26 Facts About Zhang Binglin

Zhang Binglin, known by his art name Zhang Taiyan, was a Chinese philologist, textual critic, philosopher, and revolutionary.

Zhang Binglin made contributions to historical Chinese phonology, proposing that "the niang and ri initials [in Middle Chinese] come from the ni initial [in Old Chinese]".

Zhang Binglin developed a system of shorthand based on the seal script, called jiyin zimu, later adopted as the basis of zhuyin.

In September 1898, after the failure of the Wuxu Reform, Zhang Binglin escaped to Taiwan with the help of a Japanese friend and worked as a reporter for and wrote for Qing Yi Bao produced in Japan by Liang Qichao.

Zhang Binglin returned to China two months later to be a reporter for the Shanghai-based Yadong Shibao.

In 1901, under the threat of arrest from the Qing Empire, Zhang Binglin taught at Soochow University for a year before he escaped to Japan for several months.

Zhang Binglin began to study the Buddhist scriptures during his time in jail.

Zhang Binglin coined the phrase "Zhonghua Minguo" which became the Chinese name of the Republic of China.

In 1924, Zhang Binglin left the Kuomintang, entitled himself a loyalist to the Republic of China, and became critical of Chiang Kai-shek.

Zhang Binglin established the National Studies Society in Suzhou in 1934 and chief-edited the magazine Zhi Yan.

Zhang Binglin died two years later at 67 and was buried in a state funeral.

Originally, Zhang Binglin was firmly rooted in "Old Text" philology, which emphasized "the diversity of China's intellectual heritage led to a serious erosion of the paramount position of Confucius as upheld by the unwavering guardians of orthodoxy".

Zhang Binglin shared the views of his contemporary, Liu Yiqing, that the Confucian classics should be read as history, not sacred scripture.

Zhang Binglin did not oppose radical reconceptualizations per se but only those that uncritically mirrored European taxonomies.

Rather than squeezing ancient Chinese texts and concepts into a Western-derived disciplinary corset, Zhang Binglin suggested expanding existing categories in such a way as to make space for the new knowledge that the nation, as he readily agreed, so desperately needed.

Zhang Binglin later claimed that "it was only through reciting and meditating on these sutras that he was able to get through his difficult jail experience".

In 1906, after he was released from prison, Zhang Binglin went to Japan to edit The People's Journal and developed a new philosophical framework that critiqued the dominant intellectual trend of modernization theory.

Zhang Binglin was further exposed to Yogacara Buddhism during his time in Japan, when he was actively involved in nationalist, anti-Manchu politics.

Zhang Binglin was exposed to these linguistic approaches during his time in Japan following his imprisonment.

Zhang Binglin was particularly revolutionary, as he "mobilized Buddhism for politics" and combined elements of Yogacara Buddhist thought with concepts he had developed himself in his pre-revolutionary years.

Zhang Binglin wanted to promote Yogacara Buddhism as a philosophy, not a religion.

Zhang Binglin based his philosophical vision on the doctrine of three natures.

Zhang Binglin felt that yinming, or the knowledge of reasons, enabled people to recover the true meaning of Mohist and Confucian tests in ways that Western philosophy could not.

Zhang Binglin tried to render equality without contradiction between the particular and the universal.

Zhang Binglin believed that conceptual framework is generated through our karmic actions.

Zhang Binglin continues to be viewed as an important intellectual figure in modern China in part because of his call for dissociate ideas of sovereign power from Heaven's Mandate and to instead associate it with political realism and human capacity.