Yang Wenhui

Who was Yang Wenhui?

Yang Wenhui was a Chinese lay Buddhist reformer who has been called "The Father of the Modern Buddhist Renaissance". His courtesy name was Rénshān. He was a native of Shídài county in Anhui province.

While he was young he accompanied his father to live in Beijing, but the Taiping rebellion forced them to flee to the lower Yangtze delta. Although he studied the Confucian classics as a child, in 1862 he became interested in Buddhism after reading a copy of the Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana. In 1866 he moved to Nanjing to manage architectural engineering projects for the government, where his Buddhist beliefs were strengthened through contact with other lay Buddhists.

It was not long after that he and several friends raised money to establish the Jinling Sutra Publishing House, Jinling being an old name for Nanjing. In 1878 he left China to visit England and France, bringing back several scientific instruments which he donated to researchers in China. During another trip to England he met the Japanese Buddhist Nanjo Bunyu and started a correspondence with him. With Nanjō's help, Yang was able to import over 300 sutra texts from Japan that had been lost within China. In 1894 he worked with the British missionary Timothy Richard to translate Awakening of Faith in the Mahayana into English.