This paper argues that during the Republican (1912-1949) and early Maoist (1949-1965) periods, a new institution, the Buddhist seminary (foxueyuan 佛學院 ), initiated a profound and still ongoing transformation of Chinese Buddhism centered on the education of monastics. The paper further shows that the development of seminary education in these periods reflected a complex mixture of Buddhist and secular (particularly state) goals. Institutionally, seminaries “modernized” Buddhism in the sense that they made education for monastics more similar to the education students received in the new, Western style secular schools. Doctrinally, seminaries were far more conservative. On the one hand, they taught a broader range of subjects, both within and beyond Buddhism, than had been taught in traditional monastic training institutions such as the lecture hall (jiangtang 講堂 ), vinaya hall (xuejietang 學戒堂 ), or meditation hall (chantang 禪堂 ). Yet on the other hand, and unlike emerging secular disciplines, seminaries were fundamentally committed to the sacred authority of scriptures. Thus unlike Confucianism, which as a scriptural system had largely collapsed by the end of the Qing, Chinese Buddhism remained intact as a scriptural system. Virtually all monastic seminary leaders defended the sacred authority of Buddhist scriptures, with progressive leaders simply arguing for a revised assessment of the relative ranking of various traditional scriptures and commentaries. Finally, this paper suggests that Japanese influence on the modernization of Chinese Buddhist seminary education may be even greater than is commonly recognized. It is already well known that Japanese policies and precedents influenced the first Chinese Buddhist schools. It is also widely recognized that the Chines e Buddhist Seminary (zhongguo foxueyuan 中國佛學院 ) in Beijing became the model for many of the seminaries established after 1979. This paper suggests that the Chinese Buddhist Seminary itself was partially modelled on an earlier Buddhist academy established in Japanese occupied Beijing and with a joint Chinese and Japanese board of directors.
