Through a Glass Darkly

Current revision as of 14:47, 8 July 2011

The Dharma Through a Glass Darkly: On the Study of Modern Chinese Buddhism through Protestant Missionary Sources^[1]
彷彿對著鏡子觀看的佛法：藉由基督教傳教士的史料研究現代中國佛教

Gregory Adam Scott
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Religion, Columbia University
史瑞戈
哥倫比亞大學宗教系博士候選人

This is an edited, electronic version of "The Dharma Through a Glass Darkly: On the Study of Modern Chinese Buddhism through Protestant Missionary Sources 彷彿對著鏡子觀看的佛法：藉由基督教傳教士的史料研究現代中國佛教". Shengyan yanjiu 聖嚴研究, Vol. 2 (July, 2011): 47-73.

Introduction

Christian missionaries working in China in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries produced a great deal of printed material, both through presses that they had established in China, and through publishers in their home countries. They wrote about their work, their religion, and their experiences in the field, often with a particular emphasis on indigenous religious culture. Widely regarded to be specialists in the field of religious belief, their writings on Chinese religion were very influential and authoritative in their time. The first-hand nature of their experience, especially the fact of their long years of residency in the treaty ports and hinterlands of China, was presented as part of the authority behind the material.^[2] As in the preface penned by DuBose above, this "experience as authority" was sometimes rhetorically set against the arms-length knowledge of university academics who only knew about Chinese religion through texts. After their expulsion from mainland China in the early 1950s, missionary writers lost much of their access to the field, and were supplanted to a large degree by pioneering ethnography and fieldwork that has expanded the scope of scholarly inquiry into experienced and lived religion in Chinese societies. Even so, the missionary experience of Chinese religious culture during the long years of their residence in China stands today as a unique and very intriguing corpus of historical data. This body of work is certainly problematic from a historian's point of view, since it is so explicitly biased against its subject; for the most part, missionaries criticized, dismissed, and ridiculed indigenous religion while upholding and defending their own beliefs. And yet even though they denied its validity, they earnestly sought to understand the religious culture they observed around them.

This essay is an attempt to outline how these types of missionary sources might be used by historians of religion; specifically, scholars of Buddhism in modern China.^[3] The impetus for this paper came from my experience as an intern archivist in the Missionary Research Library archives at Burke Library in New York City. Working with materials produced by missionaries who had lived and worked in East Asia prompted me to look more closely at how they described local Chinese religious culture, how these accounts had been used in previous scholarship, and how these resources might be used in future research. In my view as a historian of religion, these missionary studies represent a fascinating cross-cultural encounter between religious traditions during an era when the boundaries and concepts of 'religion' were themselves being formed; as a specialist in the study of modern Chinese Buddhism, missionary observations of Buddhist temples, sacred sites, festivals, monastics and laypeople offer a valuable perspective on an era of immense religious change. I make no claim to be an authority on the study of missiology or on the history of Christian missions in China; this field is blessed with a great number of expert studies and scholars. I do wish to argue, however, that studies coming out of those fields are critically important to those of other specializations who wish to dip their foot into this field; my thesis here is that we must first know more about the missionaries themselves, their lives and their historical context, in order to make responsible use of missionary sources in the study of modern Chinese religion. By understanding the conceptual lenses through which they viewed the religious culture of their time we are better able to compensate for their distortions and glimpse their observed world, perhaps not from some putative standpoint of objectivity, but certainly in a way that begins to draw aside the veil of criticism that colors so much of this material.

Missionaries and Orientalism

As European and American scholars of East Asian cultures during an age of imperialism, the points of view expressed by missionaries might best be understood through the rubric of orientalism. While initially articulated in reference to the Middle East, the study of orientalism has come to exert a profound influence on scholarship of East Asia as well.^[4] Studies building upon Edward Said's 1978 monograph have examined how knowledge has been constructed on an apparatus of colonial power and domination, and these have been joined by wider postmodernist movements that have urged reevaluating conceptual structures previously regarded as sacrosanct. These movements have implicated an entire intellectual legacy of information and understanding about non-European cultures in a systematic distortion and subjugation of their subject, and have prompted scholars to re-examine the sources, assumptions, and methods behind a colonialist discourse that persists in a post-colonial world.^[5] In the field of religion, studies such as David Chidester's Savage Systems have examined how scholars and researchers in the field have been complicit in developing and maintaining colonial structures of power, creating the very object of their study through their influence on modes of governance.^[6] Many scholars argue that the entire apparatus of the 'World Religions', often treated as a natural and objective descriptor of a universal phenomenon, has revealed itself to be nothing more than a modern construction formed through processes of scholarship, institutional isomorphism, law and policy.^[7] No longer able to take 'religion' for granted, scholars must now attend to its performance, representation, regulation and resistance.

