Religion in China

Ties that Bind

Adam Yuet Chau

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781509535682
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Religione

In recent years, there has been an astonishing revival of religious practices in China. Looking beyond numerical counts of religious practitioners, temples, and churches, anthropologist Adam Yuet Chau's vivid study explores how religion is embedded in contemporary Chinese lives and society, from personal devotion to community-wide festivals.

Covering Buddhism, Daoism, and folk religion, as well as Christianity and Islam, this ethnographically rich book provides insights into the contemporary relevance of religious traditions in Chinese societies. By considering the ways in which Chinese people 'do' religion, Chau reveals how religious practice plays a critical role in establishing and maintaining a wide range of relationships: between people, spirits, and places; ritual service providers and their customers; the state and religious groups. He argues that relationality is the key anchor of religious lifeworlds, and this insight demands an entirely new way of approaching religion everywhere.

This lively account will appeal to those studying or curious about Chinese or East Asian religions, and serves as a perfect gateway to understanding religious practices in China today.

1
Understanding Religious Diversity: Five Modalities of Doing Religion

Religious Diversity as Fact and Religious Pluralism as Ideology

In the introductory chapter I briefly invoked the notion of religious diversity in China. But in order to understand religious diversity, one has to first decide on the criteria with which one is “measuring” diversity. Many scholars of Christianity are now speaking of the existence of a wide variety of Christianities in the world (not only measured by the astonishingly numerous Protestant denominations or the equally numerous Catholic saint cults) (see Cannell 2006; Robbins and Haynes 2014). As Christianity has spread around the globe in the past two millennia, it has taken on all kinds of local cultural flavors and mixed with all kinds of indigenous religions. All other major religious traditions with a global reach have a similar “internal” diversity (e.g. Islam, Judaism, Buddhism).

When we speak of religious diversity in China, are we speaking of the diversity of “religions” (e.g. Buddhism, Daoism, Christianity, etc.)? Or the number of deities worshiped? Or the variety of religious practices? Or the range of different kinds of religious communities? Or the number of lines of transmission of ritual techniques?

A further question that is worth bearing in mind is whether or not you believe that religious diversity is intrinsically a good thing. The answer to this question would in some way betray our ideological orientations. A firm believer in political and economic liberalism would say “Let a hundred religions bloom!” because religions are like commercial products that should be allowed to compete with one another in a religious marketplace. An advocate of cultural diversity or multiculturalism would view religious diversity as having intrinsic value and thus call for the encouragement and protection of religious diversity for its own sake (in fact taking care to not let cruel market principles wipe out “weaker” religions and produce the religious equivalents of global franchises). This is a religious-pluralist position that treats religious diversity not just as an empirical fact but as a policy goal. But Christian missionaries and other kinds of believers of any ultimate religious Truth would prefer to see their own religion triumph over all the others. And staunch atheists would want to see a completely secularized world with no religions at all. Political leaders of authoritarian regimes would grudgingly tolerate a certain degree of religious diversity, if only for maintaining checks and balances, and for as long as religious groups constitute an easily manageable minority of the population and do not cause any trouble (for the regime or for one another). Borrowing a term from economics, the sociologist of religion Fenggang Yang has characterized this last scenario as a religious “oligopoly” (Yang 2012: chapter 7).

China has always been a religiously diverse country, but this diversity is more evident as different “modalities of doing religion” (explained below) rather than as discrete confessional religions. For the vast majority of Chinese people historically and today, the presence of a wide variety of modalities of doing religion is simply a fact of their daily lives. However, “religious diversity” as a concept is alien to most Chinese people because their approach to religion is primarily instrumental and occasion-based (what can be called an efficacy-based religiosity) rather than confessionally-based, and their experience of religious diversity is embodied in the employment of different religious service providers on various occasions rather than abstract systems of religious doctrines and teachings. Being an anthropologist rather than an intellectual historian, I will look at the issue of religious diversity in China from the perspective of ordinary people engaging in religious activities on the ground rather than religious elites engaging in high-power theological debates. Next, I will explicate what I have called “five modalities of doing religion” in China.

