From “Seeds-Karma” to “Karmic Totality”: Buddhist Discourses on Nation Building in Late Qing China

The “karmic” worldview stands at once larger and smaller than a “Buddhist” or “religious” worldview. This study demonstrates how the idea of collective karma came to the fore in an array of Buddhist discourses on nation building in late Qing China. It features three case studies: (1) Yan Fu’s invention of the term, zhongye, literally “seeds-karma,” in Tianyan lun, the Chinese translation of British biologist Thomas Henry Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics and the single most influential book in initiating Chinese readers into social Darwinism; (2) Liang Qichao’s postulation of an undying “karmic totality” as the essence of the Chinese national “spirit”; (3) Zhang Taiyan’s critique of evolutionism based on Yogācāra teachings of karmic seeds. As these cases show, at a time when “karma” assumed the other name of “heredity,” discourses of collective karma played a critical role in the conceptualization of nationhood at the inception of the modern Chinese revolution.