Some scholars of Buddhist Studies have taken up this line of inquiry, attempting to examine how the history and legacy of the field is connected to orientalist and colonialist modes of thinking.^[8] Philip C. Almond was one of the first to apply Said's methods to the study of Buddhism, arguing that in Victorian Britain the field was involved in an “imaginative creation” of its object of study, and that the biases established during this formative period have had a lasting - and deleterious - effect on the field.^[9] In the introduction to his 1995 edited volume, Donald Lopez suggests looking at the history of Buddhist Studies in order to better understand the genealogy of its received ideas, and the essays that follow in that volume do precisely that, revisiting important researchers and religious figures who have helped to construct the field as it exists today.^[10] Richard King's 1999 monograph on studies of India and "the East" urges a redirection of religious studies by making orientalism itself an object of our study. He sees this as a means of avoiding both resignation toward the influence of orientalism in the history of the field, and a re-introduction of Enlightenment thought under the guise of "critique".^[11] These pioneering efforts have established a consideration of the legacy of orientalism and of earlier scholarship on Buddhism as a necessary, and potentially quite productive, project for advancing the scope and depth of Buddhist Studies.

Missionary accounts of Chinese religion appear to embody all the hallmarks of orientalist scholarship: on the whole they establish a clear divide between reified categories of East and West, they reflect domestic concerns in portrayals of their subject, and they appear to maintain a privileged position of power and knowledge over the cultures they describe. For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, missionaries were widely held to be authoritative sources of knowledge on religious topics, including the religion of the cultures in their field. Their writings on Chinese religion, especially their translations of religious texts, were highly regarded and indeed formed some of the foundational materials for the Euro-American discipline of Sinology.^[12] Holmes Welch, whose writings on modern Chinese Buddhism in the late 1960s still stand as the most comprehensive guide to the subject in a European language, cited missionary accounts to provide details on the health of Buddhist institutions. Yet he also began to question how authoritative their work really should be, as he was able to interview many refugee monastics outside of the People's Republic who provided him with alternative narratives of the modern history of Buddhism in China.^[13]

Scholars since Welch have continued to cite missionary descriptions of modern Buddhism in China, most often their first-hand accounts of things such as monastics, temples, and festivals. The question we must face, however, is whether these missionary accounts do not, in fact, reflect anything substantial about their subject, reproducing instead a set of European concerns and biases, as Eric Reinders has argued.^[14] Said's arguments about the misrepresentation of non-European cultures focus mainly on the academic world of orientalist scholars, many of whom studied "the East" from the comfort of university libraries in Europe, disconnected from the living cultures for whom they spoke. Yet Arif Dirlik, on the other hand, has argued that orientalism was not a product of the West alone, but rather involved the confluence of European and non-European cultures in the "contact zones" of colonial modernity.^[15] These were precisely the sites where missionaries spent their long periods of residence in China, and though their training, language, and religion were sourced in the West, their daily lives put them right into the midst of a combustion chamber of intercultural and translingual intercourse. Indeed, missionaries and other workers in the field had more opportunity to incorporate input from their subaltern subjects, including that of native interpreters, collaborators, scholars, and friends, into their descriptions of local culture, although this input might not receive explicit recognition in the finished text.^[16]

My point here is that missionary writings are not simply reflections of their own culture, but rather represent the subject of their gaze filtered through the lens of their own understanding. If we are to account for their biases, however, we must first gain some insight into these conceptual lenses by learning more about the historical and intellectual contexts behind missionary writings. And just as these distortions were originally produced through contact between European and non-European cultures, if we are to mine missionary accounts for historical information we must draw upon primary sources in both European and non-European languages.

The following two sections offer examples of missionaries whose writings represent intriguing sources for scholars of Chinese Buddhism. I have chosen two figures who lived in very different periods of history to show how much their missionary approach, historical context, and relationship to Chinese culture changed from one generation to the next.^[17] I do not intend to interpret them as "representative figures", but rather to show how important it is to learn about both their personal history and the larger historical context in order to interpret missionary writings. This is to say that both their times and their own lives are critical considerations in understanding what lenses they brought to their visions of religion in China.

Joseph Edkins

Joseph Edkins (Ài Yuēsè 艾約瑟, 1823 - 1905) was a pioneer of the China mission field, one of the founders of the North China branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, and a scholar who published over a dozen monographs during his lifetime.^[18] Born in England, he traveled to China in 1848 under the auspices of the Protestant non-denominational London Missionary Society.^[19] He would later work with such pivotal figures as Hudson Taylor (Dài Déshēng 戴德生, 1832 - 1905), Walter Henry Medhurst (Mài Dūsī 麥都思, 1796 - 1857), and W.A.P. Martin (Dīng Wěiliáng 丁韙良, 1826 - 1916), leading translation and publishing efforts of the fledgling Protestant missionary enterprise in China.^[20] This groundbreaking generation of missionaries had a heady confidence in the superiority of Christian doctrine and European science. They were also leaders in the study of Chinese sacred texts - as in, for example, the translations of the Classics by James Legge, published from 1861 to 1872 - and in producing written works about the Chinese religion of their own day.^[21] Missionary authors almost universally derided Chinese religion as corrupt, idolatrous, and ultimately harmful to the people. The bias against idolatry was especially reflective of their own Protestant preoccupations, as Chinese religious images were often critiqued through thinly-veiled references to Catholic practices.

