Abstract
This article presents an ethnographic examination of a range of religious practices at the Buddhist Temple of Universal Rescue (Guangji si) in Beijing. Temple-goers engaged in both ritual practices in the temple’s inner courtyard and moralistic conversations in the outer courtyard draw on recycled fragments of China’s many “pasts” to form cultural repertoires. These repertoires provide the temple-goers with a cultural toolkit to enter into meaningful projects of self- and identity-making in an environment of rapid social change. Participants in different religious activities at the temple both add to and mobilize different elements in their repertoires as their life circumstances change. The example of the temple shows that, in the popular Chinese social arena, various past stages of China’s history, including phases in its modernization process, have neither been abandoned nor superseded but remain as cultural resources to be drawn from as needed.
On entering the outer courtyard of the Buddhist Temple of Universal Rescue (Guangji si) in Beijing during one of its weekly dharma assemblies (fahui), a visitor will encounter small groups of lay practitioners engaged in vigorous conversation. Many of these practitioners work to connect Buddhist lessons in morality to their everyday lives. Some listen to lay preachers’ sermons on living a Buddhist lifestyle in an increasingly degenerate world: one preacher might extol China’s late Chairman Mao Zedong as a model of the true bodhisattva (pusa) who strove to build a Buddhist society during his rule. Further on, in the temple’s inner courtyard, a larger group of lay adherents participates in the chanting of Buddhist scriptures (sutras, songjing). At the same time, ignoring the sutra chanters, groups of devotees weave their way through these supplicants to make individual offerings of incense, cash, and other gifts to the higher beings of their choice.
The temple’s eclectic spiritual environment is an example of diverse cultural responses that have followed the partial relaxation of restrictions on public practices of religiosity in post-Mao China. I argue that these varied modes of religiosity represent popular engagements with various Chinese “pasts,” both ritual and moral. In their public activities at the temple, religious adherents draw from both traditional religiosity and narratives of modern reform as parts of cultural repertoires that help them fashion their lives in the present. I use the term “cultural repertoire” to refer to a socially constructed inventory of knowledge and practice. 1 At the Temple of Universal Rescue, elements in an individual’s cultural repertoire can be as diverse as the ritual program of sung liturgy that the sutra chanters use during each of the dharma assemblies, the circuits through which the devotees travel to make their offerings to the temple deities, or the Maoist-inspired narratives that some of the lay preachers form. In general, elements in a repertoire can concern technologies of bodily discipline, as through ritual actions, or frameworks of thought as expressed in the conversations of the preacher circles and discussion groups in the outer courtyard. Participants in the temple activities both use different elements in their repertoires and attach different meanings to the same (and different) elements. They frequently take apart and recombine these different elements. In this respect, elements in a repertoire are like patterns in a cultural grammar of varying sizes and types that, once introduced, remain as parts of a toolkit that is culturally accessible. A repertoire is not merely a repository of culture, however, that, like books in an ever-expanding library, can be checked out and read, but contains cultural building blocks that active agents creatively combine and recombine as part of their making of self and society. Depending on the elements it contains and how they are combined, one may discuss the cultural repertoire of a large-scale society, a smaller social group, or simply an individual. Here, I will generally refer to the “repertoire” (in the singular) of an individual temple-goer and to the “repertoires” of temple-goers in the plural: although they congregate within the same small temple space, the temple-goers’ repertoires can be strikingly diverse. 2
Several studies of popular religiosity in post-Mao China have emphasized the attempts of religious communities to reestablish connections to pre-Communist forms of cultural expression and social organization through the revival of popular rituals (see, for instance, Jing, 1996; Overmyer, 2002; Lagerwey, 2004; Huang and Yang, 2005; Jones, 2011). In contrast, other studies have focused on the disconnection between present-day religiosities and past forms following the destruction of their original meanings by the Maoist-era state (Siu, 1989; Liu, 2000) or through their commoditization as part of contemporary China’s engagement with neoliberalist modes of consumption (Yü, 2008). I seek a middle ground between these interpretive models to suggest that, in China today, groups combine and recombine both practices of popular religion and the meanings attached to those practices—old and new—to form coherent and meaningful moral selves in the present. In so doing, I join Kenneth Dean (1993, 2009), Mayfair Yang (2000), and Jonathan Flower (2004) in examining how the revival of traditional religious practices enables their participants to construct frameworks of morality and community that differ from those of the post-Mao state and its local actors. In contrast to these studies, however, my work aims to show how participants in religious activities at the Temple of Universal Rescue are not only engaged in reviving pre-Communist forms of ritual practice and temple-based social organization but also draw from metanarratives employed at times by the Communist state, most notably aspects of Maoist philosophy.
In these respects, I build on Susanne Brandtstädter’s (2006: 8) study of rural residents in southern Fujian who have “recycled and recombined fragments from different modernist projects” to take agency in defining their positions in the post-Mao period and Liu Xin’s (2000: 81) study of a Shaanxi village community whose residents put together a “combination of traditional, revolutionary, and modern elements” in the creation of cultural orders relevant to their present lives. Similarly, participants in the activities at the Temple of Universal Rescue combine elements of Chinese modernity as well as premodern practices of popular religiosity to create meaningful identities in the fast-changing world of China’s growing capital from which some have found themselves completely excluded while others are uncertain of their roles. In contrast to the rural residents studied by Brandtstädter and Liu, who negotiate cultural meanings as participants in community-centered ritual orders, many of the participants in religious activities at the urban-based Temple of Universal Rescue come to the temple in search of a social environment away from their customary place-based and kin-based social networks. They often do so as part of a conscious search for elements to add to their cultural repertoires that they hope will enable them to achieve greater psychological balance, to craft more meaningful social identities, and to inhabit more cohesive and intelligible moral orders.
The discussion that follows begins by presenting the temple setting. It then explores the groups and activities that take place there, considering both how the temple-goers marshal diverse elements in their cultural repertoires and how they use these repertoires to adapt to changing conditions. 3 Finally, it considers when and how temple-goers add to and mobilize different elements in their repertoires.
