Francesca Tarocco

Terminology and Religious Identity: Buddhism and The Genealogy of the Term Zongjiao

This chapter discusses the Buddhist bias intrinsic in the choice of the new term zongjiao to designate official discourse on religion in the twentieth century. The chapter offers a step towards a fuller account of the history of the term that gives due weight to the crucial but complex developments in the mid-nineteenth century. The author believes that these developments, while they resulted in the adoption by so many contemporary language users, for better or worse, of a term now regarded as their word corresponding to ?religion, may be seen as pointing to a background in earlier discourse on religious topics. A close look at the evidence does not suggest a neologism especially coined to meet the needs of contact with the West, and so conveying no more and no less than the connotations of the word in Europe and America, but something much more nuanced. Keywords:America; Buddhist bias; Europe; religious identity; zongjiao

On the market: consumption and material culture in modern Chinese Buddhism

For many Chinese speakers in China and elsewhere, experiencing or connecting with matters of religion often includes mediation through or with material objects. Such mediation is readily accessible to larger and larger audiences and often occurs through the consumption of religious material goods, thanks also to media technologies and the Internet. In this article, the author seeks to complicate the notion that the production and consumption of novel Buddhist religious goods can be analyzed solely in terms of ‘market theory.’ While on the one hand the author shows that Buddhist technologies of salvation are historically associated with materiality, she also contends that the ‘aura’ of Buddhist-inspired modern religious goods – in the spirit of Walter Benjamins essay ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’ (1939) – is not so much effaced as it is reconfigured and transformed by technological mediations.

Lost in translation? The Treatise on the Mahāyāna Awakening of Faith (Dasheng qixin lun) and its modern readings

The Treatise on the Mahay ana Awakening of Faith, an indigenous Chinese composition written in the guise of an Indian Buddhist treatise, is one of the most influential texts in the history of East Asian Buddhism. Its outline of the doctrines of buddha nature (foxing), buddha bodies (fosheri), and one mind (yixiri), among others, served from the medieval period onwards as one of the main foundations of East Asian Buddhist thought and practice. The Treatise is putatively attributed to the Indian writer Asvaghosa, and its current Chinese version was traditionally conceived of as a translation from an original Sanskrit text. In the course of the twentieth century, however, many important scholars of Buddhism have called into question the textual history of the Treatise. Even if the specific circumstances of its creation are still largely unknown, the view that the Treatise is an original Chinese composition (not necessarily written by a native Chinese) is now prevalent among scholars. Meanwhile, and for more than one hundred years, the text has also become a source of knowledge of Buddhism in the West thanks to a number of English translations. After examining the early textual history of the two existing versions of the text, this article will offer some examples of its modern appropriation by a novel group of readers and interpreters, an appropriation that took place during the first decades of the twentieth century amidst efforts to re-envision Chinese and East Asian Buddhist history and the place of Buddhism in modern society.

The birth of orientalism

Mahāyāna (Chapter 11). The history reveals that King Chulalongkorn reintroduced the discourse about Mahāyāna, which had disappeared in Thailand around the twelfth century. This new notion of Mahāyāna was an artificial and academic ideal imported from Europe. In the last chapter Todd LeRoy Perreira presents impressive data on the usage of the terms ‘Hı̄nayāna,’ ‘Theravāda’ and ‘Mahāyāna’ in western studies of Buddhism since the late nineteenth century. He also acknowledges the term Theravāda in modern discourse. Important contributions are also the ‘Introduction’ and ‘Description of plates’ (573–597) by Peter Skilling. In the latter he provides descriptions of the many fascinating pictures illustrated in this book. These descriptions demonstrate the diversity and dynamism of Theravāda traditions. Furthermore, these detailed descriptions will stimulate the interest of specialists and non-specialists alike.

Pluralism and its Discontents: Buddhism and Proselytizing in Modern China

Since the mid-1950s, the Chinese state has exerted tight ideological and administrative control over the religious activities of its citizens. And yet, as Daniel Overmyer has observed, wherever and whenever local conditions allow it, religious practices come to the surface. Lay Buddhist movements, Confucian revivalists, evangelical Christians, and members of body cultivation movements, among others, have been active outside the officially sanctioned institutions. A politically and ideologically engineered secularization and carefully micro-managed “religious pluralism”—to be understood here merely in the sense that there exist five officially sanctioned religions—create the context in which Chinese practitioners negotiate their existence vis-a-vis the state and each other. In recent years, the state, on its part, has helped promote religious sites, Buddhist ones in particular, as tourist destinations. These facts raise a number of important and as yet little explored questions. In particular, what can a Chinese practitioner or group of practitioners lawfully do? More specifically, what do the terms “religion” (zongjiao 宗 教), “superstition” (mixin 迷信 ) and “freedom of religious belief” (xinjiao ziyou 信教自由) mean in the rapidly evolving context of contemporary China? What is the relationship between religious pluralism, secularization, proselytizing and the Chinese Communist Party’s quest for a “harmonious society” (hexie shehui 和谐社会)?