Defining the Boundaries of Buddhist Psychology: Liang Qichao and Taixu in Republican China

Abstract

In Republican China, “Buddhist psychology” became a contested name for relating accounts of mind to a modern academic discipline. This article compares Liang Qichao’s views with Taixu’s writings, read alongside periodicals and the proposed curriculum of the Wuchang Buddhist Academy. Their comparisons rested on overlapping questions about cognition and selfhood, but translation also reorganized the materials and standards being compared. Liang classified Buddhist analyses and accounts of cultivation as psychology while placing the highest realization beyond scholarly inquiry. Taixu distinguished secular from Buddhist psychology and included cultivation and realized wisdom within the latter, while accepting limited behavioral investigation. Their shared transformative concerns thus accompanied different definitions of the scope and authority of psychological knowledge. Journals and curricular planning brought these competing definitions into academic and Buddhist settings. Buddhist psychology thus functioned as a boundary category through which authors negotiated how Buddhist accounts of mind could count as psychological knowledge.

1. Introduction

In 1922, Liang Qichao 梁啟超 (1873–1929) published Fojiao xinlixue qiance 佛教心理學淺測 in Xinli 心理, the journal of the Chinese Psychological Society. He treated Buddhist analyses of mind and consciousness as material that could be classified under psychology, but also placed the highest Buddhist realization beyond scholarly inquiry. Three years later, Taixu 太虛 (1890–1947) included wisdom attained through cultivation inside what he called Buddhist psychology, distinguishing it from secular psychology. Both used the disciplinary term xinlixue 心理學 and connected knowledge of mind with Buddhist transformation. Their contrasting placement of realized knowledge provides the conceptual problem of this article.1

The novelty of the encounter did not lie in the discovery that Buddhism possessed systematic accounts of mind. In the Abhidharma and Yogācāra materials most relevant here, analyses of consciousness and mental factors were tied to questions of moral quality, karmic continuity, affliction, cultivation, and liberation. Modern psychology entered China as a newly institutionalizing field whose practitioners approached mental life through several competing objects and methods. Buddhist writers could therefore identify familiar problems within psychological accounts, while contesting their explanations and purposes. Applying the new name “psychology” made selected Buddhist concepts newly separable as disciplinary objects and raised a problem that had not previously taken this form: how much of Buddhist knowledge of mind could be rendered as psychology without losing the practical and soteriological relations in which that knowledge functioned?

The broader encounter is well established. Poon traces modern uses of “Buddhist psychology” in Japan and China, including Liang and Taixu (Poon 2020, pp. 394–96). Hammerstrom’s studies explain the Wuchang circle’s use of Yogācāra in engagements with modern mind science; they establish that Buddhist doctrines supplied criteria for judging scientific claims as well as material for comparison (Hammerstrom 2014; Hammerstrom 2015, chap. 4). Ellguth distinguishes Buddhist analyses of mind from psychological explanations of religion, showing why these overlapping inquiries require separate histories (Ellguth 2025, pp. 40–41). Sgorbati’s detailed reconstruction of Liang’s essay and its reception also emphasizes its concluding movement from consciousness to wisdom (Sgorbati 2024, pp. 179–92). This finding makes the relation between psychological analysis and Buddhist transformation a central question for comparing Liang with Taixu. Republican psychology journals, meanwhile, negotiated the indigenization of the discipline as well as its importation (Blowers et al. 2009).

Fan’s reconstruction of Taixu’s qing 情, xiang 想, and zhi 智 demonstrates how Taixu organizes psychological inquiry around the attainment of enlightenment (Fan 2024). The present study develops this finding through comparison with Liang’s distinction between learning and realization. Their shared concern with transforming the mind makes it possible to isolate a more specific difference: where the authority of realized knowledge stands when each author defines the scope of psychology.

Comparative scholarship helps identify the stakes of this question without supplying a retrospective template for the Chinese cases. Padmasiri de Silva argues that Buddhist psychological analysis can be isolated for study but must also be understood in relation to ethics and philosophical inquiry; his comparison with Western therapeutic systems extends beyond the treatment of disorders to models of the person (de Silva 1991, pp. 1–2, 99–100). The problem of relating analysis to transformation is therefore not distinctive to China. What is historically specific here is its formulation through Republican disciplinary vocabulary, Chinese Buddhist classifications, and identifiable publication and educational settings.

