“Seeds-Karma”: When Social Darwinism Encountered Yogācāra Buddhism in Late Qing China

This interdisciplinary study reopens Tianyan lun—the Chinese translation of Thomas Henry Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics and the single most influential book in initiating late Qing intellectuals into social Darwinism—as a site for Buddhist global exchange and translingual practice, when the notion of “karma” offered Huxley and his Chinese translator and readers at once a ground of convergence and a point of departure. The term this study places in the spotlight is zhongye, literally “seeds-karma,” the heading of a chapter in Tianyan lun. Notably, “seeds-karma” is not a canonical configuration, but the term has left an indelible impression on some progressive-minded intellectuals, including Lu Xun and his brother Zhou Zuoren. The notion of karma and the notion of “seeds”—which, in Chinese, also means species, race, and offspring—struck unusual chemistry when the Yogācāra revival and the pressing task of national salvation became two simultaneous events in fin-de-siècle China.