“candid and evocative…reveals as much about the passions that drive the historian's research as it does about religion in modern China."
—Stephen R. Platt
Order:
Heart of Buddha, Heart of China
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.
Praise
“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, award-winning author of Autumn in the Heavenly Kingdom and Imperial Twilight
“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 his vision that the construction of temples offered China an opportunity for spiritual and national regeneration." — Jonathan Spence, Yale University, author of The Search for Modern China
“An engaging and detailed description of the political, cultural, and social milieu in which Tanxu lived...Carter is a wonderful storyteller...a welcomed addition to scholarship on modern Buddhism, Chinese Republican-era historiography, and Chinese religions..”
— Journal of Religion
“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”
“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.
— Carla Nappi, University of Pittsburgh