Transfiguring Modern Temporality

Modernity and Crisis

As China entered the global capitalist system of nation-states, Chinese intellectuals faced a new conceptual terrain, including new modes of thinking about time and history. These new modes were linked to the distinction between subject and object. In the modern international system, any particular nation-state depends on the recognition of the entire system of nation-states for its own existence. ¹ Thus at a global level, a nation’s own national identity as subject is dependent on the look and acknowledgment of a type of generalized other, whose gaze must to some extent make it into an object. However, this dialectic between subject and object also characterized the domestic realm of nation-states, since nation-state building was inextricably linked to modernization, which usually entailed science and its related epistemologies. In early twentieth-century China, Qing intellectuals connected state-building and science, and the scientific framework evokes aspects of what Martin Heidegger called “the world-picture.” In particular, Heidegger explains that one of the key ideas of the modern age of the world-picture is the conceptual opposition of subjects to a world populated by quantifiable objects. In Europe, such a worldview was intimately linked to the emergence of capitalism and the waning of the mélange of Aristotelianism and Christianity characteristic of medieval and Renaissance philosophy. Heidegger contends that starting with Descartes, philosophers no longer conceived of things as having a specific final cause or teleological function related to some transcendent deity (Christianity) or some robust view of nature (Aristotle).

The above process of disenchantment created a crisis related to a loss of meaning, which became particularly acute during the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century. This crisis involves two conceptions of modern temporality, which inform Zhang Taiyan’s reading of Buddhism and Daoism. As people move away from an enchanted world populated by divinities to a world of discrete subjects and objects, they begin to see and experience time as constituted of discrete objective now-points. Charles Bambach explains this conception of time in relation to modern thought in the following manner and foreshadows a discussion of another mode of time, namely evolutionary time:

Modernist thought is punctuated by a peculiarly historicist understanding of time as a linear rosary bead sequence of cause and effect. This way of thinking about the past produces a kind of “neutral time,” a time in which all events are measured objectively, much as cartography measures space according to empirical canons of distance and location. “Empty homogenous time,” as Benjamin calls it, the time of cartography and mathematics, provides the ultimate context for sustaining value neutrality; it creates the illusion of a historical continuum with equally measured intervals where one can, as Leopold von Ranke expressed it, “see with unbiased eyes the progress of universal history.” (Bambach, 1995: 9)

The above quote deals with two different temporalities, one of which is abstract and empty and the other more concrete, namely the movement of a historical subject through time. Zhang Taiyan uses the abstract neutral notion of time to argue for relativism based on national culture, and the latter when explaining evolutionary history using Buddhist categories. These two types of time are more generally conditions for the modern conception of history, and evolution in particular. Historical evolution or the progression of universal history presupposes a concept of abstract time along with the idea of a subject that is evolving or moving to higher and higher levels. In short, abstract time forms the background against which the subject of history progresses.

We can link both of these two aspects of time to modern capitalism, which forms the global conditions for modern philosophy in general and Zhang’s writing in particular. Schematically, the abstract and concrete dimensions of time reflect respectively the quantitative and qualitative dimensions in capitalism, namely the exchange-value and use-value sides of the commodity form. From the standpoint of use value or quality, a commodity is a concrete sensuous thing that has various uses, but in terms of exchange value, all commodities differ merely in quantity or the amount of value they embody. In capitalist society, people experience these two aspects of the commodity form in daily life whenever they buy, sell, or use commodities. The commodity pervades capitalist society and the commodity form is dialectically related to ideas of time. Time forms the condition for the possibility of capitalist social relations as people’s wages are measured in terms of time and on the other hand, the form of the commodity affects various aspects of society including conceptions of time. The abstraction related to the exchange-value side of the commodity form concerns not only so-called economic transactions but also the formulization associated with modern bureaucracies and rule of law. What these different forms have in common is an abstraction from concrete specificity. Just as exchange value and price call on us to abstract from the specific use of a commodity, modern laws are supposed to abstract from specificities such as gender and race. With respect to conceptions of time, the quantitative dimension of the commodity corresponds to the abstract continuum of now-points, which is used to measure speed and work-time. This abstract notion of time constitutes the conditions for the possibility of historical continuum in the form of calendar-time and dating mechanisms.

While the quantitative dimension provides the abstract frame for evolutionary history, the concrete qualitative side provides the content, namely the movement of history toward greater perfection, which is often interpreted in terms of achieving modern goals. One can call this idea of historical progress illusory, but the more important question for the present article is what makes such a notion of historical progress possible. In other words, why is it that such notions of history as progress are ubiquitous during the modern period and absent in previous epochs? ² I contend that this corresponds to something historically specific, namely the actual movement of society to increasing levels of productivity, which implies an increased production of use values in shorter intervals (of abstract time). As is now well known, capitalism involves the production of commodities at an increased rate through the combination of human labor and mechanization and this changes individual units of time. In Moishe Postone’s words,

with increased productivity, the time unit becomes “denser” in terms of the production of goods. Yet this “density” is not manifest in the sphere of abstract temporality, the value sphere: the abstract temporal unit—the hour—and the total value produced remains constant. (Postone, 1993: 292)

In other words, in capitalist society, with greater mechanization, the quantity of value produced in one unit of time remains constant, since the amount of labor-time required to produce each commodity decreases. Moreover, because the social labor hour remains constant at sixty minutes, as the value of individual commodities decreases, this movement to greater productivity is not measurable in terms of abstract time, but requires another conception of time, namely historical time. The “intrinsic dynamic of capital . . . entails . . . a flow of history,” which Postone calls “historical time” as opposed to abstract time (293). This flow of history includes the radical and repeated restructuring of life in capitalism as firms use technology and machines to produce greater quantities of use values more efficiently.

Keeping this historical dynamic in mind, I suggest that the notions of evolutionary temporality are not mere illusion; they are attempts to grasp a real movement of history in capitalist society but to grasp it in an ahistorical manner. Put simply, in a capitalist world, people tend to misrecognize the actual movement of society to greater levels of productivity as a general dynamic of historical progress valid for all epochs. The orthodox Marxist vision of society, which pervaded post-1949 China, propagated one form of this misrecognition by positing a progression from slave, to feudal, to capitalist societies.

The misrecognitions related to the production of evolutionary temporality are made possible by a number of factors, including that capitalist relations present themselves as transhistorical. However, we should also understand the modern theories of history as responses to the existential crisis associated with the transition from preexisting to modern social forms. We will see Zhang deal with two types of response, one that emphasizes value neutrality and one that deals with evolutionary history. Notice that both dimensions of the above dialectic, abstract time, which is divided into now-points, and the dynamic of capital toward greater levels of productivity, are indifferent to traditional values. It is well known that time as now-points entails a type of value neutrality, since each point is interchangeable with the others. Historical time, on the other hand, appears more concrete and is experienced at some level, since it involves the constant acceleration of practices and creates a culture of time-saving. However, this more concrete time presents itself primarily as a blind dynamic in which the rhythms of life are constantly accelerating. Taken together, the dialectic between abstract and concrete times tends to produce what one can call, following Paul Ricoeur, the aporia of time (Ricoeur, 1984: 273) ³ —the experience of meaninglessness related to the split between cosmological time, which is infinite, and experiential time, which is plagued by limitation and death. Once traditional narratives which link the individual to the cosmos collapse, this aporia between the subjective and the objective returns with more force and in turn encourages intellectuals to seek historical narratives that conceal the existential gap.

