‧46‧聖嚴研究 Xian, this research will make a comparative study between the travel literature works of Master Sheng Yen and Fa Xian’s Fo- The Dharma Through guo-ji. This paper will be divided into two parts, the first part will a Glass Darkly: make an observation and analysis on the dialogue which occurred between Master Sheng Yen and Fa Xian through their writing and On the Study of Modern Chinese will deal with the following subjects: how the dialogue between Buddhism Through Protestant two great monks were made, the way the dialogue carried on, and * the contents of the dialogue. The second part of this paper will Missionary Sources focus on the dialectic speeches which appeared in many places of the books, including: see / not to see, sthiti / abolish, past / future. These dialectic dialogues made Master Sheng Yen’s traveling Gregory Adam Scott Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Religion, Columbia University writings not only special in having his own characteristic but also made his traveling writings of great importance and deep meanings in the history of Chinese Buddhist literature. ▎Abstract KEYWORDS： Master Sheng Yen, travel literature, Fa Xian, Fo- European-language scholarship on Buddhism in nineteenth— guo-ji and early twentieth—century China has traditionally relied heavily on sources originally produced by Christian missionary scholars. While the field has since broadened its scope to include a wide variety of sources, including Chinese-language and ethnographic studies, missionary writings continue to be widely cited today; * T his paper is based on presentations originally given at the North American Graduate Student Conference on Buddhist Studies in Toronto in April 2010, and at the Third International Conference of the Sheng Yen Educational Foundation in Taipei in May 2010. I am grateful to the conference committees, participants, and attendees of both events, as well as the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the Columbia University Department of Religion, and the Sheng Yen Educational Foundation for a travel grants that allowed me to attend the conferences. My work with the Earl Herbert Cressy papers was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation through the Columbia University Libraries' Graduate Student Internship Program. Special thanks are due to my supervisor in that program, archivist Ruth Tonkiss Cameron. Readers are welcome to contact the author at http://www.columbia.edu/~gas2122. ‧48‧聖嚴研究 The Dharma Through a Glass Darkly‧49‧ and yet we must acknowledge that the study of orientalism has The writer has drawn his water from native wells, the facts brought to the fore several critical problems of bias and perspective being mostly gathered from Chinese sources. The pen is not inherent in these types of materials. Rather than dismissing them, held by one seated in a professor’s study, but by a plain man, this paper offers a preliminary model for making responsible use of the vast corpus of material on Buddhist religious culture produced who daily walks to and fro among idolaters, and testifies of by Christian missionaries resident in China. It does so by means of what he has seen and heard. an examination of two figures: Joseph Edkins 艾約瑟 (1823-1905), Hampden C. DuBose, The Dragon, Image, and Demon, or, the Three 葛德基 and Earl Herbert Cressy (1883-1979). I will argue that Religions of China, 1886 through a better understanding of the historical context of Christian scholarship and mission work and in China, we may negotiate their biases and thereby access a unique and useful historical perspective Christian missionaries working in China in the nineteenth on this critical period of Chinese Buddhist history. and early twentieth centuries produced a great deal of printed material, both through presses that they had established in China KEYWORDS： missionary, modern chinese buddhism, orientalism, and through publishers in their home countries. They wrote about archival sources, Joseph Edkins, Earl Herbert their work, their religion, and their experiences in the field, often Cressy with a particular emphasis on indigenous religious culture. Widely regarded to be specialists in the field of religious belief, their writings on Chinese religion were very influential and authoritative in their time. The first-hand nature of their experience, especially the fact of their long years of residency in the treaty ports and hinterlands of China, was presented as part of the authority behind the material.1 As in the preface penned by DuBose above, this ‘experience as authority’ was sometimes rhetorically set against the arms-length knowledge of university academics who only knew about Chinese religion through texts. After their expulsion from mainland China in the early 1950s, missionary writers lost much of their access to the field, and were further supplanted to a large 1 S ome examples include Timothy Richard, Forty-Five Years in China: Reminiscences by Timothy Richard, D.D., Litt.D . (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1916); John