Practicing Scripture: A Lay Buddhist Movement in Late Imperial China by Barend J. ter Haar (review)

Barend ter Haar’s latest book is nothing less than a social and religious history of one of the most influential and widespread lay Buddhist movements in late imperial China. Known by its autonym Wuweijiao 無為教, “Non-Action Teachings,” the movement originated in early sixteenth-century north China among the followers of a religious teacher named Patriarch Luo (Luozu 羅祖). It was through the subsequent transmission of Patriarch Luo’s Five Books in Six Volumes (Wubu liuce 五部六冊) in southern China that Wuweijiao developed into a full-blown religious movement spreading across the provinces of Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Fujian, and Taiwan. On the mainland, the movement remained active until the religious repressions of the 1950s, whereas in Taiwan it fell into sharp decline after 1949, but continues to exist until the present.

In Practicing Scripture, ter Haar further explores a number of key themes from his previous publications, such as the tension between a movement’s self-perception and its labeling by other social groups or representatives of the state; the interplay between the presumed millenarian outlook of a religious group and governmental persecution; and the tendency among popular religious groups to mythologize their own beginnings and early charismatic teachers. By re-engaging these issues with new primary material, ter Haar deals a further blow to the outdated notion of Chinese non-elite religions as “diffused” religiosity. Instead, ter Haar presents the Non-Action Teachings as a distinct and self-conscious movement whose members shared the same religious affiliation character pu 普 (“universal”) as part of their name—indicating shared identity and a more formal act of joining the group—and who remained faithful to the teachings and practices of the early patriarchs. Characteristic for the Non-Action Teachings was a fundamentalist–pietist attitude that combined a focus on internalization of practice with a pronounced iconophobia. The shared identity of the movement was underpinned by conscious mythologizing of the lives of its first three patriarchs in a text entitled Overall Record of the Circumstances under Which the Three Patriarchs On-High Travelled Around and Taught (Taishang sanzu xingjiao yinyou zonglu 太上三祖行教因由總錄). In a later chapter, ter Haar analyzes the process of routinization of charisma through the building of religious lineages.

Like many other religious groups, the Non-Action Teachings were a victim of negative labeling by imperial officials who saw the movement as part of the White Lotus Teachings. Ter Haar emphatically debunks the idea that the Non-Action Teachings were of a messianic nature and, in consequence, rebellious, and combines this insight with a call for a re-definition of our analytical parameters. Reliance on distinctions based on traditional stereotypes and labels has the negative effect that scholars of Chinese religion focus on groups that were persecuted, thereby wrongly excluding those groups who behaved mostly inconspicuously. “The history of persecution,” ter Haar argues, “is not the same as the history of religious innovation” (p. 10).

The strength of Practicing Scripture lies in the skill and detail with which ter Haar weaves a wealth of information from a wide range of sources into a compelling narrative, bringing the sociological and historical contours of the Non-Action Teachings as a religious movement into sharper relief. The movement comes to life as a world inhabited by real people with unique concerns, practices, and beliefs. This is first-rate social history of religion.

A second ambition of the book is to tell “the history of a reading experience” (p. 5). Ter Haar emphasizes the importance of the Five Books in Six Volumes as a body of newly created texts around which the Non-Action Teachings coalesced into a religious movement: “Not even Buddhism, at least in China, organized itself around a clearly delimited body of texts, despite the evident importance of some texts” (p. 48). Following Paul Griffiths’s concept of “religious reading,” ter Haar states that engagement with scripture within the Non...