Decline and Revitalization

The General who Awakens the World had, by the 1960s, left the military and resumed his monastic life as Shengyan. Like Yinshun, he would become one of the most significant Chinese Buddhists of the twentieth century. Shengyan’s scholarship on religious history aimed to show how belief systems fit into a scheme of religious evolution, according to which Buddhism— using academic evidence—was judged as more “advanced” than other traditions, including Christianity. Using two of Shengyan’s academic works, this chapter shows how his Buddhist apologetics represented an elaboration of Yinshun’s scholarly approach to upholding notions of Buddhist superiority. Buddhists had lamented what they saw as the decline of their tradition in the twentieth century; Shengyan’s scholarship was also an attempt to restore “true” Buddhism, which would be seen as thoroughly compatible with the modern world.