From China to Japan and Back Again: An Energetic Example of Bidirectional Sino-Japanese Esoteric Buddhist Transmission

Sino-Japanese religious discourse, more often than not, is treated as a unidirectional phenomenon. Academic treatments of pre-modern East Asian religion usually portray Japan as the passive recipient of Chinese Buddhist traditions, while explorations of Buddhist modernization efforts focus on how Chinese Buddhists utilized Japanese adoptions of Western understandings of religion. This paper explores a case where Japan was simultaneously the receptor and agent by exploring the Chinese revival of Tang-dynasty Zhenyan. This revival—which I refer to as Neo-Zhenyan—was actualized by Chinese Buddhist who received empowerment (Skt. abhiṣeka) under Shingon priests in Japan in order to claim the authority to found “Zhenyan” centers in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia, and even the USA. Moreover, in addition to utilizing Japanese Buddhist sectarianism to root their lineage in the past, the first known architect of Neo-Zhenyan, Wuguang (1918–2000), used energeticism, the thermodynamic theory propagated by the German chemist Freidrich Wilhelm Ostwald (1853–1932; 1919 Nobel Prize for Chemistry) that was popular among early Japanese Buddhist modernists, such as Inoue Enryō (1858–1919), to portray his resurrected form of Zhenyan as the most suitable form of Buddhism for the future. Based upon the circular nature of esoteric transmission from China to Japan and back to the greater Sinosphere and the use of energeticism within Neo-Zhenyan doctrine, this paper reveals the sometimes cyclical nature of Sino-Japanese religious influence. Data were gathered by closely analyzing the writings of prominent Zhenyan leaders alongside onsite fieldwork conducted in Taiwan from 2011–2019.

The Historical Background: Molecular Theory as of 1900

The task of this chapter is to explain the sense in which molecular theory—both molecular-kinetic theory and chemical-molecular theory—were still viewed as hypotheses as of 1900 and why the evidence bearing on them during the second half of the nineteenth century was insufficient for them to have achieved standing beyond this. The chapter reviews the strengths and limitations of the evidence in question, taking advantage of two widely read textbooks in physical chemistry published in the 1890s by Wilhelm Ostwald and Walther Nernst and a uniquely comprehensive review of the evidence pertaining to the kinetic theory of gases, by O. E. Meyer, published in 1899. This background defines the historical context within physics and chemistry for the developments covered in the remainder of the monograph.

Analytica—A Journal of Analytical Chemistry and Chemical Analysis

Back in 1894, Wilhelm Ostwald defined analytical chemistry as “the art of recognizing different substances and determining their constituents”, which “occupies a prominent position among the applications of science, since the questions it allows us to answer arise wherever chemical processes are used for scientific or technical purposes” [...]

Vom Garten der "Energie" zum Garten als Kunstwerk?

Der ehemalige Landsitz "Energie" des Physikochemikers und Nobelpreisträgers Wilhelm Ostwald in Großbothen wird heute durch die Gerda und Klaus Tschira Stiftung (GKTS) verwaltet, die mit dem Museumsbetrieb das universelle Werk des Wissenschaftlers, der auch für seine farbtheoretischen Studien bekannt ist, einer breiten Öffentlichkeit zugänglich machen will.

Total knowledge? Encyclopedic handbooks in the twentieth-century chemical and life sciences

Encyclopedic handbooks have been household names to scientists – Gmelins Handbuch der anorganischen Chemie to chemists, Bergey's Manual of Determinative Bacteriology to microbiologists. Their heavy tomes were consulted for reference, and their contents taken as authoritative. This paper analyses the development of this genre as well as of ‘handbook science’. Handbooks and their claim to provide comprehensive factual knowledge on a subject should be understood as a reaction to the scattering of knowledge in modern periodical print as discussed by Wilhelm Ostwald or Ludwik Fleck. A comparative analysis of the actors, the institutions and practices of compiling and editing a German and an American handbook project around mid-century reveals commonalities and differences in how twentieth-century sciences have attempted to cope with the acceleration and dispersion of knowledge generation before computing. These attempts have resulted in different conceptions of a book, from compilation to organic whole. Moreover, the handbook's claim to comprise lasting facts makes it a fitting case in point to reflect on the temporality of knowledge and the relevance of books to the sciences.