John Makeham is Professor Emeritus at both La Trobe University and The Australian National University. He specializes in the intellectual history of Chinese philosophy, with particular interest in the role of Sinitic Buddhist thought as an intellectual resource in pre-modern and modern Confucian philosophy. His new book, The Awakening of Faith and New Confucian Philosophy, demonstrates how first and second-generation New Confucians adopted and repurposed conceptual models derived from the Buddhist text Treatise on Awakening Mahāyāna Faith and illustrates how critical challenges to the Treatise influenced their philosophical positions. His book also examines these philosophers’ awareness of their intellectual debt to the Treatise and their reconciliation of this awareness with their Confucian identity. In this Recently Published Book Spotlight, Makeham discusses his motivation for writing this book and the importance of recognizing Chinese philosophy’s influences.
What is your work about?
New Confucianism is a modern neo-conservative philosophical movement, with religious overtones, and the most successful form of philosophical appropriation, reinvention and creative transformation of “Confucianism” in China, Hong Kong and Taiwan since the 1970s. Representative first and second generation New Confucian thinkers—Xiong Shili 熊十力 (1885–1968), Ma Yifu 馬一浮 (1883-1967), Tang Junyi 唐君毅 (1909-1978), and Mou Zongsan 牟宗三 (1909-1995)—were clearly cognizant of their engagement with a broad range of Buddhist themes and constructs, which they integrated into conceptual hierarchies designed to privilege Confucian values. Working from the premise that key New Confucian philosophical ideas and constructs are the product of a sustained engagement with Buddhist thought, the broad aim of the research project that led to this work was to identify the role that one of the most important texts in East Asian Buddhism, the Dasheng qixin lun 大乘起信論 (Treatise on Awakening Mahāyāna Faith, hereafter referred to as Treatise), played in that engagement.
Addressing the problems of why it is so difficult to attain buddhahood and why so few are aware of their inherent buddha-nature, the Treatise states that it is aimed at novice Buddhists and was composed to explain the importance of faith in the Mahāyāna path and how to develop it. One reason for the popularity of the Treatise is its compelling vision of how to realize why we are deluded and then follow a path to actualize our inherent buddhahood. Specifically, it explores why it is that most beings are enmeshed in delusion, given that the mind is inherently awakened, or originally enlightened (benjue 本覺), in the sense of being self-illuminating, like a mirror. The text attempts to guide the novice towards its soteriological goal by means of a number of strategies. One key strategy is via a monism that is deployed to show the pernicious effects of, but also the illusory nature of, ignorance.
What topics do you discuss in the work, and why do you discuss them?
This volume is the outcome of a five-year collaborative research project involving a team of international researchers: John Jorgensen, Sang Yu 桑雨, myself, Liu Leheng 劉樂恆, Ady Van den Stock, Jason Clower, and Lin Chen-kuo 林鎮國. The findings of our research set out the arguments and evidence needed to explain how the Treatise features in the constitution of New Confucian philosophy, as evidenced in the writings of the above four New Confucian philosophers. It does this by pursuing three objectives: (1) demonstrating how and to what ends conceptual models derived from the Treatise were adopted and repurposed in those writings; (2) showing which of the philosophical positions defended by the New Confucians were developed and sustained through engagement with the critical challenges advanced by scholars who attacked the Treatise; and (3) examining the extent to which twentieth-century New Confucians were aware of their intellectual debt to the Treatise and explaining how they reconciled this awareness with their Confucian identity.
The four New Confucian philosophers at the center of this study did not just borrow concepts from the Treatise, but, as part of their system building, repurposed those concepts to develop the most creative ontologies in modern Chinese philosophy, while also deploying those concepts more generally to articulate their distinctive metaphysical systems. Overwhelmingly, the main conceptual model that New Confucian philosophers adapted from the Treatise and repurposed is the “one mind, two gateways” (yixin er men 一心二門) model. This model is explained in the Introduction to the volume.
In Xiong Shili’s Xin weishi lun 新唯識論 (New Treatise on the Uniqueness of Consciousness; 1932 edition) this is evident in the model’s isomorphism with Xiong’s distinction between reality (ti 體) as “the true mind” (zhenxin 真心) and its function (yong 用) as “false/deluded consciousness” (wangshi 妄識), and also in the One Mind’s being simultaneously quiescent and moving. Moreover, the final theoretical elaboration of Xiong’s “non-duality of reality and function” (ti yong bu er 體用不二) in the late 1950s and early 1960s is represented by his eventual rejection of Huayan Buddhist accounts of the relationship between pattern/principle(li 理) and phenomena (shi 實) and subsequent embrace of the Tiantai Buddhist accounts of that relationship. Both Huayan and Tiantai accounts of that relationship were philosophical responses to, and developments of, the Treatise’s account of the relationship between unconditioned dharmas (wuwei fa 無為法) and conditioned dharmas (youwei fa 有為法), as encapsulated in its “one mind, two gateways” model.
Ma Yifu’s Theory of the Six Arts (liu yi lun 六藝論) explicitly interconnects Zhang Zai’s 張載 (1020-1077) and Zhu Xi’s 朱熹 (1130-1200) thesis that “the mind combines/controls the nature and the emotions” (xin tong xing qing 心統性情) thesis and the Treatise’s “one mind, two gateways” model. In turn, Ma linked both to two other intertextual appropriations: (1) the Three Greats (san da 三大) of the Treatise: reality (ti 體), characteristics (xiang 相), and function (yong 用); and (2) the Three Changes (san yi 三易) of the Han dynasty work, Yiwei: Qian zuodu 易緯：乾鑿度 (Apocryphon to the Book of Change: Opening the Laws of the Hexagram Qian): non-change (buyi 不易), change (bianyi 變易) and simplicity (jianyi 簡易).
