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7 Religious Revivalism
- Hong Kong University Press, HKU
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Chinese religious orthodoxy is an important part of Singapore-Chinese socioreligious life. One of the earliest social institutions established by the Chinese in Singapore was the temple. Since then Singapore Chinese have continued to hold Chinese religious practices, both individually and communally. Today, Chinese ritual ceremonies and religious fairs continue to be part of the religious landscape among the Chinese in Singapore, enabling participation in communal expression that fosters a sense of group identity and solidarity. Among the Singapore Anxi Chinese, the orthodox practices of Chinese religion continue to be important. In the 1960s, they built a temple in Singapore, Penglai Si (蓬萊寺), named after the home of the majority of them. Within this temple, their guardian god (Qingshui zushigong, 清水祖師公) is housed. Since the 1980s, the old temple was demolished for redevelopment purposes and Qingshui zushigong was relocated in the new site. On various occasions, communal fairs are organized for lineage members in Singapore. The 1978 reform in China brought a revival of religious activities in Penglai, and visiting Singapore Chinese were instrumental in reinventing ritual practices in the villages of Penglai. The small-scale, individualized religious practices during the early years of reform gradually gave way and large annual religious fairs became common. Ninety per cent of village households belonging to the relevant lineage participated in them. In the 1990s, an increased number of Singapore Chinese visited their home villages to take part in them. This chapter examines religious reproduction in the qiaoxiang, focusing on the centrality of Qingshui zushigong; the revival of religious fairs and the implications for the lineage identity of Singapore and village Chinese. 7 Religious Revivalism Kuah_07_ch07.indd 163 11/11/2010 11:44 AM 164 Rebuilding the Ancestral Village Chinese Religious Orthodoxy: Its Contemporary Roles Chinese religious orthodoxy can be seen as consisting of two structures, the ritual and the ideological. Each can exist independently of the other. Both remain important in Chinese culture. In one study, Watson sees the standardization of ritual as having been central to the creation and maintenance of a unified Chinese culture (Watson, 1988: 3). To Watson, it is the ritual performance rather than the meanings behind it that is crucial. He argues that ‘what is clear and explicit about ritual is how to do it—rather than its meaning’ (Watson, 1988: 5). On the other hand, Rawski has explored the meanings behind these ritual practices and argues that, although the practitioners themselves might not be aware of it, a complex structure of meanings does exist for all ritual practices and it is important to acknowledge its existence (Rawski, 1988: 22). I argue that the surface, manifest structure of Chinese religious practice is grounded in rituals and actions, but I also recognize a deep latent structure which provides the Chinese with an identifiable, common cosmological world-view. Taken together, these two structures allow Chinese communities throughout the world to practise an identifiable form of Chinese religious orthodoxy and orthopraxy; the latent structure often changes less than the surface while the manifest structure is subjected to addition, subtraction and modification due to changing sociocultural , economic and political environments. Chinese religious orthodoxy is an eclectic mix of three main ideologies— Daoism, Buddhism and Confucianism—interwoven with folk beliefs and animism. This syncretic mix did, and still does, determine the practice of the Chinese. Historically, ideologically ‘pure’ religious practices were confined to small elite minorities—in former times, these included state officials and the literati, who favoured institutional forms of religion—either Confucianism, Buddhism or both, at different periods; as well as many religious professionals. A more diffused form of religious practice was that of the masses (Yang, 1961)—formerly this meant, for the most part, the peasantry (Granet, 1975). As a system of rituals, Chinese religious orthodoxy can be seen as a system of social action, the performance of which requires the co-operation of individuals who follow the direction of leaders (La Fontaine, 1985: 11). There are ritual rules and prescribed sets of actions that govern each action and each participant (La Fontaine, 1985: 11). Other rules concern those persons to be excluded. In contemporary Chinese society, it is the better-educated and professional classes that favour scriptural purity. Among Singapore Chinese, only in recent decades has there been a rise in scriptural Buddhism and an emerging trend towards Reformist Buddhism, while Chinese religious orthodoxy has Kuah_07_ch07.indd 164 11/11/2010 11:44 AM [54.224.52.210] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 09:40 GMT) Religious Revivalism 165 continued...