The Temple Setting
The Temple of Universal Rescue is located in the Xisi district of Beijing, just outside the new Xisi metro station. The present temple structure was built during the late Ming dynasty. Named by the Chenghua emperor in 1484, the temple was frequently the beneficiary of imperial patronage. Following the rise of the Communist government to power in 1949, it became the headquarters of the Chinese Buddhist Association (Zhongguo fojiao xiehui), a government-sanctioned umbrella organization for Buddhist monastics and laypersons, which reports directly to the Religious Affairs Bureau (Zongjiao shiwuju) of the central government. During the Maoist era, the temple was closed to the public and used for receiving dignitaries from foreign Buddhist delegations, an important activity in the effort of the Buddhist Association to legitimate Buddhism before the socialist state (see Welch, 1972: 145–47). The temple’s official status and closed doors protected it from serious damage during the Cultural Revolution. Since the late 1980s, the temple’s two southernmost courtyards, including its main halls, have been opened to the public during the daytime free of charge.
The dharma assemblies take place once a week; the temple holds a major dharma assembly every two weeks on the first and fifteenth days of the lunar month and a minor dharma assembly every other two weeks on the eighth and twenty-third days of the month. In addition to these regular dharma assemblies, several other major gatherings take place throughout the year on important occasions such as the Buddha’s birthday, the conversion day of the bodhisattva Guanyin, and the Hungry Ghost Festival. Attendance is highest for the major dharma assemblies; on both major and minor dharma assembly days, the temple monks begin the ritual chanting of the sutras at ten minutes to nine in the morning and continue for approximately one hour. The monks encourage laypersons to participate in the chanting and numerous lay volunteers arrange rows of mats and cushions outside the main temple hall to accommodate them. Before, during, and after the chanting of the sutras, groups of devotees make ritual circuits of the temple’s main images of buddhas and bodhisattvas. The lay preachers and discussion groups in the temple’s outer courtyard begin their activities concurrently with the chanting of the sutras, but their numbers do not significantly grow until after the liturgy has finished. While they are busiest during the first two hours following the conclusion of the sutra chanting, some continue their activities until the temple closes to the public at 5:00 pm (4:30 during the winter months). 4
The Inner Courtyard: Devotees and Sutra Chanters
In the inner courtyard, the devotees and sutra chanters form repertoires from elements of popular Buddhism and popular religion more generally that originated in imperial times, were curtailed to varying degrees during the Republican and Communist periods, and have experienced a revival in temples throughout China during the post-Mao era. Devotees—temple-goers who pray to or meditate before images of buddhas and bodhisattvas in the temple—usually prostrate themselves before the images with their hands turned upward in supplication. 5 Often they burn offerings of incense and occasionally bring food and flowers, which they place on the altars. They sometimes deposit cash offerings in “merit boxes” (gongde xiang) in front of the images. Some devotees enter into devotional relationships with particular buddhas and bodhisattvas and visit only those images when coming to the temple. Most, however, make a ritual circuit throughout the temple to visit each of its main images (indicated by a corresponding letter on Figure 1): The circuit normally begins with a visit to (A) the bodhisattva Maitreya (Milefo) (the future Buddha) at the Hall of Heavenly Kings (Tianwang dian), which marks the main ritual entrance to the inner courtyard; then continues to (B) the image of the bodhisattva Skanda (Weituo pusa), who stands at the rear of the same hall; (C) a large incense urn facing the main hall (Daxiong dian); (D) the image in the main hall of the historical Buddha, Shakyamuni (flanked by Kasyapa Buddha [Jiaye fo] and the bodhisattva Maitreya); and finally (E) an image of the bodhisattva Guanyin in the rearmost temple hall (Yuantong dian). The devotees generally spend less time in the temple than participants in the other temple activities, though this can vary: I witnessed devotees who literally ran into the temple to make quick offerings of flowers and incense while taxis waited outside to take them to work; I saw others who waited patiently in line before each altar to take their turn to make offerings. Most devotees visit the temple during the days of the dharma assemblies, but many also come at other days and times.
The inner courtyard of the Temple of Universal Rescue
The sutra chanters participate in a codified ritual program common to Buddhist temples throughout China. 6 Their activities also contain a significant devotional element: a large part of the sutra chanters’ liturgy focuses on a series of praises and supplications to many buddhas and bodhisattvas. Many of the sutra chanters also make the devotional circuit following the conclusion of the sutra chanting. During the liturgy, the sutra chanters line up in rows that extend out from a large stone platform directly in front of the temple altar and down the steps out to a lower stone square. On busy days, such as during important festivals or in the late spring and early autumn when the weather is most comfortable, the rows of sutra chanters can extend all of the way back to the entrance hall between the inner and outer courtyards, leaving only a narrow middle strip directly in front of the incense urn where devotees maneuver their way to the different stops on the circuit.
Both the devotees and sutra chanters engage in activities that have been common in Chinese temples, both Buddhist and otherwise, for many hundreds of years. The Maoist government severely limited these activities, however, and during the ten years of the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976) virtually all public devotional activities, particularly in urban areas, ceased. While some of the devotees, when questioned, revealed little understanding of the individual histories of the images before which they made their offerings, others were very knowledgeable. Many of the devotees and the sutra chanters had also read introductory books on Buddhist ritual practices and their meanings distributed free of charge in the outer courtyard or listened to lay preachers explain minute details of ritual etiquette such as how many incense sticks to burn before each image, how to hold the sticks, how to bow correctly, and how to correctly chant the liturgy. The concern of many devotees with correct ritual knowledge and practice reflects their interest in situating their present-day religious practice within the long tradition of Buddhist practice in China, something that lends their activities greater significance. However, to discuss them primarily as examples of religious revival would oversimplify the complexities of their significance to the devotees, which relate very much to the shaping of their lives in the present. To illustrate this connection, I turn to a closer analysis of two specific devotees.
