Datong, the “great communitas,” stands as a trumpet call for an egalitarian utopia that has echoed throughout China’s modern transformation and inspired generations of radical intellectuals. This talk focuses on the foundational text behind this call, Datong Shu, or the Book of the Great Communitas, by Kang Youwei (1858–1927), a revisionist Confucian thinker and leading reformer who also held an ardent interest in Mahāyāna Buddhism. Kang’s dream of datong was born of his sustained engagement with the emergent category of “world religions,” an endeavor which mirrored as well as rivaled that of the European orientalists in the formation of Religionswissenschaft, the “science of religion.” Behind closed doors, Kang compared Confucianism and Buddhism, eventually developing his most trenchant critique of the Confucian orthodoxy: its innate incompatibility with social equality. In his magnum opus, the Book of the Great Communitas, Kang harnesses Buddhist language to conceptualize a radically egalitarian globe that is free of boundaries and distinctions such as race, class, nation, family, and gender. At the turn of the twentieth century, the utopian vision of datong won hearts and minds in the imbrication of the search for an ideal Chinese faith and the surging revolutionary momentum. It attests to the Buddhist contribution to the modern Chinese revolution, a contribution with an enduring legacy in the subsequent decades.
Lei Ying is an interdisciplinary scholar of religion and literature, focusing on the interconnection between Buddhism and modern Chinese literary and intellectual history. Her book, Our Shared Karma: Buddhism, Literature, and the Modern Chinese Revolution, is forthcoming from Harvard University Asia Center in fall 2026. The first monograph to critique the secularist assumption that has tacitly governed the received narrative of China’s modern transformation, Our Shared Karma reveals the profoundly Buddhist beginning of the modern Chinese revolution. Lei is currently Assistant Professor of Asian Languages and Civilizations at Amherst College. She received her Ph.D. from Harvard University as a Presidential Scholar. She publishes and presents her work in both English and Chinese, and divides her time between New England and Singapore.
Joshua Brallier
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