This approach also intersects with Buddhist modernism. McMahan’s account of scientific Buddhism already recognizes indigenous projects that appropriate scientific discourse while resisting assimilation to Western frameworks (McMahan 2004, pp. 924–27). The Chinese material permits a more specific examination of the limits claimed within such appropriation. Psychology conferred academic intelligibility and a possible form of cultural legitimacy, but Buddhist writers also used it to assert the adequacy of their own knowledge. Its institutional prestige was asymmetrical, not absolute: Liang questioned scientific omnipotence, and Taixu regarded contemporary psychology as incomplete. Their adoption of its vocabulary therefore involved both participation in modern academic authority and an effort to delimit that authority.

This question took shape while psychology was acquiring institutional form in China. The Chinese Psychological Society (Zhonghua xinlixuehui 中華心理學會) was founded in 1921 and organized lectures and the specialist journal Xinli (Yan and Yang 2021). The wider debate over scientism sharpened disputes over the reach of specialized knowledge. Liang had returned from Europe skeptical of claims that science could provide a complete philosophy of life. His “Yi weichen pouchu ji: Kexue wanneng zhi meng” 一微塵剖出記：科學萬能之夢 (“A Speck of Dust Dissected: The Dream of Scientific Omnipotence”), published in Haichao yin in 1920, criticized the conversion of scientific explanation into an all-encompassing account of morality, value, and human freedom (Liang 1920; Hammerstrom 2015, pp. 29–32). His later placement of the highest realization beyond scholarly psychology can be read against this concern with the limits of a specialized science.

I use “Buddhism as psychology” and “psychology within Buddhism” as shorthand for two directions of classification. The first refers to Liang’s qualified identification of Buddhist learning with psychology, including its explicit reservation concerning the highest realization; the second refers to Taixu’s distinction between secular and Buddhist psychology and his evaluation of specialized inquiries within a Buddhist account of mind. Neither expression describes the entirety of its author’s thought. Liang’s analysis aims at the overcoming of attachment to self, and Taixu accepts partial scientific explanations. The comparison concerns the position assigned to realized knowledge within these particular formulations.2

Shared questions about recognition, memory, attachment, and the apparent unity of the self give Liang and Taixu a basis for comparison between Buddhist accounts of mind and modern psychology. The correspondences they propose also take shape through translation. Classifying the aggregates as psychology and including wisdom within a psychological scheme reorganize Buddhist materials and introduce new criteria for judging knowledge. The historical question is how each author justifies these classifications and connects psychological inquiry to the Buddhist transformations it is meant to support.

The comparison follows four related aspects of the texts: psychological analysis, moral discrimination, cultivation, and realization. Analysis concerns how mental processes are distinguished and explained; moral discrimination concerns their evaluation as wholesome or unwholesome; cultivation concerns practices intended to transform them; and realization concerns the attainment or knowing toward which those practices are directed. The analysis traces how each author connects these activities and assigns authority to reasoned explanation and realized understanding. The primary corpus consists of Liang’s (1922) essay and its 1930 reprint, with his 1920 critique of scientism as context, and Taixu’s psychological writings of 1925–1928. Periodicals and the Wuchang curriculum provide evidence of publication and educational organization.3

The central comparison concerns Liang’s (1922) exposition and Taixu’s (1925) scheme, both of which explicitly define the place of Buddhist knowing within psychology. Liang develops this issue through one sustained argument; Taixu’s later essays of 1927–1928 clarify how his scheme accommodates specialized scientific methods. Their different publication settings also allow the comparison to examine how each formulation addresses its audience. Section 4.1 situates these two positions among the contemporary approaches of Zhang Huasheng, Manzhi, and Kimura Taiken.

2. Liang Qichao: From Buddhist Analysis to Psychology

Liang’s essay appeared in Xinli 1, no. 4 (Liang 1922, pp. 1–16). The Society, established in 1921, organized academic lectures as well as its journal (Yan and Yang 2021). Sgorbati dates Liang’s lecture to June 1922 and identifies the journal editor Zhang Yaoxiang’s invitation to turn it into an article (Sgorbati 2024, pp. 179–80). The 1930 Haichao yin reprint likewise identifies a Society lecture on the emptiness of the five aggregates (Liang 1930). Liang’s opening address calls the association an institution for discussing learning and offers his views for collective examination (Liang 1922). His accessible equivalents made Buddhist arguments available for the collective examination he sought from psychological researchers.

2.1. A Modern Category for an Old Problem: Reframing Mind and Consciousness

Liang begins by claiming expertise in neither Buddhism nor psychology and presents his remarks as preliminary. He nevertheless makes two confident proposals: Buddhist study can begin from psychological materials in the scriptures, and psychology should treat Buddhist teachings as important material for inquiry (Liang 1922, 1930). The remainder of the essay develops these proposals through the problem of no-self. It first explains the aggregates and alternative ways of grouping them, then examines form, mental factors, and consciousness through scriptural passages and ordinary examples, and finally connects their conditioned aggregation to the error of a substantial self. His classification of Buddhist materials as psychology thus organizes a sustained argument for no-self.

