To view the diacritics on this page, you must install the
Indic Times font on your machine and have a browser capable of
displaying the Unicode (utf-8) character set.
ISSN 1076-9005
Volume 15, 2008
Review of Buddhism, War, and Nationalism:
Chinese Monks in the Struggle against
Japanese Aggressions
Buddhism, War, and Nationalism: Chinese Monks in the Struggle against Japanese Aggressions, 1931-1945. By Xue Yu. New York: Routledge, 2005, xiii + 278 pages, ISBN 0415975115, US $85.00 (cloth).
The late Holmes Welch would be pleased to see that Chinese Buddhism in the Republican Era (1912-1949) is finally beginning to receive due attention among scholars in the West, even if it is a full four decades after he painstakingly laid the groundwork for this field of study with his pioneering works, The Buddhist Revival in China (1968) and The Practice of Chinese Buddhism, 1900-1950 (1967). Indeed, while he questioned the existence of a true Buddhist “revival” and criticized the direction in which modernizing reforms were leading Buddhism, Welch’s work pointed to the significance and fertility of this field for both Chinese Buddhist studies and Republican Chinese history. In mainland China and Taiwan, under the influence of religious revival starting in the 1980s, Chinese scholarship has made major contributions to the study of Buddhism in the Republican era both in terms of research and the collection and publication of valuable primary sources. However, it is only now that we are finally beginning to witness an extensive exploration of this field in English-language scholarship, through recent publications by scholars such as Francesca Tarocco, Raoul Birnbaum, Don Pittman, Gray Tuttle and Jan Kiely, as well as at least half a dozen doctoral dissertations currently in preparation at major research institutions across the United States.
