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Hualin International Journal of Buddhist Studies 8.1 (2025): 33–60; https://dx.doi.org/10.15239/hijbs.08.01.02
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Asia-European Exchanges Mediated through Buddhism, Buddhism and Medicine: New Perspectives)
From Dharma Talk to Religious Sentiment: Chinese Buddhist Encounters with the Religious Psychology of Friedrich Schleiermacher and Ludwig Feuerbach, 1912–1949
Richard ELLGUTH
Free University of Berlin
Richard.Ellguth@fu-berlin.de
Abstract: In Republican China (1912–1949), many Buddhist authors began to use terms and concepts that were previously unknown in Chinese Buddhist texts. In order to explain Buddhist ideas and doctrines, but also religious phenomena in general, they often drew on Western academic sources. A particular field of research that they were interested in was religious psychology. This discipline proposed an inward perspective on religion and aimed to explain religious phenomena by investigating processes of the mind, the consciousness, or the psyche. While the empirical strands of religious psychology did not yet receive any strong response from Chinese Buddhists during that period, they were interested in its basic philosophical assumptions that had been formulated in the nineteenth century. This paper aims to show that they appropriated concepts developed by the German philosophers Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) and Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872). Both thinkers had put forward definitions of religion that were critical of a ‘monotheist assumption’ and could easily be applied to Buddhism. As a result, these approaches offered Buddhists new ways to reformulate their own teaching, contextualise it in the general context of religions, and argue against Christianity.
Keywords: religious psychology, Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768– 1834), Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872), Chinese Buddhist journals, Republican China (1912–1949)
About the Author: Richard Ellguth is a postdoc at the Free University of Berlin. He has received a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree in Chinese studies at Leipzig University. He is interested in religions in China from a perspective of global intellectual history with a particular focus on Chinese Buddhism. His recently defended doctoral dissertation is called ‘The Buddha in Plain Words: Chinese Buddhist Engagements with Western Religious Thought and the Transformation of Buddhist Language, 1912-1949’. In his new project, he investigates Chinese religious diasporas in Germany and their impact on both Chinese and German foreign policy.
This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
