Justin Ritzinger's Articles on Lions Roar

As China is changing, so is Chinese Buddhism, morphing to meet cultural forces and adapting to find a place in the economy. Justin Ritzinger provides an inside look. In April 2008, I traveled for my dissertation research to Xuedou Shan, a mountain monastery rich in Chan history and famous for its connection to Budai, the merry monk believed to have been a manifestation of Maitreya, the Buddha of the future age. As I stepped off the bus into the dusty plaza, I found myself in the middle of a major construction site. Though the main monastery was open to visitors, it was surrounded by half-completed structures covered in scaffolding. Alongside the monastery, a large expansion was underway, and across the street, a new seminary was nearing completion. From a structure built into the hillside rose a massive bronze lotus dais, which would one day serve as throne to a monumental image of the future Buddha. The goal was to construct a complex consisting of “one Buddha, three monasteries, and six cloisters”—a substantial expansion of the Buddhist footprint on the mountain, and an expensive one. The Buddha monument alone would cost tens of millions of dollars. Posters and signage around the grounds extolled the merit the pious might earn through donations to this mighty undertaking: “Offering a single spade of earth to the Buddha accumulates ten thousand blessings for your descendants,” declared one. Another offered donors the opportunity to sponsor components of the statue with donations ranging from fourteen dollars to over half a million. Still far from completion at that time, it seemed a tremendously ambitious undertaking. I returned seven years later to find the once dusty plaza in immaculate condition and the seminary complete. The expansion, now open, featured an impressive courtyard and a large hall constructed with exquisite materials and craftsmanship in the Song dynasty style. Behind the expansion was another courtyard, which led up to a thirty-three-meter tall image of Budai, gleaming in the summer sun. But while the “one Buddha, three monasteries, and six cloisters” were all complete, new construction was only just beginning. The success of the first wave of expansion had spawned even more ambitious plans, and the main monastery and its Buddha monument were now only the first of three planned centers. At the foot of the mountain was envisioned a giant glass dome, large enough to accommodate five thousand people and topped with a golden hall representing Maitreya’s Tusita palace. Near the summit, another large monastery was planned, this one dedicated primarily to cultivation. Surrounding these three centers would eventually be thirty-three temples, rather than the modest six cloisters originally envisioned. The sheer scale and speed of Xuedou Shan’s expansion are both remarkable and indicative of the Buddhist revival that has swept China, particularly in the prosperous coastal south. Two Steps Forward. Not so long ago, predictions of such growth and prosperity would have seemed absurd. Shortly after the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, the Communist Party began to gradually, but systematically, dismantle Buddhist institutions and those of other religions. Monks and nuns were forced to study Communist theory, work in productive labor, and participate in political campaigns. Monastics in little more than name, their numbers dwindled. Temples lost the land endowments they relied on for support and were converted into workshops, warehouses, and factories. Soon, only the most historically important monasteries remained to serve as showcases for foreign dignitaries, and with the onset of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, even these ceased to operate. Chairman Mao Zedong, having been sidelined within the Party due to the disastrous failures of key initiatives such as the Great Leap Forward, took his cause directly to the people, urging them to rise up and destroy the “Four Olds”—old customs, old culture, old habits, and old ideas. Buddhism was clearly included within these. Across the country, Red Guards destroyed precious historical and cultural relics. Former monks were imprisoned or subjected to traumatic “struggle sessions” to correct any counterrevolutionary ideas remaining from their ostensibly “rightist” backgrounds. Untold millions kept faith in the Buddhas in their hearts, but few dared to speak such things aloud. One can hardly fault Holmes Welch, the great scholar of modern Chinese Buddhism, for declaring in 1972 that the religion was effectively dead. Twenty-five years later, when I first went to China to spend a semester abroad in the northern city of Tianjin, though, I found that Buddhism was very much alive, if still recovering from the traumas of the Maoist era. The Cultural Revolution had ended in 1976, and a new era of Reform and Openness had been declared by Deng Xiaoping. Religious freedom was officially restored in 1980, but religion was, and remains, restricted in many ways. While the