SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Education reforms have played a key role in the turning points of Chinese history. Slogans like jiaoyu jiuguo 教育救國 became well-known when the first Republic succeeded the Empire, at the dawn of the Mao era, and with Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s. China used to base her reinvention on education reforms, and the parallel reconstructions of Chinese Buddhism had been also partly based on reforms of the education system for the Sangha. <br/>This paper draws parallels between the intellectual and conceptual foundations of the larger reforms in Chinese schooling and those at the basis of the reforms in Buddhist education that occurred from the end of the nineteenth-century and during the early Republican period. This study also analyzes the main individuals, especially the monk Taixu (1890-1947), who changed the history of Chinese Buddhist educational programs and policies within the ideological and political context of the early twentieth-century.<br/>This study shows why and how, in crucial historical contexts when China had to reinvent itself without deleting the fundamental value of its past, education projects in the secular and religious spheres undertook similar paths and passed through like patterns in terms of conceptual reforms, leading figures and institutional reconstruction. My research thus argues the interrelations between politics, government law, social history and Buddhist educational policies in the period that goes from the end of the nineteenth century to the mid of the twentieth-century. <br/>