Study Of Modern Chinese Buddhist Philanthropy

This article takes philanthropy founded by the persons in the modern Chinese Buddhist circles as the study object. With China's entry into modern society, the Western powers' gunboats, advanced technology culture and religious culture make an strong impaction to Chinese society.The impaction has not been seen in the past three thousand years. Since the Han Dynasty Buddhism which was introduced to China, after nearly two thousand years of digestion and integration has become an inseparable part of Chinese traditional culture. Under the policy of feudal rulers to suppress religion deliberately, Buddhism entered China since the Ming and Qing Dynasties, getting decline. Into the modern society, Chinese Buddhism is faced with destruction. Under the insight efforts of the Chinese Buddhist circles, modern Chinese Buddhism has some degree of recovery. Currently, the researches on modern Chinese Buddhism mostly focus on the famous characters, ethics, the modernization of Buddhist culture and so on. But about the charities run by them, there is no systematic and comprehensive academic research results. This study will help to compensate for this weakness.On the basis of previous research, the orientation of the basic theory of historical materialism, the research methods of the combination of history and sociology, this paper makes multi-angle, multi-level systems analysis to the occupied historical data. From the background of the Modern Chinese Buddhist charity, Buddhist charitable thoughts, Buddhist charity organization and the so well-known charitable people in Buddhist community, this paper conducts a comprehensive study on the development of the modern Chinese Buddhist charity in modern centuries and its impaction on China. At the same time this paper makes an objective and fair evaluation to Modern Chinese Buddhist charity.There are various Buddhist charity run by modern Chinese Buddhist circles, taking famine relief, charity education, ward off evil as its main content. In addition, some others are also taken into account. It has played a certain positive effects on treatment for disease people, accepting and training infants, alleviating the public suffering. Through its system study it can be found that Buddhist charity run by modern Chinese Buddhist circles has the purpose and motivation of temple dominated production, with some limitations. But it can't be denied that modern Chinese Buddhist charity objectively contributes to helf a number of vulnerable groups who need urgent aid, to ease the pressure on social assistance, to stabilize social order and coordinate social development. In general, modern Chinese Buddhist charity has far-reaching effects, providing us some important insights and historical experiences and lessons on the development of contemporary philanthropy in China.