Modalities of Doing Religion

In the long history of religious development in China, different ways of “doing religion” evolved and cohered into relatively easy-to-identify styles or “modalities.”¹ These are relatively well-defined forms that different people can adopt and combine to deal with different concerns in life. However, the specific contents within these forms can vary widely. These modalities of “doing religion” are:

1. 1. Discursive/scriptural, involving mostly the composition and use of texts.
2. 2. Personal-cultivational, involving a long-term interest in cultivating and transforming oneself.
3. 3. Liturgical, involving elaborate ritual procedures conducted by ritual specialists.
4. 4. Immediate-practical, aiming at quick results using simple ritual or magical techniques.
5. 5. Relational, emphasizing the relationship between humans and deities (or ancestors) as well as among humans in religious practices.

Even though these modalities of doing religion are also products of conceptualization and schematization, I would like to argue that they are far more “real” than conceptual fetishes such as “Buddhism,” “Daoism,” and “Confucianism.” The Chinese people have engaged with these modalities of doing religion in real practices, whereas no one ever engages with “Buddhism” or “Daoism” because these exist more as conceptual aggregates with only imputed concreteness and cohesiveness. Religious thinkers and scholars of religion have of course attempted to make various religious practices into coherent wholes (including by giving them names such as “Buddhism” and “Daoism”), but such attempts at arriving at cognitive, conceptual, and sometimes institutional coherence have not had much impact on how most people “do religion” on the ground, where they don't care which deity belongs to which religion or which religious tradition inspired which morality book. What happens on the ground “religiously” is very much a congruence of local customs, historical accidents, social environment, personal temperaments, configurations of modalities of doing religion, and the makeup of the local ritual market (e.g. the availability of which kinds of ritual specialists to cater for the need as well as to stimulate the need of which kinds of clients). Below I shall explicate in a little more detail each modality of doing religion found in Chinese religious culture. One thing I need to emphasize, however, is that these modalities are more or less ideal types, and that they sometimes overlap (e.g. with some actual religious practices manifesting multiple modalities).

The discursive/scriptural modality of doing religion

People are attracted to this modality because of the allure of Confucian, Buddhist, Daoist, and other “great texts” (classics, sutras, scriptures, etc.). This modality often requires a high level of literacy and a penchant for philosophical and “theological” thinking. Key practices within this modality include compiling and editing scriptures or discoursing about “the Way” (dao), or preaching, and its paradigmatic forms include reading, thinking about, discussing, debating, composing, translating, and commenting on religious texts. Also included in this modality is the composing of morality books using spirit writing and Chan/Zen masters’ exegesis on gong'an (dharma riddles; koan in Japanese). The products of this modality are usually textual (or at least eventually appearing in textual forms) that range from a single religious tract to a whole set of scriptures and liturgical texts (keyi) (e.g. the so-called Buddhist Canon or Daoist Canon compiled under imperial patronage). These texts form the basis of the classical “Religious Studies” approach to studying Chinese religions, which was derived from Western religious/theological exegetical traditions. Because of this textual bias, for a long time Chinese religious practices were understood in the West as exclusively this textually transmitted esoteric knowledge or, in the context of New Age or Orientalist consumption of exotic texts, “Oriental wisdoms.”

The personal-cultivational modality of doing religion

Practices such as meditation, qigong, internal or outer alchemy, the cultivation of the “Daoist body,” personal or group sutra chanting, the morning and evening recitation sessions in a Buddhist monastery, merit-conscious charitable acts (e.g. volunteering to accumulate karmic merit), and keeping a merit/demerit ledger belong to this modality. This modality presupposes a long-term interest in cultivating and transforming oneself (whether Buddhist, Daoist, Confucian, or sectarian). The goals of this transformation and cultivation are different in each religious tradition: to become a so-called “immortal” (xian) in Daoism,² to be reincarnated i...