Zhang Binglin

Zhang Binglin, also known by his art name Zhang Taiyan, was a Chinese philologist, textual critic, philosopher, and revolutionary.
His philological works include Wen Shi, the first systematic work of Chinese etymology. He also made contributions to historical Chinese phonology, proposing that "the niang and ri initials come from the ni initial ". He developed a system of shorthand based on the seal script, called jiyin zimu, later adopted as the basis of zhuyin. Though innovative in many ways, he was skeptical of new archaeological findings, regarding the oracle bones as forgery.
An activist as well as a scholar, he produced many political works. Because of his outspoken character, he was jailed for three years by the Qing Empire and put under house arrest for another three by Yuan Shikai.

Life

Zhang was born with the given name Xuecheng in Yuhang, Zhejiang to a scholarly family. In 1901, to demonstrate his hatred of the Manchu rulers of the Qing state, he changed his name to ‘Taiyan’ after two scholars who had resisted the Qing takeover 250 years before: ‘Tai’ came from Taichong, the pen name of Huang Zongxi, and ‘Yan’ from Gu Yanwu.
When he was 23, he began to study under the great philologist Yu Yue, immersing himself in the Chinese classics for seven years.
After the First Sino-Japanese War, he went to Shanghai, becoming a member of the Society for National Strengthening and writing for a number of newspapers, including Liang Qichao's Shi Wu Bao. In September 1898, after the failure of the Wuxu Reform, Zhang escaped to Taiwan with the help of a Japanese friend and worked as a reporter for and wrote for The China Discussion produced in Japan by Liang Qichao.
In May of the following year, Zhang went to Japan and was introduced to Sun Yat-sen by Liang Qichao. He returned to China two months later to be a reporter for the Shanghai-based Yadong Shibao. His most important political work, Qiu Shu was published in 1900–1 and then in a substantially revised edition in 1904.
In 1901, under the threat of arrest from the Qing Empire, Zhang taught at Soochow University for a year before he escaped to Japan for several months. Upon return, he was arrested and jailed for three years until June 1906. He began to study the Buddhist scriptures during his time in jail.
After his release, Zhang went to Japan to join Tongmeng Hui and became the chief editor of the newspaper Min Bao which strongly criticized the Qing Empire's corruption. There, he also lectured on the Chinese classics and philology for overseas Chinese students. His students in Japan include Lu Xun, Zhou Zuoren and Qian Xuantong. His most important student was Huang Kan. In 1908, Min Bao was banned by the Japanese government. This caused Zhang to focus on his philological research. He coined the phrase "Zhonghua Minguo" which became the Chinese name of the Republic of China.
Because of an ideological conflict with Sun Yat-sen and his Three Principles of the People, Zhang established the Tokyo branch of Guangfu Hui in February 1909.
After the Wuchang Uprising, Zhang returned to China to establish the Republic of China Alliance and chief-edit the Dagonghe Ribao.
After Yuan Shikai became the President of the Republic of China in 1913, Zhang was his high-ranking advisor for a few months until the assassination of Song Jiaoren. After criticizing Yuan for possible responsibility of the assassination, Zhang was put under house arrest, in Beijing's Longquan Temple, until Yuan's death in 1916. After release, Zhang was appointed Minister of the Guangzhou Generalissimo in June 1917.
In 1924, Zhang left the Kuomintang, entitled himself a loyalist to the Republic of China, and became critical of Chiang Kai-shek. Zhang established the National Studies Society in Suzhou in 1934 and chief-edited the magazine Zhi Yan.
He died two years later at 67 and was buried in a state funeral. On April 3, 1955, the People's Republic of China moved his coffin from Suzhou to Nanping Mountain, Hangzhou. The People's Republic established a museum devoted to him beside the West Lake.
He had three daughters with his first wife. With Cai Yuanpei as witness, he married again in 1913, with Tang Guoli, an early Chinese feminist. They had two sons, Zhang Dao and Zhang Qi.

Philosophical beginnings

Originally, Zhang Binglin was firmly rooted in "Old Text" philology, which emphasized "the diversity of China's intellectual heritage led to a serious erosion of the paramount position of Confucius as upheld by the unwavering guardians of orthodoxy". Zhang shared the views of his contemporary, Liu Yiqing, that the Confucian classics should be read as history, not sacred scripture. However, he firmly rejected Liu's suggestion to put Chinese intellectual heritage into the matrix of Western philosophy. Joachim Kurtz writes:

Zhang Binglin did not oppose radical reconceptualizations per se but only those that uncritically mirrored European taxonomies. Rather than squeezing ancient Chinese texts and concepts into a Western-derived disciplinary corset, Zhang suggested expanding existing categories in such a way as to make space for the new knowledge that the nation, as he readily agreed, so desperately needed.

