Overview

The Buddhist monk Tanxu surmounted extraordinary obstacles--poverty, wars, famine, and foreign occupation--to become one of the most prominent monks in China, founding numerous temples and schools and attracting crowds of students and disciples wherever he went. Heart of Buddha, Heart of China traces Tanxu's journey from his birth in 1875 to his death in 1963. Through Tanxu's life we come to know one of the most turbulent periods in Chinese history as it moved from empire to republic. James Carter draws on archives and interviews to provide a book that is part travelogue, part history, and part biography.

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Jay Carter's new book follows the life of one man as a way of opening a window into the lived history of twentieth-century China. Heart of Buddha, Heart of China: The Life of Tanxu, a Twentieth-Century Monk is less a traditional biography than a life of an emergent modern nation as told through the experiences of a single individual whose relationships embodied the history of that nation in flesh, bones, and blood... Carter's own travels took him from the Bronx (to meet with a Dharma heir disciple of the monk) through more than a dozen Chinese cities, taking Tanxu's own memoir and itinerary as guidebook and route-map. The resulting book is a beautifully written, historiographically self-reflexive, and humane account of the lived history of modern China. * New Books in East Asian Studies *

Heart of Buddha, Heart of China enriches our understanding of Chinese nationalism and brings the great events and issues of the day into immediate focus through the lens of an individual life. . . . teachers who may be considering offering a course on modern Chinese religion, or specifically Buddhism, will find Heart of Buddha, Heart of China a useful book with which to set the stage, as the thorough contextualization provides an accessible introduction both to the particularities of Chinese religious culture and to the challenges it faced in the twentieth century. --H-Net Reviews Heart of Buddha, Heart of China is a gracefully written and deeply humane book, which weaves together the life story of a protean individual and the tale of a nation undergoing profound transformations. This is one of those rare books that I'll look forward to assigning to students and will also encourage friends about to travel to China to read--especially if their itinerary takes them through one or more of the various cities in which Tanxu lived and worked. --Jeffrey Wasserstrom, author of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know James Carter's imaginative new book is a journey within a journey: the monk Tanxu's, to find a place for Buddhism in the war-torn chaos of modern China; and the author's, to find the echoes of the past in China's present. Carter's candid and evocative treatment of Tanxu's life reveals as much about the passions that drive the historian's research as it does about religion in modern China. --Stephen R. Platt, Associate Professor of History, The University of Massachusetts at Amherst In this ingeniously structured book, James Carter uses the Buddhist monk Tanxu (1875-1963) as a guide to China's travails across one of the most turbulent periods in its history. Carter shows us how Tanxu's personal quests for enlightenment intersected with his knowledge of life amongst foreigners, his experiences in five separate wars, and h

Author Information

James Carter is Professor of History at Saint Joseph's University, in Philadelphia. He has lived and traveled widely in China, is the author of several books and articles on modern China, and is the editor of the journal Twentieth-Century China. He is also past president of the Historical Society for Twentieth-Century China.

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