[
    {
        "id": 205124,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1966",
        "page_number": 80,
        "title": "RAS-1966",
        "content_text": "FOREIGN RELATIONS OF BUDDHISM\n\n75\n\nanti-Western anti-Christian united front among the people of the East. Visits were exchanged with Buddhists in Thailand, China, and India. In 1904 Dr. Inoue Entyu, after returning from a trip to India, proposed that the Japanese should establish a great Confucian-Buddhist university that would serve the whole Buddhist world and maintain branches in Korea, China, and Mongolia.\n\nOther possibilities for work in China were opened that very year. The Ch'ing government had been encouraging local officials to confiscate monastic property and use it for the establishment of modern schools. Chinese monks were looking desperately for a way to save their property. At this juncture a Japanese priest named Mizuno Baigyo advised them to start schools of their own in order to \"get the jump\" on the confiscators. He and other Japanese also suggested that protection might be obtained by applying to the headquarters of the Higashi Honganji sect in Japan; and indeed, the latter was pleased to accept the affiliation of some thirty-five monasteries in Chekiang province towards the end of 1904.5 It sent its representatives to protect them. A test case soon arose. Part of one Hangchow monastery was about to be turned into a technical school. On January 10, 1905, with a blaze of firecrackers, a large wooden plaque was installed over its front gate, reading: \"General place of worship of the Imperial Japanese Shinshu-Honganji sect.\"\n\nThis caused deep consternation among literati and officials throughout the province. The governor appealed, without success, to the Japanese Consul. The Japanese priests stood pat on their passports. Peking wrung its hands, but said that the Japanese would have to be respected. All that the local officials accomplished was the removal of the plaque; Japanese protection remained in force.\n\nThis was the signal for general resistance by the monasteries of neighboring provinces against the confiscation of their property. In Fukien and Kwangtung they began to place themselves under Japanese protection. Such immunity was the latter believed to confer that in Canton, on February 26, 1905, a school established on monastery land was completely destroyed by a group of infuriated Buddhists. The newspaper Shen-pao castigated the insolence of Chinese monks in accepting Japanese protection",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1966.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/bz60k0811",
        "rank": 0
    },
    {
        "id": 205126,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1966",
        "page_number": 82,
        "title": "RAS-1966",
        "content_text": "FOREIGN RELATIONS OF BUDDHISM\n\n77\n\nthem and in Kyoto they were welcomed by a crowd of ten thousand persons. Their host both at the working sessions and on the tour was Mizuno Baigyo, the same monk who had helped Chinese monasteries resist confiscation in 1904. \"It was chiefly through his good offices that the great conference in Tokyo was brought into being.\" Among those present was E. Kimura, Director of the Asiatic Bureau in the Foreign Ministry, which had apparently been at work in the background. Of course many of the Japanese who attended may have felt that they were using government help for their good purposes and would have denied that government was using them. Similarly the Chinese participants, although they were aware of the threat of Japanese militarism, probably felt that by taking part in the conference they had more to gain for their religion than to lose for their country. They saw the hope not only of a central role in the world Buddhist movement, but also of higher status for Buddhism at home, where a Japanese connection would impress their adversaries. Thus three years later, when the Japanese Buddhologist, Tokiwa Daijo, toured the monasteries of southeast China, he met Yüan-ying, who was soon to set up the Chinese Buddhist Association (Shanghai 1929) in an effort to protect monastery property. Yüan-ying told Tokiwa that his visit had given him courage and that from then on one of the arguments he would use to win over public opinion for the protection of Buddhism was the existence of a Department of Buddhist Studies at Japanese Imperial University. Japan was a country that had successfully modernized, yet it paid attention to Buddhism.10\n\nThis did not mean that the Japanese form of Buddhism was uncritically regarded in China. When T'ai-hsü was addressing the East Asian Buddhist Conference in 1925, he said quite frankly that Japanese monks were too sectarian and nationalistic; too much tainted by modernism and, compared to monks in China, less devout in their religious life and unable to undergo austerities. So strongly did T'ai-hsü feel about this that when he returned from the conference he decided that the Chinese sangha could not model itself upon its counterpart in Japan, since monks there married and ate meat.11 For their part, the Japanese thought that Chinese Buddhists were ignorant of modern critical methods and were content to take a traditional approach to Buddhist texts.12",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1966.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/bz60k0811",
        "rank": 0
    }
]