Buddhist-Daoist forest

A celebrated writer at Renmin University, in whose summer school I taught for a few years, was described to me as an international literary star. His works - dark satires of contemporary Chinese life - were not published in China, but somehow this didn't seem to be a problem. His newest novel (at least in translation) lampoons the program Renmin runs for leaders of China's five officially recognized religions. I've only read about a fourth of it so far, but it's savage. Grimly funny, too, and occasionally unexpectedly lyrical. Two main characters, a young Buddhist nun and a young Daoist priest, sort of fall in love, something she makes sense of through elaborate paper cuts imagining a relationship between the bodhisattva Guanyin and Laozi. Fascinating! But I didn't expect it might involve trees, too...!

Revival

I thought that researchers on religion in China might find their way to New School after I spent a year there making connections, but why wait? We're on Chinese time now!

Yesterday we hosted a symposium called "The Religious Revival in Contemporary China," with two ethnographically oriented sociologists from Fudan University in Shanghai. Both presentations were fascinating, providing on-the-ground descriptions of emerging formations in the spaces between an officially atheistic state and the limited list of "religions" it officially condones. Even if weren't already a lived religion fan, these amazing category-stymying thick descriptions would make clear the need for theories more supple than our understandings of religion - even world religion - for understanding what's going on.

Fan Lizhu described the wave of new and restored ancestry halls in southern China, nominally no more than public spaces and representations of family pride but in fact the continuation of ancient popular religious practices which predate all the official "religions." Na Chen described the emergence of a new religion that calls itself Confucianism 儒教 - a term scholars shun (preferring 儒学 and 儒家), in part because Confucianism is not one of the five recognized religions. This new "Confucian congregation" combines popular religious practices - healing, talismans, chanting and veneration of ancient worthies as well as its three still living founders. Its main texts and teachings are ancient Confucian but it also chants parts of the Daodejing and, cannily, Confucian-sounding government policies such as Hu Jintao's "Eight Honors and Eight Shames" and Xi Jinping's talk of "harmonious society."

Fascinating stuff, which led to a wide-ranging discussion in our standing-room-only crowd. I was the moderator, and framed the discussion with Wilfred Cantwell Smith's famous claim that "The question, 'Is Confucianism a religion?' is one that the West has never been able to answer and China never able to ask" (The Meaning and End of Religion, 69). This may no longer be true, I suggested. In any case western attempts to understand Chinese practices and ideas involving heaven, human nature, fate, ancestors, morality and ritual long predate the modern discourse of religion, and provide a great starting point for a rethink of this discourse - especially as folks in China have been wrestling with it for over a century now. How exciting that I get to explore this, there and here!

A hunch

Reading about "Buddhism Modernism" at the same time as I'm learning more about "religion" in China in the last century is giving me some interesting ideas. David McMahan, whose Making of Buddhist Modernism is our current text in "Buddhism and Modern Thought," makes clear that the bookstore is an important locus.

What could be more commonplace than a Buddhist - or perhaps someone simply "into" Buddhism - going to a good bookstore, browsing a bit, purchasing a translation of a classic primary text, then going home and reading it? Besides meditation, most western Buddhists would consider reading Buddhist books one of their primary activities as Buddhists, and many have come to Buddhism through books. ([Oxford University Press, 2008] 16-17)

I've regaled you with Carl Bielefeld's hilarious account of what role texts actually play in traditional Buddhist societies of the past - reading them, especially as a lay person, is so rare as to be nonexistent. And we all know about how Buddhism is "invented" as a textual construct by western Orientalist scholars in the 19th century, and how this textual Buddhism, privileging a pure primitive teaching over later elaborations and practice, affected Buddhist modernizers in Asia. But the way these texts now reside in bookstores all over the place, where anyone can leaf through them (along with Rumi, The I Ching, The Gnostic Gospels and of course The Varieties of Religious Experience) and perhaps take them home to read, is worth thinking about on its own. The Orientalists were seeking a sure foundation in the oldest texts, but the denizen of the Religion-Philosophy-Spirituality-New Age section of her local bookstore has other interests. McMahan stresses the importance of "perennialism," the idea that all traditions articulate the same unchanging Truth, in making Buddhist ideas accessible to the West (71f). But nowadays people may be looking for something specifically "Eastern."

