In a period of national crisis early in the twentieth century, Chinese Buddhist institutions found themselves under attack from officials and intellectuals who wanted to confiscate their temples and properties for state-building projects. For the most part Buddhists were little able to resist. But a small number of "new monks," who had received modern education as part of the young Buddhist reform movement, began to realize that in an atmosphere of nationalism the protection of institutional Buddhism would require convincing society that they could be useful to the nation. The greatest opportunity to do this came with Japanese aggression against China in the 1930s, when many monks wrestled with how to reconcile their religious commitment to non-violence ( ahimsa ) with their duty as citizens to help protect the nation.
