Buddhism after Mao: Negotiations, Continuities, and Reinventions ed. by Ji Zhe, Gareth Fisher and André Laliberté

Abstract

Reviewed by: Buddhism after Mao: Negotiations, Continuities, and Reinventions ed. by Ji Zhe, Gareth Fisher and André Laliberté Alison Denton Jones (bio) Ji Zhe, Gareth Fisher, and André Laliberté, editors. Buddhism after Mao: Negotiations, Continuities, and Reinventions. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2019. v, 355 pp. Hardcover $84, isbn 978-08-24-87734-7. Paperback $28, isbn 978-08-24-88834-3. Buddhism After Mao steps into an important gap in our understanding of religion in Contemporary China and of Global Buddhism today. As the volume points out on the first page, China is not only home to “the largest community of people on the planet who identify Buddhism as an important source of meaning in their lives,” but Buddhists also make up the “largest religious group in China” (p. 1). Despite these significant positions in China’s and the world’s religious fields, there is less scholarship on Buddhism in contemporary China than on other religious traditions there, or on Buddhist communities in other parts of the world. The introduction and eleven empirical chapters in this volume move our understanding forward along several dimensions. These contributions will be of interest to both scholars of Chinese religion and Buddhist studies scholars working on other traditions and regions, as well as to comparative religionists examining contemporary global religions dynamics such as religion- state relations, secularization, religious charitable activities, religious strategies to balance tradition and innovation while bolstering legitimacy, pressures on religious sites from tourism and urban renewal, tensions between “folk” and official forms of religion, online ritual spaces, and more. Although each chapter takes up a specialized topic, they are mostly quite accessible to nonspecialist [End Page 327] readers. Thus, the book will be of use in undergraduate classes and for scholars or lay readers who are not Buddhist scholars or China specialists. The volume is divided into three sections: “Negotiating Legitimacy” focuses on interactions between Buddhism and the PRC state; “Revival and Continuity” examines how Buddhist institutions and elites work to rebuild and elaborate upon traditional Buddhist institutions; and “Reinventing the Dharma” offers case studies of several temples to illustrate some of the diverse ways that Chinese Buddhists create community, moral discourse, ritual practice, and religious spaces within the complex and rapidly changing political, socioeconomic, urbanizing, and technological environments in the PRC today. The following section sketches each chapter, and the review concludes with overall reflections on the themes and limitations of the volume. Chapter 1, by André Laliberté, provides the national political context for the volume, outlining the relatively favorable relationship that (Han Chinese) Buddhism has with the PRC state compared with other religious traditions, and identifies four policy domains where the state hopes that Buddhism may work toward state goals. The chapter then traces the changes in Buddhism-state relationships regarding these four domains over the most recent three regimes: those of Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and Xi Jinping. Claire Vidal’s chapter on the administration of the Buddhist pilgrimage site Putuoshan moves the lens on the Buddhist-state relationship to the concrete, local level. It shows us how the state’s complicated apparatuses for administration and political control interact with the Buddhist community’s attempts to carve out autonomy on both practical and discursive dimensions. As other case studies of religious revival in Reform Era China have shown, Vidal’s examination of Putuoshan demonstrates that, despite the apparently rigid hierarchical power structure and total state control, there is room for savvy religious leaders to take initiative. In addition to this practical (if unofficial) autonomy for the Buddhist community, Vidal argues that it uses traditional Buddhist stories and schema to reimagine the state-dominated administrative and power relations within a Buddhist precedent and cultural vision. This chapter is the most dense in the volume and may not be accessible to nonspecialists. An even more microlevel case study of Buddhism-state relationships is presented in chapter 3, where Susan K. McCarthy examines the Ren’ai Charity Foundation to explore the areas of overlap and disconnect between Buddhist concepts and practices of charity, and the Chinese state’s goals of social welfare provision and promoting civic-mindedness. This chapter raises a number of thought-provoking issues for both China...