Liang’s most provocative formulation is that Buddhist dharma 法 can, for the purposes of “a general classification of learning” (xuewen dagai de fenlei 學問大概的分類), be treated as psychology. He groups the seventy-five and one hundred dharmas, the five aggregates, dependent origination, the sense fields and elements, and the eight consciousnesses around the study of the “characteristics of mind and consciousness” (xinshi zhi xiang 心識之相). He also includes the cultivation taught through the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, presenting these practices as ways of removing accumulated habits of consciousness through an understanding of mental processes. He distinguishes these materials from the highest “realization” (zheng 證), which he places “beyond psychology” (chao xinlixue 超心理學) and outside scholarly inquiry (Liang 1922, 1930).

The qualifying phrase “a general classification of learning” is therefore as important as the equation of Buddhist dharma with psychology. Liang makes Buddhist materials available under a modern academic heading while recognizing differences in scope and analytical refinement. His inclusion of cultivation gives this psychological learning a practical direction. Its boundary lies at the highest realization, where direct attainment exceeds what discursive learning can establish.4

The setting in Xinli sharpens the point. Blowers, Cheung, and Han show that Republican psychology journals were sites of negotiation between emulation and indigenization (Blowers et al. 2009). Within this developing field, Liang’s article proposed Buddhist materials as objects of psychological inquiry and opened their disciplinary status to discussion. “Buddhist psychology” became thinkable because psychology had acquired institutional visibility, but what the term should include remained unsettled.

Liang’s earlier criticism of “scientific omnipotence” helps explain this limit. He could affirm scientific investigation while resisting its elevation into a complete philosophy of life (Liang 1920). In the 1922 essay, psychological inquiry serves an argument against attachment to self, but discursive demonstration and the highest realization remain different achievements. Scholarly psychology thus contributes to Buddhist transformation through reasoned analysis, while its authority stops short of establishing the highest realization.

2.2. Translating the Five Aggregates: Equivalence, Distortion, and Doctrinal Remainders

Liang’s treatment of the five aggregates shows how his new vocabulary works. For an initial explanation, he glosses rūpa 色 as things with objective character, vedanā 受 as sensation, saṃjñā 想 as memory, saṃskāra 行 in terms of attention and conduct, and vijñāna 識 as the unified state of psychological activity. He warns that these are rough equivalents whose fit requires further analysis (Liang 1922, 1930). These initial glosses introduce distinctions that the subsequent argument will refine. The apparent division between objective form and four mental aggregates is subsequently reconsidered when Liang explains form through experienced qualities and consciousness as a changing state.

The familiar example of recognizing a willow tree gives the procedure a concrete form. Liang parses recognition into sensation, the recall of previous images, comparison, and eventual identification. What appears as an immediate encounter with a stable object is analyzed as a sequence of mental activities (Liang 1922, 1930). The example prepares his claim that form, as an object known, depends on psychological representation. He then examines the mental factors and consciousness in order to challenge the corresponding assumption of an enduring knower. The sequence connects the analysis of objects to the critique of an enduring subject, giving psychological inquiry a specific role in dismantling attachment to “self” and “what belongs to self.”

A Buddhist intellectual-historical perspective complicates the modern vocabulary used here. In the relevant Buddhist frameworks, the five aggregates function as an analytical device for decomposing the apparently unitary person into conditioned processes. Abhidharma and Yogācāra analyses of mind also connect description with moral and soteriological evaluation: mental factors can be wholesome or unwholesome, cognition afflicted or purified, and consciousness transformed through practice. Modern “psychology” illuminates one dimension of these taxonomies while risking the loss of relations that made them specifically Buddhist. Liang’s provisional equivalents expose this tension between disciplinary translation and the relations preserved in Buddhist classification.

The editorial correction in the 1930 Haichao yin reprint shows how doctrinal distinctions constrained Liang’s psychological equivalents. As Hammerstrom notes, an editorial comment objected to his identification of the third aggregate, saṃjñā 想, as the source of memory (Hammerstrom 2014, p. 193). The objection applied Buddhist doctrinal standards to a proposed psychological equivalence. It shows that the new vocabulary created a setting in which the accuracy of the comparison itself could be contested.

The two publication settings brought different evaluative standards to the same exposition. In Xinli, Liang’s equivalents helped make a Buddhist account of experience intelligible as psychological learning. In Haichao yin, their doctrinal accuracy remained open to Buddhist editorial correction. The contrast shows how an equivalence could introduce Buddhist thought to psychologists and still require doctrinal correction when read within Buddhist scholarship.