Joseph Levenson was one of the first historians of China to explicitly theorize this crisis of meaning in late Qing China as the dynastic system gave way to a world-system of nation-states. Although he does not deal with crisis in terms of the aporia of time, his analysis allows us to perceive some of the antinomies that result from the dialectic between abstract and historical time, in relation to absolutism and relativism with respect to value in history. Moreover, his notion of history as relativism echoes half of Zhang’s theory of history. Levenson famously noted that as China became a nation-state, intellectuals began to see their own tradition from a historical perspective, which de-centered the Chinese worldview. In Levenson’s words, in a nationalist framework, in “history relativism is all” (Levenson, 1967: 3.87). History in this context is governed by precisely the aforementioned neutral time and Levenson contends that as a result, late Qing intellectuals ceased to conceive of their tradition as universally valid and valued it only as particular. Thus Levenson frames much of his interpretation within the relativist parameters described above and deals with the problem of the existential aporia of time only implicitly insofar as he presupposes that the crisis of identity and temporal flux can be solved by appealing to a subsisting nation-state.

However, Levenson’s narrative does not theorize critically the way that spatial relativism is related to a temporal absolutism that legitimates modernity. Relativism is only half the story of modern temporality and its relation to the other half is ambiguous. ⁴ The other half concerns “the illusion of historical continuum,” which makes it appear as if one can “see with unbiased eyes the progress of universal history.” Bambach also describes this as “the Hegelian pageant of world history,” which is an evolutionary narrative that attempts to bridge the gap between value and objective history. I suggested above that phenomena such as “the illusion of historical continuum” and “the progress of universal history” are misrecognitions originally made possible by the concrete dynamic of capitalism. In other words, evolutionary views of time are related to experience in a capitalist world, in which people transpose a dynamic specific to capitalist society onto narratives of history in general to construct a transhistorical moral narrative of progress, which in turn is connected to nations. Historians invoke evolutionary narratives to explain the modern world divided between the developed and underdeveloped nations.

Given that a nation presupposes historical continuity and usually demands progress, nationalists often propagate narratives of evolution (Duara, 1995: 28). ⁵ However, the narrative of evolution is just one of the narrative responses to capitalism and the nation-state; Zhang Taiyan’s critique of evolution reflects another trend. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as the problems with industrialism became increasingly apparent, scholars in Europe began to question the validity of the “Hegelian pageant of world history.” Bambach describes a sense of crisis among German intellectuals in the early twentieth century, and focuses specifically on Heidegger. As intellectuals rejected the interpretation of history as progress, they could embrace a relativism associated with abstract time. However, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer are not satisfied with simply affirming the value-neutrality of time as a series of equally valid now-points. They represent a type of counter-movement against Hegel’s evolutionary vision of history and make their own judgments about the movement of historical time. All of these three thinkers represent something of a pessimistic or critical turn with respect to the narrative of modernity, or what we now call modernization theory. They each sought to explain the emergence of the various splits and aporias of modernity, such as the rift between subject and object, by appealing to some primordial dimension of human existence and history. Thus, in Heidegger’s words, “Philosophy will never find out (dahinterkommen) what history is as long as it analyzes it as an object of contemplation (Betrachtungsobjekt), in terms of a method. The riddle of history lies in what it means to be historical” (Heidegger, 1992 [1924]: 20; trans. amended, cf. Bambach, 1995: 15). The question of “being” here is of course complex. It clearly involves an interpretation of existence, but, at the same time, Heidegger’s contrast between history as object and “being historical” immediately invokes some notion of historical existence as subjective or as connected to subjective activity. At the heart of philosophies as different as those of Hegel, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer, is precisely this link between existence and subjective activity or even a connection between subjectivity and existence as an activity that precedes and produces the distinctions between subject and object. For each of them, history is some type of practical activity, but their intellectual trajectories are separated by whether they believe that such an activity represents a progressive pageant motivated by self-conscious spirit or whether they gesture behind the curtains of the pageant to a degenerative disaster propelled by unconscious tendencies. In the latter case, the task would be to struggle against a logic of history that is created by human beings, but proceeds independent of human control and constantly undermines the conditions of human existence. As we shall see, Zhang Taiyan will affirm some version of the latter project.

China’s Entry into the Global Capitalist System of Nation-States

Zhang Taiyan lived and wrote in both late Qing China and late Meiji Japan, at a time when each of these countries was undergoing massive transformations as part of their respective projects to enter and compete in the global capitalist system of nation-states. While scholars have vigorously debated the extent of capitalism in China and Japan during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there is no doubt that capitalist-like production relations were developing in urban centers in both places. This development was of course intimately connected to China and Japan being forced to integrate into the global capitalist system of nation-states. In the case of China, the famous treaties of Nanjing (1842) and Tianjin (1860) were key turning points, since they led China to open key treaty ports. Initially, social and economic transformations were limited to these ports, but during the several decades following the Treaty of Tianjin, Chinese intellectuals and officials began to conceive of ways to develop China’s productive forces and resist foreign encroachment.

As a result, state-sponsored reforms created capitalism and consequently promoted an abstract conception of time. In a recent publication, Marie-Claire Bergère explains that during the period from the Self-strengthening Movement in the 1860s to the New Government Policies in the first decade of the twentieth century, China developed state and bureaucratic capitalism (Bergère, 2007: 53). In other words, state officials and gentry mobilized resources to create modern industries and thus developed commodity production in various parts of China.

Moreover, Chinese historians generally agree that during the late Qing Chinese capitalists and foreign capital in China were constantly rising. For example, after the Sino-Japanese War in 1895, the Treaty of Shimonoseki enabled foreign companies to invest in China, thus causing a sense of crisis among indigenous Chinese firms. According to Zhu Yuhe, Ouyang Junxi, and Shu Wen’s recent study, both officials and intellectuals believed that China lost the Sino-Japanese War because it had an insufficiently developed economy. By 1898, under the influence of reformers, the Qing government implemented a series of policies in order to promote indigenous industries. With the failure of the Hundred Days Reform, some of these policies were repealed, but were put into full force again by 1901 as part of the New Policies. Thus in the period from 1895 to 1913, there were 549 indigenous industrial and mining enterprises that invested more than 1,000 yuan each, and investment totaled 120,288,000 yuan (Zhu, Ouyang, and Shu, 2001: 41).

Economic historians such as Albert Feuerwerker repeatedly stress that such numbers are miniscule when compared to the whole of China (see Feuerwerker, 1970). However, when one looks at the problem from a global perspective, it is equally important to keep in mind the constant rise in capital flows into China, which signified increasing incorporation into the global economy. As Wu Chengming notes, from 1895 to 1913, foreign investment more than doubled and trust companies from all over the world entered China (Wu, 1956: 40–41). Although such socioeconomic transformations were not uniform and usually focused in urban centers such as Shanghai, this is precisely where much intellectual activity also took place. ⁶

Time and History in the Late Qing

As Chinese responded to the treaties, they expressed a dialectic associated with the two sides of the commodity form. From an abstract standpoint, a treaty takes place between two equal nations and both the treaties and the various contracts associated with commercial development in the late nineteenth implied some notion of abstract time. In short, a treaty requires that the nations involved share a temporal frame that stipulates among other things the duration of the treaty. If two nations had different conceptions of time, treaties would often be inefficacious. Hence, during the late Qing, as part of their project to modernize the state, both the government and intellectuals begin to develop a new abstract sense of time, which was associated with modern clocks and calendars (Bastid-Brugière, 2001: 41–54). This enabled Chinese to participate more easily in transnational treaties and commerce, and of course made it possible to measure time for wages.

However, the defeats China suffered in wars beginning with the Opium War (1839–1842) also produced a new sense of more concrete historical time. Chinese signed treaties to which they would not have otherwise consented: they felt forced to do so because of a perceived difference between China and the powers in productive capacity and military strength. This perceived difference implies a complex spatio-temporality: from various perspectives or in certain domains, Chinese scholars and officials would begin to consider themselves temporally behind the imperialist powers.

This sense of lagging behind implied the goal of attempting to catch up, which in turn implied an orientation to the future and a sense of crisis and uncertainty about whether China would survive in this new world. In face of the wars and crises of the late nineteenth century, Chinese scholars and officials began to question or at least supplement a Confucian view of history as one of decline (Kwong, 2001).