Yet in spite of their near-universal criticism of idolatry and superstition, there was one aspect of Chinese religious culture to which this generation of Christian missionaries in China were overwhelmingly favorable: the sacred mountains, temples, monasteries, and related religious spaces of the Chinese countryside. This is an argument that Michael J. Walsh put forward in a seminar delivered at Columbia University in November 2009, where he described how the normally critical gaze of missionaries was suspended when writing about Chinese sacred spaces, especially those in natural surroundings.^[22] With their majestic vistas and cool climates, religious properties were often prized as retreats from the summer heat in the lowlands, or used as hostels by traveling missionaries. While the contents of the temples presented frightening examples of idolatry gone wild, and Buddhist priests were usually targets of criticism for their dullness and sloth, the experience of the wild and natural spaces themselves was something that Victorian missionary minds could well appreciate.

From Hampden C. DuBose, The Dragon, Image, and Demon, p. 257

Edkins' published works are full of travel accounts, among the most interesting of which is one that narrates his visit to Nánjīng 南京 in 1861 while it was occupied by forces of the Tàipíng rebellion. He also wrote a detailed and colorful description of the city of Běijīng 北京 in 1898.^[23] Here, however, I will examine one account recorded in his book Chinese Buddhism: a Volume of Sketches, Historical, Descriptive, and Critical, first published in London in 1880.^[24] Most of Edkins' book focuses on describing the textual corpus of East Asian Buddhism, where his own biases show through quite clearly: his own theology is consistently used as a touchstone of truth, and Buddhist teachings are only presented as imitations or deviations from his own belief. If we turn to his accounts of visiting Buddhist sacred spaces, however, we find ourselves looking through a much more sympathetic lens.

Edkins and Tanzhe Temple

One of these narratives is particularly interesting. It describes a brief visit to Tánzhé Temple 潭柘寺 in the western hills of Běijīng.^[25] Edkins' account describes how in 1866 he and some friends arrived at the temple one night and stayed in a guest room. They observed an evening ritual involving about forty priests, as well as a box containing a snake that was said to have lived for two thousand years and which ingested only water. Edkins understood it to have been pacified by the power of the Buddha.^[26] He describes a Lèngyán Altar 楞嚴壇 depicting scenes from the Lèngyán Sūtra (the Śūraṅgama Sūtra), and pays particular attention to six iron figures of Portuguese sailors placed around the altar.^[27] He also recounts how, since a heavy rainstorm had just passed, a monk took them to see the rushing waters of the stream near the monastery gate. Lastly we find a description of an altar to the Pratyeka Buddhas 辟支佛, the name of which I have reconstructed from his Romanized “An-lo-yen-sheu-tang” as “Hall for Extension of Longevity and Peaceful Happiness” 安樂延壽堂.^[28] In his descriptions of these features of the temple grounds, Edkins' narrative is surprisingly free of the judgmental tone present in his earlier discussions of Buddhist doctrine.

We can compare this narrative with what would normally be one of our main sources of historical information on the site: its temple gazetteer, which was first compiled in the eighteenth century by Shén Mùdé 神穆德 (d.u.), and expanded in 1883 by the monk Yì'ān 義庵 (d.u.)^[29] From this text we can learn about the major sights on the temple grounds, for example the Yìnyuè Stream 印月溪 in front of the temple, likely the same "foaming and dashing water" described by Edkins. We can also read biographies of temple abbots and learn of their contributions to the temple. Yet we also find many poems and accounts written by certain named individuals based on their visit to Tánzhé Temple. These include pieces by the eighteenth-century literati Shěn Wéngǎo 沈文鎬 (d.u., jìnshì 進士 1733), and Zhāng Péngchōng 張鵬翀 (1688 - 1745, jìnshì 1727). Yì'ān himself made two visits to the temple in spring and autumn of 1883, recording his impressions in eight and ten poems respectively. Edkins' experience is thus very much of a type that would have been included in a temple gazetteer, had he been a Chinese literatus or monk. Although separated by language and culture, we can find similar things mentioned in both types of accounts.

Yet not only does Edkins offers us further details not present in the gazetteer, he also presents an new source independent from that of the Chinese record. As far as I can tell, his description of the Lèngyán altar and the altar to Pratyeka Buddhas are not to be found in the Chinese-language historical record. Edkins and Yì'ān valued different sorts of phenomena when they wrote their accounts of Tánzhé Temple, and each is useful to us in its own way. Edkins recorded the sights and sounds he felt were remarkable based on what he valued in a sacred space, and in light of his experiences at other Buddhist temples; Yì'ān was focused on situating the temple in a history defined by imperial favor, the poetic impressions of powerful literati, and a series of exemplary monastic leaders. Elsewhere in Edkins' publication, we find descriptions of his visits to Bìyún Temple 碧雲寺, southwest of Tánzhé temple, and Mount Pǔtuó 普陀山 in Zhèjiāng province 浙江.^[30] Again in sharp contrast to his denunciations of the corruption of Buddhism elsewhere in the text, his descriptions of these locales are relatively free from such judgments.

