Li Shu-t'ung (1880-4 September 1942), pioneer of modern music and drama in China who became Hung-i, one of the most celebrated Buddhist clerics of his time.

Tientsin was the birthplace of Li Shu-t'ung, the son by a concubine of Li Hsiao-lou, a chinshih of 1847. The elder Li was an adept both of the philosophy of the Ming Xeo-Confucian thinker Wang Yang-ming (1472-1529) and of Zen Buddhism. He died when Li Shu-t'ung was four, leaving the boy to be reared by his mother, then only in her twenties.

Li's education and upbringing were unexceptional for a boy of his class and era. Encouraged by his elder half-brothers, he began to study the Confucian classics and made rapid progress. He also learned painting and seal carving. At the same time, he gave evidence of pronounced religious preoccupation, as when he committed to memory the Mahdkarunddharani and other liturgical texts recited by Buddhist monks at family memorial services or imitated monkish rituals of propitiation and exorcism. According to an account given to a friend in later years, the young Li was also given to fits of depression when he contemplated the transience, emptiness, and misery which even then seemed to him to characterize this world. Through the kindly attention of his elder half-brothers and the simple piety of the women members of his family, he achieved a command of the main elements of the Chinese classical tradition together with an understanding of Buddhism, at least as practiced by the devotees of the buddha Amitabha.

As a consequence of his family's high position, Li had been affianced at birth to a Miss Yü, whom he married in 1897. Two sons, born in 1900 and 1904 respectively, resulted from this union. Little more is known of either his wife or children, for, if Li in subsequent years did not precisely abandon them, he never regarded his marriage as having prior claims over filial piety, devotion to the arts, or religion. Also in 1897, Li became a partisan of the reform faction then seeking a voice in the operations of the Chinese government. To what extent he actually participated in the activities of the young men and junior officials who supported K'ang Yu-wei and Liang Ch'i-ch'ao (qq.v.) cannot be determined, but it is certain that he was considered a member of the reform party. He even carved a seal reading "Xan-hai K'ang-chün shih wushih" [K'ang Yu-wei is my teacher]. As a consequence, he was obliged to flee from Tientsin to Shanghai when, on 21-22 September 1898, the Empress Dowager Tz'u-hsi (ECCP, I, 295-300) launched the coup d'etat which ended the Hundred Days Reform and which cost six of the reform leaders their lives. In his flight Li was accompanied only by his mother. At Shanghai, Li thought it prudent to establish residence in the French concession. At the same time, he set about making the acquaintance of local literati. By winning three times in succession the prize offered for classical composition by the Hu-hsueh-hui [Shanghai literary club], Li came to the favorable notice of the principal sponsor o'f the club, Hsti Huanyuan. In 1899 Hsü invited Li and his mother to take up residence in his country villa south of Shanghai, initiating what Li himself later came to regard as the period of his secular life which came closest to perfection. Hsü's villa, surrounded by ancient willows and bordered by a meandering brook, was in a secluded suburb. Li was alloted a small house, where he lived contentedly with his mother and a few servants. Together with Hsü, and such friends of Hsü as Ts'ai Hsiao-hsiang, Chang Hsiao-lou, and Yuan Hsi-lien, Li spent six years at the villa painting and practicing the art of Chinese poetry in its various classical forms. These activities led eventually to the formation of the Shanghai shu-hua kung-hui [Shanghai association for calligraphy and painting], which for several years published the weekly Shu-hua pao [bulletin of calligraphy and painting]. The bulletin was edited by Li Shu-t'ung and was notable for the high quality of its plates and for exposing practitioners of traditional Chinese art to new artistic ideas. Li, Whose own poetry, painting, calligraphy, and seal carving were attracting notice in Shanghai, shortly after 1900 published Li-luyin-p'u [my book of seals], which contained impressions of rare and ancient seals from his own collection and of seals carved by himself. His next publication was Li-lu shih-chung [the bell], a collection of his own verse. Beginning in 1902, Li studied for a time at Nanyang University, where he and Shao Li-tzu (q.v.) were favorite pupils of Ts'ai Yuan-p'ei (q.v.). While living at Hsü Huan-yuan's villa, Li Shu-t'ung made the acquaintance of a number of the most famous singsong girls of the time and down to the day of his ordination preserved in elaborate brocade mountings copies of poems and letters which he had exchanged with them. In 1901 Li's name was linked to that of Yang Ts'ui-hsi, a courtesan celebrated both for her abilities as a singer and for the minuteness of her bound feet. She later became the concubine of Ts'ai-chen, an important personage in his own right and the son of I-k'uang (ECCP, II, 964-65;, who from 1903 until 1911 was the highest official in the Ch'ing government. A garbled and somewhat fictionalized account of their relationship appears in Yang Ts'ui'hsi erhsan shih [some incidents in the life of Yang Ts'ui-hsi].