2.3. From Learning to Realization: Where Psychology Stops

Liang establishes the distinction between learning (xue 學) and realization (zheng 證) near the outset of the essay. Learning uses reasoning to explain why the self is absent and to correct mistaken reasoning; realization apprehends no-self directly, leaving verbal explanation behind. The latter is both a mode of apprehension and the final attainment toward which Buddhist learning is directed (Liang 1922, 1930). This distinction gives cultivation and realization different positions: accounts of cultivation belong within psychological learning, while the highest realization exceeds its discursive procedures.

The subsequent analysis gives learning a substantive cognitive task. Liang treats consciousness as a state of knowing rather than an enduring knower, and argues that neither consciousness nor the apparent unity of the aggregates supplies a permanent self. A forest may retain its name while its constituent trees change; similarly, the continuity of an aggregate does not demonstrate an unchanging substance. He closes by relating mistaken attachment to self to affliction and suffering, and urges the study of Buddhist psychology toward “transforming consciousness into wisdom” (zhuan shi cheng zhi 轉識成智) (Liang 1922, 1930). The essay’s practical destination is thus present in its conclusion as well as its opening. This orientation toward wisdom establishes a shared purpose with Taixu, making the scope of psychological knowledge the central point of comparison.

Liang’s xue/zheng distinction reworks a familiar Buddhist relation between understanding an account of no-self and realizing it directly. Scholarly analysis can explain the error of attachment and orient learning toward wisdom. The highest realization requires a mode of apprehension that exceeds this reasoned explanation. “Beyond psychology” marks the limit of what scholarly psychological inquiry can establish within the Buddhist path.

“Buddhism as psychology” thus describes Liang’s inclusion of Buddhist learning within psychology and his reservation of the highest realization beyond it. His analysis serves the Buddhist aim of overcoming attachment to self. Taixu shares this transformative purpose and assigns realized wisdom a place within specifically Buddhist psychology. The comparison therefore turns on the epistemic position of realization within a discipline oriented toward the transformation of mind.

3. Taixu: Reconstructing Psychology from Within Buddhism

Taixu shifts the question from whether Buddhist materials may be called psychology to what psychological inquiry should do when understood from a Buddhist standpoint. His 1925 lecture includes cultivation and wisdom within Buddhist psychology; the essays of 1927–1928 then test how far behavioral inquiry and theories of consciousness can account for mental life. Read together, these texts define a Buddhist purpose for psychology and specify the place of specialized investigation within it.

3.1. From Description to Transformation: Redefining Psychological Inquiry

Fojiao xinlixue zhi yanjiu 佛教心理學之研究 (A Study of Buddhist Psychology) was delivered at Wuchang and recorded by Xianjiao 顯教. Taixu opens by holding two claims together: Buddhist scriptures and treatises are already comprehensive and well organized, yet contemporary conditions call for “research organized by classification using scientific methods” (yi kexue zhi fangfa wei fenlei zhi yanjiu 以科學之方法為分類之研究) (Taixu 1925, TX22, 751a3–6). Scientific classification offers Taixu a way to reorganize this existing body of knowledge for specialized inquiry.

Taixu accepts specialization as a way to make a comprehensive Buddhist corpus available for inquiries suited to particular problems. The question is how the knowledge produced by these inquiries relates to Buddhist criteria of attainment. His answer appears immediately in the distinction between secular and Buddhist psychology:

Secular psychology observes the psychological activities of living beings and ordinary people, but does no more than record and describe them. Beyond this lies what exceeds the range of ordinary human experience and therefore does not belong to the field. Buddhist psychology is different: in addition to classifying and inferring, it must discriminate good and evil and indicate cultivation and realization. Only then can the study be put into practice rather than remain empty theoretical talk. (Taixu 1925, TX22, 751a7–9)

世俗心理學，就生物及常人心理作用觀察，但為敘列述明之記錄而已。過此以往，則為溢出常人經驗範圍，非本科所應有事。佛教心理學不然，集類推論而外，又必決擇善惡，指示修證，而後此學有所應用，不至空談學理。

Taixu defines Buddhist psychology by the work it should perform in cultivation and realization. His contrast assigns secular psychology the recording of ordinary mental activity and gives Buddhist psychology the further tasks of evaluating mental states and directing their transformation. He presents psychology as a recent, still developing science, thereby identifying an opportunity for Buddhist knowledge to contribute to its development (Taixu 1925, TX22, 751a3–9). He thus uses the distinction to argue that Buddhist knowledge should help define the purposes of the emerging discipline.

The practical criterion is explicit in Taixu’s wording: the study should have application and should not remain “empty theoretical talk.” On this reading, Buddhist psychology is adequate only if knowledge of mental processes contributes to the practitioner’s transformation. Description acquires its place in this field through its contribution to cultivation and realized understanding.

