There is no Buddhist-Christian dialogue in modern China. But it is not, as I once thought, because of a lack of ideas (Lai 1986b, 1989). It is rather that the real issue, at least since the late nineteenth century, is works. To wit, not faith but works. That is, social work, social service, or charity. This is an area where the new Protestant missions may be said to differ from the Jesuit missions of old (Ocho 1979, 208). Social service was not the new missionaries' first priority. And perhaps it never should be. Evangelism should come first. But Timothy Richard came to see the pressing need for it (Bohr 1972). He was the first; he would not be the last. The Buddhists had not thought much about social service either. The leader of the so-called Buddhist Revival (Welch 1968), the monk T'ai-hsii, was contented with the old way. He also became a convert and a social activist late, only after reading the works of the 1898 reformers, K'ang Yu-wei and T'an Ssu-t'ung (Jan 1990), whom Richard just happened to have tutored. Yet Christian social work might well be the modern missions' greatest triumph. The number of Chinese converts to the new faith would remain low, but the lives touched by the likes of the YMCA, the Christian colleges, and the church hospitals were many (Garrett 1972; Lutz 1971; West 1976). These modern expressions of Christian charity impressed the Chinese. They impressed all Buddhists-so much so that all modern Buddhist leaders, from Dharmapala in Sri Lanka, through Buddhadasa and Sulak Sivaraksa in Thailand, to the movers of the New Religions in Japan, all copied the Christians and set up Buddhist counterparts of the YMCA (called the YMBA, in fact), the Christian colleges, and the church hospitals. Of all the Buddhist revivals, those within the New Religions of Japan are the success stories. They succeeded not because of great ideas (some of them are plainly shamanic) but because they could provide their members the kind of care and service, quite literally from cradle to grave, that the new urban population of Japan wanted but that even the Japanese state could not yet provide. The difference between Christianity and much of Buddhism lies here. The