Chen Ling
I first met Chen Ling (female, mid-40s) on a non-dharma assembly day in October 2002 as she bowed in front of the image of Shakyamuni Buddha at the main hall. 7 On this day, with the temple mostly empty, and seeming quiet and unrushed compared with the world outside, Chen was unguarded and open about the reasons for her devotions. The new owner of a small restaurant, she was anxious about the success of her business: she faced many uncertainties, she explained to me, from attracting clientele to arranging permissions and permits from the capricious city government. There was also, of course, food to be ordered and prepared, staff to arrange, and many other small responsibilities. She explained to me that she hoped to secure supernatural help in making her business run smoothly: she planned to talk to a monk she knew at Beijing’s Tibetan Buddhist Lama Temple (Yong he gong) to arrange a ceremony (kaiguang) to bless an image she had installed at the restaurant. 8 This, in turn, she hoped would help her business to become successful. Yet Chen also insisted that this was not the reason she had come to the Temple of Universal Rescue to pray on the particular day that I met her: she had not asked Shakyamuni Buddha for help; rather it was the action of bowing before the Buddha that allowed her to ease and calm her mind, to find a peaceful island in her otherwise contentious day.
Li Xiangqian
I first met Li Xiangqian (male, 36) in November 2002 and got to know him well in several meetings over the course of the following few months. Like Chen Ling, Li Xiangqian was caught up in the uncertainties of a changing market system. He was born and raised in Henan province, several hundred miles south of Beijing. Six years earlier, he had decided to move to Beijing with some friends and open a small convenience store and café near the entrance to the Beijing South Railway Station (Beijing nan zhan) in what was, at that time, a less well-developed part of the city. At night, he slept in a bunk above the store in a room he shared with the other owners. Li had a wife and teenage daughter back in Henan whom he did not see for months at a time. Although Li had come to Beijing with the hope of earning money to support his family and eventually send his daughter to college, the success of his shop was very intermittent. Indeed, when visiting him in the shop, I could see that Li could easily go for hours without a single customer in spite of the many train-goers who passed by: his was one of many small shops that sold identical products. Li Xiangqian took even less delight than Chen Ling in the vagaries of his life within an uncertain economic system. He was not a petty entrepreneur by choice but by necessity; he did not dream of making money, only of earning enough to support his daughter’s education. He did not enjoy risk or chance, choosing to avoid games of cards in which his fellow store owners gambled small amounts of money to pass the time while waiting for customers. Moreover, he fully realized that Buddhism was a deeper and more complex religious system than a means of gaining fortune (fuqi) and protection (baoyou) in this lifetime; he was knowledgeable about its philosophical speculations on emptiness and they interested him, yet he also saw them as remote from the struggle and competition endemic to his daily life. The aspect of Buddhism that helped him most with that struggle was asking for divine help to ensure that his ability to earn money would be protected and calming his heart by helping himself to believe that it was. For this reason, he periodically went to the Temple of Universal Rescue to offer incense to the images of Maitreya, Guanyin, and Shakyamuni Buddha, usually on the days of the dharma assemblies, like the occasion when we first met. In this way, like Chen Ling, he drew on devotional practices from far back into Chinese history to mediate his position in the contemporary world.
At the Temple of Universal Rescue, the examples of Chen Ling and Li Xiangqian show that activities such as devotional praying and chanting to buddhas and bodhisattvas do not represent vestiges of past practices in the lifetimes of their participants, most of whom were raised as atheists and only encountered Buddhism during the post-Mao period. Instead, these activities take on significance as elements in the repertoires of the adherents that help them to cope with their lives in the present. By coming to the temple to both seek solace and pray for stability in their fortunes, Chen Ling and Li Xiangqian, like many other devotees, found a space where they could mitigate the tensions of their lives in a capitalist system that neither embraced but on which both depended. In the next section, I will explore how China’s more recent narratives of modernization also operate as elements in the repertoires of those who come to the Temple of Universal Rescue.
The Outer Courtyard: Preacher Circles and Discussion Groups
Following the chanting of the sutras, the preacher circles and discussion groups gather in earnest in the temple’s outer courtyard. Some preacher circles and discussion groups focus on instructing newcomers in basic Buddhist teachings, providing lessons in ritual etiquette, or engaging in everyday conversations about non-religious topics. Many also mix into their dialogues elements from both traditional Buddhist teachings and China’s more recent narratives of modernization to create moral frameworks relevant to their listeners’ present-day lives. In comparison to the sutra chanters and devotees whose activities are ubiquitous in Buddhist temples throughout China, the dialogical interactions of the preacher circles and discussion groups are unique. 9 My research findings suggest that their popularity at the Temple of Universal Rescue is related to three factors: first, the outer courtyard as a physical space is large and spacious compared with most courtyards of a similar position at other temples; with the exception of the devotees who worship in front of the Maitreya image in the Hall of Heavenly Kings (Stop “A” on Figure 1), it is rarely occupied for ritual activities. Second, because of the temple’s status as the headquarters of the Chinese Buddhist Association, many prominent masters reside within its walls or come to the temple from outside to deliver talks. Participants in the preacher circles and discussion groups often come to the temple seeking spiritual guidance or ethical counseling from these masters but end up directing their questions to the lay preachers. This is because the preachers are far more accessible to them and also because, as fellow laypersons still imbedded in social relationships outside of the temple, the preachers can speak more directly to their listeners’ everyday concerns. Third, the lack of an admission fee makes the temple accessible to those who are economically marginalized in Beijing society, including many who are unemployed or underemployed. It is to this group that the preachers’ sermons about social decline and the need for moral reform most often appeal.
The preacher circles and discussion groups vary in size and type: the discussion groups, informal gatherings ranging from five to fifteen participants with no central preacher, meet either standing in small circles or sitting on benches in front of the temple’s drum and bell towers (see Figure 2). Some of these discussion groups regularly convene each week while others are formed on an ad hoc basis from passers-by who wander upon interesting conversations. The preacher circles are engaged in similar types of discussions with the difference that it is largely one person doing the talking and others only listening (or perhaps asking questions as well). Like the discussion groups, the preacher circles sometimes form randomly. Sometimes discussion groups are transformed into preacher circles when one member of the group takes the lead in the discussion. 10 Some preachers find themselves in the role of preacher for only one day or a few weeks before either fading back as passive listeners or disappearing from the temple altogether. Other preachers are more established and return to the dharma assemblies to preach on a regular basis, sometimes attracting crowds of more than eighty listeners, or as many people as can gather to hear their unamplified voices. The better known preachers sometimes write and distribute their own interpretive essays. They also hand out free reprints of sutras, typed sermons, or DVD recordings from well-known monks and essays on personal experience and interpretation of the scriptures written by others (see Fisher, 2011). The participants in the preacher circles and discussion groups gain most of their knowledge of Buddhism from the sermons of the preachers and the texts that are distributed in the courtyard.