People’s Republic guarantees freedom of religious belief in its constitution, in practice, this is heavily circumscribed. The freedom of Chinese citizens to believe in religion is paired with the freedom not to believe in religion. Thus, all religious activity is legal only within the confines of a registered religious venue and must be kept out of the public sphere. Although by the 1990s many monasteries had been restored, many others had not, and the state intentionally suppressed the number of monasteries and monastics in order to contain religious activity. Among the monasteries to be restored was the Cloister of Great Compassion, where I spent much of my free time. The only place I could hear birdsong, it was an oasis of peace in what was, in 1997, a rather noisy, polluted city. Under grey autumn skies, I watched pious retirees, mostly women, make the circuit of devotions from hall to hall, offering incense and prostrating to the images enshrined inside. Their devoted cries of “Amituofo!” (Skt., Amitabha Buddha; Jpn., Amida Butsu) in salutation or celebration stood in stark contrast to the Buddhism of nightstands and lecture halls I had known thus far. It was there that I took refuge with the elderly abbot, Master Baohan. Like many monastic leaders of that time, he had left home to become a monastic prior to the 1949 revolution, been laicized during the Maoist period, and returned to a monk’s life in the 1980s. He provided a living link to tradition for the twenty or thirty younger monks who had gathered around him. Buddhism’s revival in those early days was lean. Monasteries may have been restored, but the lands that had once served as their endowments were not returned. Historic monasteries received some government funds for restoration, but they relied on fees for ritual services and donations from the laity to meet their day-to-day operational expenses. These most often came in the form of small bills stuffed into the ubiquitous “merit boxes” that stood in each hall, but they also drew income from ticket sales and enterprises, such as the simple restaurant where the Cloister of Great Compassion served vegetarian versions of typical northern fare. Entrepreneurial outreach to an increasingly wealthy and educated populace and an alliance, often fraught, with tourism have become key drivers of Buddhism’s revival in recent decades. Many other monasteries were still in the process of being restored. On a trip to Wutai Shan, the mountain home of the bodhisattva Manjushri, every monastery seemed to have fliers printed on tissue-thin colored paper that told the story of the “karmic conditions” of its revival and enjoined the reader to earn merit by donating to its ongoing reconstruction. Donors’ names would be inscribed on stone tablets to record their generosity for years to come. While many did respond, in those days the average local believer was of limited means. Most of the largest donations came instead from the Chinese diaspora, often monks and laypeople who had fled the Communist regime and now wished to support the revival of the religion in their homeland. At Wutai Shan’s Pushou Nunnery, I saw a group of laywomen from Hong Kong present the abbess with an offering of a fat roll of redbacks, amounting to perhaps a thousand U.S. dollars. Though in those days much of Chinese Buddhism was simply trying to reestablish itself and return to normal function, early sprouts of dynamism were already evident. One notable example was the Bailin Temple, where a monk named Jinghui was engaged in pioneering work to spread the teachings of Chan. Invited by the local government in 1988 to rebuild the historic home of the Chan Master Zhaozhou (Jpn., Joshu), Jinghui had broken new ground by publishing a temple magazine, organizing summer camps for university students to learn about Buddhism, and developing a distinctive brand, “Chan for Living,” for his approach to the dharma. Another was Putuo Shan, an island believed to be the home of the bodhisattva Guanyin. In 1997, the local Buddhist association erected the South Seas Guanyin, an eighteen-meter bronze image that has since served as the visual emblem of the island, attracting tourists and pilgrims alike. These two developments—entrepreneurial outreach to an increasingly wealthy and educated populace and an alliance, often fraught, with tourism—have become key drivers of Buddhism’s revival in recent decades. These developments flourished during times of economic growth and favorable political conditions that followed. China’s gross domestic product stood at a little over a trillion U.S. dollars at the turn of the millennium; by the time of the Beijing Olympics, and my first visit to Xuedou, it had quadrupled to 4.6 trillion. When I returned in 2015, it had hit eleven trillion, a tenfold increase in less than a generation. With few exceptions, Chinese cities in the nineties were drab, polluted, and filled with nondescript concrete buildings...

An Ambivalent Revival: Buddhism in China Today

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