From Disciples to Student-Monks: Educational Modernization and Identity in Chinese Buddhism

Event date:14:00–15:30 (UK) / 21:00–22:30 (Taiwan) Tuesday, 14 May, 2024 

Organizer: University of Cambridge

Monastic education was one of the most important and consequential dimensions of the modernization of Chinese Buddhism. The 1920s and 1930s witnessed a period of intense growth in the establishment of new Buddhist academies, known as foxueyuan, which fundamentally transformed the institutional landscape of Chinese Buddhism. This lecture examines the convergence of identity and institution in this pivotal historical moment, focusing on the emergence of modern Buddhist academies and the student-monks they produced. Three paradigm shifts are identified as central to this transformation: a reconception of the vertical teacher-student relationship in which ideological inspiration displaced absolute authority; the emergence of a horizontal, collective student-monk identity that operated across regional and lineage boundaries; and a reformulation of Buddhist orthodoxy that cast educational modernization as renewal rather than departure from tradition. Together, these shifts gave rise to a new way of imagining what it meant to be Buddhist in modern China, one in which formal education replaced lineage transmission as the defining marker of monastic identity.

 Lecture Report: “From Disciples to Student-Monks: Educational Modernization and Identity Production in Chinese Buddhism”

Yin-Cheng Distinguished Lecture Series 
University of Cambridge, May 14, 2024, at 14:00–15:30 UK
Lecture by Professor Rongdao Lai (McGill University)
Response by Professor Stefania Travagnin (SOAS, University of London)

Report by Tzu Chi Charity Foundation

Supported by the Buddhist Tzu Chi Charity Foundation, this lecture was hosted by the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Cambridge as part of the Yin-Cheng Distinguished Lecture Series on Buddhism. Professor Rongdao Lai of McGill University delivered the keynote lecture, entitled “From Disciples to Student-Monks: Educational Modernization and Identity Production in Chinese Buddhism,” drawing on her forthcoming monograph Citizen Bodhisattva: Education, Student-Monks, and Identity Production in Modern Chinese Buddhism (1911–1949). The discussant was Professor Stefania Travagnin of SOAS, University of London. The event was chaired and introduced by Professor Noga Ganany, who welcomed the speaker and situated the lecture within current scholarship on institutional religion and identity formation in modern China. Opening remarks on behalf of the Tzu Chi Foundation were offered by Dr. Rey-Sheng Her.

Prof. Rongdao Lai is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and East Asian Studies at McGill University. She holds a PhD from Harvard University and specialises in the institutional and intellectual history of Chinese Buddhism in the modern period, with particular attention to monastic education, identity politics, and the intersection of Buddhist reform movements with broader social and political currents in Republican China. Her forthcoming book, Citizen Bodhisattva, is the first comprehensive study in English of the foxueyuan phenomenon and the student-monks it produced.

Prof. Stefania Travagnin is Reader in Chinese Buddhism at SOAS, University of London. She has conducted extensive fieldwork in mainland China, Taiwan, and Southeast Asia, with research interests ranging from Republican-era Buddhist reform and gender in Chinese Buddhism to contemporary monastic education and Sino-Tibetan Buddhist exchange. She has recently completed a research trip focused on sangha education in Sichuan, covering both the Republican era and the post-Mao period.

An Opening Anecdote: The Uncertain World of the Student-Monk

Professor Lai opened her lecture with a vivid and revealing anecdote drawn from the memoir of Zhenhua (1922–2012), a young monk from Henan who in the autumn of 1945 had just completed his full ordination at the prestigious Baohua Mountain Longchang Monastery outside Nanjing. Near the end of the fifty-three-day ordination session, word circulated among the new ordinands that Taixu, the most celebrated reformist monk of the era, was to set up a Buddhist Studies academy at the Pilu Monastery in Nanjing, with classes beginning immediately after the Lunar New Year. Zhenhua and eight fellow monks, electrified by the possibility of a modern Buddhist education, made their way together to the monastery and were warmly received.

What followed was a sequence of disappointments that captures, with unusual clarity, the disorder and volatility that characterised many of the new Buddhist institutions of this period. Two months passed without any sign of the academy opening. The majority of the group fell into performing paid ritual services for the monastery, tempted by easy income. Zhenhua alone refused, and fell ill without money for a doctor. When a fellow monk eventually told him that the promised academy had almost certainly been a ruse to attract newly ordained monks into the ritual labour schedule of the monastery, he left. A year later, through the recommendation of a prominent lay Buddhist, he secured a place at the Tianning Buddhist Academy in Changzhou. Here too he was quickly disillusioned: the teachers were unqualified, the food was poor, the monastery treated the academy as an afterthought, and tension between students and administrators regularly erupted into conflict. He left again.