Yet we must be careful to weigh his observations against what we know about his biases; while he writes much about Chinese Buddhist texts, I would not value his perspective on these as much as I would his descriptions of the physical layout and condition of temples and other sacred spaces. These were aspects that Edkins and many other missionaries of his day could appreciate and represent in their writings without having to condemn them, and given the importance of landscape, architecture, and space for Buddhism in China as elsewhere, this represents a source of very valuable information for our studies.

Earl Herbert Cressy

Earl Herbert Cressy (Gě Déjī 葛德基, 1883 - 1979) was an American Baptist missionary who traveled to China in 1910 under the auspices of the American Board of Foreign Missions. Cressy was involved with the Council of Christian Colleges in China as well as the National Christian Council of China, and was principal of a college in Hángzhōu.^[31] While the Protestant missions of Edkins' generation were characterized by a heady confidence, those of Cressy's era were more subject to conflict, introspection, and change. The World Missionary Conference convened in Edinburgh in 1910 set the stage for a radical rethinking of the mission enterprise, a new direction that was formalized in China by the establishment of the China Continuation Committee in 1913.^[32] By 1928 the committee was reformed into the National Christian Council of China, a consultative non-denominational body of Protestant leaders. Organizations such as these had helped to increase cooperation among mission groups, but they were still faced with the question of why their mission efforts were not producing the dramatic number of conversions that they had expected. The anti-Christian movement of 1927, a stronger Chinese state and calls for the indigenization of Chinese churches all added to the sense of urgency - each one could be a sign that the mission enterprise was failing, or represent an opportunity for greater success. One effort to study this problem, the Laymen's Foreign Missions Inquiry, was initiated in 1930 by a group of Baptist laypeople and soon gained the support of John D. Rockefeller (1839 - 1937) and the Presbyterian Church.^[33]

Cressy was recruited as a fact-finder for the China section of the study, but evidently he soon decided to undertake a much more thorough approach than that laid out in the original plan. To this end he recruited a Mr. Y.D. Bao in Hángzhōu and a Mr. Paul T.T. Seng in Wǔchāng 武昌 to assist him in gathering data on "indigenous religions", by which he means Buddhist, Daoist, and local and/or popular religious institutions. Bao and Seng personally visited a total of 379 temples and monasteries, and interviewed or otherwise recorded data on 326 monks, nuns and laypeople. Some of this data was incorporated into the published report, but like other contributors to the LMFI report Cressy entrusted the bulk of his data to the archive in hopes that future researchers would be able to make use of the copious amounts of data that could not be put into print.^[34]

These data sheets record a great deal of information about these religious institutions, including their name, location, date founded, sect affiliation, the number and type of monastics, and comments by the researchers. While many of the cells are blank, there is still a great deal of information that is provided. In addition to temples and monasteries listed in the Nationalist government's survey of religious institutions, there are also data sheets on Buddhist monasteries outside of this list.^[35] One of these is the Zhēnjì Temple 真際寺, for which there is more detail recorded than for most of the other entries. From the data sheet we learn that this temple, which is still extant today, is located on Mt. Wǔyún 五雲山, was founded in the Sòng dynasty, is affiliated with the Pure Land school, and was rebuilt during the Qīng. There are nine monks and three novices recorded as being in residence, with seven being literate. It is noted that the monastics come from Wēnzhōu 溫州 and Táizhōu 台州 in Zhèjiāng province, and elsewhere in China such as Húběi 湖北 province, and that the officers of the monastery are appointed for life. The sheet shows four hundred pilgrims from all classes of society (but "mostly business") visiting the temple per year, mostly from the locality. Further information is provided on temple income, major and minor images, as well as personnel including their name, age, province of birth, position and reason for their becoming a monk.

It is important to remember, however, that the data is not recorded in any systematic fashion. Many cells remain blank, and question marks abound. The judgments of the researchers - such as their impressions of the piety and intelligence of the monks - are especially suspect. Yet this data offers us a unique ability to add to what we know from other sources, such as temple gazetteers and reports in Buddhist periodicals and official documents. Since this study sought reliable information on the strengths and weaknesses of Chinese religious institutions, data that would help Christian leaders enact reforms in their own churches, we can be reasonably sure that they attempted to make it as accurate as possible within the terms of their understanding. As was the case with Edkins, knowing the auspices under which the research was undertaken helps us to better judge the data itself. Even better would be some knowledge of Y.D. Bao and Paul T.T. Seng, but to date no such information has been unearthed.

