Heart of Buddha, Heart of China

James Carter is Professor of History at Saint Joseph's University, in Philadelphia. He has lived and traveled widely in China, is the author of several books and articles on modern China, and is the editor of the journal Twentieth-Century China. He is also past president of the Historical Society for Twentieth-Century China.

Jay Carter's new book follows the life of one man as a way of opening a window into the lived history of twentieth-century China. Heart of Buddha, Heart of China: The Life of Tanxu, a Twentieth-Century Monk is less a traditional biography than a life of an emergent modern nation as told through the experiences of a single individual whose relationships embodied the history of that nation in flesh, bones, and blood... Carter's own travels took him from the Bronx (to meet with a Dharma heir disciple of the monk) through more than a dozen Chinese cities, taking Tanxu's own memoir and itinerary as guidebook and route-map. The resulting book is a beautifully written, historiographically self-reflexive, and humane account of the lived history of modern China.

• Prologue: The Present Past ; Chapter One: Not Far From Anywhere ; Chapter Two: Leaving Home ; Chapter Three: New Worlds ; Chapter Four: Family ; Chapter Five: Conditioned Arising ; Chapter Six: Ice and Fire ; Chapter Seven: Famine and Flight ; Chapter Eight: Qingdao ; Chapter Nine: Life During Wartime ; Chapter Ten: Forward to the Past ; Epilogue: The Past in the Present