Zhenhua was conscripted during the civil war and taken to Taiwan in 1949. After re-ordaining in 1952, he studied under several eminent teachers, including the scholar-monk Yinshun, and went on to become principal of several Buddhist academies, most notably the Fuyan Buddhist Institute. His story distils the central themes of Professor Lai’s lecture: the infectious enthusiasm for the new educational institutions, the gap between ideal and reality, the tensions between student-monks and the monastic establishment, and the ultimately transformative power of the student-monk identity, even when the institutions themselves fell short.

Taixu and the Foxueyuan: Ambition, Marginality, and Reform

Against this personal history, Professor Lai turned to the figure who dominates the landscape of modern Chinese Buddhist education: Taixu (1890–1947). Any account of Taixu, she noted, immediately runs into a paradox. On the one hand, he seems ubiquitous in the Buddhist life of twentieth-century China: he published widely, his activities were regularly reported in Buddhist periodicals and newspapers, and his call for systematic reform attracted passionate responses from monastic and lay followers across the country. On the other hand, his lifelong effort to introduce structural changes to Chinese Buddhism was marked, by his own acknowledgement, by constant failure. Within the traditional Buddhist establishment, with its networks of prestigious monasteries and influential abbots, Taixu was a consistently marginalised figure. He was never part of the influential core. He always found it difficult to secure a major monastery as the base for his reform movement, and he depended almost entirely on the goodwill and financial support of urban lay Buddhist networks, which were themselves a relatively new and unpredictable force in Buddhist life.

Professor Lai argued that it was precisely this marginality that gave Taixu his particular historical significance. Unable to work through the existing institutional channels, he was free to move between his reform-minded following and the traditional Buddhist circles, negotiating a different way of imagining modern Buddhist identity. His appeal lay not in the institutions he managed to build, most of which were short-lived, but in his capacity to articulate a new vision for what Chinese Buddhism could become. That vision centred on education as the primary vehicle of reform, and it was in education that Taixu made his most lasting impact.

The Founding of the Wuchang Buddhist Academy

In 1918, Taixu established the Jueshe (Bodhi Society) in Shanghai, together with a network of lay Buddhist reformers that included Chen Yuanbai, Jiang Zuobin, and Huang Baocang. The society’s most important activity was publishing, producing the periodical Haichaoyin (Voice of the Ocean Tide), which would become one of the longest-running Buddhist publications in modern China and a primary vehicle for the circulation of reformist ideas. In the spring of 1922, Taixu travelled to Wuhan to lecture on the Sūtra of Perfect Enlightenment, and the enthusiasm of the local lay Buddhist community led directly to the founding of the Wuchang Buddhist Studies Academy, which opened its doors in September of that year to approximately seventy lay and monastic students.

The academy’s founding charter is remarkable in its comprehensiveness. Divided into fifteen chapters, it covered founding principles, admission requirements, a detailed curriculum, daily schedules, evaluation procedures, graduation requirements, job descriptions for each administrative post, rules for communal living, merit and disciplinary procedures, and provisions for expansion. The curriculum was deliberately eclectic, covering the doctrinal traditions of all eight schools of Chinese Buddhism and incorporating secular subjects including Western ethics, psychology, biology, philosophy, and sociology. Language instruction in English, Japanese, Sanskrit, and Tibetan was to rotate across semesters. The strict regulations for communal life were modelled on those of the traditional public monastery.

Taixu was frank about what he was attempting. In an address to the academy’s second incoming class in 1924, he distinguished his school from the Buddhist institutions he considered inadequate: those that had borrowed secular school structures merely to protect monastic property from government confiscation, and those that trained students only in the doctrine of a single school or lineage. The Wuchang Academy aimed to combine the best of both the modern pedagogical system and the traditional public monastery, while shedding the shortcomings of each. Yet even as he spoke, Taixu was becoming aware of the difficulty of sustaining what he had built. Two years after the founding, citing health reasons, he submitted his resignation to the lay patrons and departed, having lost their support amidst competing pressures: a shortage of qualified teachers, institutional competition from other Buddhist groups, and the growing intellectual independence of his own student-monks, who had absorbed the critical spirit of the May Fourth movement and were not always amenable to direction.

Between 1925 and 1949, the academy operated intermittently, forced to close during the Northern Expedition in 1926 and again during the Second Sino-Japanese War. After 1928 it was reorganised as a division of Taixu’s World Buddhist Institution. Despite its turbulent history, or perhaps because of it, the Wuchang Academy assumed a mythological significance in the collective imagination of modern Chinese Buddhism. In 1935, the monk Weifang called it “the Buddhist Whampoa,” comparing it to the famous military academy that had produced the officers of the Nationalist revolution.

