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“Seeds for a New Life”: Modernity and the Pacific Turn in the Progressive Era
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 June 2020
Abstract
Since the colonial era, the ideological and cultural usefulness of Asia has changed with evolving American needs. This article argues that the Progressive Era turn toward the Pacific world marked a new epoch and mode of transnational interchange as a diverse array of Americans traveled to China and Japan. Encounters with Asianness in situ would lead to a reinvention of the U.S. worldview in the late nineteenth century. The question at hand for certain Americans was how to become “modern,” to germinate “seeds for a new life” that would ensure the prosperity and well-being of the United States amidst momentous global changes. Instead of being antimodernist, the fetishization of Asia served as a way to rein in and define modernity for American purposes. In the process, modernist Orientalism became a framework for imagining China and Japan and their cultural practices. Buddhism, in particular, was reconceptualized as a hybrid entity that seemed to be emblematic of the dawn of a new era. Ultimately, the flow of ideas and peoples between Asia and the United States enabled Americans to construct a global “modern” identity for themselves and to carve out a prominent role for the nation within the international community.
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE)
References
Notes
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145 Bigelow, William Sturgis, Buddhism and Immortality (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1908), 55–61Google Scholar. Bigelow argued that “the process of evolution is the process of increase in the amount [of universal consciousness] realized.”
146 Bigelow, Buddhism and Immortality, 71–72. Ultimately, to be able to transcend the material world through the evolutionary process would help the Buddhist arrive at “infinite and eternal peace. … That peace is NIRVANA” (76).
147 Kino, “A Normal Religion,” 12–13.
148 According to Suzuki, “all religious systems, whatever their original character, must adapt themselves to new surrounding.” Suzuki, “Is Buddhism Nihilistic,” 6–7.
149 Hart, Western China, 218–19.
150 Lafcadio Hearn, “The Introduction of Buddhism,” in The Buddhist Writings of Lafcadio Hearn, 263.
151 Kino, “New Application of the Old Truth,” 27–28.
152 Shaku Soyen, Sermons of a Buddhist Abbot, in Asian Religions in America, 139.
153 This new “United Buddhism” was also a “cosmopolitan one … grounded in faith and in reason, born in Asia and global in its application.” Quoted from Ketelaar, Of Heretics and Martyrs, 177.
154 Quoted from Olcott, Henry Steel, Old Diary Leaves (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1895), 169Google Scholar.
155 James Legge was a professor of Chinese language and literature who also worked as a missionary in China for over thirty years. He asserted that “it is difficult in China to say to what religion a man belongs, as the same person may profess two or three.” Even the emperor paid homage to both Confucius and Buddha. From Legge, James, trans., A Record of Buddhistic Kingdoms Being an Account by the Chinese Monk Fa-Hien of His Travels in India and Ceylon (A.D. 399–414) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1886), 7Google Scholar.
156 Beal, Samuel, Buddhism in China (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1884), 241, 243Google Scholar.
157 Beal, Buddhism in China, 250.
158 Hart, Western China, 79.
159 Hart, Western China, 149.
160 Hart, Western China, 220.
161 Morse, Glimpses of China, 147–48.
162 Kino, “A Normal Religion,” 15.
163 Cunha, J. Gerson Da, Memoir on the History of the Tooth-Relic of Ceylon; with a Preliminary Essay on the Life and System of Gautama Buddha (London: W. Thacker & Co., 1875), 24Google Scholar.
164 Sprague, Roger, From Western China to the Golden Gate: The Experiences of an American University Graduate in the Orient (Berkeley: Lederer, Street & Zeus Co., 1991), 122Google Scholar. Sprague taught at Chinese government schools in 1910, and thereafter decided to travel on his own through China. He went on to write that China was also considered to be the “do-nothing kingdom, the land where the people are wedded to the ways of their forefathers from which they will not depart.”
165 Sprague, From Western China to the Golden Gate, 126.
166 Sprague, From Western China to the Golden Gate, 126.
167 Sprague, From Western China to the Golden Gate, 123.
168 Parsons, An American Engineer in China, 15.