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Title:
Taixu on Christianity. Corpus analysis of the master’s Collected Works
Abstract:
As one of the key Chinese Buddhist reformers of his time, Master Taixu’s 太虛 works have been analyzed through numerous angles. One topic, however, received less scholarly attention so far. This is his understanding of Christianity. A few analyses have been written in Chinese and English addressing the topic, notably the works of Darui Long, Yu-Shuang Yao and Richard Gombrich, as well as Xue Yu 學愚, Wang Ying 王鹰 and Zhang Jingde 張金德. However, these analyses mostly focus on one particular aspect of the master’s approach, such as his criticism of Christian theology, or Christianity’s practical features he incorporated into his own reforms. Xue Yu provides an excellent account of the evolution of the master’s views, however that account can also be augmented. Therefore, this paper and the author’s broader work sets out to fill this crucial gap in the literature and provide a comprehensive account of Master Taixu’s views and understanding of Christianity. This particular paper would present the results of the author’s recent research conducted jointly with a data scientist colleague, which set out to analyze the Collected Works of Master Taixu 太虛大師全書 in relation to Christianity, utilizing corpus analysis. In our analysis, we segmented the complete corpus into 5 million Chinese characters, and after reassembling them into words, sentences, paragraphs and chapters, we could launch inquiries into the mentions of Christianity within the corpus. The main results of the analysis are as follows. We located all texts, writings and speeches, where the master mentions Christianity. These number a surprisingly high amount, namely 264 individual texts out of the 1447 total, which is the largest amount compared to the mentions of other religions besides Buddhism within the corpus. The differences in his discussion of various religions also became apparent through the analysis of key words he used in relation to them. For Christianity, what stood out, was the prominent mentioning of philosophy, science and research, which was lacking in the discussions of other religions. Then, we also determined the dates when the texts on Christianity were produced and established a timeline demonstrating the results. This timeline clearly shows when Taixu focused more on Christianity, such as right after his yearlong European and North American journey. Finally, we also collected the spatial information regarding half of all texts in the corpus, including all text about Christianity, and thus could create a series of maps which present when and where Taixu wrote his articles and gave his speeches regarding Christianity compared to the entirety of his works. These maps, we also uploaded to a webpage to enable further research on the topic open access, which the author would present at the conference as well. Hence, the author strongly believes that the present paper could contribute to the scholarly discussion regarding Master Taixu’s views and the increased understanding of Buddhist–Christian dialogue in early 20th century China.
