Thinking Dialectically with Zhang Taiyan

This paper revisits the Buddhist-anarchist encounter during late Qing China through an examination of the writings of the revolutionary philologist Zhang Taiyan. Through close readings of Zhang’s writings, in which Zhang stages the dialectical analysis of the concept of ‘nature’ (xing; svabhāva) through dialogue with the voice of an interlocuter, this paper examines not only what Zhang says, but how he argues it. I claim that for Zhang, the practice of Buddhist logic aimed not at the establishment of formally valid truth claims but instead, towards the ethical self-fashioning of an anarchist subject. The question of the ethical, at the heart of philosophical problem of nature is resolved not through an account of the good but in the very practice of dialogically analyzing “nature.” Yogācāra then, functioned not a repository of philosophical concepts but as a soteriological logic intended towards the liberation of self and others.