A poet, journalist, and lay Buddhist. She had extensive experience living abroad in the 1920s and 1930s, and worked to tell Chinese about Buddhism in Eurrpe, and teach Europeans about Buddhist compassion.
Biography
Lǚ's father, Lǚ Fèngqí 呂鳳岐 was a presented scholar 進士 and semi-famous poet. Lǚ was engaged at the age of 9 to a 12 year old, but her parents later backed out and she never married. He parents wanted her to have a modern education, so they sent her to study at her uncle’s school.
In 1903, she went looking for a friend in Tiānjīn 天津 and ended up becoming an editor at the Dàgōng bào 大公報. She had not been there five months when, in September, she opened and began overseeing a girls’ school. Much of this was through the help of Yīng Liànzhī 英歛之 and his wife. In 1909, the first class of ten students graduated with teaching degrees. Included in this class was Zhōu Enlái’s 周恩來 future wife.
Lǚ left the school (which changed its name) after the start of the Republic and worked as a secretary in Yuán Shìkǎi’s 袁世凱 administration, but when he declared himself emperor she quit and went to live with her mother in Shànghǎi 上海, where she studied English, read, and invested sucessfully in trading companies.
After her mother died in 1918 or 19, Lǚ planned to go abroad, but first went up to the Beijing/Tianjin area where, in 1920, she heard Dìxián 諦閒 lecturing on the Buddhist sūtras. She took refuge under him at that time. After hearing another lecture by Dìxián and reading some works by Yìnguān 印光 she took the precepts and became a vegetarian.
In 1920, she went to America where she audited literature classes at Columbia University, while serving as a foreign correspondent for the Shanghai Times 上海時報. After a few years she went to Europe, visiting England, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and other countries.
She saw that Europeans and Americans valued material culture, but were not vegetarian and mistreated animals. She also saw the aftermath of World War 1. This led her to decide to promote love, non-killing, vegetarianism, and the protection of animals.
In 1932, she published Ōu Měi zhī guāng 歐美之光, a book about vegetarianism, animal protection, and Buddhist studies in the West. She also did translations of Buddhist works into English and published bilingual Chinese-English editions of others (such as of the Pǔmén 普門 Chapter of the Lotus Sūtra, which was published by Shanghai Buddhist Books 上海佛學書局 in 1933).
From 1926， she lived in Switzerland, but when World War II broke out, she moved from there to the United States and then Hong Kong. She ended her days on Kowloon 九龍, where she sequestered herself in recitation 念佛, not caring about the outside world.
Important Works
In Chinese:
Bilingual Chinese-English:
References:
Shì Dōngchū 釋東初. Zhōngguó fójiào jìndàii shǐ 中國佛教近代史 (A History of Early Contemporary Chinese Buddhism), in Dōngchū lǎorén quánjí 東初老人全集 (Complete Collection of Old Man Dongchu), vols. 1-2. (Taibei: Dongchu, 1974), 2:632－634.
Yú Língbō 于凌波. Zhōnguó jìnxiàndài fójiào rénwù zhì 中國近現代佛教人物志 (Biographical Almanac of Early Contemporary and Modern Chinese Buddhism). (Beijing: Zongjiao wenhua, 1995), 505－511.
Yú Língbō 于凌波, ed. Xiàndài fójiào rénwù cídiǎn 現代佛教人物辭典 (A Dictionary of Modern Buddhist Persons), 2 vols. (Taipei: Foguang, 2004), 1:403a-406c.