The concept of Buddhist culture in late Qing dynasty was not merely a “cultural exchange”. Instead, it was more suitable to be regarded as “cultural circumfluence”, because that the religion had been spread to Japan, but it was re-accepted by Chinese scholars after it returned from Japan with knowledge absorbed from the Western Works. At the same time, the book Evolution and Ethics, translated by the Yen, Fu, had introduced the Western’s theory of evolution to China. It also has inspired the intellectuals in Chinese Buddhism circle. As the result, this Western concept syncretized with the concept of time described in Buddhism Classic, causing an interactive development to concepts of Chinese Buddhism in Modern period. Though the idea of evolutionary had explained the transformation from a Buddhism scholar’s perspective, it fails to display the complete picture of the historical development of Buddhism in China. Therefore, Buddhism scholar Dawu’s “Circular Historical View”, and Rosen Furugawa’s “Circular History of Evolution” both give further expansion to the idea of development, that had been purely based on the theory of evolution. With the process of interacting and substituting with each other, the histories of traditional Buddhism and modern period add in diversity to the transformation of Buddhism history in modern China. In this thesis, discussion will be performed based on issues related to written work and conception of Modern Chinese Buddhist History, using Foxue Congbao (《佛學叢 報》), a Buddhist publication which was first published in 1912 by Di Baoxian, as an example.