In coming to grips with China’s new place in the world of nation-states, Chinese thinkers also had to grapple with their own inner conflicts, tensions, and confusions. This is readily apparent in, for instance, Tan Sitong’s attempt to synthesize Buddhism, Confucianism, and modern science. In Tan’s An Exposition of Humanity (Renxue), written in 1896, he posits an ontological source, which he glosses with various concepts, such as ether, the Confucian concept of humanity, and the Buddhist idea of the “ocean of nature” and “compassion.” The tensions in Tan’s philosophy extended to his view of history, in that he claimed that the goal of history was embodied in ideas of time-saving and mechanization, but that this had already been adumbrated in Confucian classics.

Within a very short span of time, the civilization of the Western countries emulated that of the three dynasties. They relied on nothing other than time-saving, so that they never fell short of time, and this is like putting into one man all the energies of a few dozen men. It is written in the Great Learning: “One must do things quickly.” Only machines can do this. (Tan, 1984: 132–33, Tan 2002 [1896], 80)

The reformer Tan Sitong supplements the Confucian ideal of the Three Dynasties with a sense of the importance of mechanized production in capitalism to develop a new ideal of a well-governed land. Tan thus relays the Western countries’ progress back to an idealized Chinese past, which endows linear development with moral validity. The past is now connected to the temporal category of speed, saving time, and machines. By linking these concepts to Confucianism, Tan presents them as normative and compatible with a nationalist narrative.

Tan of course was not alone in this attempt to combine traditional Chinese texts with modern temporality. Kang Youwei’s theory of the three ages—the age of disorder, the age of ascending peace, and the age of peace—and Yan Fu’s famous creative interpretations of Herbert Spencer and Thomas Huxley are examples of attempts to combine Confucianism or Daoism with evolutionary temporality in order to construct a moral vision of progress for the Qing empire. Yan’s combining of the Daoist notion of cyclical temporality with a linear vision of evolution emerges clearly in the preface to his translation of Edward Jenks’s A History of Politics:

If one examines the stages of evolution (jinhua) of the various peoples of the world, they all begin with totem societies, advance to kinship societies and then become states. . . . The sequence of these is just like the four seasons, like a person’s body changing from infancy to old-age. There may be variations in speed, but no one can be without one stage. (Yan, 1996 [1904]: 133)

Thus, Yan is able to maintain the linearity of evolution while still invoking cyclical metaphors such as the four seasons. However, while a number of traditions, including the system of divination in the Book of Changes, Buddhism, and especially, Daoism, serve to inflect Yan’s theory of evolution, when it came to applying these traditions to a vision of history, Yan often emphasized a more linear version of evolution.

Zhang Taiyan took an opposite position and attacked evolution. Of course, since Zhang is famous for being a revolutionary and a pungent critic of Kang Youwei, Yan Fu, Tan Sitong, and their cohort, one might argue that his critique of evolution was a politically motivated attack on reformist Confucian and Daoist visions of evolution. This is, however, only partially true. Zhang Taiyan was critical of the reformers’ adherence to Confucianism and consequently of their attempt to connect evolution to Confucianism. However, the evolutionary framework pervaded revolutionary discourse as well. For example, Zhang’s fellow revolutionary Zou Rong famously connected revolution to evolution. In this context, Zhang’s critique of evolution points beyond the mere opposition between revolutionary and reformist politics and attempts to undermine philosophical assumptions about time and history shared by both political camps.

Japanese Attempts to Link Buddhism to Evolution

Zhang began to conceive of his critique of evolution from a Buddhist perspective when he was in jail for revolutionary activities from 1903 to 1906. After his release and move to Tokyo, he wrote the essays that attacked the theory of evolution, explicitly mentioning the thinking of famous Japanese intellectuals such as Anesaki Masaharu’s ideas about religion and German idealism. Thus, we are almost certain that he was familiar with Japanese assessments of the concept of evolution. ⁷ If so, the debate between Katō Hiroyuki (1836–1916) and Inoue Enryō (1858–1919) over the relationship between progressive conceptions of history and Buddhism would have been especially significant for Zhang.

These Japanese debates are significant not merely because they might have influenced Zhang and that his Buddhist critique of Hegel was probably a direct counter to Inoue’s attempt to fuse Buddhism and Hegel. ⁸ Rather, as in the Chinese case, we should understand the debates surrounding evolution in Japan in the context of Japan’s trajectory of incorporation into the global capitalist system of nation-states. Consequently, the similarities between the Chinese and Japanese cases, and between Zhang and Meiji Buddhists in particular, suggest that their intellectual histories must be seen as part of a larger global trajectory of global capitalist expansion and resistance to imperialism. In other words, the movement of ideas from Germany to Japan to China gestures toward a type of global contemporaneity, which would include other states entering the global capitalist world late, such as India. ⁹ An important aspect of this contemporaneity concerns transformations of conceptions of time in the face of imperialism.

In response to the threat of Western imperialism, the Meiji state had rapidly developed its industries and in the process new concepts of time emerged. For example, a few years after the Meiji Restoration (1868), the Japanese government promulgated a unified calendar based on the Western model (Tanaka, 2004: 6). Using these new concepts of time, numerous intellectuals, such as those associated with the Meiji Six Society, an intellectual society in Meiji Japan associated with Westernization, promoted “civilization” and “enlightenment” in an evolutionary context. ¹⁰ However, precisely because the Meiji state was initially successful in modernizing, by the end of the nineteenth century intellectuals could perceive the dark underbelly of capitalist modernity. As a result, they searched for something beyond the material self-interest that seemed to characterize the modern world. This led to a renewed interest in philosophical interpretations of Buddhism. In the 1890s, one of the leading Buddhist philosophers of the time, Inoue Enryō, launched Buddhist arguments against the materialistic tendencies of the Meiji Six group and especially his one-time philosophy teacher, Katō Hiroyuki.

We can look at this debate as revolving around ontology, which served as the condition for the possibility of their theories of evolution and history. Katō Hiroyuki advocated a monistic materialism and considered the egoistic individual as the root of evolution. In some writings, Katō interpreted the individual broadly to include all things in the world, including aggregates such as the nation and society, and hence, he could derive a nationalist ethics from his philosophical framework. He combined these two perspectives by claiming that individuals should realize that by promoting the evolution of the group as it struggles against others, they promote their own individual survival (Godart, 2008: 78).

Katō opposed all religions, since they posit something above the state and hence he concluded they would eventually harm a nationalist ethics. He rejected the concept of heaven since he linked it to the old polity, which had to make way for a modern conception of the state (Thomas, 2001: 101). In 1895, he published an essay using such an argument explicitly to attack Buddhism (Godart, 2008: 84). ¹¹ In response, several late Meiji thinkers defended Buddhism and attempted to reconcile Buddhist concepts with evolution and morality. In particular, Buddhist philosophers such as Inoue Enryō advocated an idea of bi-directional evolution—that is evolution could also be retrograde and lead to degeneration—anticipating Zhang Taiyan’s own theory of evolution. As Funeyama Shinichi explains, in Inoue Enryō’s view, “evolution is not one-sided, but also encompasses its opposite, namely regression” (Funeyama, 1996: 358). Inoue gave a number of different names to the combination of progressive evolution and regression, among them “great change” and “revolving change.”