By 1927, Taixu also recognized social and educational psychology and discussed associationist, Gestalt, and vitalist approaches. He credited the competing schools with particular strengths while arguing that their explanations remained partial (Taixu 1927b, TX22, 770a6–771a9). His recognition of these fields clarifies the criterion at work in the 1925 lecture: Buddhist psychology should direct inquiry toward the realization of wisdom.

James’s treatment of religious experience clarifies what is distinctive about this criterion. The Varieties of Religious Experience examines conversion and mysticism, recognizes the noetic character of mystical states, and distinguishes their authority for the experiencer from an obligation on others to accept their revelations (James 1902, lectures IX–X, XVI–XVII). James thus separates the psychological study of transformation from the general authority of the knowledge claimed through it. Taixu gives realized Buddhist wisdom authority within the definition of Buddhist psychology itself. The comparison identifies the authority assigned to transformative knowing as a distinct question within the psychological study of religious experience. Ellguth’s distinction between Buddhist accounts of mind and psychological interpretations of religion further clarifies the different inquiries involved (Ellguth 2025, pp. 40–41).

3.2. From Mental Functions to Soteriological Order: Qing, Xiang, and Zhi

Taixu’s divisions of qing 情, xiang 想, and zhi 智 organize mental life according to its relation to attachment and liberation. I translate them contextually as “affective attachment,” “aspiration and inquiry,” and “wisdom.” The three categories distinguish the attachments that sustain ordinary existence, the search that can lead beyond them, and the knowing attained through purification.5

Qing is attachment to the life one has received and is centered on the four self-directed afflictions associated with manas: delusion about the self, grasping at the self, self-conceit, and self-love (Taixu 1925, TX22, 751a10–752a4). The term is therefore more diagnostic than the ordinary English “affection.” It names the affective structure through which ordinary life remains bound to self-reference. The category links the analysis of ordinary mental life to the afflictions that Buddhist cultivation must overcome.

Xiang is more difficult to translate because Taixu uses it for the movement of aspiring to what is higher and seeking what is true. His examples range from hopes for heavenly or Pure Land rebirth to meditation, philosophy, and scientific investigation. He associates the category especially with the sixth consciousness and treats it as a pivot between attachment and wisdom (Taixu 1925, TX22, 752a5–8). Religious aspiration and scientific inquiry share a place here because both reach beyond present attachment toward a sought state or truth. Their common position in xiang allows Taixu to evaluate them by how far this seeking leads toward wisdom.

In Taixu’s scheme, modern science is one disciplined form of xiang: a search for truth beyond immediate attachment, yet still a search conducted through conditioned cognition. This placement gives scientific inquiry a positive but intermediate role between attachment and realized wisdom. Its value depends on what it can establish within its own range and on how that range relates to higher forms of cognition in his Buddhist account.

Zhi denotes direct knowledge of things as they are. Taixu defines it as nondiscriminating wisdom that presently realizes the true character of phenomena (xian zheng zhu fa shixiang zhi wufenbie zhi 現證諸法實相之無分別智). Its basis is the purified aspect of the eight consciousnesses together with the five universal, five object-determining, and eleven wholesome mental factors. Bodhisattvas and buddhas possess it, with full realization attained only by buddhas (Taixu 1925, TX22, 752a9–11). He further distinguishes an ordinary level of psychology from a higher level oriented toward realization, assigning part of xiang to each. He then directs those seeking cultivation and realization to relinquish the afflicted and move toward the purified (Taixu 1925, TX22, 752a12–753a3). Wisdom is the purified mode of knowing that gives this movement its goal.

The inclusion of zhi gives Buddhist psychology a goal as well as a subject matter: transformed knowing belongs within the field and supplies the attainment toward which cultivation is directed. Taixu’s lecture sets out this relation through its classification of mental life and refers practitioners to the scriptures and treatises for the methods of cultivation (Taixu 1925, TX22, 753a1–3).

The relation between zheng and zhi clarifies the difference between Liang’s and Taixu’s classifications. In Liang’s distinction between learning and realization, zheng names the direct apprehension and attainment toward which learning is directed. In Taixu’s scheme, zhi names the wisdom defined by present realization. Liang’s concluding appeal to transform consciousness into wisdom confirms their shared concern with transformed cognition. The decisive difference is where such knowing stands: Liang places the highest realization beyond scholarly psychology, while Taixu includes realized wisdom in the definition of Buddhist psychology.