Looking at Cressy's LMFI data as a whole, it paints a picture of a thriving Buddhist scene in Hangzhou, supported by large wealthy monasteries which attracted more than one million pilgrims per year. Whereas the most prominent narratives of Chinese Buddhism during this era are dominated by reformist figures such as Ōuyáng Jiàn 歐陽漸 (1871 - 1942) and Tàixū 太虛 (1890 - 1947), it is sobering to find that, for example, the surveyed monastics seem to have been exposed to few Buddhist books and periodicals, one of the most common venues for discussions of reform. Clearly the institutions surveyed by Cressy's associates were very much of the traditionalist mold, and yet appear to have continued to enjoy popular support.

Concluding Thoughts

Although it has only been possible for me to take a few tentative steps into what I feel is a very intriguing field of inquiry for historians of religion, I hope that others will join me in exploring the potential of missionary sources. Just as we see a cross-cultural encounter taking place in the works published by Protestant missionaries to China, so too must our work partake of different cultures, languages, histories and contexts. Scholars today, who are able to participate in more international exchanges than before, are perhaps better equipped to undertake this type of work than ever before. In this way we might still be able to glimpse of a period of religious history that missionary writers saw only as through a glass darkly.

Research Bibliography

The following is a list of relevant missionary writings on Chinese religion, with a focus on those sources that discuss Buddhism at some length. An URL is provided if the text is currently available online. Full author names are given in each instance to facilitate internet searches.

• The Chinese Recorder and Missionary Journal. 41 Vols. Shanghai: Presbyterian Mission Press, 1868-1941. Known simply as The Chinese Recorder after 1915, this periodical published news and articles about China and missionary activities. Many volumes are available on [www.archive.org www.archive.org]. The full run is available through "China: Trade, Politics and Culture: 1793 - 1980” hosted by SOAS in London at http://www.china.amdigital.co.uk but an institutional subscription or access is required. A comprehensive index is available: Kathleen L. Lodwick, The Chinese Recorder Index: a Guide to Christian Missions in Asia, 1867-1941, 2 Vols (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources Inc., 1986).
• De Groot, J.J.M. Buddhist Masses for the Dead at Amoy. Leyde: Brill, 1884. Available at <http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924022928836>
• De Groot, J.J.M. "Militant Spirit of the Buddhist Clergy in China." T'oung Pao, vol. 2, no. 2 (1891), 127-139.
• De Groot, J.J.M. "Miséricorde envers les animaux dans le Bouddhisme chinois." T'oung Pao, vol. 3, no. 5 (1892), 466-489.
• De Groot, J.J.M. Le code du Mahāyāna en Chine; son influence sur la vie monacale et sur le monde laïque. Amsterdam, J. Müller, 1893. [Reprint, New York: Garland Pub., 1980.] This is a translation of the Sūtra of Brahma's Net (Fànwǎng jīng 梵網經; Brahmajāla-sūtra).
• De Groot, J.J.M. Der thüpa, das heiligste Heiligtum des Buddhismus in China. Ein Beitrag zur Kenntnis der esoterischen Lehre des Mahāyāna. Berlin, Verlag der Akademie der Wissenschaften, in Kommission bei der Vereinigung wissenschaftlicher Verleger Walter de Gruyter u. Co., 1919.
• DuBose, Hampden C. The dragon, image, and demon; or, The three religions of China; Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism, giving an account of the mythology, idolatry, and demonolatry of the Chinese. New York: A. C. Armstrong & son, 1887. Available at http://www.archive.org/details/thedragonimage00dubouoft
• Edkins, Joseph. The religious condition of the Chinese: with observations on the prospects of Christian conversion amongst that people. London, New York: Routledge, Warnes & Routledge, 1859.
• Edkins, Joseph. Religion in China: containing a brief account of the three religions of the Chinese, with observations on the prospects of Christian conversion amongst that people. Second Edition. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1877. Available at http://www.archive.org/details/religioninchina00edkiuoft
• Edkins, Joseph. Chinese Buddhism: a volume of sketches, historical, descriptive, and critical. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1893. Available at http://www.archive.org/details/chinesebuddhism00edkiuoft
• Edkins, Joseph. The early spread of religious ideas: especially in the far east. London: Religious Tract Society, 1893. Available at http://www.archive.org/details/earlyspreadofrel00edkiiala
• Eitel, Ernest John. Buddhism: its historical, theoretical and popular aspects. In three lectures. London, Trübner & Co., 1873. Available at http://www.archive.org/details/buddhismitshisto00eiteiala
• Eitel, Ernest John. Hand-book of Chinese Buddhism, being a Sanskrit-Chinese dictionary, with vocabularies of Buddhist terms in Pali, Singhalese, Siamese, Burmesi, Tibetan, Mongolian and Japanese. London, Trübner & Co., 1888. Available at http://www.archive.org/details/handbookchinese00takagoog
• Hodous, Lewis. Buddhism and Buddhists in China. New York: The Macmillan company, 1924. Available at http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/8390/pg8390.html
• Hodous, Lewis, and William Edward Soothill. A Dictionary of Chinese Buddhist Terms: with Sanskrit and English Equivalents and a Sanskrit-Pali Index. London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner & co., ltd. 1937. Available at http://www.acmuller.net/soothill/index.html, but has also been incorporated into the Digital Dictionary of Buddhism http://www.buddhism-dict.net/ddb/.
• Johnston, Reginald Fleming. Buddhist China. London: J. Murray, 1913. Available at http://www.archive.org/details/buddhistchina00johnuoft. While Johnston was not a missionary, he lived in China for many years and had close contact with the Qīng court.
• Missionary Research Library Collection, Burke Library (Columbia University Libraries) at Union Theological Seminary, New York City. This archive has several collections of documents relating to missionaries and their study of religion in China.
• Reichelt, Karl Ludvig. Truth and Tradition in Chinese Buddhism. Translated from Norwegian by Kathrina Van Wagenen Bugge. Shanghai, 1928.
• Reichelt, Karl Ludvig. Religion in Chinese Garment. Translated from Norwegian by Joseph Tetlie. New York: Philosophical Library, 1951. [Written 1912-1913].
• Reichelt, Karl Ludvig. Meditation and Piety in the Far East. Translated from Norwegian by Sverre Holth. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1954.
• Richard, Timothy. Guide to Buddhahood: Being a Standard Manual of Chinese Buddhism. Shanghai: Christian Literature Society, 1907.
• Richard, Timothy. New Testament of Higher Buddhism. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1910. Available at http://www.archive.org/details/newtestamentofhi021800mbp.
• Richard, Timothy. Forty-five Years in China: Reminiscences. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1916. Available at http://www.archive.org/details/fourtyfiveyears00richuoft.

