The Religious Question in Modern China

Vincent Goossaert, David A. Palmer

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780226304182
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

Recent events—from strife in Tibet and the rapid growth of Christianity in China to the spectacular expansion of Chinese Buddhist organizations around the globe—vividly demonstrate that one cannot understand the modern Chinese world without attending closely to the question of religion. The Religious Question in Modern China highlights parallels and contrasts between historical events, political regimes, and cultural movements to explore how religion has challenged and responded to secular Chinese modernity, from 1898 to the present.

Vincent Goossaert and David A. Palmer piece together the puzzle of religion in China not by looking separately at different religions in different contexts, but by writing a unified story of how religion has shaped, and in turn been shaped by, modern Chinese society. From Chinese medicine and the martial arts to communal temple cults and revivalist redemptive societies, the authors demonstrate that from the nineteenth century onward, as the Chinese state shifted, the religious landscape consistently resurfaced in a bewildering variety of old and new forms. The Religious Question in Modern China integrates historical, anthropological, and sociological perspectives in a comprehensive overview of China's religious history that is certain to become an indispensible reference for specialists and students alike.

PART I

Religions and Revolutions

ONE

The Late Qing Religious Landscape

The twentieth century was a time of uninterrupted, rapid, and often violent change for religion in China. By contrast, it is tempting to describe what preceded as stable tradition. It was not. Our purpose here, however, is not to describe the nineteenth-century history of Chinese religion but to provide a point of departure for the narrative that we chose to start in 1898. Therefore, in this chapter we will consider the Chinese religious landscape as a system in dynamic equilibrium, privileging structures over change. Like any system, it was an easy prey to unsustainable demands and to built-in contradictions and conflicts, and we will pay particular attention to those contradictions and conflicts as forerunners of the twentieth-century mutations. Here, as a way of introducing the basic categories and actors of Chinese religious life—cults, traditions, specialists—we will sketch the basic structural elements of Chinese religion as they stood in the nineteenth century—elements that we will follow in later chapters as they evolved along different trajectories in the twentieth century, following beaten tracks, crisscrossing, or breaking into new territory. In this general sketch of the religious landscape at the beginning of our historical survey, we proceed first from the basic structure of Chinese religious practice in late imperial times and the state’s management of these practices, and then look at the causes of instability: challenges from inside and outside, and built-in tensions and dynamics of change.

CHINESE RELIGION AT ITS LATE QING STAGE

Western descriptions of Chinese religious life have long tended to emphasize its motley, disorganized nature. However, with better knowledge and a more neutral outlook, twenty-first-century social scientists can describe the varied field of China’s religious practices, beliefs, and organizations as belonging to a coherent system (but a system with several hierarchies) that we choose to term “Chinese religion” (sometimes called “Chinese traditional religion”).¹ This system integrated traditions of individual salvation, such as self-cultivation through meditation and body techniques, moral living, and spirit-possession techniques, including spirit writing; kinship-based rites, such as life-cycle rituals and ancestor worship; and communal religion, such as cults to local saints and deities—all of which were only partly framed within the three institutionalized teachings of Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism. Islam and Christianity were later arrivals; owing to their exclusive claims of truth, they did not become fully integrated into the system, even though they gradually became thoroughly sinicized and, in the period covered by this book, had a powerful impact on the changes to the religious landscape.

As Chinese religion does not have a single canon that could be a source of textual authority, there is no unified formal theology. All communities and religious specialists, however, share common cosmological notions, even though these notions are interpreted in many different ways. In its classical form, this cosmology, formed during late antiquity and the Han period (210 BCE–220 CE), dictates that the material and spiritual realms are not separate. The universe is an organic system, constantly evolving according to knowable rules, described through operative symbols (including yin

and yang

, the five phases

, and the eight trigrams

). All beings—humans, animals, and even plants—are in constant interaction (ganying

), even at long distances. Due to their different inherent qualities and histories, beings are more or less pure and endowed with spiritual power (ling