3.3. Against Reduction: Behaviorism and the Limits of Psychological Science

Taixu’s later discussions specify how specialized scientific inquiries fit within his broader Buddhist account of mind. In Xingweixue yu xinlixue 行為學與心理學 (Behavioral Science and Psychology, Taixu 1927b), Xingweixue yu weigenlun ji weishenlun 行為學與唯根論及唯身論 (Behaviorism, Sense-Faculties-Only Theory, and Body-Only Theory, Taixu 1927a), Hou’erte yishixue yu foxue 候爾特意識學與佛學 (Holt’s Theory of Consciousness and Buddhism, Taixu 1928a), and Zai lun xinlixue yu xingweixue 再論心理學與行為學 (Further Discussion of Psychology and Behavioral Science, Taixu 1928b), he distinguishes inquiries by their objects and the reach of their claims. He accepts methods for particular tasks and evaluates the reach of the explanations they support.6

The 1927b essay grants behavioral inquiry a legitimate object while rejecting the conclusion that psychology has therefore become dispensable. Physics, physiology, psychology, behavioral science, and ethics investigate different aspects of life and may assist one another without becoming interchangeable (Taixu 1927b, secs. 3–4). The objection is directed at turning one successful approach into an exhaustive account of mind.

He states the point with economy:

To study the mind through bodily conduct is indeed one method, but it is not the only method.

(Taixu 1927b, TX22, 766a7–12)

彼從身行以研究於心理，未始非一方法，但非唯一之方法耳。

The sentence supports a limited, pluralizing stance toward methods. Bodily conduct can be used to investigate mental activity, but Taixu denies that this route is uniquely authoritative. The problem arises when a method suited to a restricted object is converted into a total account of mind.

The doctrinal reason for this restriction becomes explicit in Taixu’s 1927 lecture at the Minnan Buddhist Academy. If mental activity is nothing more than an organism’s response and perishes with the body, he argues, rebirth becomes unintelligible and, with it, nirvāṇa (Taixu 1927a, TX22, 772a5–773a4). As Sgorbati (2026) observes, karmic continuity is a central stake in Taixu’s response to naturalized accounts of mind. His proposed “sense-faculties-only theory” (weigen lun 唯根論) draws on the Śūraṅgama-sūtra’s teaching that the six faculties participate in both bondage and release. “Faculty” is expanded beyond the material sense organs to include functions that Yogācāra assigns to consciousness, including the seventh and eighth consciousnesses (Taixu 1927a, TX22, 773a5–775a11). This reconstruction accommodates bodily and environmental responses within a Buddhist account of mental continuity, allowing behavioral explanation to be assessed in relation to rebirth and liberation.

Taixu’s discussion of Edwin Holt was itself mediated through Chinese print. His 1928 essay refers to a presentation of Holt’s theory in Dongfang zazhi 東方雜誌; Zang Yuquan 臧玉洤 had published “Hou’erte de yishi xueshuo” 候爾特的意識學說 (“Holt’s Theory of Consciousness”) there in 1927 (Zang 1927, pp. 77–85). Taixu compares the account of consciousness available through this mediation with a Buddhist analysis centered on the sense faculties. He observes that some disputes arise because systems distribute phenomena differently: what one assigns to consciousness another may assign to bodily faculties or external objects (Taixu 1928a, TX22, 783a12–784a3). Comparison therefore requires examining how each theory defines and groups the phenomena it seeks to explain.

Taixu evaluates these classifications according to their capacity to account for karmic continuity and liberation. He credits Holt’s theory with challenging belief in a substantial soul, yet calls that achievement provisional (buliaoyi 不了義) in contrast to the definitive (liaoyi 了義) account he locates in Yogācāra (Taixu 1928a, TX22, 784a9–785a7). The provisional achievement has value within a broader Buddhist explanation of mind. Yogācāra supplies the standard of completeness because it recognizes the forms of consciousness on which Taixu’s account of continuity and liberation depends.

Taixu’s response is therefore selective. Behavioral and physiological inquiries retain limited tasks, while Buddhist analyses supply criteria for judging claims about the whole of mental life. The later essays give concrete form to his 1925 distinction by defining the tasks that specialized investigation can perform within a Buddhist account of mind. Relative to Liang’s essay, the contrast lies in the inclusion of realized wisdom within Buddhist psychology’s scope, while both authors resist treating one restricted explanation as exhaustive.

4. Buddhist Psychology in Print and Curriculum

Liang’s and Taixu’s arguments were articulated in settings where psychology had become a visible academic name. Journals supplied audiences, translations, and occasions to evaluate competing classifications; the Wuchang Buddhist Academy’s proposed curriculum gave Western psychology a place alongside Buddhist textual learning. These settings made the relation between two accounts of mind a professional and pedagogical question. The evidence shows how publication and curricular planning organized the encounter and made competing definitions of psychological knowledge available for discussion.