The outer courtyard of the Temple of Universal Rescue
The outer courtyard is not the only place where discussions of Buddhist teachings take place, however; the temple monks also hold twice-weekly lectures on their interpretations of Buddhist scriptures (jiangjing ke). Like the courtyard preachers, the monks frequently lecture on the meaning of Buddhist teachings with emphasis on their moral implications. Most of the regular participants in the preacher circles and discussion groups, however, told me that they found the classes inadequate: they felt that the monks could not identify with their problems, spoke too abstrusely and sometimes unintelligibly, and were not as accessible as the preachers.
The cultural elements on which the preachers draw are complex and varied: One preacher dressed as a traditional sage complete with a long white beard and cane and discussed the importance of cultivating one’s own moral virtue rather than looking outside or blaming others for one’s problems. Some preachers use Buddhist teachings on karma to reassure their listeners that local officials and bosses of work units who have embezzled the people’s money will pay for their crimes. I listened to preachers who idolized American-style capitalism and connected it to Buddhist ideas of self-reliance and the individual pursuit of salvation. Many of the courtyard participants also engaged seriously with elements inspired by Mao and Maoist thought. How they reconciled this with Marxist critiques of religion is part of the creative combining of discourses at which they excelled. To illustrate this more concretely, I turn to a closer look at the largest and most cohesive of the preacher circles during the time of my research, the Lotus Sutra group.
Creating Diverse Repertoires: Teacher Zhang and the Lotus Sutra Group
A large, rosy-cheeked man with a deep, booming voice, Teacher Zhang preached at most of the dharma assemblies I attended during my time at the temple. His main guide was the Lotus Sutra (Fahua jing), one of the most popular Buddhist scriptures in Chinese history and the subject of popular lectures to lay people since at least the tenth century (Overmyer, 1976: 87). Teacher Zhang also wrote his own essays on the Lotus Sutra and, after his group began to gain members, so did some of his students. Teacher Zhang and his closest students, whom the other regulars in the temple courtyard labeled as the Lotus Sutra group, frequently evoked and praised Mao and what they presented to their listeners as Maoist ideals of moral personhood. Teacher Zhang wrote in one of his essays that Mao was a bodhisattva and that the Maoist period where “the people had led the way with hearts that were as pure as mountain water” had seen “the realization of the dharma.” Led by Zhang, the members of the Lotus Sutra group would regularly quote from Mao and Lei Feng along with the teachings of the Buddha. Many of them wore Mao pins on their lapels on the days they came to the temple. When not preaching at the temple, Teacher Zhang would frequently advise his followers at his apartment home or over the telephone, often using the example of Mao’s selfless sacrifice to the masses, to put the interests of others before themselves in their everyday actions.
Teacher Zhang rejected the notion that Mao or any of the other great leaders of his time, such as Premier Zhou Enlai, were critical of Buddhism. Almost none of his followers had identified themselves as lay Buddhists during the Maoist period, nor had they engaged deeply with Buddhist teachings and practices at this time; like most of the laypersons at the Temple of Universal Rescue, most had converted to the religion only within the preceding ten years. Some of them, including those who most ardently advocated a return to Maoist ideals, had only been small children during the ideologically excessive years of the Cultural Revolution. Generally speaking, they had not suffered from the Maoist-era regime’s restrictions on religious activities or persecution of religious adherents. This lack of experience on the part of his followers enabled Teacher Zhang (and certain other lay preachers who evoked Mao) to create a historical amnesia over any potential contradictions between Mao’s attitude toward religion and the claim that the late chairman was a true exemplar of the compassionate ideal of a bodhisattva. When pressed on the contradiction between Mao’s critical statements about religion and Buddhism and his claim that Mao had embodied Buddhist ideals, Teacher Zhang maintained that what Mao had really criticized were the “superstitious” (mixin) aspects of popular Buddhist religiosity, which focused on making offerings to gain the favor of powerful buddhas and bodhisattvas, rather than cultivating a heart of compassion (cibei xin) to serve others. Teacher Zhang also argued that if Mao had been alive in the present day, he would have criticized what Zhang believed was the egocentric and self-serving nature of the temple’s devotees, in what he characterized as their greedy pursuit of wealth, and the temple monks for encouraging a culture of devotional behavior with the sole aim of lining the temple’s coffers with cash offerings.
In making Mao into a bodhisattva, Teacher Zhang and his followers did not pursue his deification as an efficacious god (shen) as some other Chinese did during his life and have continued to do since his death (Cohen, 1993; Dorfman, 1996; Landsberger, 1996; Xin, 1996), but rather aimed to rehabilitate Mao’s teachings on egalitarianism and selflessness by representing them as forms of timeless moral guidance. To his followers, Teacher Zhang’s “discovery” that the teachings of the Lotus Sutra contained the essence of a Maoist ethical system meant that the spread of individualistic values in the contemporary period did not represent the passing of a short collectivist phase in China’s long process of modernization but the disturbing rejection of timeless values that had been realized during the Maoist era. That the members of the Lotus Sutra group realized this error meant that, if they followed their teacher’s instructions correctly, they could play an important role in teaching others the errors of their selfish ways. This role of spreading an abandoned but crucial message to others provided them with the potential to form a positive self-image in a society they had previously felt they did not understand and in which they did not have a place. Rather than being abandoned ex-workers or failed consumers, they now saw themselves at the head of a moral vanguard to rehabilitate China (and even the world) from its decline into selfishness and greed.