In 1905 Li Shu-t'ung's mother died suddenly. Her death was a great shock to him, and, after seeing her coffin safely to its final resting place in Tientsin, he spent some time meditating on his future before deciding to go to Japan and to study Western art and music. During his years in Shanghai, Li had become interested in Western art and also in the adaptation of Western techniques to Chinese art. Another factor which influenced his decision was that a number of his old reformist acquaintances who had fled to Japan in 1898 were still living there. After arriving in Japan late in 1905, Li Shu-t'ung entered the Ueno Bijutsu Semmon Gakko [Ueno art academy], where his chief subject was oil painting. At the Ongaku Gakko [academy of music] he studied music, concentrating on the piano. In both branches of study he made rapid progress and readily adapted himself to Western techniques. His charcoal study Ch' U-nü-hua [portrait of a virgin] excited great interest, as much for its technique as for the spiritual expression of the model, and later became a part of the collection of Feng Tzu-k'ai (q.v.;. After Li discovered that his age and the many hours needed for practice would effectively prevent him from obtaining first rank as a pianist, he began to study music theory and composition. Some of his songs were published years later under the title Chung-wen ming-ko wu-shih-ch' ü [fifty famous songs in Chinese]. In 1906 he began publication of Yin-yüeh hsiao-tsa-chih [the little magazine of music], a biannual devoted to the introduction of Western music theory to China and the first magazine devoted entirely to musical affairs to be published in China. The activity which won Li Shu-t'ung most fame during his years in Japan was neither painting nor music, however, but theater. Before going to Japan he had become a skilled amateur performer in Chinese opexa, which he had studied in leisure moments while a student at Xanyang University. Li was profoundly impressed by the Western naturalistic drama which he saw presented on the Japanese stage. Accordingly, he joined with Ou-yang Yü-ch'ien (q.v.), and others in organizing the Ch'un-liu chü-she [spring willow drama club] for the presentation of Western plays in Chinese. In the course of the next several years the group put on successful productions of such plays as La Dame aux camelias, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Les Aliserables. Li specialized in women's roles, and his moving performance as Camille was acclaimed by both Chinese and Japanese critics.

In 1910 Li returned to China with a young Japanese girl who had been living with him for some months. Li established her in Shanghai and his wife and children in Tientsin and went to work as a teacher of drawing at the Chih-li mo-fan kung-hsüeh hsüeh-t'ang [Chihli academy of applied arts]. In 1912 Li's personal fortune, much of it invested in stocks, diminished considerably as a result of the revolution. He then moved to Shanghai, where he assumed the position of instructor in music at the Ch'engtung nü-hsueh [east Shanghai girl's college]. At this time, revolutionary ardor was reflected in the formation of a number of literai~y societies dedicated to the cause of bringing new vitality to Chinese literature. Among these new groups was the Xan-she [southern society], led by Liu Ya-tzu (q.v.). Li Shut'ung attended its first meeting in April 1912 and became one of its more prominent members. In Shanghai, Li also continued his career as a journalist and editor. When Ch'en Ch'i-mei (q.v.) started the T'ai-p'ing-jang pao [Pacific journal] in 1912, with Chu Shao-p'ing as editor in chief and Yeh Ch'u-ts'ang (q.v.) as chief editorial writer, he persuaded Li to assume the dual post of literary editor in chief and editor of the pictorial supplement, the T'ai-p'ing-yang hua-pao. The pictorial supplement, one of the first such features to be tried on a regular basis by a Chinese newspaper, succeeded largely because of Li's imaginative and tasteful direction. The literary section also flourished, and under Li's editorship a number of new young writers of merit were published, including Su Man-shu (q.v.), whose Tuan-hung ling-yen [a single goose] first appeared in this publication. Li also organized a new literary group, the Wen-mei hui [fine arts society] and assumed editorship of its journal, the Wen-mei tsa-chih [fine arts magazine]. Before long, however, both the T'ai-p^ing-yang pao and the Wen-mei hui went bankrupt. As a result, Li left Shanghai for Hangchow.