4.1. Two Publication Contexts: Xinli, Haichao Yin, and East Asian Circulation

Liang’s first venue, Xinli, addressed the newly organized community of Chinese psychology. Publication there presented Buddhist analysis to psychological specialists as material for inquiry. Republican psychology journals reflected a continuing negotiation between emulation and indigenization, and the field contained multiple orientations (Blowers et al. 2009). Liang’s article is significant because it placed Buddhist materials inside that heterogeneous professional conversation while retaining purposes that exceeded the restricted psychological models he was willing to accept.

Haichao yin provided a different publication context. The same 1925 issue that printed Taixu’s lecture carried Zhang Huasheng’s 張化聲 comparison of Buddhist and Western psychology (Zhang 1925, pp. 37–41). Zhang’s contrast between application and liberation, examined by Sgorbati (2024, pp. 262–63), makes the purpose of inquiry an explicit point of dispute. Two issues later, Manzhi 滿智 compared psychological instinct with Yogācāra seeds (Manzhi 1925, pp. 22–27). As Hammerstrom’s discussion of memory and instinct shows, this circle was addressing specific psychological problems, as well as asserting Buddhism’s relevance (Hammerstrom 2014, pp. 193–98). The journal thus juxtaposed comparisons of function with disagreements over ends; this plurality explains why Liang and Taixu cannot exhaust the category’s contemporary uses.

The category was also transregional. In 1925 Haichao yin published a Chinese translation of the Japanese Buddhologist Kimura Taiken’s 木村泰賢 “Yuanshi Fojiao zhi xinlixue” 原始佛教之心理學 (“The Psychology of Early Buddhism”) (Kimura 1925; Hammerstrom 2014, p. 194). Poon’s broader history likewise traces “Buddhist psychology” through Japanese as well as Chinese usage (Poon 2020). The shared terminology therefore belonged to a wider East Asian effort to redescribe Buddhist textual traditions through modern academic nomenclature, even though the texts grouped under that name were not uniform.

Circulation brought distinct Buddhist accounts of mind into a shared field of comparison. Liang’s aggregates, Taixu’s Yogācāra-centered account, and Kimura’s discussion of early Buddhism foregrounded different corpora and purposes. Translating and publishing them under related disciplinary names created occasions for comparison without deciding in advance which Buddhist materials or standards belonged to psychology.

The 1930 reprint of Liang’s essay reinforces this point. A text first offered to a psychological association became available to Buddhist readers with an editorial objection to its rendering of saṃjñā. The editorial intervention shows how a change in venue could renew debate over the doctrinal accuracy of a psychological account.7

The venues therefore mattered to the work that the category performed. Xinli placed Buddhist materials before a specialist audience as possible psychological evidence; Haichao yin placed psychological terms before readers able to evaluate their Buddhist adequacy. The latter also circulated Japanese scholarship. These different audiences and translations made the authority of psychological accounts depend on the standards applied in each publication setting.

4.2. Psychology Beside Buddhist Studies: Wuchang as a Curricular Context

The founding regulations of the Wuchang Buddhist Academy assigned Western psychology a place alongside Buddhist textual study in a proposed curriculum. Published in Haichao yin in 1922, Wuchang foxueyuan chengli zhi jingguo (yi): Foxueyuan yuanqi ji zhangcheng 武昌佛學院成立之經過（一）：佛學院緣起及章程 set out a proposed three-year program combining Buddhist texts with non-Buddhist subjects (Anonymous 1922, pp. 4–5). Its curricular structure makes the relation between the two fields a question of how study should be organized.8

For the third semester, the proposed curriculum listed, among other Buddhist subjects, the Cheng weishi lun 成唯識論, Vasubandhu’s commentary on the Mahāyānasaṃgraha, the Saṃdhinirmocana-sūtra, the Laṅkāvatāra-sūtra, and the Mile shangsheng jing 彌勒上生經, alongside Chinese Buddhist history and “Outlines of Western Logic and Psychology” (Xiyang lunlixue ji xinlixue gailüe 西洋論理學及心理學概略). The fourth semester paired Tiantai works, the Vimalakīrti-sūtra, the Lotus Sūtra, and histories of Buddhism with “Outlines of Western Psychology and Biology” (Xiyang xinlixue ji shengwuxue gailüe 西洋心理學及生物學概略) (Anonymous 1922, p. 5).

The proposed pairings link Western psychology first with the study of reasoning and then with the study of living organisms. Their placement alongside Yogācāra and other Buddhist texts brings different accounts of mind into a common educational framework. The curricular arrangement makes the relation between their objects, methods, and purposes pertinent to the organization of Buddhist study.

