After the First Sino-Japanese War, he went to Shanghai, becoming a member of the Society for National Strengthening (強學會) and writing for a number of newspapers, including Liang Qichao's Shi Wu Bao (時務報).
After his release, Zhang went to Japan to join Tongmeng Hui and became the chief editor of the newspaper Min Bao (民報) which strongly criticized the Qing Empire's corruption.
Because of an ideological conflict with Sun Yat-sen and his Three Principles of the People, Zhang established the Tokyo branch of Guangfu Hui in February 1909.
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" (Kurtz 302).
Joachim Kurtz writes: 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 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.
[3]Zhang replaced conventional sense of mingjia (which was the name of one of the nine philosophical schools pre-Qin) with a new understanding—the methodology of debate similar to European logic and Buddhist dialectic.
Zhang's interest and studies in Buddhism only became serious during the three years he spent in prison for "publishing anti-Manchu propaganda and insulting the Qing emperor as a 'buffoon' in 1903".
[5] During this time, he read the Yogacara-bhumi, the basic texts of Weishi "Consciousness Only" school, and the foundational work of Chinese Buddhist logic (the Nyayapravesa).
[8] In 1906, after he was released from prison, Zhang went to Japan to edit The People's Journal (Minbao) and developed a new philosophical framework that critiqued the dominant intellectual trend of modernization theory.
This is made apparent in "Zhang Taiyan's Notes on Reading Buddhist Texts", in which he is concerned with the concepts of "freedom, constraints, sadness, and happiness".
[10] While he was in Japan, he joined Tong Meng Hui, a party that was primarily made up of anti-Manchu exiles (including Sun Yat-sen) seeking the cultural and political regeneration of China.
"[11]: 300 Upon his return to China, Zhang worked on the commission "convened by the new Nationalist government's Ministry of Education in 1913 to establish a national language and helped develop the Chinese phonetic symbol system still used today in Taiwan, among other places.
[12] In a time when most Chinese intellectuals favored modernization ideologies and endorsed history as a progressive movement, Zhang Taiyan (Binglin) drew on Buddhism and Daoism to express his critiques.
Social and intellectual life during the Qing dynasty was primarily influenced by "widely circulating discourses of modern philosophy and the concrete forces of the global capitalist system of nation-states".
[7] Following a string of defeats in the late 19th century, Chinese intellectuals began to focus on how China could be improved in order to compete in the global capitalist system.
Zhang was particularly revolutionary, as he "mobilized Buddhism for politics"[13] and combined elements of Yogacara Buddhist thought with concepts he had developed himself in his pre-revolutionary years.
Yogacara (or Weishi) primarily focuses on cognitive processes that could be used to overcome ignorance that prevented one from escaping the karmic rounds of birth and death.
This revival was primarily led by Liang Qichao, Yang Wenhui, Tan Sitong, Zhang Taiyan and many other prominent intellectuals of the late Qing period.
Zhang was not the only one who believed this—the late Qing discussion of religion became a philosophical project designed to modernize China so it could compete "as a nation-state in an increasingly rationalized and reified world.
Zhang 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.
In his essay Discussion on the Equalization of Things, Zhang uses Yogacara Buddhist concepts to make sense of Zhuangzi, an ancient Daoist philosopher.
[21] Zhang 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.