References

1. ↑ This paper is based on presentations originally given at the North American Graduate Student Conference on Buddhist Studies in Toronto in April 2010, and at the Third International Conference of the Sheng Yen Educational Foundation in Taipei in May 2010. I am grateful to the conference committees, participants, and attendees of both events, as well as the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the Columbia University Department of Religion, and the Sheng Yen Educational Foundation for a travel grants that allowed me to attend the conferences. My work with the Earl Herbert Cressy papers was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation through the Columbia University Libraries' Graduate Student Internship Program. Special thanks are due to my supervisor in that program, archivist Ruth Tonkiss Cameron. Readers are welcome to contact the author at <www.columbia.edu/~gas2122>.
2. ↑ Some examples include Timothy Richard, Forty-Five Years in China: Reminiscences by Timothy Richard, D.D., Litt.D. (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1916); John Leighton Stuart, Fifty Years in China: The Memoirs of John Leighton Stuart, Missionary and Ambassador (New York: Random House, [1954]); George A. Fitch, My Eighty Years in China (Taipei: Meiya Publications, 1967).
3. ↑ I focus here on Protestant sources here because my experience so far has mostly been with Protestant texts, but there are a great number of very promising Catholic sources as well. One of which that, at the time of writing, will soon become available is the Archives of the Archdiocese of Canton (Guangzhou), China 天主教廣州總教區檔案. See http://www.ricci.usfca.edu/cantonarchives.htm.
4. ↑ On how orientalism might be applied to the case of China, see Arif Dirlik, "Chinese History and the Question of Orientalism" in Genealogies of Orientalism: History, Theory, Politics, edited by Edmund Burke III and David Prochaska, 384-413 (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2008).
5. ↑ See, for example, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000).
6. ↑ David Chidester, Savage Systems: Colonial and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996). See also Nicholas Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001).
7. ↑ One example is Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995), but we also find an early attempt to treat the fashioning of religions as historical entities or "traditions" in Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991 [1962]). A more nuanced examination of this issue can be found in the essays in Eric J. Ziolkowski, ed., A Museum of Faiths: Histories and Legacies of the 1893 World's Parliament of Religions (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993).
8. ↑ By 'Buddhist Studies' I mean the academic study of Buddhism as a religion, distinct from Buddhist religious practice or doctrinal study. 'Buddhology' often refers to the latter but can also include the former.
9. ↑ Philip C. Almond, The British Discovery of Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
10. ↑ Donald S. Lopez, ed., Curators of the Buddha: the Study of Buddhism under Colonialism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995).
11. ↑ Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India, and 'The Mystic East' (New York: Routledge, 1999).
12. ↑ One example is James Legge (Lǐ Yǎgè 理雅各, 1815-1897). See Norman J. Girardot, The Victorian Translation of China: James Legge's Oriental Pilgrimage (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002).
13. ↑ Holmes Welch, The Buddhist Revival in China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968).
14. ↑ Eric Reinders, Borrowed Gods and Foreign Bodies: Christian Missionaries Imagine Chinese Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
15. ↑ Dirlik, "Chinese History and the Question of Orientalism". Compare Rogaski's application of "hypercolonial" to Chinese treaty ports such as Tianjin. Ruth Rogaski, Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
16. ↑ Charles Hallisey, "Roads Taken and not Taken in the Study of Theravāda Buddhism" in Lopez, Op. Cit., 31-61.
17. ↑ Considerations of time prevented me from exploring another figure, the Baptist missionary Timothy Richard (Lǐ Tímótài 理提摩太, 1845 - 1919), whose life and work falls within a period intermediary to that of Edkins and Cressy. On Richard see Gōng Jùn 龔俊, “Yijingzhong de zhengzhi - Li Timotai yu Dasheng qixinlun 譯經中的政治 - 李提摩太與《大乘起信論》”, in Xinshixue: gainian, wenben, fangfa 新史學: 概念‧文本‧方法, Vol. 2, edited by Sūn Jiāng 孫江 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2009). Also see my forthcoming article "World Religions in Missionary Garb: Timothy Richard and his New Testament of Higher Buddhism" in Social Sciences and Missions, 25.1 (2012).