Beginning in 1913 Li was employed as instructor in drawing and music at the Che-chiang liang-chi shih-fan hsüeh-hsiao [Chekiang dual level normal school], which subsequently became Che-chiang ti-i shih-fan ta-hsüeh [Chekiang first normal college]. In 1915 he also assumed the post of instructor in drawing at Nan-ching kao-teng shih-fan ta-hsueh [Nanking higher normal school]. Among Li's colleagues were Hsia K'ai-tsun, T'ien Chün-fu, and Ma Hsü-lun (q.v.), and his students included Feng Tzu-k'ai, Liu Chih-p'ing, Wu Meng-fei, and I's'ao Chüjen. As a teacher, Li was remembered by his students both for his clear, painstaking way of teaching and for his high example of seriousness and probity. In Hangchow he became increasingly sober and reflective and adopted a style of life which stressed the traditional Confucian simplicity appropriate to a teacher and scholar. In a remarkable way he was able to communicate his enthusiasm for drawing and music to students. His recognition and encouragement of Feng Tzu-k'ai's talent led directly to Feng's choice of art as a career. Although Li Shu-t'ung had lived a full and sophisticated life, at least up to his return from Japan, he later confided to friends that he had never known real happiness and that as a layman he had never been without a depressing sense of the transience of all things. The death of his father in 1884, the failure of his political dreams in 1898, the death of his mother in 1905, his loveless marriage and complicated home life, and the political confusion and the loss of his fortune in 1912 eventually led him to a thoroughgoing reexamination of life and his place in it. Initially, he turned to Neo- Confucianism, a subject in which his father had acquired considerable learning. At the same time, he took up Taoism and went so far as to affect Taoist garb and to practice certain Taoist austerities. In January 1917 Li traveled to Ta-tz'u-shan and made his first extended fast, a 17-day effort involving gradual withdrawal from food, subsistence on water alone for one week, and gradual return to normal nutriment. The physical and spiritual effects of the fast were so pronounced that Li adopted a new personal name, "Ying" [newborn], and resolved to pursue to the end the new studies and disciplines that the experience of the fast had opened up to him. At this stage, his religious interests were centered in Taoism, but he had begun to study related aspects of Buddhism. His conversion and decision to join the Buddhist clergy came about in the same apocalyptic way as had his wholehearted conversion to Taoism. When asked by a friend. Ma I-fu, to recommend a quiet district for meditation to a certain Mr. P'eng, a friend of Ma and a student of the ching tso [meditation], Li named Ta-tz'u-shan. As it happened, Li planned to be there at the same time, and he struck up an acquaintance with P'eng. When they arrived at Ta-tz'u-shan, P'eng conceived the desire to become a Buddhist monk. His decision so moved Li that he determined to follow suit, but he was able to take only the vows of a lay believer. At this time, Li became a disciple of the eminent monk Liao-wu, began public worship of the Buddha, gave up meat and spicy vegetables, and studied the Buddhist scriptures. On 15 April 1918, having given away all of his books, seals, clothes, scrolls, and paintings to his colleagues and students, he took his first vows of entrance into the Buddhist clergy. At this point he adopted his name in religion, "Hung-i" [vast unity]. It has been reported that Hung-i's wife, children, and Japanese concubine arrived in Ta-tz'u-shan shortly thereafter in hopes of dissuading him from becoming a monk. Their protests proved futile, however, and they departed—the wife and children for Tientsin, the Japanese concubine for Japan. Hung-i shaved his head and took final vows in July 1918.

As a monk, Hung-i continued to practice the austerities through which he had achieved his first insights into profound religious experience. His frequent fasts and rigorous life won him many lay admirers. Hung-i also became known for delivering simple, moving sermons. However, Hung-i's most notable contribution to modern Chinese Buddhism was not in evangelism nor in the investigation which he made into the doctrines of the ching-t'u [pure land] sect, but in reform of the Buddhist clergy. He believed that the decline of Buddhism had come about in large measure through the decay of the clergy and that moral reforms were needed. This view of the problem of a Buddhist renaissance centering on the clergy contrasted sharply with the views of Yin-kuang, who proclaimed a simplified version of ching-t'u teachings which stressed an unquestioning faith in the buddha Amitabha, and with those of Hsü-yün, who dispensed almost entirely with ecclesiasticalapparatus and preached the Zen doctrine of the sudden enlightenment of the individual 'through meditation. T'ai-hsü (q.v.) attempted to bring the clergy back into the modern world by a synthesis of traditional doctrines with socialism, relativity theory, and other imports from the West, earning in passing the title ''revolutionary monk," but Hung-i concentrated on the moral regeneration of the clergy.