Three Paradigm Shifts

Professor Lai argued that the significance of the Wuchang Academy, and of the foxueyuan movement more broadly, lay not in the stability of its institutions but in the three paradigm shifts it generated.

The first was a transformation of the teacher-student relationship. In traditional Chinese Buddhism, the master-disciple bond was the foundational unit of institutional life: it was vertical, personal, and lifelong, governing tonsure lineage, dharma transmission, and the entire trajectory of a monk’s career. The Wuchang Academy did not abolish this relationship. But it changed its character in a significant way. At a modern foxueyuan, students were taught by multiple teachers in a classroom setting, engaging with textbooks, blackboards, and structured evaluations rather than with a single revered master whose word was absolute. Taixu himself had disciples and followers in the traditional sense, but the relationship between him and the wider community of student-monks who identified with his vision was often mediated not through personal contact but through print: periodicals, textbooks, essays, and open letters. This means that students sometimes identified with Taixu and his ideas without ever meeting him. The teacher’s role at the modern foxueyuan, Professor Lai argued, was to provide the ideological basis for the students’ undertaking rather than the absolute spiritual authority of the traditional master. A multiplicity of voices and authoritative sources replaced the singular dharma relationship of the past.

The second and most consequential shift was the emergence of a collective, horizontal student-monk identity. The 1920s saw the rise of a new generation of young monastics who understood themselves as members of a unique community distinct from the rest of the Chinese sangha. In a socio-political environment saturated with the language of democracy, freedom, equality, and national renewal, these young monks were determined to demonstrate that they too could become “new monks” for a new era. Student-monks were not merely the passive products of their institutions; they were active and often critical agents who published essays, debated the future of Buddhism in print, and organised themselves in response to external threats such as government proposals to confiscate temple property. The monk Fachuang, for example, proposed lobbying the government so that a Buddhist revolution introducing universal sangha education could be carried out.

Professor Lai stressed that this collective identity operated along two parallel axes simultaneously: the physical network of Buddhist academies and the abstract network constituted by the hundreds of Buddhist periodicals published during this period. It was in the continuous competition, tension, and negotiation between these student-monks, both in their academies and in the pages of their journals, that a shared vision of collective belonging took shape. The identities they generated, variously named the xueseng (student-monk), the xinseng (new monk), and the seng qingnian (young monk), were fluid and contested rather than fixed, but they were real and consequential. They added a new layer of horizontal affiliation to the pre-existing networks of dharma kinship and regional belonging that had always characterised Chinese Buddhist social organisation, without displacing those older networks.

The third shift was a reformulation of orthodoxy. Modern Buddhist educators justified their institutions not as departures from the traditional public monastery system but as renewals of it, claiming that the foxueyuan preserved the best of the conglin tradition while equipping it with the tools needed for the present moment. Taixu was explicit that the newness he advocated was grounded in Chinese Buddhist history and enriched by the strengths of Japanese, Tibetan, and other traditions, rather than imposed from outside. His followers extended this claim in ambitious directions: the monk Zhifeng predicted that, if properly reformed, a renewed Chinese Buddhism would benefit not merely China but all humanity, and saw a globally-oriented Buddhist educational system as the prerequisite for world peace. This reformulation of orthodoxy gave student-monks the authority to represent Buddhism in public, to demand lay support for their institutions, and to position themselves as the vanguard of an authentic tradition. Their prolific writing in periodicals was not merely a supplement to their formal learning; it was itself the primary medium through which the student-monk identity was articulated, circulated, and contested.

The Wuchang Legacy

Professor Lai closed by observing that the influence of the Wuchang model extended far beyond its physical history. Graduates of the Wuchang Academy and its affiliated institutions went on to found or teach at at least fifty Buddhist academies across China between the 1920s and 1940s. The “Wuchang ideal” became a reference point against which other institutions defined themselves, whether by claiming allegiance to it or by articulating a different path. In a wider sense, the pedagogy of the modern foxueyuan changed what it means to be a Chinese Buddhist monastic. Today, when Chinese monastics are introduced in formal or informal contexts, their biographical information routinely includes the Buddhist academies they attended, alongside the traditional markers of native place, tonsure temple, ordination monastery, and dharma lineage. This shift, Professor Lai suggested, amounts to the emergence of a new form of lineage, one grounded not in the transmission of dharma from master to disciple but in the shared experience of modern institutional education.

Response by Professor Stefania Travagnin

Professor Travagnin offered a rich and contextualising response that both affirmed the significance of the lecture’s contribution and extended it in several directions.

