The Struggle between Tradition and Modernity in the Early Twentieth Century of the Tibetan Buddhist World

Hamugetu’s paper discusses the relationships between tradition and modernity through an examination of the Seventh lCang-skya’s activities in China and Inner Mongolia in the late Qing period. Articulating a modern ideology of the separation of church and state, he sought to protect the interests of Tibetan Buddhist society from both the Chinese government and Inner Mongolian nationalists through accommodating both forces, while simultaneously seeking to reform Tibetan Buddhism in Inner Mongolia along modernist lines. Striving to protect the interests of the Buddhist community, the struggle of the Seventh lCang-skya between the system of jasak lamas and the separation of religion and state is typical of the issues facing the Tibetan Buddhist world in the early 20th century.

Religion, Gender, and Bodies: Women’s Polyvalent Roles and Experiences in the Biopolitics of Taiwan’s Presbyterian Missions

The Presbyterian missions and medical missions in 19th-century Taiwan were successful enterprises that over time developed into the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan, which stands today as the largest Christian minority church in this country. Through a Foucauldian biopolitical perspective, this paper analyzes the roles of female missionaries in the management of bodies and the subjective experiences of both foreign and Native women in the missions. Going beyond descriptive narratives and control-versus-agency reductionist frames, the paper points the polyvalent semantics of such roles and experiences. It also explores the complex relations between the women’s biopolitical functions, the PCT’s industrial type of biopolitical apparatus, and the biopolitical regimes of the late Qing dynasty and the Japanese colonial government in the early 20th century. The conclusions remark on the analytical relevance of biopolitical perspectives in the study of gender and body-related phenomena in Christian missions and Christian religions beyond Western societies.

Revolutionary Christian Attitudes toward Women and Family in Late Qing and Republican-Era China

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Chinese Christian familial ideals were traditional and revolutionary at the same time. They were traditional in wanting to preserve some role for parents in forming the marriages of their children and in seeing wives as primarily responsible for the care of children. But Christians were revolutionary in encouraging women to develop their personalities and work outside the home. They advocated women’s education and associated education with women’s empowerment and independence. Christians taught that marriage should be based on love and that daughters were just as important as sons, even if they chose to be single. Singleness, spouse self-selection, prioritizing the husband-wife relationship over the parent-child relationship, and pursuing a companionate model of marriage were all ways that Christians helped revolutionize familial ideals in China.

On the English Translation of Jian’ai by Late Qing Missionary-Sinologists

With an increasing volume of research being conducted on the transmission of premodern Chinese thought in the Western world, a plethora of studies have been published on the English translation of the ancient text Mozi, primarily through the lens of cross-cultural translation studies. Discussions on how the concept of jian’ai – often rendered as “universal love” – should be expressed in English have also taken place in this framework, while the topic has rarely been examined hermeneutically or with reference to histories of knowledge transfer, intellectuals, or scholarship. This article discusses the translation of jian’ai into English by the missionary-sinologists Joseph Edkins and James Legge during the mid-to-late 1800s. It points out that, while both scholars used the term “universal” to translate the concept, they differed on whether “equal” could be used. The author also demonstrates how differences in translation can signify differences in thinking. Using the “unit of thought” of hermeneutics as a methodology to study the translators’ conception of jian’ai via a comparison of common structural levels, a case can be made that both of them used the criticism by Mengzi of Mozi as a kind of “situational construction”. However, in terms of “situational processing”, Edkin’s demonstrated the necessity and equality of jian’ai by quoting the words of ancient sages and wise rulers just as Mozi did, while Legge focused on the “Teng Wen Gong I” chapter of the Mengzi, arguing that the idea of “equality” was not espoused by Mozi himself but rather his later followers. From the perspective of “situational fusion”, Edkins pointed out that, while jian’ai is similar in form to the love of Christ, it in fact shares more similarities with utilitarianism. By contrast, Legge believed that jian’ai was more in line with the thought of Confucius, while he also discussed the similarities and differences between jian’ai and the love of Christ. The differing understandings of jian’ai arrived at by these two scholars demonstrates that missionaries sent to China after the mid-nineteenth century underwent a transition from amateur to professional sinologists. Moreover, by examining how Mohism was introduced to the West in modern times, it can be shown how Legge’s interpretation of jian’ai coined a longstanding translated name for the concept.