In September 1918 Hung-i took a series of special vows known as chieh [prohibitions]. Finding that these vows were especially relevant to his own spiritual needs, Hung-i proceeded to make a special study of the tradition within Buddhism from which they emerged. This was the lü or "monastic discipline" sect, which flourished during T'ang times, but subsequently declined. The doctrines of the lü school had been codified and brought to completion by the eminent monk Tao-hsüan (596-667). The most important part of the canon consisted in carefully detailed "prohibitive precepts," 250 for monks and 348 for nuns, which effectively applied to all aspects of life. Because he was convinced that a national Buddhist renaissance would have to begin with a regenerated clergy and that he had discovered systems of "monastic discipline" through which such a regeneration could take place, Hung-i devoted the rest of his life to a reexamination and recodification of the doctrines of the lü school. In 1924 these studies culminated in his Ssu-fen-lu pi-ch'iu chieh-hsiang piao-chi [rules of monastic discipline in four sections]. In this synthesis of a large number of existing treatises on "monastic discipline," Hung-i set forth a simple, consistent system of behavior for clerics which, more than any other work published for hundreds of years, responded to the needs of the tens of thousands of Buddhist monks throughout China. The book was welcomed by Buddhist churchmen of almost all persuasions. Hung-i then wrote a series of treatises on related topics. Among these were biographical accounts of the sect's virtual founder, Tao-hsüan, which appeared as Nanshan Tao-hsüan lü-tsu lueh-p'u [a brief life of Taohsüan, founder of the "monastic discipline" school] and Nan-shan nien-p'u [chronological biography of Tao-hsüan]. For his efforts in reviving this branch of Buddhism, Hung-i earned the designation ch'ung-hsing Nan-shan lü-tsung ti-shih-i-tai tsu-shih [eleventh patriarch and restorer of the "monastic discipline" school]. In 1929 Hung-i collaborated with his pupil Feng Tzu-k'ai on the first of a series of volumes entitled Hu-sheng hua-chi, a calligraphic text written by Hung-i in the form of fables with Buddhist morals. Feng produced 50 illustrations for the first volume. The second and third volumes appeared in 1940 and 1950. Soon after the Sino-Japanese war began in 1937, Japanese forces occupied the area where Hung-i was living. Hung-i did not allow their presence to interrupt his life of preaching, traveling, and writing.

By this time, Hung-i had reduced his personal needs to a minimum and traveled with little more than one battered straw mat for a bed and an extra robe. His endurance of want and suffering served as a much emulated example in the occupied areas through which he traveled. Typical of his spirit during his final years was his remark to Hsia K'ai-tsun after Hsia had accidently added too much salt to Hung-i's simple vegetable supper: "Let it be. Salt has the flavor of salt, and that is good too." Although a cleric and thus "dead to the world," Hung-i reacted patriotically to the Japanese invasion, resisting efforts to remove him to safer areas and responding to requests for samples of his calligraphy with such mottos as "nien-Fo pu-wang chiu-kuo" [in the worship of Buddha do not neglect the salvation of China]. Wartime privation combined with continued austerities and fasts soon began to weaken Hung-i's health. His condition became grave during the summer of 1942, and in September of that year he made a final gift of all his earthly possessions to Hsia K'ai-tsun and Liu Chih-p'ing. He died on 4 September 1942 at Ch'üanchou, Fukien. Since his demise, the memory of Hung-i has been kept alive, largely through the efforts ofhis former colleagues and disciples. A memorial stele was raised at Ch'üanchou in 1952 on the tenth anniversary of his death. A year later a similar but larger monument was erected at Hangchow. Feng Tzu-k'ai and Yeh Sheng-t'ao (q.v.) were among the sponsors of the Hangchow column. In recent histories of Chinese music Hung-i has been commended for his pioneer efforts in introducing Western music to China. In 1958 a collection of his songs, edited and illustrated by Feng Tzu-k'ai, was published at Peking under the title Li Shu-t'ung ko-ch'ü chi [songs of Li Shu-t'ung].