Zhang replaced conventional sense of mingjia with a new understanding—the methodology of debate similar to European logic and Buddhist dialectic.
Zhang's thoughts on religion went through multiple phases. Originally, in his pre-imprisonment days, he was highly critical of religion, and wrote several essays that criticized religious concepts: "Looking at Heaven", "The Truth about Confucianism", and "On Bacteria". In these essays, he emphasized that the scientific world could be reconciled with classical Chinese philosophy. However, his thoughts on religion significantly changed following his imprisonment.

Imprisonment (1903–1906)

Zhang's interest and studies in Buddhism only became serious during the three years he spent in prison for "publishing anti-Manchu propaganda and insulting the Qing emperor as a 'buffoon' in 1903". During this time, he read the Yogacara-bhumi, the basic texts of Weishi "Consciousness Only" school, and the foundational work of Chinese Buddhist logic. These texts were given to him by members of the Chinese Society of Education. He later claimed that "it was only through reciting and meditating on these sutras that he was able to get through his difficult jail experience". His experiences with Buddhist philosophical texts gave him a framework to reassess the significance of his pain and suffering and view it in a different light. In 1906, after he was released from prison, Zhang went to Japan to edit The People's Journal and developed a new philosophical framework that critiqued the dominant intellectual trend of modernization theory.
He emerged from jail as devout Yogacarin. His attitude towards religion—namely Buddhism—changed after his time spent in prison. This is made apparent in "Zhang Taiyan's Notes on Reading Buddhist Texts", in which he is concerned with the concepts of "freedom, constraints, sadness, and happiness". After 1906, Buddhist terms became more prevalent in his writing, especially in his interpretation of Zhuangzi's "Discourse on Making Things Equal".

Time in Japan (1906–1910)

Zhang was further exposed to Yogacara Buddhism during his time in Japan, when he was actively involved in nationalist, anti-Manchu politics. During his time there, he edited the Tokyo-based The People's Journal, where he first expressed a "Buddhist voice". While he was in Japan, he joined Tong Meng Hui, a party that was primarily made up of anti-Manchu exiles seeking the cultural and political regeneration of China.
His 1907 text The Five Negations denounced how European economies "exhaust their own enterprises" and "extinguish the fertility of the land."
Upon his return to China, Zhang worked on the commission "convened by the new Nationalist government's Ministry of Education in 1913 to establish a national language and helped develop the Chinese phonetic symbol system still used today in Taiwan, among other places."
The terminology used by Zhang is not common in earlier Chinese philosophical discussions of symbol, language, and the sacred—before the 20th century, Chinese philosophical texts were in classical Chinese, which uses monosyllabic style. The vernacular began to be more commonly used after the May 4th Movement in 1919. Compound words like yuyen were rarely used in pre-20th-century Chinese writings. Zhang was exposed to these linguistic approaches during his time in Japan following his imprisonment.

Yogacara and Zhang

Zhang’s Buddhist–Daoist approach to history

In a time when most Chinese intellectuals favored modernization ideologies and endorsed history as a progressive movement, Zhang Taiyan drew on Buddhism and Daoism to express his critiques. Social and intellectual life during the Qing dynasty was primarily influenced by "widely circulating discourses of modern philosophy and the concrete forces of the global capitalist system of nation-states". Following a string of defeats in the late 19th century, Chinese intellectuals began to focus on how China could be improved in order to compete in the global capitalist system. This marked a clear departure from previous Chinese thought, which had primarily focused on the teachings of traditional classical Chinese texts. This was thought to effectively prepare bureaucrats for their positions in the imperial government. However, a national crisis—the loss of several armed conflicts—spurred Chinese philosophers towards modernization thinking. Zhang was particularly revolutionary, as he "mobilized Buddhism for politics" and combined elements of Yogacara Buddhist thought with concepts he had developed himself in his pre-revolutionary years.
Zhang understood the conditions of possibility as described by Immanuel Kant in Buddhist terms, namely, "as the karmic fluctuations of the seeds in alaya consciousness ".
He viewed history as an "unconscious process of drives". The storehouse consciousness, which is defined as the highest level of consciousness, contains seeds that initiate historical process. He believed that "karmic experiences develop from unseen roots, which stem from seeds. As we act in these experiences, we unconsciously plant new karmic seeds and so a cycle of the interplay between past, present and future continues". In his essay On Separating the Universal and Particular in Evolution, Zhang utilizes this framework to explain Hegel's philosophy of history. What Hegel describes as "a triumphant march of spirit" is actually "a degenerative disaster created by karmic seeds" according to Zhang.