Buddhist Futures: Reform, Rectification, Utopia

This paper will consider how utopian ideology may have developed within medieval Chinese Buddhism. By comparing Collins' analysis of the early Buddhist (Pāli) monastic traditions, which suggests that utopianism was not a significant element of this tradition, with the work of other scholars such as Forte, who argue that utopianism was a prominent element within the medieval Chinese Buddhist milieux, this paper considers why and how this shift may have taken place and whether it can be regarded as one of the characteristic changes that occurred in tandem with the transmission of Buddhism to China, i.e. "sinification," or may have come from some other source. In other words, the paper aims to consider what may have catalyzed the development of utopian thinking within Chinese Buddhism, assuming such characteristics were absent from earlier forms of Buddhism, as Collins suggests

Buddhism is often framed through renunciation, severing ties with “the world” as the premise of religious life. This paper challenges that presumption by reframing colonial Korean Buddhism’s modernization project (1910—1945) as a utopian enterprise. Rather than a reactive accommodation to colonial rule, modernization operated as a utopian social imaginary: an effort to conceptualize and engineer Buddhism as a public religion producing recognizable public good within a state-centered order and redefining its place in society.

Focusing on two axes, educational reorganization and institutional incorporation, I show how Buddhist leaders pursued “socially viable Buddhism” as both a normative and institutional project. Legitimacy hinged on public usefulness, bureaucratically legible organizational forms, and personnel able to translate Buddhist ethical claims into civic morality and social responsibility. Here, “utopia” names a this-worldly mode of Buddhist world-making: repositioning Buddhism from mountain seclusion into urban public space as a defensible, socially consequential civic actor under colonial constraint.

This study examines the historicization of Buddhism within the Chinese Marxist framework by analyzing the writings of leftist historians from the 1940s to the mid-1960s, a period before and after the CCP’s rise to power. It investigates early encounters between Buddhism and Marxist ideology prior to the Cultural Revolution, considering how these encounters reshaped definitions, perceptions, and attitudes toward Buddhism, and how historiography was mobilized to align Buddhism with the Communist Party’s ideological and political vision. Focusing on Guo Moruo (1892–1978), Fan Wenlan (1893–1969), and Ren Jiyu (1916–2009), the study examines Marxist approaches to Buddhism’s transmission, periodization, Sinicization, and its socio-political and cultural significance in Chinese history. By situating these Marxist historical narratives within broader scholarly and Buddhist debates, the study illuminates the complexity of modern Chinese Buddhist scholarship and demonstrates the formative role these narratives played in shaping the CCP’s emerging official discourse on Buddhism

This paper situates the 7th Changkya Khutuktu’s post-1949 activities in Taiwan within the early Cold War as a project of postcolonial rectification that sought to purge the island of its Japanese Buddhist colonial legacy while reimagining Taiwanese Buddhism as part of a mainland Chinese pedigree. After relocating to Taiwan with Chiang Kai-shek and assuming the presidency of the Buddhist Association of the ROC, the Inner Asian tulku undertook initiatives to “return” temples formerly administered by Japanese sects to Chinese Buddhist lineages, toured the island to promote what was framed as “proper” Chinese Buddhism, and advocated for the transfer of Xuanzang’s relic to Taiwan rather than to the PRC. I argue that, although articulated as anti-Japanese imperial redress and cultural restoration, these efforts participated in a new (arguably imperial) Buddhist worldmaking shaped by Cold War pressures and the ideological climate of the White Terror martial law era. Ultimately, they consolidated centralized Buddhist authority among waishengren mainlanders while marginalizing localized religious networks that had integrated multiple layers of colonial history.