Like other large-scale religions ... Buddhism has become detraditionalized among many adherents, including the rapidly emerging affluent and educated middle-class populations of various Asian countries, as well as in the West among converts. Among western converts, detraditionalization occurs in part because most of them learn about Buddhism from books that portray it as part of an amorphous "Eastern mysticism" that is considered largely independent of institutional structures. Popular literature in the West often presents the "essence" of Buddhism as primarily about inner experience rather than its institutional and social realities. This approach has created a new kind of quasi-lay community of Buddhist sympathizers [a term from Thomas Tweed] who read popular Buddhist books and do some meditation and an occasional retreat but do not necessarily identify themselves exclusively as Buddhist. These sympathizers ... may not be committed to Buddhism in any institutional form, may reject or simply be unaware of doctrines unpalatable to late modern sensibilities, and may also be "Hindu sympathizers," "Daoist sympathizers," and "neo-pagan sympathizers." It is not just their eclecticism, though, that makes them particularly modern - the religious lives of many, if not most, traditional East Asians throughout history has been constituted by an amalgam of beliefs and practices from a variety of traditions. What marks such contemporary spiritually eclectic Buddhist sympathizers as embodying detraditionalized Buddhism is the fact that they quite consciously feel free as individuals to adopt or reject whatever bits and pieces they choose from Buddhism, as well as mixing and matching them with fragments from other traditions, thus creating their own personal religious bricolage. Autonomous reason, freedom of choice, and intuitive insight are implicitly considered superior to external authority, even though part of that freedom may include placing oneself under the guidance of a spiritual teacher. (43-44)

A few months ago I would have dwelt on how this conforms with the picture "lived religion" gives us of contemporary life, which of course it does (along with questions about its historical and cultural specificity). Now what strikes me here is a possible parallel with the unfolding religious world in China, and especially what I understand are called "cultural Christians" (wenhua jidutu 文化基督徒). Largely based at universities - professors and students - these are apparently people who have developed a keen interest in Christianity and embrace some of its teachings but don't choose to be baptized or join an actual church community. They learn about Christianity as part of "western culture" from books, and integrate elements of what they find into their lives without feeling the need to connect to the legacies of interpretation and practice of actual churches and denominations. Yang Fenggang, in the first book I read on the subject, stressed that this "religion as culture" sector - independent both of the state and religious authority - plays a distinctive and significant part in the story of religion in China.

It sounds like - for a few of the same and many different reasons - Christian traditions could be as textualized, dismembered, reassembled and hybridized in China as "Buddhist" ones are in the modern West. Especially in the context of a society which doesn't expect people to (at least claim to) belong to one or another faith tradition or community, there's no reason necessarily to expect that cultural Christians will wind up in what we would recognize as church traditions. It'll be fascinating to learn more about this in situ, to see how far the analogy goes...

Ways to go

I've only just scratched the surface of the surface of the Chinese language, but I'm starting to sense the depths below. The surface is deceptively simple - little grammar, none of those pesky genders, articles, conjugations or, for that matter, tenses which entangle other languages. Its classic texts are often columns of just four characters per line which, in translation, spill out in nuance over many more words. And it's long been thus. I was disconcerted - excited and confused - to recognize every character in this text, for instance, which came up in the East Asian Religions course I'm auditing. The text is the early Daoist "Inward Training," possibly the oldest surviving mystical text in China (2500 years old, or more). This poem, VI, is translated as:

As for the Way:

It is what the mouth cannot speak of,

The eyes cannot see,

And the ears cannot hear.

It is that with which we cultivate the mind and align the body.

When people lose it they die;

When people gain it they flourish.

When endeavors lose it they fail;

When they gain it they succeed.

The Way never has a root or trunk,

It never has leaves or flowers.

the myriad things are generated by it;

The myriad things are completed by it.

We designate it "the Way."

Harold D. Roth, Original Tao: Inward Training (Nei-Yeh)

and the Foundations of Taoist Mysticism (Columbia, 2004), 56-57

As when I was understanding some of the lines in the Hangzhou Yue opera performances last week, it's trippy to be recognizing anything, just two months in. How is that even possible?!

That there's more than meets the eye was confirmed by a story the instructor of the class told us. He'd gone to visit Maoshan, a famous Daoist mountain, important in the medieval history of Daoism, only to find it had been turned into a Daoist theme park: on a hillside facing it a huge gilded statue of Laozi (who never set foot anywhere near this place) looked out across the valley. Near the foot of the sacred mountain itself was a stone marker with these characters carved in red:

In modern Chinese this means something like special or cool path (feichang dao), but as N ascended the paved path which led uphill behind it he encountered stone plaques with the entire text of the 道德经 Daodejing [Tao Te Ching] along its sides. Eventually he remembered that 非常道 appears in the Daodejing, whose very first lines (again in characters all of which I recognize) are, with D. C. Lau's translation:

道可道

The way that can be spoken of

非常道

Is not the constant way;

名可名

The name that can be named

非常名

Is not the constant name.

Was the sign advertising a special walking trail, or the sacred text whose second line describes a way that is not the constant way? Why, yes?!