The connections that Teacher Zhang and his followers proposed between Maoist teachings and the core lessons of the Lotus Sutra would not always have impressed a social historian of China. As I will discuss in the next section, some of Zhang’s advice to his followers included discouraging at least two of his female followers from divorcing (in one case) abusive and (in another case) unfaithful husbands. This particular piece of advice was probably less Maoist and more Confucian. The disjuncture between what Mao might have really preached and the content of Teacher Zhang’s sermons and essays becomes less important, however, when one considers that the concern of the Lotus Sutra group was less with reviving the past than with mobilizing cultural resources to address what they perceived as the moral malaise of the present. In this way, Maoism and the model of Mao, along with the ethical teachings of the Lotus Sutra, and perhaps even Confucian virtues on the role of a dutiful wife became, like the devotional rituals of the participants in the inner courtyard activities, elements in the cultural repertoires of the temple-goers which, though originating in the past, could be called upon to address the problems of the present.
“Split Cultural Responses” and a Diversity of Repertoires
In certain respects, the stories of Li Xiangqian and Chen Ling in the inner courtyard and Teacher Zhang’s group in the outer courtyard form examples of what Robert Weller (1999: 88) refers to as “split cultural responses” to the rapid spread of a market-based economic system. Writing primarily about Taiwan, whose export-based manufacturing economy not only accelerated rapidly but also became more unstable during the 1980s, Weller (88–93) argues that, in addition to the revival of more traditional local worship practices, Taiwan saw, paradoxically, the emergence of both amoral and utilitarian worship practices on the one hand and highly organized religious-based civic associations with moralistic concerns on the other. The utilitarian worship is exemplified by the praying to solitary ghosts for success in a capricious market economy, even by illegal means. Examples of moralistic religious organizations include the Way of Unity (Yiguandao) sect (see also Skoggard, 1996: 155–72) and the Compassionate Relief Merit Association (Ciji gongde hui) (Weller, 2000: 490–93). Weller suggests that these two different cultural responses represent two different reactions to rapid change: one, represented by the more utilitarian worship practices, is to embrace the cold economic logic that accompanies marketization, and the other, represented by membership in religious organizations like Yiguandao and Ciji hui, is to resist the moral fragmentation of social and community ties that rapid marketization in Taiwan has entailed.
The different elements on which laypersons at the Temple of Universal Rescue draw to form their cultural repertoires, as exemplified in the case studies discussed above, reflect split responses to marketization in mainland China in a similar way. Chen Ling and Li Xiangqian frequently sought the assistance of Buddhist deities in their search for success in an economy under growing marketization. The Lotus Sutra group, like the members of the Yiguandao and Ciji hui, provided moralistic responses to marketization that warned of the erosion of past social values. In considering this comparison, two observations are instructive.
First, whether worshippers at the Temple of Universal Rescue tend toward a “utilitarian” or “moralistic” approach says less about which system they find most desirable than it does about their structural position within a changing market society. Both Chen Ling and Li Xiangqian looked to Buddhism for succor under a capricious market system that unnerved them even as they sought to gain from it. Both were forced to, rather than desired to, depend on the market for their livelihood. This, in turn, directed their engagements with Buddhism toward a more utilitarian side. Chen’s and Li’s structural positions in the Chinese economy are typical of many of the devotees, who include both well-off and highly educated private-sector workers and petty entrepreneurs with little formal education and low levels of income, such as Li. In spite of their economic differences, both of these sets of devotees depend for their livelihood on market forces. In this way, both differ from participants in the preacher circles and discussion groups of the outer courtyard, such as the members of the Lotus Sutra group, many of whom were laid off from their state-run work units or forced to retire early. 11 These participants have little hope of or interest in finding new employment but receive subsistence incomes from their work units. For this reason, members of the courtyard groups such as the Lotus Sutra group have little to gain from utilitarian forms of worship but aim to form more positive social identities by questioning processes of marketization that have led, in part, to their marginalization within a society in which, as workers, they had once been lauded.
Second, members of the groups that Weller compares, such as worshippers of lonely ghosts and members of civic-based religious associations, engaged in practices of religiosity that, presumably, seldom overlapped in space. In contrast, temple-goers at the Temple of Universal Rescue, who form different cultural repertoires as part of varied cultural responses to marketization and other forms of social change, convene at the same religious site. While many of these temple-goers have little or no interaction with one another (except to occasionally engage in mutual criticism), the presence of different temple-goers forming different repertoires in close proximity provides resources for those who, owing to changing life circumstances, find it desirable or necessary to modify their moral outlook, constructions of self and identity, or social associations. I turn to a deeper examination of these temple-goers in the next section.
Changing One’s Repertoire
The combination and re-combination of cultural elements in repertoires enable the participants in temple activities to mediate their subject positions within contemporary society. In an environment of rapid social change, however, these different subject positions do not remain static. The life circumstances of the temple-goers frequently change, and in response temple-goers sometimes change both the cultural elements from which they draw and the meanings they attach to those elements. While some of these changing circumstances lead participants in the temple activities to leave the temple altogether, the diverse elements available in the cultural milieu of the temple also provide opportunities for them to change and grow within the same social space. This is a crucial part of the temple’s appeal.
Participation in the temple activities sometimes overlaps and it is possible for temple-goers to participate in more than one activity and draw from multiple elements in forming their cultural repertoires. As noted above, participants in the chanting of the sutras regularly take part in a devotional circuit of the temple images following the conclusion of their liturgy. As they leave the inner courtyard to exit the temple, they must pass through the outer courtyard, where some are drawn to the loud, charismatic performances of the lay preachers. The participants in the outer courtyard groups alone form their repertoires from a variety of cultural elements to fit their Buddhist practice into their lives. In short, the temple-goers can find much within one temple space to help them address changes in their lives and religious outlook. Indeed, within the outer courtyard, seekers are more the exception than the norm: there are far more practitioners who “shop around” for preachers than there are practitioners who consider themselves regular students of a single preacher. Likewise, discussion groups (and many preacher circles) are less often a meeting of regulars than a spontaneous gathering of practitioners who suddenly find themselves interested in a similar topic.