Leighton Stuart, Fifty Years in China: The Memoirs of John Leighton Stuart, Missionary and Ambassador (New York: Random House, [1954]); George A. Fitch, My Eighty Years in China (Taipei: Meiya Publications, 1967). ‧48‧聖嚴研究 The Dharma Through a Glass Darkly‧49‧ and yet we must acknowledge that the study of orientalism has The writer has drawn his water from native wells, the facts brought to the fore several critical problems of bias and perspective being mostly gathered from Chinese sources. The pen is not inherent in these types of materials. Rather than dismissing them, held by one seated in a professor’s study, but by a plain man, this paper offers a preliminary model for making responsible use of the vast corpus of material on Buddhist religious culture produced who daily walks to and fro among idolaters, and testifies of by Christian missionaries resident in China. It does so by means of what he has seen and heard. an examination of two figures: Joseph Edkins 艾約瑟 (1823-1905), Hampden C. DuBose, The Dragon, Image, and Demon, or, the Three 葛德基 and Earl Herbert Cressy (1883-1979). I will argue that Religions of China, 1886 through a better understanding of the historical context of Christian scholarship and mission work and in China, we may negotiate their biases and thereby access a unique and useful historical perspective Christian missionaries working in China in the nineteenth on this critical period of Chinese Buddhist history. and early twentieth centuries produced a great deal of printed material, both through presses that they had established in China KEYWORDS： missionary, modern chinese buddhism, orientalism, and through publishers in their home countries. They wrote about archival sources, Joseph Edkins, Earl Herbert their work, their religion, and their experiences in the field, often Cressy with a particular emphasis on indigenous religious culture. Widely regarded to be specialists in the field of religious belief, their writings on Chinese religion were very influential and authoritative in their time. The first-hand nature of their experience, especially the fact of their long years of residency in the treaty ports and hinterlands of China, was presented as part of the authority behind the material.1 As in the preface penned by DuBose above, this ‘experience as authority’ was sometimes rhetorically set against the arms-length knowledge of university academics who only knew about Chinese religion through texts. After their expulsion from mainland China in the early 1950s, missionary writers lost much of their access to the field, and were further supplanted to a large 1 S ome examples include Timothy Richard, Forty-Five Years in China: Reminiscences by Timothy Richard, D.D., Litt.D . (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1916); John Leighton Stuart, Fifty Years in China: The Memoirs of John Leighton Stuart, Missionary and Ambassador (New York: Random House, [1954]); George A. Fitch, My Eighty Years in China (Taipei: Meiya Publications, 1967). ‧50‧聖嚴研究 The Dharma Through a Glass Darkly‧51‧ degree by pioneering ethnography and fieldwork that has expanded offer a valuable perspective on an era of immense religious change. the scope of scholarly inquiry into experienced and lived religion in I make no claim to be an authority on the study of missiology or Chinese societies. Even so, the missionary experience of Chinese on the history of Christian missions in China. I do wish to argue, religious culture during the long years of their residence in China however, that studies coming out of those fields are critically stands today as a unique and very intriguing corpus of historical important to those of other specializations who wish to dip their data. This body of work is problematic from a historian’s point of foot into this field. My thesis is that we must first know more about view, since it is so explicitly biased against its subject; for the most the missionaries themselves, their lives and their historical context, part, missionaries criticized, dismissed, and ridiculed indigenous in order to make responsible use of missionary sources in the study religion while upholding and defending their own beliefs. And of modern Chinese religion. By understanding the conceptual yet even though they denied its validity, they earnestly sought to lenses through which they viewed the religious culture of their understand the religious culture they observed around them. time, we are better able to compensate for their distortions and This essay is an attempt to outline how these types of glimpse their observed world, not from some putative standpoint of missionary sources might be used by historians of religion; objectivity, but certainly in a way that begins to draw aside the veil particularly, scholars of Buddhism in modern China.2 The impetus of criticism that colors so much of this material. for this paper came from my experience as an intern archivist in the Missionary Research Library archives at Burke Library in 1.