The Science of Chinese Buddhism: Early Twentieth‐Century Engagements By Erik J.Hammerstrom. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Pp. iii + 245. Hardcover, $50.00.

Abstract

Erik Hammerstrom's The Science of Chinese Buddhism makes an important contribution to the study of modern Buddhism by examining its engagements with science during the 1890s through the 1940s, the formative moment of their encounter. Working with essays published in Buddhist periodicals of the day by figures both renowned and obscure, lay and monastic, Hammerstrom analyzes his materials to reveal patterns in Buddhist engagements with science, organizing his discussion thematically around physical sciences, empiricism, psychology, ethics and society, and self-cultivation. He argues that science was a “compelling discourse” which Buddhists wrote and thought about not merely due to the necessities of their social and political environment but also due to its intrinsic attractions. As such, Buddhists constituted one part of the broader “community of scientific discourse” emerging in China. Like many Chinese of their time, they were less interested in the particular truths science uncovered than in the implications of those truths for how people should live. Although fascinated with scientific discoveries, they were often dismayed by what they saw as its moral implications. In response, they sought not to refute these discoveries but to show that their tradition was compatible with science and in fact could remedy its deficiencies, both epistemic and ethical. In the process, they used scientific ideas and terms to help articulate a distinct Chinese Buddhist modernism. Zeroing in on a period when the discourses of both science and Buddhist modernism were taking shape in China to reveal patterns and tactics that still inform the tradition today, the book's chief contribution lies in historicizing and particularizing two discourses that have sometimes been treated as ahistorical monoliths. It is an important work that will be used and cited for a long time to come. Lucidly written enough to be read by an advanced undergraduate, it will be of primary interest to scholars and graduate students working on Buddhism, Chinese religion, and religion and science.