Yet many of the temple-goers, especially those who are regular attendees and not new to their practice, participate in the same activity during each temple visit and have little or no association with any of the other temple groups. In certain cases, this intergroup boundary relates to lifestyle and varying degrees of commitment to practice: many devotees who did not also participate in the chanting of the sutras told me that they did not have time to stay for the liturgy because of work commitments outside the temple that conflicted with the time of the dharma assemblies. Others said they were unwilling to participate in the chanting of the sutras because that sort of activity was appropriate only for committed Buddhists; simply making a devotional circuit of the images of buddhas and bodhisattvas with whom the devotees could engage as deities in a folk religious pantheon, by contrast, did not necessarily involve such commitment. Sometimes devotees would move back and forth between just burning incense and bowing before the images (shaoxiang baifo) and participating in the liturgy as their commitment to Buddhism varied based on life needs and responsibilities.
Unwillingness to associate with one or another temple group also relates to institutional or ideological affiliations. This is often the case with preacher circles and discussion groups whose discussions are explicitly moralistic. At the time of my research, the core members of the Lotus Sutra group were the most hardened in this respect: with rare exceptions, none of them participated in the chanting of the sutras or other devotional activities in the temple, seeing these as superstitious activities unrelated to true Buddhism. Many of the regular participants in the chanting of the sutras or in the monks’ scripture class asserted to me that the courtyard was chaotic (zaluan), that the preachers did not have authentic knowledge of Buddhist teachings, that mixing Buddhism with non-Buddhist teachings like Maoism was inappropriate, and that the whole scene was an embarrassment to the temple that was best ignored.
Among these regular participants committed to one temple activity, change still does occur, however, and usually for very specific reasons. In the following ethnographic examples, I explore two regular practitioners whose shifting participation reflected changes in their life circumstances outside of the temple and the elements they accessed to form their cultural repertoires.
Yu Jiali
At the time I first met Yu Jiali (female, 21) in November 2003, she was a regular participant in the discussion groups at the Temple of Universal Rescue. Yu’s parents had abandoned her as an infant and she had been raised by her grandparents. She lived in a single apartment with her grandparents and several of her extended relatives including at least one aunt and uncle and several cousins, all of whom had lived their entire lives in Beijing. She told me that she had found it difficult to study in school and had chosen not to continue with her education after junior middle school (chuzhong) (age 14). Although she had attempted to advance her credentials through various night classes, she remained unemployed.
Yu told me that when she was around middle school age, she had a dream that seemed to her like a vision of the Paradise of Western Bliss (Xifang jile shijie). 12 Her grandmother, a practicing Buddhist, thought her vision might be important and began to take her to temples. From these temples, Yu acquired a large library of freely distributed Buddhist literature. When she got a little older, Yu began to read the texts that had been given her. She most liked miracle narratives (of both historical and contemporary origin) where pious or chosen Buddhists were visited or saved by the unexpected interventions of bodhisattvas. One day, when she opened a sutra, she found she could smell a very fragrant odor. When it happened a second time, she asked her family whether they could smell it too, but they could not.
After reading more sutras and frequenting temples more often, Yu decided at age 20 to formally convert as a lay practitioner with a monk from the Temple of Universal Rescue. The monk was not always accessible to her, however, so she began to frequent the outer courtyard of the temple because she could ask many questions of the people in the discussion groups about the meaning of the texts she had read. Yu disliked the dogmatism of preachers like Teacher Zhang: she felt the outer courtyard should be an eclectic environment where one could gain varying knowledge and perspectives both from the texts and from fellow participants in the discussion groups. I saw Yu most frequently in the company of lay practitioners around her own age or a little older, most of whom, like herself, had failed to find jobs and spent much of their time reading Buddhist stories. Like many of them, she believed that she had been led to her engagement with Buddhism because she possessed a special, predestined relationship (yuanfen) with the Buddha’s teaching that had first been forged in a previous life. Like her fellow discussion group participants, she identified with the characters in the stories she had read and saw her unusual vision and perceptions as evidence of her special nature.
The following spring, Yu succeeded in finding work as a ticket collector on one of the local bus routes. Because of her schedule, she frequented the discussion groups less and less. Later on, she told me that her job had made her aware that there were many people out to cheat others: she had learned this from older co-workers who had taken her under their wing. After becoming aware of these realities, Yu claimed that the discussion groups at the temple were probably no exception and that there were many there whom she had approached quite naively but who likely had possessed ulterior motives such as trying to get money from her. She suspected that some of them may have lied about their experiences with the supernatural in order to impress and ultimately swindle others. I was initially surprised that Yu changed her opinion of the discussion group practitioners as she had considered many of them to have shared common life experiences and equally providential relationships with the Buddha and Buddhist teachings. It became apparent, however, that Yu’s changing fortunes and networks of social association outside of the temple now led her to look very differently on a group of people and a religious environment that had once been so central to her identity formation. She continued to participate in other temple activities, however, and to identify herself as a Buddhist: although her work schedule did not permit her to come to the temple as often, she still visited when she could to bow before the images and collect the free literature. She went with me to circumambulate the Buddha tooth relic at the Temple of Divine Light (Lingguang si) on the outskirts of Beijing and purchased necklaces and pendants of bodhisattvas, which she proudly wore.
Wang Xuan
I first came to know the lay practitioner Wang Xuan in September 2003 after both of us had finished listening to one of Teacher Zhang’s sermons. Like Yu Jiali, Wang was interested in participating in my research in exchange for some help with her English, and we met frequently after that, often spending the better part of a day in a teahouse or Starbucks café. Her interest in Buddhism was relatively recent: after breaking down in tears toward the end of our very first day-long talk, she explained to me that her husband, an officer in the Public Security Bureau, had been having affairs with other women. Living in a world where, as she explained it, the ethic of marital fidelity was breaking down especially with respect to men’s extramarital affairs, Wang had initially been attracted to Buddhism as a new moral system with which she could hope to make sense of her predicament. She was initially interested after her sister lent her a book on karmic consequence (yinguo) that explained to Wang how her misfortunes with her husband may be related to her own past misdeeds. Wang was interested in the book’s perspective, which she felt contrasted with an ethic of blaming others that she believed was now dominant in post-Mao China. Wang had many questions about what she had read in the book, however, and simply knowing that she had planted the seeds of her own misfortunes did not tell her what to do next. Seeking the advice of a teacher, she had found her way to the outer courtyard of the Temple of Universal Rescue.
