Religion in China and Its Modern Fate

Introduction

1 INTRODUCTION T he main goal of this book is to assess the important processes of change that shaped the fateof Chinese religion during the last decade of the Qing dynasty and the entire Republican era. Historians of literature, culture, the arts, political thought, and other areas of Chinese culture all have shown abundantly how creative this period was in shaping Chinese modernity and creating the society we now live in,1 and scholars of religion are rapidly following suit.2 In this book, I endeavor to place religion at the core of understanding modern Chinese history by assessing three forms of change, which are treated in separate chapters.Chapter 1 considers mutations of the communal structures of religion as seen in the different campaigns that targeted temples, their rituals (especially festivals), and other forms of traditional religious life. Chapter 2 treats the innovative production of knowledge that shaped religious publishing enterprises. Chapter 3 examines new types of religiosity and their roles in the lives of modern Chinese elites. These three chapters cover various forms of change at many different levels and therefore require different types of analysis. The first level of these analytical frameworks is macrosocial and looks at the entirety of Chinese communal life in both rural and urban areas. The second focuses on smaller institutions, in this case religious publishing houses and the associations that supported them, while the third level deals with individuals.The three frameworks are united by a common research agenda, which is to trace the ways in which the vast 2 IntroductIon religious resources (texts, expertise, symbolic capital, material wealth, and so on) that circulated throughout Chinese society during the late imperial period were reconfigured in new ways and new social formations during the Republican era. The book traces these complex processes of destruction and revitalization by following modern Chinese elites as they joined in attacks on communal temples or resisted such campaigns (chapter 1), while alsoengaging in the dissemination of religious knowledge (chapter 2) and playing active roles in the development of urban-based religious groups (chapter 3). In this introduction, I set the stage for the consideration of these issues by describing the nature of Chinese religious life as well as the challenges these beliefs and practices were forced to confront during the modern era because of the impact of Western culture, especially Christianity. I also assess previous research on these topics, as well as related methodological issues. on The naTure of chineSe religiouS life Over the years, scholars have come to realize that, despite the unfortunate use of labels such as “chaotic” or “diffuse,” Chinese religions constitute a coherent system that integrated practices for individual self-cultivation, kinship rites, and communal rituals. Religious life is in large part based on the belief that all sentient beings are endowed with spiritual power (ling 靈) and can purify themselves through morality and self-cultivation, which shapes their fate after death in terms of being reborn as gods, ghosts, ancestors, or various animal spirits.3 Another key concept is that of divine retribution (bao 報), which can occur both in the afterlife and in this world as well.4 Conventional wisdom focuses on the role of three leading religious traditions (the so-called “Three Teachings” or sanjiao 三教: Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism ; early forms of Christianity and Islam are ignored), each of which is credited with possessing its own canons, religious specialists , and sacred sites. At the same time, scholars have recog- 3 IntroductIon nized that the Three Teachings were not merely self-contained institutions that provided exclusive paths to salvation; instead, one of their main roles in Chinese religious life was to serve autonomous religious communities that chose among the texts and specialists of these three traditions as need or preference dictated.5 Most of these religious communities centered on temples that were built and managed by clerics or local elites. These temples served as key public spaces and, like the communities that patronized them, were largely autonomous, although they could participate in alliances and networks as needed.6 In terms of religious organizations, one highly useful distinction is between ascriptive communities and voluntary associations. The former included territorial cults, lineages, and corporations such as guildhalls (huiguan 會館, gongsuo 公所), while the latter ranged from pious societies to devotional incense associations (xianghui 香會) to pilgrimage associations to voluntary performance troupes to sectarian groups devoted to individual salvation and philanthropic activities. The latter often are referred to...