Knocking

When folks find out I'm planning to spend next academic year in China, most ask why with some combination of surprise, confusion and alarm. Depending on my mood and who the interlocutor is, I give different reasons, or at least different constellations of reasons. The main reason is of course academic - the recent resurgence of religion in China is important for the global study of religion, including the theory of religion, as also of modernity and secularism. But I have also long been fascinated by Christianity in China, which seems to me an important chapter in the future of Christianity. (This is one reason why there's a copy of a page from a recent Chinese edition of Job in my book.) I'm curious even about the Three-Self Patriotic Movement 三自爱国运动, the officially sanctioned Protestant church in China. The three-selfs - self-government, self-support and self-propagation - were enforced by the communists in 1951, severing all connections with western Christian organizations. They actually go back to the mid-19th century, but indigenization was turbocharged in the second half of the 20th century.

What, I wonder, will it be like to worship with these Christians?

Above: collage of church entries in rural central China by Yuanming Cao.

Gray matter

Just read a first book about religion in contemporary China, and it's amply confirmed my religious studies excitement about going there next year. Purdue Sociologist Fenggang Yang's Religion in China: Survival and Revival under Community Rule (Oxford, 2012) surveys the place of religion in China before, during and after various communist measures at control - or, during the Cultural Revolution, elimination - and develops a broader theory of religion to make sense of it. A great place to start exploring!

Yang challenges secularization narratives as well as the "new paradigm of religious vitality" in recent US religious studies, the idea that China has never been religious (Hu Shih) and also the view that China has always been religiously pluralist in a "diffused" way (C. K. Yang). China is better explained as a religious "oligopoly" - several religions are officially recognized by the state, all others repressed - and an object lesson in the futility of religious regulation.

The main theoretical proposal is a "triple-market" understanding of religion. When what is permitted (he calls it the "red" religious market) doesn't meet everyone's religious demands (he takes from Janos Kornai the idea of a "scarcity economy" found across communist societies), a "black" market of underground practices and communities emerges. The costs of participation in the black market are high, however, so a third market emerges, a "gray" one, which includes the forbidden activities of members of permitted religions as well as alternative religions presenting themselves non-religiously (as culture or folklore, as economic driver, or - as in the case of Qigong - as health science). If all these are included, China seems religiouslyvibrant beyond most estimates, and likely to remain so as long as the government tries to manage the religious sector.

It's a rich and intriguing thesis, engaging many of the broad theory of religion questions I love to discuss. Yang rejects those views which suppose religion culturally or historically contingent, something which might not be a feature of some societies and will in any case disappear from any society as it modernizes, but also those like the "new paradigm" which presuppose an unchanging demand" for religion among all people which religious organizations seek to meet. As Yang reads the Chinese evidence, religious demand, at least "active demand," does seem to ebb and flow in response to changing environments.

Despite its title, though, Religion in China offers itself as a contribution to the sociology of religion as a whole, not just the study of a region; indeed, Yang scorns regionalist views (like the exceptionalisms bedeviling the study of religion in America) as unscientific. Leave the search for the "idiosyncratic uniqueness" of particular regions to the humanities, he says (10). Fighting words - but I can understand his desire to shake up a sociology of religion seeking universals in European and North American experiences but seeking culturally specific phenomena - if anything - everywhere else.

The book does leave me wanting more texture in its account of China, though - and not just, I think, because I'm in the humanities. Yang rightly questions the "new paradigm" assumption that the story of religious change is the story of competition among suppliers in the face of a constant demand, but he doesn't provide any account of the nature (and varieties?) of religious "demand" or what drives it, and drives it to change when it changes. By default he winds up endorsing a somewhat flabby version of the "new paradigm" view, a view suggested by occasional use of phrases like "religious" or "spiritual hunger" (144, 152) and reference to a "spiritual consciousness ... waiting to be awakened" (118, see 139). Are all people spiritual, then, needing a religious dimension to their lives? If one think so one should admit it, and, especially if a scientist, give some reasons for others to agree - and explain why it doesn't express itself consistently in "active demand."

I have no doubt Yang has interesting and considered views about all this, just not in this book. But on reflection I find that these are precisely the questions most interesting to me - and the ones which make me think that a sojourn in China would be so edifying. There may be better ways than thinking of religious "demand" but I'll let it stand. What I want to know is what the oligopolistic Chinese past, always with attendant black and gray markets, has done to understandings of cosmos and society. More recently I want to know how religious "demand" has been shaped by violent collective traumas, massive social disruptions, collectivizations, the Cultural Revolution, the one child policy, and the future shock of contemporary China's top-speed transformations. Etc!