Inoue then synthesizes this vision with Hegelian concepts, which link change to an ontological and moral ground. First he claims that evolution deals only with phenomena; it does not get at the substance behind change. Thus he explains that even if it is commonly believed that the organic comes from the inorganic and that conscious life comes from things without consciousness, this is only looking at things from the perspective of appearance. He provides both a Buddhist and a Hegelian metaphor to explain this. Using a Buddhist metaphor, he notes that although there are many changes in waves, they are all contained in the water, which consistently remains water. Similarly, invoking Hegel’s Phenomenology, he points out that a seed sprouts and grows to become a tree, but this transformation is contained in the seed (Inoue, 1990: 7.576–77). As Hegel wrote in the Phenomenology of Spirit:

The bud disappears in the bursting-forth of the blossom, and one might say that the former is refuted by the latter; similarly, when the fruit appears, the blossom is shown up in its turn as a false manifestation of the plant, and the fruit now emerges as the truth of it instead. These forms are not just distinguished from one another, they also supplant one another as mutually incompatible. Yet at the same time their fluid nature makes them moments of an organic unity in which they not only do not conflict, but in which each is as necessary as the other; and this mutual necessity (diese gleiche Notwendigeit) constitutes the life of the whole. (Hegel, 1986: 12)

Inoue follows Hegel’s logic. For example, both make a distinction between phenomena and something constant or eternal. In the Hegelian system, Spirit (Geist) remains constant even as it grounds the myriad phenomenal changes. According to Inoue Enryō, there is some type of substance (jitsuzai, 実在) that is eternal while supporting transformation. While Hegel’s Spirit “falls into history” and becomes involved in a linear progression of forms of life, Inoue contends that evolution can only be used to discuss biological things and cannot be applied to the realm of psychology, society, morality, religion, or philosophy.

However, given that from Inoue’s perspective spiritual things and material things are intimately interwoven, it seems that his concept of great change (daika) encompasses both history and the natural world. Hence his comments on evolution are clearly compatible with the Hegelian model. After all, there is evolution and regression in the Hegelian vision of history as well. It is only when a previous form of life regresses and is destroyed that a new one emerges. Moreover, for all of Inoue’s stress on regression, he does not want to attack modern institutions such as the state, which proponents of evolution, such as Katō Hiroyuki, supported. Rather, Inoue’s political point is merely that the materialist and evolutionary worldview entails an individualism that runs counter to the goals of national morality, and that Buddhism could help lay the foundations for this morality. Thus, even if one concedes that neither Inoue nor late Qing intellectuals wanted to make Buddhism a mere instrument of the state, their philosophies have a component of social morality that explicitly seeks to promote citizenship and implicitly takes the nation-state as a more evolved political community than previous political forms (see Inoue, 1996: 7.662). In other words, whether we are dealing with most Meiji Buddhists or late Qing reformers, their interpretations of Buddhism were connected to the respective modernization projects of the Meiji state and the late Qing empire/nation-state.

Zhang Taiyan’s Buddhist/Daoist View of History as Objective

Zhang Taiyan’s Buddhist vision differs considerably from that of his Chinese and Japanese counterparts. In the beginning of this article, I pointed out that Zhang Taiyan uses Buddhism to both affirm some vision of modernity and to attack modernity. However, in both these cases, Zhang’s conclusions about time and history go against evolutionary models. Part of the reason that Zhang is able to do this is because of the complex nature of the resources in the Yogācāra tradition. Buddhism is broadly divided into Mahayana and Hinayana schools, the former being the more popular version of Buddhism. Within the Mahayana tradition there are two main divisions: the Madyamika school, which emphasizes debate about concepts emerging from the scriptures, and the Yogācāra school (literally the yogic practice school), which places the emphasis on meditation, psychology, and epistemology. Because of Yogācāra’s emphasis on consciousness, this school is also known as Consciousness-only Buddhism. The two main proponents of this school in India were Vasubandu (ca. fourth century) and the brothers Asanga (ca. fourth century) (see Powers, 1993: introduction).

During the seventh century, the Chinese pilgrim Xuanzang (602–664) traveled to India (primarily the area that is today Bangladesh) in order to bring a number of the Yogācāra texts back to China and then translated them into Chinese. This was a major source of knowledge about Yogācāra in China. Although late Ming scholars, such as Wang Fuzhi (1619–1692), made use of Yogācāra doctrines, Yogācāra ideas became especially popular during the late Qing, at the height of China’s entry into the modern world of global capitalism. Perhaps because of its emphasis on epistemology and consciousness, scholars such as Yang Wenhui (1837–1911), Liang Qichao (1873–1929), Xia Zengyou (1863–1934), Song Shu (1862–1910) and others were all enthusiastic about Yogācāra as a means to create a modern subject. Zhang Taiyan was indeed closely acquainted with both Xia Zengyou and Song Shu, but he seriously studied Yogācāra only after being imprisoned for revolutionary activities in 1903. Zhang and many of his contemporaries looked to Yogācāra as a means to effecting something tantamount to Kant’s Copernican revolution. Instead of accepting the world as given and out there, Yogācāra focuses on the role of consciousnesses in creating the appearances of the world.

Of course, although Kant’s aim was to provide a philosophical foundation for science and freedom, the Yogācāra tradition was more interested in overcoming suffering through meditative practices that would dissolve the self. Therefore, Yogācāra Buddhists developed, as a heuristic device, a theory of levels of consciousness and karmic seeds, which would explain how the appearances of self and world arise. I deal with Zhang’s interpretation of these concepts below, but in general Yogācāra Buddhists distinguish between eight levels of consciousness, the most fundamental being ālaya consciousness. Ālaya literally means storehouse and the ālaya consciousness stores karmic seeds, which refer to our past actions and their influence on the way we experience and act in the present. At the level of ālaya consciousness there is no distinction between self and other, but such differences emerge at less fundamental levels of consciousness, specifically the seventh and sixth levels, namely manas consciousness and the sense-centered consciousness (manovijñāna), respectively. At the seventh level of consciousness, a self emerges from misrecognizing ālaya consciousness as a self. This self is the root of suffering and persists even during dream states and deep sleep. The sixth level of consciousness, the sense-centered consciousness, refers to the empirical self, which exists while awake. The last five levels of consciousness are the five senses, namely touch, sight, hearing, smell, and taste. These levels do not exist separately but combine to make our experience. Moreover, through our experience and action, we produce new karmic seeds, which in turn influence our future experiences and actions. In this way, ignorance gives rise to ignorance and one is in a never-ending cycle based on self-centered action. Through pursuing self-interested projects, we produce the conditions for future self-interested action. The goal of Yogācāra is to break free from this cycle by promoting actions, such as meditative practice, that release us from the bonds of the self and desire.

We can see here that Yogācāra contains elements, such as the emphasis on consciousness, that overlap with modern ideas of the subject, but on the other hand, from a Buddhist perspective, the subject or the self is precisely the problem. Hence Yogācāra Buddhism ends up also being a weapon against modern ideas of the subject and science and, as we shall see, evolution. Zhang’s writings embody the contradictory nature of Yogācāra in relation to the modern world. Although Zhang interprets Yogācāra as objective and modern, he eventually invokes Zhuang Zi to endorse a vision that bears resemblance to Levenson’s idea of history as a type of national relativism. In the rest of this section, I will analyze this modern side to Zhang Taiyan’s conception of history and in the next section I tackle Zhang’s more difficult critique of evolution. ¹²

As with Inoue, Zhang’s theory of evolution also separates phenomena and a deeper level of reality as process. However, Zhang grounds both of these levels in the categories of Yogācāra Buddhism. At the phenomenal level, the realm of appearances, namely the level of science, Zhang constructs a theory of history that accounts for the occurrence of objective events. Like his neo-Kantian contemporaries, Zhang sees the importance of objectivity, and perhaps because he was confronted with the problem of imperialism, he tries to carve out a space for temporal and spatial others. However, Zhang recognizes that history itself involves the negation of the other and he will eventually use the Yogācāra concept of seeds to explain and negate the homogenizing movement of history.