), which can be understood as efficacy and charisma. All beings can purify themselves through morality and self-cultivation before and after death, and thereby ascend the ladders of the spiritual hierarchy and increase their ling. Dead humans become, according to the circumstances, ancestors, gods, or ghosts, and each of the three types has a particular kind of ling, and receives a particular kind of cult.² Humans who suffer unnatural death and do not receive postmortem sacrifices become ghosts (or demons) and are a major cause of unrest, hence a highly developed demonology. Miracles and the answering of prayers are manifestations of ling. Beyond these basic principles, the formulation of cosmological and theological thinking was entrusted to clerical specialists who were invited by cult communities to write texts (such as stele inscriptions, scriptures, hagiographies, and liturgical hymns) to legitimize their cults and practices and place them in a larger orthodox framework, usually but not exclusively defined in terms of one of the Three Teachings.

Communities and individuals by and large shared similar values within the framework of a common ethics, integrating elements of Confucian, Taoist, and Buddhist origin, that were expressed in morality books (shanshu

), the most widely read and revered normative texts in pre-1900 China.³ While often overlooked by philosophers and highbrow intellectuals trying to define moral norms, they reflect common thinking and practice as articulated by local moral authorities and their audience. Morality books were both authoritative (their core sections were revealed by gods and saints) and inclusive, seeking consensus in that they articulated a vision much more encompassing than strict Confucian morality. They agreed that actions carry good or bad retribution (conceived as either automatic karmic accounting or, more often, a postmortem judicial process administered in courts of hell),⁴ and this concept determines the fate of each human being after death. The theoretical elaborations on this principle provided by specialists were supplemented by an abundance of “popular theology,” mostly in accord with clerical formulations, that expressed itself in vernacular genres such as the novel or the opera. Novels such as Investiture of the Gods (Fengshen yanyi

), Journey to the West (Xiyouji

), or Outlaws of the Marsh (Shuihuzhuan

) played (and still play) a major role in transmitting lore on gods, rituals, and retribution; however, their authors were sometimes accused by some officials of encouraging heterodox interpretations and inspiring rebellions.⁵

What we see at the level of ideas and values—common frameworks and varying interpretations—is also true at the level of the social organization of religious life. The Three Teachings were precisely defined, each with a distinctive clergy,⁶ a canon of scriptures, a liturgy, and training centers—the monasteries (Buddhist si

and yuan

, Taoist gong

and guan

) and academies (shuyuan

) where the canon was kept and the clergy was trained and ordained. The institutions defined by these four characteristics can be referred to as Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism stricto sensu. Within Chinese religion, the Three Teachings did not function as self-contained institutions that provided lay followers with an exclusive path to salvation, as in the nineteenth-century Western concept of religion; rather, their function was to transmit their tradition of practice and to serve the entire society, either through the teaching of individual spiritual techniques or through the provision of liturgical services to associations and communities. In late imperial times and well into the twentieth century, only clerics and a small number of devout laypersons (jushi

) would identify themselves as Buddhist or Taoist,⁷ but most people at least occasionally engaged in rituals officiated by Buddhist or Taoist priests. A state doctrine of the coexistence of the Three Teachings reinforced the increasing overlap and mutual influences between them after centuries of interaction and universal acceptance among the populace, although functional differences remained, with Confucians monopolizing statecraft and playing a privileged role in kin-based worship; Taoist liturgy often structuring communal festivals; and Buddhist priests often being the preferred choice for conducting funerals.

The Three Teachings served the whole of Chinese religion, within which they were expected to coexist and even cooperate with one another, but without merging. This form of pluralism was thus not equivalent to syncretism, such as that practiced by many salvationist groups, in which there was a conscious attempt to integrate, synthesize, and supersede all existing teachings. The myriads of autonomous groups that formed the social basis of Chinese religion—households, lineages,⁸ territorial communities, professional guilds, devotional associations, political entities—each chose, from among the shared repertoire of beliefs and practices, those services offered by clerics of the Three Teachings that served their needs. Certain scholars have suggested that the Three Teachings correspond to an elite religion, in contrast to “popular religion.”⁹ However, the relationship between the Three Teachings and local cults hinged on socioeconomic, ideological, and theological considerations much more complex than an elite / popular dichotomy can suggest. Therefore, most communities were not Confucian, ...