Tai Xu’s Reflections On Modern Chinese Thougth Process

China Modern Buddhism was revitalized and expanded when China was forced to open the door by foreign countries and Chinese traditional culture is fiercely influenced by the Western modern culture. At the time that modern China was facing an unprecedented national crisis and an impact of Western pluralistic politics, religion, science and technology, and cultural ideology, the Chinese society was facing "no big change for three thousands years". Therefore, the traditional society was forced to go into the modern world and the traditional culture was facing severe problems of modern transformation. In this context, in the late Qing Dynasty there was a revival and innovation of Buddhism, a group of Buddhist monks incorporated innovative ideas into Buddhism and committed to integration of Buddhism and modern spirit. Tai Xu(1889-1947) as one of the most outstanding practitioners of Buddhism took Buddhist teachings and doctrines as the center. On the one hand, he had a profound research and reflection of scientism, rationalism, envolutionism, realism and liberalism; on the other hand, he had a profound consideration on the modern Confucian process and the direction of traditional Chinese cultural development. He proposed to build new Buddhist culture to adapt to modern culture, promoted the Buddhist idea of "life Buddhism" and attempted to expand Buddhist way to rescue the nation. His reflection achievement of Chinese modern thought process is the idea of "new Buddhist", he interpreted his idea with two aspects: "new Buddhist center" and "new Buddhist base". The former was that Buddhist was taken as center for all new economic, politic, education, culture, science and philosophy; the latter is based on stream of Buddhism for two thousand years, and on this basis, Buddhists from different time and region were applied to adopt to modern China and new Buddhist.During Tai Xu’s reflection of the process of modern China, he was sensitive to capture some modern thoughts which had a far-reaching impact on the future thoughts development and he had made a lot of responses and treatments based on the Buddhist moral principles and methods, which showed his practice on "life Buddhism", but also ignored by those who promote "life Buddhism".