Zhang looked at Buddhism as a means for understanding history as objective and attempted to carve out a space for historical difference or otherness. In his famous letter to Tie Zheng, ¹³ written in 1907, where he defends Yogācāra Buddhism as a practical political ideology, Zhang comments on the confluence of Yogācāra theory and science:

There is another reason why I only respect Yogācāra Buddhism. Modern scholarship slowly moved in the direction of seeking truth from the facts and the people from the Han-learning school discussed things in a reasoned manner (fentiao xili), which was far beyond what Ming scholars could attain. This came close to the sprouts of science and they used their minds in an increasingly meticulous manner. This is why, although Yogācāra was not appropriate for the Ming, it is extremely appropriate for the modern period, because of the direction of scholarship. (Zhang, 1986 [1907]: 370)

Zhang associates Yogācāra Buddhism with “seeking truth from the facts” (shishi qiu shi), which is intimately linked to his debate with Kang Youwei and the New Text school, which advocated using history for politics. Zhang now draws on Buddhism to elaborate a position with respect to history which he sees in Confucianism and Daoism. For example, in the aforementioned letter he praises Confucius as a historian more than anything else and in his “An Interpretation of ‘the Equalization of Things’” (“An Interpretation”), published in 1910, he points out that Daoists were officials of history.

However, in “An Interpretation” and other works, Zhang explains the objectivity of history and time using the concepts of Yogācāra Buddhism. In other words, he shows that the conditions of so-called objective history are generated by the movement of consciousness. From this perspective, Zhang’s reading of Yogācāra Buddhism is similar to Kant’s epistemological turn. In his “On Establishing a Religion,” Zhang explains the emergence of time and space:

the twelve (Kantian) categories in the objects of conscious (fachen) and the objects of the five senses (wuchen) are both independent and need not be causally linked to one another. For example, space is related to the static state of the object of the five senses while time is related to the active state of the object of the five senses. (Zhang, 1996a [1906]: 199)

Zhang here invokes the Yogācāra schema for the production of the self and objects through the misrecognition of ālaya, or storehouse, consciousness. In short, the storehouse consciousness is the eighth level of consciousness and prior to distinctions between self and other. Manas consciousness, which is the seventh level, misrecognizes ālaya consciousness as a self and this is the beginning of self-consciousness. The world of objects in space and time emerges at the sixth level of consciousness, the sense-centered consciousness. Finally, the last five levels of consciousness refer to the five senses. In Zhang’s view, the twelve categories emerge clearly with the movement to the last six levels of consciousness.

The movement from the storehouse or ālaya consciousness to manas consciousness or the rise of the self is initiated by karmic seeds (bijas), which emerge as a result of past actions. Once self-consciousness arises, and especially when self-consciousness meets the empirical world at the sixth level of consciousness, the conscious mind produces the feeling of time. Zhang explains this point in his “An Interpretation”:

The mind at the present experiences things in the present and one feels that there is a now. If one uses the mind of the present to look at the mind that is no longer now, one feels that there is a past. If one uses the mind of the present to look at the mind that is not yet, then one concludes that there is a future. Therefore, when the mind arises there is time. When the mind is quiet, there is no time. (Zhang, 1986 [1910]: 10)

The karmic seeds produce time consciousness and thus can be read as creating the conditions of history. These seeds enable Zhang to both explain and defend his stance with respect to the ordinary concept of history as objective and they also allow him to put forth an alternative to progressive evolution.

With respect to the mundane concept of history, Zhang advocates “seeking truth from the facts” and also a type of historicist relativism, which we can relate to the idea of “value neutrality” along with the “illusion of a historical continuum with equally measured intervals.” After all, most schemes of historical periodization presuppose some idea of equal measurable intervals. Zhang deals with the issue of history in “An Interpretation,” as he comments on the following obscure passage of the Zhuang Zi:

What is outside the cosmos, the sage locates but does not discuss. What is within the cosmos, the sage discusses but does not assess. The records of the former kings in successive reigns in the Annals the sage assesses, but he does not argue over alternatives. (Zhuang Zi, 1986: 57)

Using Buddhist categories to analyze this passage, Zhang points out that one can have cognitive knowledge (biliang, anumāna) about what is outside the cosmos, but no direct perception (xianliang, pratyaksha). Therefore, with respect to the outside of the cosmos, one cannot have knowledge of discrete events or entities because in Kantian terms we have no intuition of such objects. However, with respect to things within the cosmos, the veritable scope of history, we have cognitive knowledge and we can also have a type of knowledge of discrete events.

The events on the earth (yu nei) are also unlimited. With respect to the records of the ancient past and reports about foreign lands, one can list them. However, since the human situation is different, one does not uniformly establish right and wrong. The Spring and Autumn Annals records events that happened in this land, but its time is already gone. Whether something is recorded or not depends only on custom. (Zhang, 1986 [1910]: 37)

Zhang equates “records of the ancient past and reports about foreign lands” and notes that in both cases one cannot “uniformly establish right and wrong.” While Zhang can be interpreted as expressing value neutrality, his stance actually affirms an openness to future and past others, ¹⁴ such that one does not impose one’s vision on those others who are not present. This is itself an ethical value. In other words, Zhang resists putting all of history under one narrative that hierarchically orders various moments in time. In another part of the same text he cites the following passage in which Zhuang Zi discusses Confucius in order to show that things change through time:

Confucius has been going along for sixty years and he changed sixty times. What at the beginning he used to call right, he has ended up calling wrong. So now there is no telling whether what he calls right at the moment is not in fact what he called wrong during the past fifty-nine years. (Zhang, 1986 [1910]: 16). ¹⁵

Zhang interprets this passage as expressing the importance of historical particularity. In other words, throughout history value judgments change and one cannot use the standards of one period to judge another:

If one holds on to the perspective of one time and then uses the present to negate the past or the past to negate the present (or uses a foreign country to negate one’s own country or uses one’s own country to negate other countries), this is precisely upside down (diandao, viparīta) theory. (16)

Zhang rejects ahistorical value judgments. He goes on to compare categorical callousness to the other to “using Han dynasty laws to discuss the people of the Yin or using the criteria of the Tang to select officials from the Qin” (Zhang, 1986 [1910]: 16). ¹⁶ However, the above-cited passage shows that Zhang’s conception of otherness is not just temporal but also spatial or geographical and thus meshes with Levenson’s point about nationalist particularity. Zhang mobilizes this translation of time into space in his 1907 intervention against representational government:

Today people look at Europe and Japan and note that a constitutional government has brought some stability. They conclude that since all places within the four seas are similar, China cannot be an exception. They only know that countries inhabit the same space, but they do not understand that they exist in different times (但知空间之相同而不悟时间之相异). This is a grave mistake. (Zhang, 1977a [1907]: 374)

These remarks were part of Zhang’s argument linking the feudal or fengjian system with parliamentary government and thus concluding that the constitutional system was appropriate for the West and Japan since they were historically close to feudalism. ¹⁷ In Zhang’s view, China, on the other hand, had abolished feudalism after the Qin unification in 221 bce, and so, while a parliamentary system may have been appropriate then, in the early twentieth century such a system would only disrupt existing practices of equality. Hence we see that Zhang’s belief in historical particularity does not lead to total arbitrariness or relativism with respect to political judgment, since in addition to the ethical imperative of tolerance, concrete social conditions of a particular nation-state ground arguments in a specific context.

Moreover, despite appearances, the above passage does not endorse a linear model of historical development since Zhang does not claim that Western countries will follow China’s path. In fact, following Zhang’s adoption of Yogācāra Buddhism after his jail experience, he repeatedly criticized evolutionary theory. For example, in the above-cited section of “An Interpretation,” Zhang declares that “people who follow evolution use the present to criticize the past; this is a confused theory” (Zhang, 1986 [1910]: 16). Thus Zhang seems to reject all universal theories and appears to rely on a historically specific and nation-based epistemology.

Zhang’s Grounding of Evolution in Yogācāra Concepts

However, Zhang did not believe that one could get rid of evolution merely by changing ethical principles. In the late Qing, evolutionary theory served as an overarching ethical and metaphysical worldview for reformist thinkers like Kang Youwei, Liang Qichao, and others. In a word, reformists like Kang understood Chinese history in an evolutionary framework. According to Zhang Taiyan, this ethical framework was grounded in a more fundamental movement. To some extent, the more radical aspect of Zhang’s inquiry anticipates the Heideggerian question of “what it means to be historically.” In this context, the answer cannot be limited to the fragmented world of nation-states; rather at this level, Zhang’s discourse responds to a global dynamic of modernity by developing a universal theory that transcends national boundaries.

