The unlikely Buddhologist Mou Zongsan (1909--1995)

About this book

Mou Zongsan (1909-1995) is remembered as the leading light of Chinese philosophy in the last century, and he has influenced the study of philosophy and religion in greater China as deeply as Heidegger did in Europe. He is remembered above all for trying to revive the Confucian tradition using, seemingly incongruously, ideas that he mined from the largely-forgotten philosophy of Tiantai Buddhism. Well-known though he is for this, it has not been clear just why Mou, who was first and last a Confucian apologist, should have cared so much about Buddhist philosophy and put it at the center of his work and thought. To that end I have tried to reconstruct and explain Mou's mature opinions about the "what?" and the "so what?" of Buddhist philosophy and his reasons for prizing it as a boon to Confucian philosophers. My method has been to research Mou's nearly unstudied two-volume normative history of Buddhist philosophy, Buddhaness and Prajña ( Foxing yu borun ), in concert with his writings about metaphysics and Confucian philosophy and thereby to arrive at interpretive conclusions about his missing definitions and arguments with which to make fuller sense of his explicit statements. Simply put, Mou thought that Buddhists lead the way for Confucians, who can piggyback off one of their great breakthroughs. He abstracted from the Tiantai tradition of doxography or panjiao a scheme with which he analyzed philosophic systems in terms of what they have to say about the relationship between ultimate value and the universe of objects and prizes those systems most highly which claim that the ultimate value is "paradoxically identical" to the universe of objects in some fashion. Tutored in such a scheme, Mou thought, Confucians can solve one of their great intramural disputes and more clearly voice a truth which Mou took to be especially important for human flourishing, namely that in a very special sense, we and our world are all perfect just as we are and that if we take the necessary pains to attain full spiritual perfection, our efforts will be crowned with happiness.