Taixu
Who was Taixu?
Qing Dynasty buddhist (1890-1947)
Biographical data adapted from Wikipedia’s article on Taixu (CC BY-SA 4.0).
Biography
Taixu (January 8, 1890 – March 17, 1947), born in Haining, Zhejiang Province, China, during the late Qing Dynasty, was a highly influential Buddhist monk, reformer, and thinker of the twentieth century. Before becoming a monk, his name was Lu Peitong, and he is also known as Shi Taixu. Ordained as a monk at a young age, he dedicated his life to reforming and revitalizing Chinese Buddhism during a period when traditional religious institutions were under significant pressure from modernization, secularization, and political upheaval.
Before Fame
Taixu was born in 1890 in Haining, a coastal town in Zhejiang Province, during the last years of the Qing Dynasty, a time of decline, foreign interference, and increasing demands for social and institutional reform. He became a monk in his early teens, receiving ordination and taking the dharma name Taixu. His early training exposed him to traditional Chinese Buddhist scholarship, and he also encountered the reformist ideas spreading through China in the early 20th century, influenced by thinkers like Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, and later the iconoclastic spirit of the May Fourth Movement.
Key Achievements
- Formulated the concept of Humanistic Buddhism, providing a theoretical framework that influenced Buddhist thought and practice across East Asia throughout the twentieth century.
- Founded the Wuchang Buddhist Institute in 1922, establishing a model for modern Buddhist monastic education in China.
- Conducted international lecture tours in Europe and North America, raising the profile of Chinese Buddhism on the global stage.
- Edited and contributed to numerous Buddhist journals and publications that disseminated reformist ideas to monks, laypeople, and intellectuals across China.
- Trained a generation of prominent Buddhist scholars and monastics who carried his vision forward into post-1949 Chinese Buddhist communities in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Southeast Asia.
Did You Know?
- 01.Taixu coined the term 'Renjian Fojiao' (Humanistic Buddhism), a concept that would later be adopted and further developed by monastic leaders in Taiwan such as Master Xingyun and Master Cheng Yen.
- 02.He founded the Wuchang Buddhist Institute in 1922, one of the first modern Buddhist seminaries in China to incorporate secular academic subjects alongside traditional Buddhist studies.
- 03.Taixu traveled to France, Germany, England, and the United States in the late 1920s, making him one of the first senior Chinese Buddhist monks to undertake an extended international lecture tour in the West.
- 04.Despite his reformist reputation, Taixu engaged seriously with the Yogacara (Mind-Only) school of Buddhist philosophy and wrote extensively on the Consciousness-Only doctrine, demonstrating deep classical learning alongside his modernist agenda.
- 05.At the time of his death in 1947 in Shanghai, Taixu had produced millions of words of written work, including treatises, lectures, poetry, and correspondence, which were later compiled into the multi-volume 'Taixu Dashi Quanshu' (Complete Works of Master Taixu).