In an essay on evolution, “On Separating the Universality and Particularity of Evolution,” published in 1906, Zhang interprets history as a movement of ālaya consciousness. In this essay, Zhang does not just criticize theorists of evolution for using the present to negate the past; rather, he attempts to ground evolution as a double movement in the Yogācāra theory of karmic seeds. The point of grounding this movement is not only descriptive; rather, Zhang claims that if the movement of evolution is produced by changes in consciousness, it is not something completely objective and we can thus potentially overcome the dynamic of history. Thus Zhang’s long excursion through Buddhist texts should be seen as an attempt to denaturalize the processes of history. Zhang makes reference to Buddhist concepts to explain the production of larger narratives and institutional embodiments that obscure the space of the other. He wants to account for the phenomena of evolution, to explain how people misrecognize it as linear progression and to overcome the logic of history.

Zhang roots the misrecognition of history as evolution in Hegel’s philosophy:

The modern theory of evolution begins with Hegel. Although he does not clearly use the term evolution, the theory of evolution burgeons amidst what he calls the development of the world, namely the development of reason. Darwin and Spencer use this theory. The former uses living things as evidence and the latter uses social phenomena as evidence. They both grasp a final telos, namely that in the end, society/the species will attain a place of ultimate beauty and pure virtue. This is where the theory of evolution begins. (Zhang, 1996b [1906]: 150)

In Zhang’s view, the problem with evolutionary theories is not so much what they describe but rather their evaluative dimension. As we have already seen, Zhang criticizes judging the past in terms of the present, but when he explains evolution with Buddhist concepts, he affirms the reality of evolution. “One cannot negate the fact of evolution, but one should not accept the effects of evolution on us” (Zhang, 1996b [1906]: 151). In other words, Zhang accepted evolution, but did so more critically than his contemporaries. We can see clues of this when he says “I do not say that the theory of evolution is wrong. In fact, what Schopenhauer calls pursuit (zhuiqiu) can be called evolution (jinhua)” (150).

The reference to Schopenhauer suggests that Zhang will create a theory of history as the result of the blind progression of the will, which is not connected to a uniform development of morality. ¹⁸ He asserts at the outset that, contra proponents of history as evolution, history or evolution is not linear but moves in two directions. As the good progresses, so does the bad; as pleasure increases, so does pain.

Next, Zhang tackles the question of how one explains this dual nature of history and his response involves a complex argument concerning the way karmic seeds produce a dual dynamic of history. Karmic seeds in ālaya consciousness produce this dynamic of history by constructing the conditions for individual and collective experience, desire and consequently, action. In Yogācāra Buddhism, seeds (zhongzi, bijas) produce phenomena and are stored in ālaya consciousness. Zhang explains this process in his “On Establishing a Religion”:

Ālaya consciousness does not begin at a given time and contains many seeds, like sorghum. In this realm of seeds, there are the phenomena of the twelve categories, color and space, the three worlds, up to the seeds in the sixth consciousness. These are all in ālaya consciousness. Because it is its own condition, ālaya consciousness does not arise, it does not fall, and it does not break. Ālaya consciousness is not like the sixth level of consciousness that arises when perceiving objective phenomena and ceases when far from objective phenomena. (Zhang, 1996a [1906]: 208)

Ālaya consciousness is its own condition, because it occurs before the split between subject and object and the seeds therein are the conditions of the possibility of cognition. ¹⁹ In other words, there is nothing outside of ālaya consciousness and with the seeds, ālaya consciousness works to form the world that appears even when or especially when people are not conscious of their function. Indeed an important goal of Buddhism is to become conscious of the mechanisms that produce our phenomenal world so that one can break free from its clutches.

Because Yogācāra Buddhists do not use ālaya consciousness to discuss societal trends and instead focus primarily on the individual level, they used both seeds and perfuming primarily to indicate cycles of birth and rebirth. However, Yogācāra Buddhists do posit a degree of collective karma, which forms the condition for the possibility of human beings’ perceptual world and communication. In Zhang’s view this collective karma is grounded in ālaya consciousness, which he claims is identical to living things. “All living things are the same as suchness (tathātā, zhenru); they are the same as ālaya consciousness. Therefore, consciousness is not limited to one’s body” (Zhang, 1996a [1906]: 207).

From this perspective, the seeds in ālaya consciousness not only propel the rebirth cycle of individuals, they also form a type of driving force of history. We can understand the effects of karma as ahistoricality related to the organic metaphor of seeds. Just like plants, karmic experiences develop from unseen roots, which stem from seeds (Lusthaus, 2002). ²⁰ These new experiences in turn plant new karmic seeds, and so a cycle of the interplay between past, present, and future continues.

In addition to the above horticultural metaphor, Yogācāra Buddhists use the olfactory metaphor of perfuming (xunxi, vāsāna). Just as a cloth acquires the scent of nearby perfume, humans’ behavior and mental activity are conditioned by karmic actions and experiences (Lusthaus, 2002: 193). In Yogācāra Buddhism, the concept of seeds and perfuming have a moral dimension since they are often used to show how the self is constantly confused and hence clings to things in the world. In fact, as Lusthaus felicitously puts it, from a Yogācāra perspective, objects in the phenomenal world are produced by seeds and these objects “are the screen on which the film of our desire is projected” (478). However, Zhang uses this moral dimension of Yogācāra to build a general theory about the nature of evolution as a double movement:

Why do morality and immorality advance together? One cause is perfuming. Sentient beings’ original natures are neither virtuous nor immoral, but through action they can become virtuous or immoral. Ālaya consciousness is a state of non-impedimentary moral neutrality (wufu wuji, aklista-avyakrta). Manas consciousness is a state of impedimentary moral neutrality (youfu wuji). With consciousness (yishi) ²¹ we began to have virtue, immorality, and neutrality. Pure neutrality is called original seeds. When good and bad are mixed, this refers to when the seeds begin to rise. All things advance according to the law of evolution; hence they cannot stay at the level of neutrality. One must mix the seeds of good and bad. The only creature that does not mix these two is the earliest amoeba. From that time on, because there are impediments (youfu), various types of good and bad slowly appear and develop. They perfume the original consciousness and become seeds. (Zhang, 1996b [1906]: 153)

In this passage, Zhang combines Yogācāra concepts with a notion of linear development so that the temporal interaction of past, present, and future seeds leads to the emergence of species and historical change. The movement from ālaya consciousness to manas, the seventh level of consciousness, and manovijñāna, the sixth level of consciousness, corresponds to a type of evolution. According to Yogācāra Buddhism, manas consciousness, the seventh level, creates a sense of self that persists even when one is not consciousness, and thus Zhang characterizes it as impedimentary moral neutrality. It contains impediments because the self, which is the root of suffering, has already emerged. The sixth consciousness, which Zhang refers to as consciousness in the above quote, is centered in the empirical world, and is enmeshed in various moral distinctions of the world. Zhang points out that the amoeba does not mix the seeds of good and bad and thus perhaps remains at the level of manas consciousness, with impediments, but no moral view.