She began by situating the lecture within the broader field of Taixu studies, noting that Western scholarship had already produced important monographs on Taixu, including Justin Ritzinger’s recent work, while mainland Chinese scholarship had increasingly enshrined him since the late 1980s as the “founding father” of modern and contemporary Chinese Buddhism. She observed that this enshrinement is itself an act worth examining critically: Taixu was, as Professor Lai had shown, frequently marginalised and often unsuccessful in his own lifetime. It was the subsequent construction of his significance, not just his actual achievements, that needs to be understood. She praised Professor Lai’s work for adding nuance to this picture by focusing not on Taixu himself but on the student-monks he inspired, whose own agency in shaping the trajectory of modern Chinese Buddhism had been insufficiently appreciated by previous scholarship.

Professor Travagnin raised four questions designed to set the Wuchang model within a broader educational and social context.

First, she asked how the student-monk community compared with the communities of students generated by the new secular universities of the same period, such as the new Peking University founded a generation earlier. The collective identity of the student-monk, with its emphasis on citizenship, national responsibility, and the reform of inherited institutions, bears striking parallels to the self-understanding of secular student movements in Republican China. Understanding how these two domains connected and conversed, she suggested, would sharpen the analysis of what was distinctively Buddhist about the student-monk phenomenon and what was a refraction of a broader social transformation.

Second, she turned to student-nuns, a dimension of the story that the lecture had not addressed. Wuhan hosted the women’s division of the Wuchang Buddhist Academy from 1924 onward, and in 1931 the Wuchang Bodhi Vihara was founded, which in 1936 began publishing the Fojiao nüzhong zhuankan, the first magazine on Buddhist women in Chinese history. These communities of female student-monastics developed in parallel to, and sometimes independently of, the male institutions, and they deserve their own analysis. Professor Travagnin’s fieldwork had uncovered extensive evidence of nuns who practised canxue and xingjiao, travelling to lecture and propagate the dharma, and whose stories appeared in Republican Buddhist periodicals. The question of whether female monastics developed the same form of collective self-awareness as their male counterparts, and whether gender shaped the student-nun identity in distinctive ways, is one that the existing scholarship has not yet adequately addressed.

Third, she broadened the institutional picture by pointing to the shuyuan, the traditional Chinese academy, as an alternative educational model that was being revived in the Republican period alongside the new foxueyuan. Wang Enyang’s Guishan Academy in Sichuan was one of many institutions of this kind that combined the learning of Confucian and Buddhist values, claiming to renew the spirit of the Song and Ming shuyuan tradition. Like the foxueyuan, these institutions presented themselves as models for the salvation of humanity. But they moved in a rather different direction from Taixu’s vision, representing a different, sometimes more conservative, response to the challenge of Western intellectual dominance in the wake of the May Fourth movement.

Fourth and finally, Professor Travagnin drew attention to what she called the alternative models: institutions and pedagogical approaches that emerged from within or alongside the Wuchang network but that were not straightforward replications of the Wuchang model. Many of these were founded by former students or close collaborators of Taixu, who shared his general orientation toward reform while charting their own paths. These alternatives, she argued, offer essential context for understanding the full spectrum of effects of Taixu’s call for Buddhist renewal, and for positioning Wuchang not as the single origin of all subsequent developments but as one powerful pole in a complex field of competing visions. It was ultimately the renewal of emphasis on education as a vehicle of human development and institutional transformation, rather than the Wuchang model in particular, that constituted Taixu’s most enduring legacy.

Discussion

The discussion that followed ranged widely.

A question about how student-monks navigated the tension between their modern educational identities and the traditional demands of monastic life prompted Professor Lai to draw on her memoir sources, which reveal a persistent ambivalence. Student-monks were critical of the established monastery system, yet they remained dependent on it for ordination, for the ritual economies that generated institutional income, and for the social legitimacy that traditional monastic affiliation conferred. This dependence was felt as a constraint, and the resentment it generated was one of the primary motors of the student-monk identity’s critical and reformist edge.

A question about the relationship between the student-monk periodical culture and the broader May Fourth print culture led to a discussion of how Buddhist publications shared form, vocabulary, and sometimes writers with the wider Republican cultural press, and how the category of the “new youth” was adapted within Buddhist discourse to produce the figure of the “Buddhist new youth” or the “young monk,” who was simultaneously a nationalist subject, a modern intellectual, and a religious practitioner.

A question about the reception of the foxueyuan model in Taiwan after 1949, following the migration of many mainland Chinese monastics, provided an opening for a reflection on the longer arc of the story: the institutions Professor Lai had studied did not simply end with the Communist victory. They were transplanted, adapted, and extended in Taiwan, where figures like Yinshun and Zhenhua himself continued the project of monastic education in new conditions. This transnational afterlife of the Republican-era foxueyuan is, Professor Lai noted, a subject that her book addresses in its concluding chapters and that warrants sustained future investigation.

Bibliography