Transforming Consciousness

The Western roots of many aspects of modern Chinese thought

have been well documented. Far less well understood, and still largely

overlooked, is the influence and significance of the main exemplar of

Indian thought in modern China: Yogācāra Buddhist philosophy. This

situation is all the more anomalous given that the revival of Yogācāra

thought amongst leading Chinese intellect...

The Western roots of many aspects of modern Chinese thought

have been well documented. Far less well understood, and still largely

overlooked, is the influence and significance of the main exemplar of

Indian thought in modern China: Yogācāra Buddhist philosophy. This

situation is all the more anomalous given that the revival of Yogācāra

thought amongst leading Chinese intellectuals in the first three

decades of the twentieth century played a decisive role in shaping how

they engaged with major currents in modern Chinese thought: empirical

science; “mind science” or psychology; evolutionary theory; Hegelian

and Kantian philosophy; logic; and the place of Confucian thought in a

modernizing China.

The influence and legacy of Indian thought have

been ignored in conventional accounts of China’s modern intellectual

history. This volume sets out to achieve three goals. The first is to

explain why this Indian philosophical system proved to be so

attractive to influential Chinese intellectuals at the very moment in

Chinese history when traditional knowledge systems and schemes of

knowledge compartmentalization were being confronted by radically new

knowledge systems introduced from the West. The next goal is to

demonstrate how the revival of Yogācāra thought informed Chinese

responses to the challenges of modernity, in particular modern science

and logic. The third goal is to highlight how Yogācāra thought shaped

a major current in modern Chinese philosophy: New Confucianism.

Transforming Consciousness forces us to rethink the entire project in

modern China of the “translation of the West.” Taken together, the

chapters develop a wide-ranging and deeply sourced argument that

Yogācāra Buddhism played a much more important role in the development

of modern Chinese thought (including philosophy, religion, scientific

thinking, social, thought, and more) than has previously been

recognized. They show that Yogācāra Buddhism enabled key intellectuals

of the late Qing and early Republic to understand, accept, modify, and

critique central elements of Western social, political, and scientific

thought.

The chapters cover the entire period of Yogācāra’s distinct shaping of

modern Chinese intellectual movements, from its roots in Meiji Japan

through its impact on New Confucianism. If non-Buddhists found

Yogācāra useful as an indigenous form of logic and scientific

thinking, Buddhists found it useful in thinking through the

fundamental principles of the Mahāyāna school, textual criticism, and

reforming the canon. This is a crucial intervention into contemporary

scholarly understandings of China's twentieth century, and it comes at

a moment in which increasing attention is being paid to modern Chinese

thought, both in Western scholarship and within China.