Topics in Contemporary Buddhism. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2014. x, 263 pp. (Figures, tables.) US$50.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-3966-6.
From Comrades to Bodhisattvas, by Gareth Fisher, is a comprehensive and highly readable ethnographic study of lay Han Buddhists in post-Mao China in Beijing. Fisher magnificently gives the lay Buddhists, who were severely socially and economically marginalized during the grand social transition after the Mao administration, distinct faces and compelling voices as they apply “temple courtyard” Buddhist moral teachings to address what he calls the “moral breakdown” and imbalances of their daily lives. In the six chapters of this monograph, Fisher seeks to describe the social, as well as moral, transformations that lead these lay people from “chaos” to “balance” and the establishment of “Buddhic bonds.”
Borrowing the analytical framework of Jarrett Zigon and Foucault, Fisher defines moral breakdown “as an unsettled psychological state that occurs when changing circumstances challenge the cultural norms within which one exists as a social person, forcing one to engage ‘ethical demands’ to work out the contradictions that these changing circumstances provoke” (3). Fisher attempts to advance Zigon’s concept by suggesting that “the solution of moral breakdown can occur only through the wholesale rejection of social persons and institutions that brought about the breakdown in the first place” (4). After the establishment of new Buddhist personhood, the sustainability of identity depends on practitioners’ relationships with her/his fellow Buddhists and “minimizing interactions outside of the temple.” Taking the emic approach, Fisher analyzes the notion of foyuan (chapter 3 and 4), a concept lay people use to “ethically remake themselves from marginalized persons in an illegible world into chosen participants in a vanguard to morally reform that world” (87). He looks at how practitioners utilize this term as a rationale for their own conversion and the establishment of a bond with the Buddha’s teachings. His study also shows how this concept was further employed to convert and socialize new practitioners. A Buddhist identity could be temporary and might shift, as Fisher describes in the conclusion when he witnesses a young practitioner effectively rejoining the secular world and changing the outlook of her Buddhist stance (202–203).
In chapter 4, Fisher investigates the guanxi-based morality under the Buddhist viewpoint of ethics and discovers that yinguo (cause and consequence) is treated as an alternative morality by his informants. The foyuan is evidence that practitioners have an important status in the cosmic universe that cannot be understood through the narrower perspective of other mainstream social relationships used by guanxixue. Fisher suggests that this practice is empowering to the practitioners because it leads them to believe that they are special. It is interesting to learn how the definitive idea of foyuan differentiates those who are converts, those who have prior connections with Buddhist teachings but without much memory or knowledge of them, and those who are non-believers. In the second part of the chapter, Fisher turns to the interpretation of the morality of exchange among his informants. In this yinguo-based system of morality, for Buddhists the exchange of literature and media takes place under the framework of jieyuan, often occurring anonymously, a pattern also found by research on a Protestant group. Fisher proposes that Buddhist and Protestant Christian communities in contemporary urban China share similar moralities of exchange for two reasons. First, both religions are dominated by adult converts. Secondly, both religions offer universalistic systems of morality that posit that all beings share an equal status. This is an appealing moral vision for those who have been marginalized by the moral discrimination of social persons in the ego-centered morality of guanxi (130–133). In chapter 5, Fisher argues that the spread of print matter and multimedia materials plays a similar role in the creation of an imagined community of lay Buddhists in contemporary mainland China. The discursive networks, formed under the impression that many others share in their practice, contributes to their belief that moral reform is attainable and can be created by Buddhists’ circulation of media through the moral framework of jieyuan.
Another contribution of Fisher’s book is that it cleverly designates those individuals who practice within isolated social spaces as encompassing the conceptual space of “islands of religiosity.” This concept signifies that most urban religious phenomena function as “religious islands in a larger sea of secularism” (204) due to the state’s control of space. Along with his sympathetic understanding of these socially demoted practitioners, the author also defends how they assert their own agency, such as when they distribute printing and multimedia materials. By doing so, they are creating a national imagined community that empowers them to make extensive Buddhist bonds and break away from their confined social space (89, 137, 168).
Weishan Huang
Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, SAR, China
pp. 880-882