Thinking Dialectically with Zhang Taiyan

In October of 1903, the Buddhist poet and painter Su Manshu (1884 – 1914) published an article titled “Emma Goldman, the Heroine” in the Shanghai newspaper National People’s Daily. The essay, being the first Chinese-language publication to use the word “wuzhengfu zhuyi” (anarchism), introduces the anarchist vision and narrates the plight of the imprisoned Emma Goldman following the assassination of the United States president William McKinley by Leon F. Czolgosz, a Polish-American factory worker and anarchist. Czolgosz cited Goldman’s speeches as his inspiration, subsequently leading to her imprisonment by the American government. Alongside this essay on Emma Goldman, the National People’s Daily featured articles on the recent Subao Incident in Shanghai - the suppression of the Subao newspaper and the arrest of two anti-Manchu revolutionaries, Zou Rong (1885- 1905) and Zhang Taiyan (1869 - 1936). A mere few months before Su’s piece, the two dissidents were arrested in June for their publication of Revolutionary Army, a political manifesto that called for an uprising against the Qing empire. The parallels between Goldman’s imprisonment and Zou’s and Zhang’s would have been too close to ignore for anyone attuned to political events in Shanghai, linking the increasingly volatile political situation in China to a global struggle for freedom. Indeed, by 1907, both the young would-be father of modern Chinese literature, Lu Xun (1881 – 1936) and his newly freed teacher, Zhang Taiyan, will insist on anarchism as a global form, as anarchism confined to a single nation was considered to be dangerously useless in the pursuit of freedom and equality. A few decades later, the influential modern Chinese Buddhist reformer, Master Taixu (1890 – 1947) will reminisce upon the impact of this late Qing Buddhist-anarchist encounter in his own intellectual coming-of-age. He writes in his autobiography: “As I read Zhang Taiyan's ‘On Establishing Religion,’ ‘On the Five Nothings’ and ‘On Bi-Lateral Evolution,’ I came to see anarchism and Buddhism as close companions” (see Ritzinger 2017 for this connection).

As this historical anecdote demonstrates, late Qing anarchism was more than just the political movement called anarchism, as previous scholars have taken it (Dirlik 1991; Zarrow 1990). Rather, to paraphrase Su Manshu reading Emma Goldman, anarchism aimed at the liberation of the human mind and body for the creation of new forms of life. Anarchism, in other words, as soteriology. As such, this paper joins recent scholarship which has problematized the dominant secular characterization of central modern Chinese intellectuals, such as Lu Xun (Ying 2016) or Liang Qichao (Gildrow 2024). However, this paper also challenges the approach of the scholarship above for their focus upon the import of Buddhist philosophical concepts in other discourses. This model of Buddhism and X (such as politics or literature) misses how, for instance, it was not a question of Buddhism and anarchism, but how anarchism itself was Buddhist and Buddhism was anarchist.

Against this trend, this paper reads the liminal yet central figure to this history, Zhang Taiyan, on two fundamental questions to both anarchist social theory and Buddhist philosophy: “nature” (xing; svabhāva) and freedom. Beginning with a reading of his “Notes on Reading Buddhist Scriptures,” often taken as a sign of Zhang’s “conversion” to Buddhism (Murthy 2011), I ask what is Buddhist about a text that has no actual references to Buddhist Scriptures or ideas. In other words, how does this text challenge where we look, when we look for the history of Buddhist thought? I argue that Zhang reconstructs Buddhism as a method of dialogical and dialectical thinking through which, in that essay, he explores how the question of suffering and pleasure leads to the contradiction between the individual and the social – the anarchist problematic par excellence. It then offers a close reading of Zhang’s 1910 essay “Debating Nature” (Bian xing), in which Zhang stages the dialectical analysis of the concept of “nature” through dialogue with the voice of an interlocuter. This paper seeks to understand not only what Zhang says, but how he argues it. By tracing the movement of the text – in other words, its form and how it works - 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 ontological or metaphysical account of either the good or of human nature as such, but in the very practice of dialogically analyzing the very idea of “nature.” Yogācāra then, functioned not a repository of philosophical concepts but as a soteriological logic intended towards the liberation of self and others. The anarchist ideal of freedom becomes enacted in the very form and style of writing. 

Works Cited:

Dirlik, Arif. Anarchism in the Chinese Revolution. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. 

Gildow, David. “The First Conception of Modernist Chinese Buddhism.” T’oung Pao 110 (2024): 185-236.

Murthy, Viren. The Political Philosophy of Zhang Taiyan: The Resistance of Consciousness. Leiden: Brill, 2011.

Ritzinger, Justin. Anarchy in the Pure Land: Reinventing the Cult of Maitreya in Modern Chinese Buddhism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Ying, Lei. “Lu Xun, the Critical Buddhist: A Monstrous Ekayāna.” Journal of Chinese Literature and Culture, 3:2 (2016): 400–428

Zarrow, Peter. Anarchism and Chinese Political Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990.