18. ↑ S. W. Bushell, "Rev. Joseph Edkins, D.D.", The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland (January 1906): 269-271.
19. ↑ On the LMS see Norman Goodall, A History of the London Missionary Society, 1895 - 1945 (London, New York: Oxford University Press, 1954).
20. ↑ On Medhurst's use of different printing technologies, see Christopher A. Reed, Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876 - 1937 (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004), pp. 31-32.
21. ↑ Girardot, The Victorian Translation of China.
22. ↑ The presentation was part of the Buddhist Studies Seminar series, a recording of which is available online: http://www.cbs.columbia.edu/files/cbss_podcast_walsh.mp3. Further work on this topic is forthcoming from Walsh.
23. ↑ See Joseph Edkins, "Narrative of a Visit to Nanking" in Chinese Scenes and People with Notices of Christian Missions and Missionary Life in a Series of Letters from Various Parts of China by Jane Rowbotham Edkins (London: James Nisbet and Co., 1863); Joseph Edkins, Description of Peking. Supplement to Dr. Williamson's Travels in North China and Manchuria (Shanghai: "Shanghai Mercury" Office, 1898).
24. ↑ Joseph Edkins, Chinese Buddhism: a Volume of Sketches, Historical, Descriptive, and Critical (London: Trübner and Co., 1880). A reprint was issued in 1893, and this version is available online. See the Research Bibliography, below.
25. ↑ Also known as Xiùyún Chán Temple 岫雲禪寺, Tanzhe Temple was originally built some time in the Jīn 金 Dynasty (265 - 420 CE). See Tanzhe shan Xiuyun si zhi 潭柘山岫雲寺志 (Gazeteer of Xiuyun Temple in Tanzhe Mountain), in Zhongguo fosi shizhi huikan 中國佛寺史志彙刊, Vol. 44, edited by Du Jiexiang 杜潔祥 (Taipei: Mingwen Shuju, 1980). Available online as part of the Dharma Drum Buddhist College Archive of Buddhist Temple Gazetteers, http://dev.ddbc.edu.tw/fosizhi/ui.html?book=g047.
26. ↑ The meaning of this may be related to the Legend of the White Snake 白蛇傳 associated with the Léifēng Pagoda 雷峰塔 in Hángzhōu 杭州.
27. ↑ This was a key text in the Chán school of Chinese Buddhism. See Charles Luk, trans., The Śūraṇgama Śūtra (New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 2001).
28. ↑ Edkins, Chinese Buddhism, 252-254.
29. ↑ Du Jiexiang, ed., Op. Cit.
30. ↑ Bìyún Temple was built in the 14th century. Mt. Pǔtuó is an island of temple complexes in Zhèjiāng province, traditionally associated with Guānyīn Bodhisattva 觀音菩薩.
31. ↑ See MRL 6: Earl Herbert Cressy Papers, 1930 - 1960, the Burke Library Archives (Columbia University Libraries) at Union Theological Seminary, New York. The main collection of Cressy’s papers can be found at the American Baptist Historical Society, Valley Forge, PA.
32. ↑ See Brian Stanley, The World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh 1910 (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2009).
33. ↑ The MRL series 12 collection of the Burke Library archives has a (as of July 2011) largely unprocessed collection of documents relating to the Laymen's Foreign Missions Inquiry. See MRL 12: Laymen’s Foreign Missions Inquiry Records, Series 1B, box 6, folders 7 - 9 and Series 1B, box 7, folders 1 - 4.
34. ↑ On the scope and aims of the LFMI project, as well as the controversy that surrounded it, see William Earnest Hocking, Re-Thinking Missions: A Laymen's Inquiry after One Hundred Years (New York and London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1932); Laymen's Foreign Missions Inquiry, Supplementary Series, 7 Vols. (New York and London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1932); "Religion: Re-Thinking Missions", Time (Nov. 28, 1932); Stephen W. Angell, "Rufus Jones and the Laymen’s Foreign Missions Inquiry: How a Quaker Helped to Shape Modern Ecumenical Christianity", Quaker Theology, Vol. 2, no. 2 (Autumn 2000).
35. ↑ National surveys were also undertaken later in 1932 and 1935, but the reliability of their data is extremely questionable. See Rebecca Nedostup, Superstitious Regimes: Religion and the Politics of Chinese Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2010), especially chapter 6.
36. ↑ Listed twice and the first entry does not have any data included, may represent an error.
37. ↑ No recorded information follows for this entry.
38. ↑ Recorded as 灵峯寺.
39. ↑ This entry appears initially with no information, then an entry (#125) appears to be missing, then the entry appears followed by information.
40. ↑ No recorded info follows for this entry.

