Excerpt

The complex interaction between existing Chinese values and values arriving from “the west” has a long history. It is not limited to just the century of interest in Marxism, nor even to the more than four hundred years since Jesuit missionaries arrived in China. In fact the 1400 years of Islamic presence in China still pales before the close to two millennia that Buddhism has thrived in China, both challenging then-indigenous values as well as adapting and growing in its new context. Zen Buddhism is one of the products of this process of adaptation; so is Neo-Confucianism, the dominant state-sponsored…