Taixu’s later statements indicate why psychology could matter to such an educational project. In 1927 he presented psychology as increasingly fundamental to other sciences, mentioning social and educational psychology and likening its relation to other fields to the pole star around which the stars gather (Taixu 1927b, TX22, 770a6–10). The statement shows the broad educational and scientific importance that Taixu publicly assigned to psychological inquiry. The curricular listing is consistent with the expectation that knowledge of mind would serve broader education, while Taixu’s 1925 lecture proposed a Buddhist contribution to a science he regarded as incomplete.

The curriculum brings two ways of organizing knowledge of mind into the same educational plan. Buddhist textual classifications link mental factors to affliction and liberation, while Western psychology appears as a separately named field alongside logic and biology. The plan thus gives psychological inquiry a distinct curricular place within a program whose Buddhist subjects already address mental life. Sgorbati’s account of psychology within monastic reform provides the broader setting for this arrangement (Sgorbati 2024, pp. 158–60). The conceptual issue is how specialized psychological study relates to the Buddhist purposes of the program.

Read alongside this proposed curriculum, Taixu’s 1925 lecture clarifies how specialized psychology could be related to Buddhist study. His distinction between secular and Buddhist psychology places cultivation and realized wisdom within a specifically Buddhist field while recognizing specialized investigation. The regulations specify an educational arrangement, while the lecture articulates a Buddhist framework for relating specialized inquiry to cultivation and realization.

4.3. Two Uses of a Shared Disciplinary Name

The comparison identifies two overlapping uses of a disciplinary name. Liang classifies Buddhist analyses and accounts of cultivation as psychological learning but reserves the highest zheng beyond it. Taixu distinguishes secular from Buddhist psychology, placing cultivation and zhi inside the latter while assigning specialized behavioral inquiry a narrower task. Both preserve a Buddhist transformative purpose. Their different placements of the highest attainment define the scope of psychological knowledge in each formulation.

“Buddhist psychology” functions as a boundary category because it places Buddhist accounts of mind within a modern disciplinary field while leaving their criteria of inclusion open to dispute. Liang’s contested equation of saṃjñā with memory shows that a shared vocabulary still requires justification at the level of individual concepts. Beyond these equivalences, the contrasting places assigned to zheng and zhi concern which forms of knowing belong within a psychological discipline. Because realization is also the goal of cultivation, deciding whether it belongs within psychology affects what the discipline is expected to accomplish. The category thus links questions of conceptual equivalence to judgments about epistemic authority and the purposes of inquiry.

The publication and curricular materials show how these judgments were put into circulation. Xinli addressed Buddhist analysis to psychological specialists, while Haichao yin exposed psychological equivalents to Buddhist criticism and circulated Japanese scholarship. In the Wuchang plan, the relation appeared in curricular form, with Western psychology placed beside Buddhist textual study. These settings gave competing standards of psychological knowledge a public form in scholarly exchange and educational planning.

5. Conclusions

Liang Qichao and Taixu formulated different boundaries for Buddhist psychology while sharing the conviction that accounts of mind mattered to Buddhist transformation. Liang classified Buddhist analyses and accounts of cultivation as psychological learning, directed that learning toward wisdom, and reserved the highest realization beyond scholarly inquiry. Taixu distinguished secular from Buddhist psychology and included realized wisdom within the latter, while recognizing legitimate restricted methods. The comparison shows how a shared transformative purpose supports different accounts of the scope and authority of psychological knowledge.

The comparison rests on shared questions about cognition and selfhood and shows how modern classification reorganized their treatment. Liang’s psychological equivalents made Buddhist analyses available for scholarly examination, and Taixu’s placement of wisdom within psychology gave the field a Buddhist standard for judging the adequacy of inquiry. These choices affected both the grouping of Buddhist materials and the standards by which an account of mind was judged.

The institutional materials show why this distinction mattered beyond isolated exposition. Xinli offered a specialist setting for Liang’s proposal; Haichao yin published doctrinal corrections, competing Buddhist comparisons, and Japanese scholarship; the Wuchang plan placed Western psychology beside Buddhist accounts of mind. Together, these settings made the scope of psychological knowledge a question for authors, editors, and educational planners. Their differing arrangements show how a common disciplinary name could sustain competing Buddhist definitions of inquiry and attainment.

The article’s contribution is to show that the adoption of psychology as an academic name reorganized an existing Buddhist problem: how learning relates to realized knowledge. Liang made the highest attainment a limit of scholarly psychology; Taixu made realized wisdom a defining part of Buddhist psychology. Their common commitment to transforming the mind thus supported different judgments about what psychological knowledge could include and accomplish. Buddhist psychology acquired its significance through this contested relation between scholarly explanation and Buddhist attainment.