Traditionally, Buddhist categories were used primarily with respect to humans, and so the question of the manas consciousness of an amoeba would not arise. Clearly influenced by modern discourses of science and biology, Zhang brings evolution into dialogue with Yogācāra:

From a biological perspective, the good and bad seeds are just the karmic consciousness that one’s grandfather passed down. Seeds cannot have good without bad and hence the phenomenal world they produce also cannot have good without bad. As the biological level advances and becomes good, the power of bad also increases. (Zhang, 1996b [1906]: 153)

Hence by the time human beings emerge in natural history, the impediments of manas consciousness led to moral consciousness. In Yogācāra theory, the impediments associated with manas consciousness refer to the four perspectives (sijian): the view of the self (youshen jian); attachment to extremes; erroneous views about cause and effect (xiejian); and attachment to views (jian qu jian) (Muller, n.d.). Although these are characterized as morally neutral, the third term (xiejian, 邪見) can also be translated as an “evil perspective,” and hence failing to understand causality seems to have ethical consequences. From a Buddhist perspective, when one does not understand that things are caused through dependent co-origination, one tends to conceive of the self as independent and become attached to things. Hence ignorance of causality initiates a karmic cycle, which would also motivate evil.

Zhang claims that it is precisely because people are attached to their selves that morality and immorality or good and bad advance together: “The reason for this dual advancing is self-conceit (woman xin, asmi-mana). This arises when manas consciousness grasps ālaya consciousness as a self and does not stop thinking about it. At this point, the four minds (xin) arise” (Zhang, 1996b [1906]: 153). ²² The four minds (sixin) refers to ignorance about the self (wochi, atma-moha), ego belief (wojian, atman), self-conceit (woman xin, asmi-mana), and love of the self (woai, atma-sneha). However, Zhang focuses on the self’s will to win (haosheng xin), which he derives from self-conceit. He further separates the will to win into a desire that stems from some goal and a desire that is without a goal. In the former, people “seek to gain concrete objects to fulfill the five desires and to realize cravings for property, fame and so on” (153). Zhang compares the latter, namely the will to win without relation to material gain, to crickets and chickens fighting or people wanting to win in chess.

Zhang’s discussion of the will to win is part of a larger argument about how as desires are further removed from their immediate objects, people become capable of greater pleasure and pain. Notice that Zhang’s discussion follows a movement away from use values to exchange value and abstract goods, such as money. In other words, according to Zhang, people move increasingly from enjoying concrete things to enjoying the means to things, such as money, or even abstract things, such as fame.

Things such as land, money, a high post, and a good salary cannot be directly enjoyed, but the means to enjoyment must begin here. After one has these one can fulfill the desire for food, warmth, and marriage. When one begins to enjoy these things [i.e., money, etc.], it is indirect as a means to fulfill the desire for food, warmth, and marriage. But in the end, one pursues these things as bearers of happiness and may even sacrifice food, warmth, and marriage because of these things. Or even more seriously, one may take fame as happiness and because of this sacrifice land, money, a high official post, and good salary. Can animals seek this kind of happiness? (Zhang, 1996b [1906]: 152)

Zhang’s comments foreshadow his critique of money as trickery in his “On the Five Negations,” and of societal pressure in a 1908 essay, “On the Four Confusions.” The two points are interrelated since both refer to a process of abstraction and mediation that separates human communities from animals. In other words, human beings developed the capacity to delink themselves from an immediate link in the food chain and thereby also the ability to systematically exploit their fellow humans and the animal world. ²³

Zhang’s discussion of the “will to win” implies a striving for social or abstract objects, which entails a social mediation unique to the human species. Drawing on an early section of this article, one could argue that Zhang takes the distinction between capitalist and pre-capitalist forms of mediation as a distinction between humans and animals. In Zhang’s view, the basic misrecognitions of ālaya consciousness, which lead to the will to win and attachment to the self, also produce related institutional developments that are two-sided, both beneficial and detrimental.

Zhang refers to this double-edged logic of history when he criticizes statism. In short, he clearly believes that as humans develop to form states, their capacity to do both good and bad increases. In his essay “On the Five Negations,” Zhang explains the detrimental effects of the state by quoting the Jin dynasty Daoist Bao Sheng:

When common people fight, they . . . cannot combine the power of others and they cannot use other people’s authority. How can one compare this to the anger of kings who send the army out and make their soldiers march? They use people with no enemy and attack innocent countries. This results in more than 10,000 corpses and one cannot count the amount of blood that is shed and makes the fields red. (Zhang, 1996c [1907]: 258–59; cf. Baopuzi, 1991: 547)

In both Zhang’s essay on evolution and his “On the Five Negations” he stresses that although people only focus on the positive aspects of political development, with the birth of the state and the advancement of technology, such as the invention of firearms, human beings’ potential for causing harm has greatly surpassed that of their forebears. Political organization can be used for what one might call positive things such as procuring collective goods, such as water. However, political organization also makes possible a new type of military strategy which uses people who have no enmity against other states. Again when making this point, Zhang shifts between natural-biological and political perspectives. That is, the capacity for bad increases both with the evolution from animals to humans and with the movement from primitive forms of community to more complex forms of political organization, such as the state.

Drawing on the distinction between the concrete and abstract will to win, Zhang argues that as life evolves, sentient beings’ capacity for harm, pleasure, and pain increases since their lives are more mediated by abstraction. Because Zhang believes that the problem occurs deeper than on the level of political institutions, he criticizes some of his contemporaries’ perspectives. In the following passage, Zhang makes an oblique reference to Kang Youwei’s “Great Community” and the anarchists’ utopia, and points to a deeper cause of political problems:

Even if the world were united and people did not use weapons, the use of knowledge and strategy for attack would still be greater than before. Why? Killing someone with a blade is not as good as killing with strategy. This becomes a situation where “when we deal with other people, everyday we use our minds to attack one another.” In this way they chase their own kind and the number of people who are disheartened, sad, and angered to the point of death is greater than in battles and this mind is crueler than war. This definitely does not happen with leopards and tigers, it only occurs with humans. (Zhang, 1996b [1906]: 151)

In this thought experiment, Zhang follows Kang Youwei’s and the anarchists’ logic and conjectures that life has evolved to the realm of the Great Community beyond the state. He claims that if such a realm is an evolution of previous spheres of being, it will necessarily increase people’s will to win and their psychological capacity to inflict and suffer harm. In Zhang’s view, as life evolves to a human level, people become capable of offending and even killing each other with their minds. He thus takes literally Zhuang Zi’s line about using our “minds to attack one another” (ri yi xin dou, 日以心斗) (Zhuang Zi, 1998: 26). ²⁴ Moreover, by invoking the second aspect of the will to win, namely the will to win without a goal, he stresses that such a will is not reducible to any object or material condition. It is not dependent on inequality or scarcity, but emerges from and increases with the sedimentation of temporal development or of history itself.

By linking temporal development to karmic seeds, Zhang stresses that the two-track development of both good and bad, from biological, political, and psychological perspectives, will only continue to become more intense. In this way, he argues against people, such as Kang Youwei, who believe that if one lets evolution run its course, the good will eventually prevail. Zhang contends that “it is better to leave this world early and seek enlightenment, outside of sight, hearing, words and thought and save all living things and negate them (miedu zhi, 灭度之)” (Zhang, 1986 [1906]: 393). The term miedu foreshadows Zhang’s argument in “On the Five Negations,” since it refers to nirvana, the cessation of suffering and the act of negation.

This forms an essential part of Zhang’s argument that in order to solve the problems associated with contemporary institutions, such as the state, one cannot simply attack the institutions themselves; rather, one needs to grasp something more fundamental. One must stop the primordial dynamic related to karmic seeds, the will to win, and attachment to the self. Echoing Nietzsche, Zhang argues that if one does not attack karmic processes at the root, history can be nothing other than an eternal recurrence of the same.

