Buddhist Historiography: A Tale of Deception in a Seminal Late Ming Buddhist Letter

Abstract

This article offers an historical repositioning of an unusually rich early seventeenth-century autobiographical letter written by the Donglin 東林 partisan Wang Yuanhan 王元翰 (1565–1633). The letter is religiously complex, yet historians have previously focused only on a single short excerpt listing the names of eighteen monks and officials to argue that Buddhist activity flourished in Beijing circa 1600. To the contrary, the greater historical value of this letter resides in its depictions of religious desire, vision of self-cultivation, and critical judgments imparted by an impassioned Buddhist and unremitting Donglin remonstrator. Through examination of Wang’s political and spiritual biography and actual evidence that the network he conjures was more aspirational than real, this article concludes that we need to rethink earlier scholarly depictions of the Donglin as anti-Buddhist, distinguish between being critical and being anti-Buddhist, and reflect on the use of lists in an age of scholarly attention to networks.