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 nineteenth-century to early twentieth-century China. It features three case studies: (1) Yan Fu’s 嚴復 (1854–1921) invention of the term, zhongye 種業, 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 梁啟超 (1873–1929) postulation of an undying “karmic totality” (jiemo zongti 羯磨總體)—which encompasses all individual members, bygone and present—as the essence of the Chinese national “spirit”; (3) Zhang Taiyan’s 章太炎 (1869–1936) 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.

The notion of karma and the notion of “seeds”—which, in Chinese, also means species, race, and offspring—struck unusual chemistry at a juncture when the Yogācāra revival and the Darwinian tenor of Tianyan lun encapsulated in the idea of “self-strengthening and preserving our seeds” became simultaneous events in late Qing China. Yan Fu, an ingenious translator who would eventually be credited for opening Chinese eyes to evolutionary theory, should also be seen as an earnest and important participant in the late Qing Yogācāra revival. Tianyan lun, which was first published in 1897, opens up a rewarding site for investigating how evolutionary thinking entered China through Buddhist global exchange and translingual practice. A Buddhist explanation of “karma” caught the attention of Huxley as well as his Chinese interpreter and readers. In Evolution and Ethics, Huxley draws a tacit parallel between the operation of karma and the transmission of heredity, an idea popular in the Victorian discovery of Buddhism. Yan Fu endorsed this view and coined the term zhongye, literally “seeds-karma,” a term that is not found in the Chinese Buddhist canon. Yan Fu likely conflated two Yogācāra terms—gotra (family, lineage) and bīja (seed), both of which are rendered in Chinese as zhong 種—and merged them with the social Darwinian notion of racial and national heredity. The term zhongye, therefore, came to stand for racial and national karma, a clear departure from the understanding which concentrated only on individual karma as Huxley and his contemporaries thought.

A Yogācāra-inflected alternative for karma, “seeds-karma” reflects a karmic worldview that was broadly shared among Chinese progressive intellectuals who were inspired by the late Qing Buddhist revival. Yan Fu’s karmic musings were clearly grasped by his contemporaries, including Liang Qichao, Zhang Taiyan, and, following in the footsteps of these erudite revolutionaries, Lu Xun 魯迅 (1881–1936) and Zhou Zuoren 周作人 (1885–1967). In the aftermath of the crackdown of the Hundred Days’ Reform in 1898, Liang Qichao spent years in exile in Japan. Liang was critically indebted to the intellectual milieu of Japan in grappling with the significances and boundaries of the newly formed epistemic category of “religion,” particularly in the immediate context of China’s national survival. The year 1902 witnessed two milestones in Liang’s intellectual trajectory: his open divergence with his mentor and leader of the reform movement, Kang Youwei 康有為 (1858–1927), and withdrawal from Kang’s mission to establish Confucianism as China’s state religion; and his ardent embrace of Buddhism as an ideal faith to serve China’s nation building. Two years later, in a further development of Yan Fu’s view, Liang postulated an undying “karmic totality”—which encompasses all individual members, bygone and present—as the defining essence of the Chinese national “spirit.” This belief stayed with Liang for the rest of his life. In 1922, in a public lecture, Liang defined “culture” as the “shared karma” (gongye 共業) that arose and accumulated from the “energy of the human mind.”

The Yogācāra turn of the intellectual giant and anti-Manchu flagbearer Zhang Taiyan is well-known among scholars of modern Chinese Buddhism. This study looks into Zhang’s engagement with the collective dimension of karma and its implications for China’s modern rejuvenation. Zhang, who rejected Herbert Spencer’s notion of “the Unknowable” and espoused a thoroughly materialistic view of evolution in 1898, rediscovered the power of faith for the revolutionary cause at the turn of the twentieth century. During his imprisonment from 1903 to 1906, Zhang devoted his intellectual energy to reading Yogācāra texts and came to penetrate the “deep purport” of the Mahāyāna. A staunch critic of colonialism and the Christian mission, Zhang eventually hailed Yogācāra Buddhism as the ideal faith—or “philosophy”, a stance Zhang consolidated post 1911—which eschews otherworldly divinities and places the matter of salvation in one’s own hands, or, rather, in one’s own mind. In 1906, Zhang Taiyan contested the preeminence of evolutionism, arguing that both types of karmic seeds, the good and the evil, are passed down from the forefathers and evolve alongside each other. Zhang’s discussions of heredity, evolution, and collective karma not only echoed the views of Yan Fu and Liang Qichao; moreover, they revealed an acute awareness of the dark side of evolution and the naïveté of a developmentalist optimism in “progress.” This line of thought would be picked up by Lu Xun and Zhou Zuoren and eventually culminate in the Zhou brothers’ critique of China’s spectral past and the “terror of heredity.”