Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2019. vii, 355 pp. (Tables, figures, B&W photos.) US$72.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-7734-7.
Buddhism after Mao is a long-awaited collection that has finally materialized more than four decades after Mao’s death and the publication of Holmes Welch’s Buddhism under Mao (Harvard University Press, 1972). Diligently following Welch’s approach to the period between the late Qing and the Cultural Revolution, Ji, Fisher, and Laliberté state in the introduction that this volume focuses on Buddhist institutions, “from the beginnings of Buddhist revival in the early 1980s through the middle 2010s” (3).
Buddhist institutions “under” Mao and “post” Mao are not the same. The subject matter has changed from “temples, academies, and lay associations” for Welch’s trilogy to “temples and monasteries, as places of worship and learning, as tourist sites, and as providers of philanthropy” for Ji, Fisher, and Laliberté (3). Moreover, the context has shifted from modernity and Maoism to that of globalization, neoliberalism, and an ever-expanding party-state. The volume fully recognizes new subject matter while defying an ahistorical portrait of a “new” Chinese Buddhism.
The authors ask: “How has Buddhism re-embedded itself into the Chinese political framework and social fabric, which themselves have been in full transformation since the beginning of the 1980s?” (7). The volume answers this question by examining three institutional aspects: politics, monastics, and space. The state is, by default, present in each of the three aspects. In response to the theoretical approaches to Chinese religions—Yang Fanggang’s religious economy, Sun Yanfei’s religious ecology, and Adam Chau’s five “modalities of doing religion”—Ji, Fisher, and Laliberté propose to build their volume most strongly on Chau’s model, as it shifts the analysis “from religion as a cognitive process to an action that one ‘does’” (6), with the modification that it is institutions rather than individuals “doing” Buddhism.
While not all 12 contributors incorporate Chau’s model, the volume as a whole provides findings on three institutional aspects in the post-Mao era. For the politics of Buddhism, as the state is near pervasive in civil society in China, Buddhist organizations, temples, monasteries, and collective charities together negotiate their post-Mao revivals amid evolving governmental regulations and corporatism. Further, Buddhist space is expanded in the expensive city of Shanghai through a charismatic and savvy abbot, invented over the Internet, and re-invented in the temple courtyard. Perhaps most surprising are the monastic initiatives to resume the tradition of transmission and ordinations, dating back hundreds or even a thousand years, that was disrupted under Mao, and to restart anew, with unprecedented proliferation, the institutional genre of Buddhist academies. In some ways, the state and space are analytical approaches shared across comparative religions, whereas genealogies, ordination, and monastic education concern unique models “of” and “for” Chinese Buddhism.
The book consists of an introduction and 11 chapters, which are sorted into three sections. Each chapter could be a stand-alone article.
Part 1 is titled “Negotiating Legitimacy: Making Buddhism with the State,” and of the four chapters, those by Laliberté and Nichols are the most institutional. Laliberté illustrates the “incorporation” relationship between the CCP and the Buddhist Association of China (BAC) during the Hu and Xi administrations, an unduly understudied subject. He offers a nuanced evaluation of, among other things, propaganda’s effects on cross-Strait reunification that draws on cooperation with Taiwanese Buddhist associations. Nichols provides a typology of paths for temple revivals: first, the path of the “curators,” the governmental, secular entities who seek to preserve temples as artifacts; second, the path of the “revivalists,” the monastics, lay Buddhists, and worshippers who rebuild temples for religious concerns; and a third, hybrid path “forged through the necessary negotiations between the curators and revivalists” (78). Vidal’s chapter is a case study of a Buddhist pilgrimage site, the island of Putuoshan (Mount Putuo). Through the lens of a local power holder, the sacred site of Putuoshan unfolds into a kaleidoscope of governmental administering boxes and a flow chart of donation money. McCarthy focuses on charity, using the Ren’ai Foundation in Beijing, and the life rescue (fangsheng) practice, which releases captive animals such as birds or fish, as two examples of “congruence” between charities and the party-state. The former is faith-based, civic minded, and partially secular, whereas the latter is “purely religious,” concerned only with merit-making charity (cishan), and thus, controversial.
Part 2 is titled “Revival and Continuity: The Monastic Tradition and Beyond.” The post-Mao monastic tradition strives to resume and revive the Buddhist orthodoxy. Campo surveys how Buddhist kinship through the private transmission of Dharma genealogies survived the interruption between 1957 and 1981. With substantial documentation of primary sources, Campo argues that Tiantai and Chan kinships survived because of systematic transmission and prestigious genealogies, as well as by moving abroad to Hong Kong and the United States while still under Mao’s rule. Bianchi documents the revived tradition of “triple platform ordination” (santan dajie) for both monks and nuns, and the “dual ordination” (erbu sengjie) for nuns. Restored ordinations are critical to the monastic status. At the same time, the trend towards standardization and uniformity seems to leave no space for diversity, such as caigu, the lay Buddhist women in southeast China, known as the “vegetarian women.” Ashiwa and Wank coin the term “laynuns” for caigu and document their history and practice leading to the Xiamen local government’s special recognition of the laynuns as “religious professionals” in 2012. They argue that the persistence of laynuns ties in to the powerful legend of Miaoshan in the Sinicization of Guanyin. Ji’s chapter is an ambitious survey of the proliferation of Buddhist academies (foxueyuan) in the post-Mao era and provides insights into the dualism between “study” and “practice” in sangha education.
Part 3, “Reinventing the Dharma: Buddhism in a Changing Society,” examines three “spaces” for Buddhism and their implications for Buddhism in China. Huang point to the success of the abbot in expanding Jing’an Temple in Shanghai as an example of temple agency. The existence of the somewhat tenured liminal space in the public courtyards of temples in Beijing answers the question of why Buddhists do not have underground movements as do Chinese Christians, according to Fisher. Travagnin examines the online ritual practices of Nanputuo Temple in the pre-pandemic era, and argues that the offline practice is nevertheless “higher” than the online one in the overall hierarchy.
C. Julia Huang
DePaul University, Chicago