]. 《南瀛佛教》 7.1. [Sets out a three-stage institutional program for unifying Taiwanese Buddhism: first among ordained monastics, then between monastics and lay Buddhist halls (齋堂), and finally across the whole island's Buddhist population.]
• (1929). 〈唯物論者所指摘的歷史上宗教所演的主角〉 [The Historical Role Assigned to Religion by Materialist Critics]. 《臺灣民報》, nos. 258–267 (serialized). [A survey and partial defense of Buddhism against the standard Marxist critique of religion as ideology.]
• (1929). 〈階級鬥爭與佛教〉 [Class Struggle and Buddhism]. 《南瀛佛教》 7.2: 52–58. [Lin's single most influential essay, laying out a Marxist definition of social class and arguing that its resolution, the "Pure Land in this world," is the proper goal of Buddhist practice.]
• (1930). 〈活殺自在之大乘佛教－朝鮮僧伽之報國〉 [The Freely Living and Killing Mahāyāna Buddhism: The Korean Sangha's Service to the Nation]. 《南瀛佛教》 8.3–5 (serialized). [Sharply criticizes Taiwanese monastics for ignorance and passivity under colonial rule, contrasting them unfavorably with Korean Buddhist reformers; includes his oft-quoted complaint that idle monks invite being called "genteel beggars" and "parasites."]
• (1930). 〈我們為什麼參加勞青的反普運動〉 [Why We Are Joining the Young Workers' Anti-Ghost-Festival Movement]. Special issue, 《反普特刊》. [Written to accompany his campaign, with the Chikan Young Workers Association, against the Ghost Festival as wasteful superstition.]
• (1930). 〈我們要怎樣參加無產文藝運動〉 [How Should We Participate in the Proletarian Literary Movement]. 《赤道報》 2. [Published in the journal he co-founded and edited; only two of its five issues survive.]
• (1930). 〈馬克斯進文廟 (二)〉 [Marx Enters the Confucian Temple, pt. 2]. 《赤道報》 2 (under the pen name 坎人). [A satirical dialogue in which Marx and Confucius debate historical materialism versus the Confucian "Great Unity" (大同), using the fictional exchange to explain surplus, accumulation, and class conflict to a lay readership.]
• (1930). 〈柯倫泰女士的戀愛觀 (上)〉 [Madame Kollontai's View of Love, pt. 1]. 《赤道報》 2 (under the pen name 守俄). [A discussion of Alexandra Kollontai's writings on love and sexual morality, part of Lin's broader engagement with revolutionary sexual politics.]
• (1930). 〈普羅列塔利亞的性道德十二誡〉 [Twelve Precepts of Proletarian Sexual Morality]. 《赤道報》 4 (under the pen name 守俄). [A programmatic statement on sexual ethics for the working class, banned along with the issue in which it appeared.]
• (1931). 〈佛教は宗教か〉 [Is Buddhism a Religion?]. 《臺灣新民報》 347. [A Japanese-language essay arguing for a "philosophical" rather than devotional understanding of Buddhism.]
• (1933). 《真心直說白話註解》 [Vernacular Commentary on the "Direct Explanation of the True Mind"]. Tainan: Kaiyuan Temple. [Lin's vernacular commentary on a Chan text by his teacher's line, reflecting his Komazawa training under Nukariya Kaiten.]
• (1933–1934). 〈婦人講座 佛說堅固女經講話〉 [Women's Lecture: Talks on the "Sūtra of the Resolute Woman"]. 《南瀛佛教》 11.12 (1933): 18–25, and 12.3 (1934): 12–18 (serialized). [A sustained argument for women's spiritual equality that also develops Lin's "one Buddha" holism and his image of the bodhisattva as social vanguard.]
• (1934). 《佛說堅固女經講話》 [Talks on the "Sūtra of the Resolute Woman"]. Tainan: Kaiyuan Temple. [Book publication of the serialized lectures above, issued a few months before Lin's death.]
• (1934). 〈和尚吃火腿－秀才罵和尚的唯物的考察〉 [Monks Eating Ham: A Materialist Examination of Scholars Scolding Monks]. 《南瀛佛教》 12.7. [Defends monastic consumption of meat and, by extension, clerical marriage, arguing from a "materialist" standpoint that celibacy and vegetarianism are disciplinary conventions rather than doctrinal necessities; reflects the influence of his unconventionally married, meat-eating teacher Nukariya Kaiten.]

Secondary Literature in English

• Brons, Lajos (2022). A Buddha Land in This World: Philosophy, Utopia, and Radical Buddhism. punctum books. pp. 94–96. [A recent, freely available open-access study situating Lin within a broader comparative history of Buddhist Pure Land utopianism across East Asia, contrasting his Marxist-inflected "Pure Land in this world" with Taixu's Confucian-influenced "Pure Land in the human world."]
• 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. [The first sustained scholarly treatment of Lin outside Taiwan and the primary English-language source for his biography and thought; freely accessible online.]

Secondary Literature in Chinese

• 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. [The definitive biographical study, compiled by Lin's nephew from primary documentary sources, oral interviews with surviving relatives and associates, and a full inventory of Lin's scattered periodical writings; nearly all subsequent scholarship, in any language, ultimately draws its biographical details from this work. It supersedes the author's own earlier pamphlet, 《革命的和尚：抗日社會運動者林秋梧》 [The Revolutionary Monk: Anti-Japanese Social Activist Lin Qiuwu] (Taipei: 八十年代出版社, 1979).]
• 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 (2nd ed., 2006). [The foundational philosophical analysis of Lin's "one Buddha" metaphysics and its role in his account of class and class struggle.]
• 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. 183–194. [Situates Lin institutionally within the Sōtō Zen (曹洞宗) network linked to Komazawa University, contrasts him with the traditional Fujian Gushan (鼓山) monastic lineage that otherwise dominated Taiwanese Buddhism, and supplements Li Xiaofeng's biography with broader context on the colonial-era Buddhist establishment that Lin was reacting against.]

How to Cite This Article

Brons, Lajos (2026). "Lin Qiuwu". The Radical Buddhism Project. Version of 28 July 2026. http://radicalbuddhism.net/wiki/Lin_Qiuwu.