Works Cited

• Almond, Philip C. The British Discovery of Buddhism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
• Angell, Stephen W. "Rufus Jones and the Laymen’s Foreign Missions Inquiry: How a Quaker Helped to Shape Modern Ecumenical Christianity". Quaker Theology, Vol. 2, no. 2 (Autumn 2000).
• Bushell, S. W. "Rev. Joseph Edkins, D.D." The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, January 1906: 269-271.
• Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000.
• Chidester, David. Savage Systems: Colonial and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996.
• Dirks, Nicholas. Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001.
• Dirlik, Arif. "Chinese History and the Question of Orientalism". In Genealogies of Orientalism: History, Theory, Politics, edited by Edmund Burke III and David Prochaska, 384-413. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2008.
• Edkins, Joseph. "Narrative of a Visit to Nanking". In Chinese Scenes and People with Notices of Christian Missions and Missionary Life in a Series of Letters from Various Parts of China by Jane Rowbotham Edkins. London: James Nisbet and Co., 1863.
• Edkins, Joseph. Chinese Buddhism: a Volume of Sketches, Historical, Descriptive, and Critical. London: Trübner and Co., 1880.
• Edkins, Joseph. Description of Peking. Supplement to Dr. Williamson's Travels in North China and Manchuria. Shanghai: "Shanghai Mercury" Office, 1898.
• Fitch, George A. My Eighty Years in China. Taipei: Meiya Publications, 1967.
• Girardot, Norman J. The Victorian Translation of China: James Legge's Oriental Pilgrimage. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002.
• Goodall, Norman. A History of the London Missionary Society, 1895-1945. London, New York: Oxford University Press, 1954.
• Gong Jun 龔俊. “Yijingzhong de zhengzhi - Li Timotai yu Dasheng qixinlun 譯經中的政治 - 李提摩太與《大乘起信論》”. In Xinshixue: gainian, wenben, fangfa 新史學: 概念‧文本‧方法, Vol. 2, edited by Sun Jiang 孫江. Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 2009.
• Hallisey, Charles. "Roads Taken and not Taken in the Study of Theravāda Buddhism". In Curators of the Buddha: the Study of Buddhism under Colonialism, edited by Donald S. Lopez, 31-61. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995.
• Hocking, William Earnest. Re-Thinking Missions: A Laymen's Inquiry after One Hundred Years. New York and London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1932.
• King, Richard. Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India, and ‘The Mystic East’. New York: Routledge, 1999.
• Laymen's Foreign Missions Inquiry. Supplementary Series, 7 Vols. New York and London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1932.
• Lopez, Donald S., ed. Curators of the Buddha: the Study of Buddhism under Colonialism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995.
• Luk, Charles, trans. The Śūraṇgama Śūtra. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 2001.
• Masuzawa, Tomoko. The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995.
• MRL 6: Earl Herbert Cressy Papers, 1930-1960, the Burke Library Archives (Columbia University Libraries) at Union Theological Seminary, New York.
• MRL 12: Laymen’s Foreign Missions Inquiry Records, the Burke Library Archives (Columbia University Libraries) at Union Theological Seminary, New York.
• Nedostup, Rebecca. Superstitious Regimes: Religion and the Politics of Chinese Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2010.
• Reed, Christopher A. Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876-1937. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2004.
• Reinders, Eric. Borrowed Gods and Foreign Bodies: Christian Missionaries Imagine Chinese Religion. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
• "Religion: Re-Thinking Missions". Time, Nov. 28, 1932.
• Richard, Timothy. Forty-Five Years in China: Reminiscences by Timothy Richard, D.D., Litt.D. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1916.
• Rogaski, Ruth. Hygienic Modernity: Meanings of Health and Disease in Treaty-Port China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004.
• Smith, Wilfred Cantwell. The Meaning and End of Religion. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991 [1962].
• Stanley, Brian. The World Missionary Conference, Edinburgh 1910. Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2009.
• Stuart, John Leighton. Fifty Years in China: The Memoirs of John Leighton Stuart, Missionary and Ambassador. New York: Random House, [1954].
• Tanzhe shan Xiuyun si zhi 潭柘山岫雲寺志. In Zhongguo fosi shizhi huikan 中國佛寺史志彙刊, Vol. 44, edited by Du Jiexiang 杜潔祥. Taipei: Mingwen Shuju, 1980.
• Welch, Holmes. The Buddhist Revival in China. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968.
• Ziolkowski, Eric J., ed. A Museum of Faiths: Histories and Legacies of the 1893 World's Parliament of Religions. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1993.