After listening to several of the courtyard preachers, Wang Xuan found herself attracted to Teacher Zhang’s message of Maoist revival combined with Buddhist teachings on compassion and selflessness. Born in 1969, she was too young to have remembered much about the Maoist era, but she did recall that when she was a primary and junior middle school student her teachers had always encouraged her and her other classmates to develop “public-mindedness” (gongxin) and to put the community ahead of themselves. They would often lead the students to participate in community service activities during the weekends and taught them to always do small deeds for the public good such as picking up trash in a messy public area or helping a blind person to cross the street. While in high school, the policies of reform and opening (gaige kaifang) began to take effect and, as she described it, Wang’s school quickly dropped its enthusiasm for public-minded ethics: the community service ended and those who went out of their way to help others were seen as slow, stupid, or gullible.
After hearing Teacher Zhang preach several times and talking to several of his closest students, Wang Xuan went to visit him in his apartment where she explained to him her marital problems. At that time, Wang was thinking of divorcing her husband, but Teacher Zhang counseled her to remain with him and help him to understand his misdeeds through the example of her own moral virtue. Throughout most of the year that we talked, Wang Xuan tried hard to follow Teacher Zhang’s advice, frequently justifying it to me by explaining which of her past faults may have generated the karmic fruits of her husband’s unfaithfulness. Yet her husband’s infidelity continued, and Wang found it more and more difficult to continue their relationship.
Slowly, Wang also began to associate less with Teacher Zhang, whom she increasingly saw as arrogant and sexist, and, contrary to his advice, began to attend the monks’ scripture class. While highly suspicious of Teacher Zhang’s categorical rejection of the temple monks as spiritually superficial and morally disinterested, she had mixed opinions of the rotating monk/teachers until one day she heard a monk discuss a story from one of the Jataka Tales of Shakyamuni Buddha’s past lives (Shijiamouni fo zhuan). In this story, as Wang described it, the Buddha counseled one of his (male) disciples to leave an abusive partner, saying that he had given and suffered enough. After hearing the story, Wang decided that Teacher Zhang had been wrong; she had now found a moral justification within the Buddhist tradition for divorcing her husband and decided to do so. When I saw Wang Xuan again in July 2007 during a return visit to Beijing, she seemed much happier than I had remembered her before: she had completed the divorce, retained custody of her daughter, and was working for the municipal government.
Both Yu Jiali and Wang Xuan came to the temple seeking answers to moral and spiritual questions, and, to some extent, a community of fellow believers who could guide them in this search. As each participated in the different temple activities, they formed their repertoires from different cultural elements that helped them address their changing personhood in contemporary Chinese society: for Yu Jiali, the sharing and discussion of miracle narratives helped her develop a more positive sense of self than that of an abandoned child and unemployed youth. The guidance of Teacher Zhang drawn from a synthesis of Buddhist, Maoist, and Confucian teachings provided Wang Xuan, for a time, with a moral framework with which to address her marital problems. As the life situations of each practitioner continued to shift outside of the temple, however, so did the cultural elements on which they drew to form their repertoires. Before she found her job as a ticket collector, Yu Jiali’s frequent association with fellow discussion group practitioners, many of whom had their own stories of the miraculous power of Buddhism, helped to sustain her belief in the providential nature of her own journey on the Buddhist path and enabled her to understand herself as chosen and special. This sense of self as chosen and special helped Yu to mitigate a negative self-perception stemming from her inability to finish school and find employment. After Yu found her job as a ticket collector, however, her status outside of the temple improved; this provided her with a different sense of self-importance and achievement. Her identity as a Buddhist remained important to her, but she no longer needed to share miracle stories with the same discussion group practitioners to find self-validation. This change in both status and perception did not require Yu to break with Buddhist practices altogether, however, and she continued to engage in devotional activities. Wang Xuan’s problems with her husband did not go away and so she sought and eventually found a different teaching presented through a different group (the monks’ scripture class) on which she could draw to justify her decision to divorce her husband.
Although she had suffered financially, Yu Jiali had been relatively satisfied with her identity prior to attaining the job as a ticket collector, but changing life circumstances led her to mobilize different elements in her cultural repertoire and forge a new sense of self. Wang Xuan, by contrast, consciously sought out different symbols and discourses to add to her repertoire so that she could arrive at an ethical framework appropriate to solving her ongoing marital problems. The ability of both practitioners to add multiple elements to their cultural repertoires as they moved between different groups and teachings at the temple gave them the flexibility to find the answers to their spiritual and personal searches within the same setting (even when they were not always certain themselves what they were searching for).
Conclusion: Historical Metanarratives as Repertoire
In the ethnographic example of the Temple of Universal Rescue, we see how social persons living through changing times mobilize cultural repertoires drawn from different Chinese “pasts” to create selves and make meaning in the present. They are not alone: in certain important ways, the temple-goers follow a model of symbolic re-patterning that Chinese people living in both contemporary times and historically have used in their discourses and strategies. Ching Kwan Lee (2000) has studied how laid-off workers in China’s northeast rustbelt employ values of worker and class solidarity from the Maoist era to sustain their struggles against corrupt local officials and work-unit bosses in the post-Mao period. Timothy Weston (2006) has examined how ex-workers in the same region used a 2002 commemoration of Wang Jinxi, a Maoist-era model of the ideal worker, to appeal their recent redundancies to the central government. It might be tempting to look upon these workers as pitiful vestiges of a state-planned economy who have remained rooted in nostalgia for the past because their skills have become outmoded in the reform-era economy. Yet as Weston makes clear, these workers have drawn on Maoist-era themes to address their needs and problems in the present, that is to evoke a moral framework of the state’s proper role as a caretaker for all workers in contrast to indifferent local officials and bosses from whose mismanagement and corruption they claim to have suffered. Villagers in Fujian studied by Stephan Feuchtwang (2001) and Susanne Brandtstädter (2006) also have drawn on Maoist-era values of morally upright leadership along with traditional worship practices to address present-day moral and economic problems caused by the corruption of local cadres. Feuchtwang (2001: 196) refers to the practices of villagers from his fieldsite as examples of the “remnants” of socialism in China today. However, we might more fruitfully understand both the villagers’ and urban labor activists’ use of these Maoist-era tropes as elements in a cultural repertoire just as they are for the participants in the religious activities at the Temple of Universal Rescue: in the eyes of these people, rather than the remains of a dying fire, these cultural elements are resources that can be fruitfully employed when needed to address challenges of the present and future.