Tang Junyi’s account of the relationship between the two gateways as one of mutual concealment, mutual alternation, mutual habituation/perfuming became intimately connected to the main theme of his 1977 publication, Shengming cunzai yu xinling jingjie 生命存在與心靈境界 (Life-Existence, and the Horizons of the Mind): “authentic feeling’s connecting the mind and horizons” (xin jing gantong 心境感通). Tang also appropriated the Three Greats from the Treatise in his hierarchy of the “nine horizons” so as to group the horizons into three tripartite groupings, deploying them to articulate his key notion of “authentic feeling.”
Mou Zongsan’s appropriation of the “one mind, two gateways” model provided the inspiration for his own “two-tier ontology” (liangceng cunyoulun 兩層存有論): an “ontology with grasping” (zhi de cunyou lun 執的存有論) and an “ontology without grasping” (wuzhi de cunyoulun 無執的存有論), or more straightforwardly, an ontological account of (1) “appearances” or phenomena (xianxiang 現象) and (2) “things-in-themselves” (wu zishen 物自身). Moreover, for Mou, the One Mind not only provides the “transcendental basis” guaranteeing the necessity of buddhahood for all, it also provides the support for all dharmas, the a priori condition for their possibility. This was important for Mou because it seemed to guarantee thenecessary existence of distinct things.
How does this work fit in with your larger research project?
This volume—the second in Brill’s new East Asian Buddhist Philosophy series—builds upon the foundations established in three other international collaborative research projects I have led, and which resulted in the following publications: (1) Transforming Consciousness: Yogācāra Thought in Modern China (New York: OUP, 2014). That edited volume is concerned with the influence and significance of the main exemplar of Indian thought in modern China: Yogācāra Buddhist philosophy. The essays in that volume demonstrate that the revival of Yogācāra thought among leading Chinese intellectuals in the first three decades of the twentieth century played a decisive role in shaping how they engaged with major currents in modern Chinese thought: empirical science; “mind science,” or psychology; evolutionary theory; Hegelian and Kantian philosophy; logic; and Confucian thought in a modernizing China. (2) The Buddhist Roots of Zhu Xi’s Philosophical Thought (New York: OUP, 2018). That edited volume presents a range of “case studies” to show just how the Neo-Confucian philosopher Zhu Xi 朱熹 (1130-1200) both engaged with and also drew upon a diverse repertoire of Buddhist ideas and conceptual structures—including those in the Treatise—repurposing them for his philosophical project. (3) An annotated translation of the Treatise on Awakening Mahāyāna Faith (New York: OUP, 2019).
Why did you feel the need to write this work?
In China, and indeed throughout much of the world, Confucianism is typically presented as an expression of a native system of ideas and values, developed independent of external cultural influences over two thousand years. It is privileged as the true representation of Chinese cultural ideals and values, and an integral part of traditional Chinese social and cultural identity. Despite being vilified for much of the twentieth century, over the past three decades various aspects of Confucianism have been rehabilitated. Diverse interest groups both within and outside the mainland Chinese academy have favored Confucianism over other forms of traditional thought and philosophy, touting it as the principal exemplar of indigenous Chinese thought and values and so best suited to nation- and state-building. Buddhism is excluded on the grounds that it is a foreign import—despite having first been introduced into China two thousand years ago and subsequently having shaped the development of indigenous Chinese traditions of religion, philosophy, art and literature. This exclusive privileging of Confucianism feeds a reductionist assumption that Confucian philosophy is a hermetically sealed tradition that can be understood and adjudicated only by reference to its own “internal” norms and premises. But to regard Confucian philosophy this way is to ignore the vital contribution that Buddhist thought has made to the development of Confucian philosophy. One consequence of this is that the intellectual constitution of the main exemplar of modern Chinese philosophy, so-called New Confucianism, continues to be misrepresented, both in China and beyond.
How is your work relevant to the contemporary world?
Revealing the extent to which the complex and diverse intellectual make-up of modern Chinese philosophy has been ignored, distorted or misunderstood warrants a critical re-assessment of hand-me-down assumptions about just what it is that purportedly makes Chinese philosophy unique and “exceptional.” Our work shows the limitations of the epistemological nativism that seeks to restrict Chinese philosophy to what is putatively “indigenously Chinese” (which is to say, Confucian rather than Buddhist—even though Sinitic Buddhist thought has long been part of Chinese intellectual and religious culture). I believe it will become increasingly necessary to acknowledge and, indeed, to celebrate and to enhance the hybrid qualities of Chinese philosophy and its rich legacies if Chinese philosophy is to thrive in a rapidly globalizing world.
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The purpose of the Recently Published Book Spotlight is to disseminate information about new scholarship to the field, explore the motivations for authors’ projects, and discuss the potential implications of the books. Our goal is to cover research from a broad array of philosophical areas and perspectives, reflecting the variety of work being done by APA members. If you have a suggestion for the series, please contact us here.
John Makeham
John Makeham is Professor Emeritus at both La Trobe University and The Australian National University. His research specialization is in the intellectual history of Chinese philosophy. He has a particular interest in Confucian thought throughout Chinese history and in the role played by Sinitic Buddhist thought as an intellectual resource in pre-modern and modern Confucian philosophy. He is editor of the Brill book series, Modern Chinese Philosophy, and one of the editors of the new Brill book series, East Asian Buddhist Philosophy, and welcomes book proposals!
Maryellen Stohlman-Vanderveen is the APA Blog's Diversity and Inclusion Editor and Research Editor. She graduated from the London School of Economics with an MSc in Philosophy and Public Policy in 2023 and currently works in strategic communications. Her philosophical interests include conceptual engineering, normative ethics, philosophy of technology, and how to live a good life.
Thanks for this fascinating introduction