| The translation and dissemination of modern science in China was one of the main projects of Chinese modernity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Buddhists played an active role in the appropriation of science in China as they sought to relate their tradition to science in such a way that Buddhism would still have a place in the society of the modern Chinese state. In the course of these negotiations, Chinese Buddhists dealt with the most current advances in science; they discussed X-rays in the 1890s, the discovery that the Milky Way is not the only one in the universe in the 1920s, and they followed developments in the fields of Relativistic and quantum physics. Buddhists argued that while science was invaluable for the people of the world, scientific materialism was not. They cautioned about the ethical implications of certain aspects of science, such as the invention of new weapons and the theory of social Darwinism. In this dissertation, I show how Chinese Buddhists drew from their traditions of epistemology, psychology, and cosmology to highlight similarities between science and Buddhism, all while maintaining the superiority of Buddhism by identifying it as a "higher empiricism." I trace the historical development of Chinese Buddhist discourses about something called "science," by which I do not mean a body of knowledge or a set of practices, but an ideological entity that was identified by conflicting definitions and usages. I explicitly avoid the pitfalls inherent in adopting the popular "conflict thesis" for understanding the relationship between science and religion. I also avoid the opposite view, that of the "compatibility thesis," which states that Buddhism is inherently compatible with science (especially when compared with Christianity). In analyzing the development of Buddhist discourses on science, I point out the areas of disagreements among them with regard to the proper use of science, as well as the extent to which Buddhists thought they could or should rely on science to prove the veracity of their doctrine. Finally, I reflect on the ways in which this study could expand and enhance the global study of the relationship between science and religion. |
