Philosophy East and West

The idea that Buddhism played a key role in the development of New Confucianism has long prevailed in academia, but it is not until recent years that such an idea has been critically studied through a series of monographs, mainly published by Brill. This book is one of the excellent works concerning such an important topic. Unlike other works which focus on the possible influence of specific Buddhist schools on individual New Confucian thinkers, The Awakening of Faith and New Confucian Philosophy stresses the relationship between a specific Buddhist 'classic,' the Treatise on Awakening Mahāyāna Faith or Dasheng qixin lun 大乘起信論, and New Confucianism as a whole. This makes for a very in-depth discussion.

Including the introduction, there are eleven essays in this edited volume. John Makeham provides a clear introduction to the book, presenting the background and the characteristics of the Treatise, its relationship with Indian Buddhist thought, and that of Yogācāra in particular, as well as with the New Confucian thinkers covered in the book. As Makeham correctly states, "the main conceptual model that New Confucian philosophers adapted from the Treatise and repurposed is the 'one mind, two gateways' model" (p. 46). This highlights the main argument advanced by the book. The following chapters, to different extents, address this issue from different perspectives. In the next two essays, John Jorgensen examines the controversy over the Treatise within Buddhist circles in Republican China, demonstrating that there was no consensus about the identity of the Treatise as a Buddhist text even among Buddhist scholars. Below, I argue that this point is essential to our understanding of the role the Treatise, and even Buddhism more generally, played in New Confucianism. The following seven essays are about the appropriations of the Treatise by individual New Confucian thinkers such as Xiong Shili 熊十力, Ma Yifu 馬一浮, Tang Junyi 唐君毅, and Mou Zongsan 牟宗三. Here, I do not go into details about the arguments and conclusions of these essays one by one, but stress that all discussions develop, implicitly or explicitly, the idea that if New Confucianism was influenced by the Treatise, it was affected by its notion of the 'one mind, two gateways' [End Page 1] model and the philosophical ideas implied by it, such as the peculiar ti-yong 體用 paradigm of the Treatise. In the final essay, Lin Chen-kuo puts the discussion into the broader context of East Asian Buddhism, indicating that the main theme of the debate over the relationship between the Treatise and New Confucianism is not the 'one mind, two gateways' model and its ti-yong paradigm, but the characteristics of the mind and the nature of the ti-yong view that the Treatise may imply. In Lin's view, it is the 'subjectivity' laid in the Treatise that makes the text controversial (pp. 462–466) and it is also thanks to the ambiguity of this 'subjectivity' that the Treatise could serve as a bridge between Buddhism and Confucianism, and even between Chinese and Western philosophies (pp. 483–484). Lin's essay helps make clear the potential role played by the Treatise in New Confucianism as, no matter how important the Treatise appears to be, its role is restricted to a means and not an end. This further implies that there may be other Buddhist elements that play a role in New Confucianism aside from those which the Treatise provides.

The book has at least two advantages. First, it provides a complete survey of the position of the Treatise in Buddhism. Second, it offers a thorough evaluation of the role the Treatise may have played in New Confucianism. This part of the discussion is particularly valuable, as it is a topic that lacks systematic investigation in present-day academia. For the first point, the position of the Treatise in Buddhism is highly controversial, not only because it is widely considered to have been written in China and not India, but also because of...