In considering why multiple agents from different arenas of social life in the post-Mao era mobilize different elements of China’s past to address their lives in its present, we may ask to what extent their actions are unique to the post-Mao period. Liu Xin (2000: 184) suggests that because of the disappearance of both “local gentry,” whose authority was undermined by revolutionary-era cadres and, subsequently, the retreating moral authority of the cadres themselves, in present-day China, there is no authoritative set of moral meanings for any cultural form or cultural action and a lack of connection between particular cultural forms and moral content. This has made the negotiation of both cultural forms and their meanings a particularly urgent project for the building of social identity. While Liu’s argument about the retreat of a central moral authority in the post-Mao period is to some degree persuasive, I am not convinced that the process of putting together different practices, symbols, and discourses as cultural repertories to make new meanings is unique to the post-Mao period, nor am I convinced that the presence of a strong moral authority would preclude such experimentation in any case. Robert Weller (1987a; 1994) has shown persuasively how Chinese actors participating in the same rituals often hold a plurality of interpretations about the meaning of their acts. This is true both in popular religious practices such as the Hungry Ghost Festival and political rituals such as the Tiananmen protests. In a comparative analysis of the Hungry Ghost Festival throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Weller (1987b) also shows how even in the presence of a strong local or national authority seeking to impose particular meanings on the festival (or to ban it outright), participants still created their own forms and interpretations out of ritual events. However, what may be unique in Chinese history is that the Maoist-era state penetrated so far into local interests that it succeeded in imposing its own metanarrative over customarily pluralistic cultural forms and their meanings. The retreat of a master narrative which those growing up during the Maoist era had come to accept as normal, combined with rapid economic and social change, may indeed make the present post-Mao period seem an unusually uncertain time to many of those experiencing it regardless of whether the absence of a central moral authority is truly unprecedented in Chinese history. Like the villagers in Liu’s study, many laypersons at the Temple of Universal Rescue experienced this uncertainty as a form of moral and cultural disorder and sought through their practices at the temple to form repertoires that could enable them to negotiate it. Yet a substantial minority of the temple-goers saw the retreat of a Maoist metanarrative in another way: as providing possibilities for them, within the legalized religious space of the Temple of Universal Rescue, to create their own discourses and practices in the absence of a hegemonic moral order.
Finally, although Maoism is no longer an authoritative and all-encompassing metanarrative, we should not infer that Maoist-era thought has been transcended or made redundant. We should not be surprised to discover that social actors as diverse as Buddhist lay preachers and labor activists employ Maoist tropes in their attempts to construct both new moral frameworks and revised social positions for twenty-first-century Chinese. Like religious worshippers who incorporate Mao into a range of deities they worship, many other Chinese have incorporated what was once a Maoist metanarrative as an element in a cultural repertoire that can help them to negotiate their lives in the present. This is seen most clearly in the example of Wang Xuan, who adopted elements of Maoist (along with Confucian and Buddhist) moralities in her cultural repertoire in the search for an ethical course of action in dealing with her husband’s infidelity. Her interest in Maoist-inspired morality did not imply her acceptance of Maoism as an all-encompassing moral framework just as her later use of a morality tale from Buddhist scripture did not lead her to the rejection of certain elements of Maoism as components in her cultural repertoire. While Teacher Zhang and the core members of the Lotus Sutra group adopted Maoist-inspired morality to a greater extent as the driving force of their ethical system, in their case also, it made most sense in combination with Buddhist and Confucian-inspired teachings, a combination that would have made much less sense during Mao’s time.
Both elite proponents of social change in China and the present-day state, as well as certain scholars of Chinese history, have tended to divide modern Chinese history into periods of epochal shift such as that from tradition to modernity, from feudalism to socialism, or from socialism to global capitalism. The periods demarcated by these shifts are seen to include some cultural elements (e.g., utopian socialism) while excluding others (e.g., ritual practices labeled as superstitious). The inclusion of some elements when they are meant to be excluded marks the actions (and their users) as belonging to the past. Their reappearance in significant form (such as in the revival of popular rituals or petty capitalism during the post-Mao era) is taken to indicate the social failure of a certain school of thought or mode of cultural experience (e.g., Maoism) that was intended to replace them. However, the example of the creative combination and re-combination of symbols, discourses, and practices and their meanings at the Temple of Universal Rescue and elsewhere in China indicates that the use of particular rituals, moral frameworks, and sometime-metanarratives does not necessarily imply the exclusion of others. It also does not indicate that certain cultural elements belong to the past any more than they belong to the present. Rather, like layers on a pagoda, these elements exist as parts of the cultural repertoires of Chinese people as they adapt to the challenges and possibilities of the present. The elements may be experienced as novel when they are first introduced; they may also appear more relevant at some times than others, and to certain groups of people more than others, but that does not mean they will ever disappear altogether.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Michael Szonyi, Adam Chau, and Charles Jones for their advice on earlier versions of this article.
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article:
The research on which this article is based was supported by a Fulbright from the U.S. State Department, a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship, and a faculty research fellowship from the College of Arts and Sciences at Syracuse University. Portions of funding for its write-up were made possible through a postdoctoral fellowship from the Council on East Asian Studies at Yale University.