In his “On the Five Negations,” the first two negations, no state and no groups, target political life at what he would call a superficial level, while the last three negations, no-self, no-sentient beings, and no-world, aim to eradicate the root of history. Zhang explains the problem when discussing the importance of negating all sentient beings:

From extremely small things such as monella they mutually produce one another until the human race emerges. People call this evolution, but it is actually suchness amidst the deluded transmigration of life and death (liuzhuan zhenru). In short, if one sentient being still exists, one cannot break from the human race. The newly born thing will slowly evolve and become a human being and gradually it will be completely corrupted and then today’s society and state will arise again. Therefore, the Buddha did not rest in nirvana; he was born in the three evil realms [hell, demons, and animals] and taught the people there to understand no-self and to stop the self from arising again. (Zhang, 1996c [1907]: 259)

There is a logic among sentient beings that forces them to constantly follow the same patterns of oppression and domination. We can find traces of Zhang’s analysis of the causes of evolution in his pre-Buddhist essay “On Bacteria,” which he wrote in 1899. In that essay, he explained that organisms evolve due to their own mental effort, which eventually causes changes in their species. In “On the Five Negations,” Zhang continues this line of argument with concepts such as self-love and the will to win, which we can interpret as not only having an effect on this world, but on the evolution of the species after reincarnation. However, after Zhang’s jail experience and his immersion in Buddhist texts, he couches all of this in terms of karma, seeds, and other Buddhist concepts and this puts the emphasis on larger processes rather than on the individual will. Consequently, while in “On Bacteria” Zhang looks at the mental effort to change one’s species as a positive thing and encourages it, in “On the Five Negations” the will to evolve is a result of karmic sediments and thus is beyond one’s control; the process is governed by ignorance. Moreover, rather than being part of the solution, the will to win is part of the problem and evolution itself must become the object of negation.

At this point we can return to the way Zhang opposes his position on evolution specifically to Hegel’s. In “On the Five Negations,” Zhang discusses Hegel’s idea that history should be understood as the evolution of Spirit and counterposes his own idea of history as the blind activity of karmic seeds:

Some steal Hegel’s theory of being, non-being, and becoming and believe that the universe emerged because of a goal and hence only things that accord with this goal are correct. If we take the universe not to have any knowledge/consciousness, then there is originally no goal. If we take the universe to have knowledge/consciousness, then it is as if this peaceful and happy self suddenly created the myriad things to bite into itself. It is as if it eats without stop and in the end the harms of a parasitic worm emerge and so the universe repents [creating]. Sometimes one thinks of how one can use laxatives such as lilac daphne and croton to get rid of these things. ²⁵ So the goal of the universe is perhaps precisely this repentance about its “becoming.” How can one be happy about “becoming?” The person who manages the world must be the person who repents about the universe. This person should not be the one who floats around with the universe. If one speaks from the perspective of humans limited by their physical form, then both purity and contamination stem from one’s will. What use is it to make loyalty and filiality the goals of the universe? If one speaks from the perspective outside of form and matter, then the universe originally does not exist, so how can there be a goal? (Zhang, 1996c [1907]: 264)

In this passage, Zhang separates the perspective of suchness, according to which all phenomena are empty and thus without movement or evolution, and the mundane perspective, according to which one must account for the phenomena of history and becoming. But because Zhang looks at history as produced by blind karma, rather than as the triumphant march of rational spirit, he understands historical becoming as the tragic torment of deluded impulses. It is as if the motor of history is an alien parasite that the universe must try to purge through laxatives. However, given that the parasite is created by human will, selves, and actions, the only laxative that would work is negation of the self and all the contents of the world or the realization of the world’s original emptiness. ²⁶

From this perspective, we can see that both Hegel and Zhang seek an end of history. However, while Hegel conceives of the end of history as the final point of a teleological process in which Spirit realizes its goal, Zhang thinks of the end of history as the negation of the processes that produce history. The distinction lies also in a different conception of the beginning of history and time. In Hegel’s view, Spirit falls into history and thus externalizes itself in time. Zhang asks about how one should understand this production of time and history. For both Hegel and Zhang there is in a sense no outside of this process of history. Hegel points out that absolute knowing is precisely the process of Spirit’s self-knowledge in history, and in Zhang’s view, historical evolution is actually “suchness amidst the deluded transmigration of life and death (liuzhuan zhenru)” (Zhang, 1996c [1907]: 259).

But Zhang asks the natural question, why does spirit fall into history and “bite into itself” if it is perfect? Toward the end of Being and Time, Heidegger made a similar remark with respect to Hegel’s idea of spirit falling into time: “It remains obscure what indeed is signified ontologically by this ‘falling’ or by the ‘actualizing’ of a spirit which has power over time and really ‘is’ [seienden] outside of it” (Heidegger, 1962 [1929]: 485). However, Heidegger replaces Hegel’s paradigm with an equally ambiguous formulation: “Spirit does not fall into time; but factical existence ‘falls’ as falling [verfallende] from primordial authentic temporality” (485). Here again one could ask why factical existence falls. In other words, while Heidegger criticizes Hegel for producing a dichotomy between temporal and eternal realms, his own perspective describes but does not really explain the emergence of so-called fallen or everyday temporality and the interpretations of beings as subject and object. For Zhang the foundation of history, time, and evolution is ignorance and the karmic seeds in ālaya consciousness. In other words, in Zhang’s view, history, time, and evolution are the misrecognition of ālaya consciousness that human beings always already are. ²⁷ Hence, while Hegel advocates a type of self-realization, Zhang stresses self-negation and the end of history as the negation of history. This of course becomes the philosophical ground for their differing views about the institutions of modernity, such as the state.

Conclusion

As we have seen, Zhang uses Buddhism to construct a twofold theory of history. On the one hand, he considers Yogācāra as modern and valuable for its respect for temporal and spatial otherness and for the importance it places on objectivity in history. When speaking of objectivity, Zhang invokes the world of abstract time along with a scientific gaze, which entails a world of subjects and objects. In this realm, he tries to carve a space for the other through defining the limits on the scope of values. On the other hand, he realizes that the move to put the other into an evolutionary narrative is grounded in a deeper process. Zhang attempts to explain the movement of history, and indeed the production of the world, using Yogācāra concepts and finally seeks the negation of the world and history.

Zhang’s critique of history is, however, not adequate to its object. This brings us back to the problem of history in Marx’s eyes. Unlike Hegel, Marx does not posit a transhistorical subject of history, but rather looks at the movement of modern history as linked to the intrinsic dynamic of capital. Thus capital is the subject of history and Marx’s aim, rather than the realization of this subject, is its negation. German idealists such as Hegel put forth an optimistic narrative of history based on transposing the historically specific categories of capitalism to the whole of history. Beginning with Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, there was a countercurrent to Hegelian optimism, which Zhang followed in developing a narrative of blind compulsion. Zhang considers Hegel’s Spirit as representing an actual phenomenon and thus he clearly states that he does not simply deny the “fact of evolution.” Zhang tries to ground the phenomena of evolution in a fundamental dynamic linked to human action and he constructs a narrative of evolution based on the karmic ignorance of all things in the world. Then he attempts to negate this dynamic and concludes that this would involve negating existence and living things themselves. Thus, like Schopenhauer, Zhang aimed to overcome the blind compulsion associated with capitalist modernity and again like Schopenhauer, he sees such compulsion as emerging from an ontological ground.

At a practical level, Zhang’s project won few followers and he was often ridiculed by his contemporary revolutionaries. One could then perhaps conclude that his critique of capitalist modernity was a failure. However, looking back at the history of the twentieth-century revolutions, perhaps it is precisely Zhang’s pessimistic vision of modernity and his totalizing critique of history that were missing. In other words, most so-called May Fourth intellectuals were wedded to an evolutionary vision of history and Marxist versions of such a history involved an evolution progressing in specific stages. Blinded by this framework, Chinese Marxists were unable to see that the ideas they extolled, including linear time, were inextricably linked to the mode of production that they hoped to overthrow. Although Zhang did not grasp capitalism as the ground of evolutionary history, using Buddhist categories he proposed a totalizing critique of evolution that is both subjective and objective. Indeed, human practice as represented by ālaya consciousness constitutes both the subjective and objective world and thus Zhang’s work points to the fundamental insight that transforming our world involves a transformation of both subjectivity and objectivity. Such a fundamental critique of evolutionary thinking is perhaps the starting point toward imagining a different future.