On the market: Consumption and material culture in modern Chinese Buddhism

For many Chinese speakers in China and elsewhere, experiencing or connecting with matters of religion often includes mediation through or with material objects. Such mediation is readily accessible to larger and larger audiences and often occurs through the consumption of religious material goods, thanks also to media technologies and the Internet. In this article, the author seeks to complicate the notion that the production and consumption of novel Buddhist religious goods can be analyzed solely in terms of 'market theory.' While on the one hand the author shows that Buddhist technologies of salvation are historically associated with materiality, she also contends that the 'aura' of Buddhist-inspired modern religious goods - in the spirit of Walter Benjamin's essay 'On Some Motifs in Baudelaire' (1939) - is not so much effaced as it is reconfigured and transformed by technological mediations. © 2011 Taylor and Francis Group, LLC

Religious Tolerance: A View from China

Scholars of religion in the Chinese speaking world find themselves often having to dispel the many myths that surround it. Does China have religion? What does it look like? And where does it stand vis-a`-vis religious tolerance? In this short article, I take a comparative look at the late imperial period in China and the substantive changes that took place at the end of it. What does religious tolerance – and its opposite – mean in the context of China’s modern epistemic order

Lost in translation? The Treatise on the Mahāyāna Awakening of Faith (Dasheng qixin lun) and its modern readings

The Treatise on the Mahāyāna Awakening of Faith, an indigenous Chinese composition written in the guise of an Indian Buddhist treatise, is one of the most influential texts in the history of East Asian Buddhism. Its outline of the doctrines of buddha nature (foxing), buddha bodies (foshen), and one mind (yixin), among others, served from the medieval period onwards as one of the main foundations of East Asian Buddhist thought and practice. The Treatise is putatively attributed to the Indian writer Aṡvaghosa, and its current Chinese version was traditionally conceived of as a translation from an original Sanskrit text. In the course of the twentieth century, however, many important scholars of Buddhism have called into question the textual history of the Treatise. Even if the specific circumstances of its creation are still largely unknown, the view that the Treatise is an original Chinese composition (not necessarily written by a native Chinese) is now prevalent among scholars. Meanwhile, and for more than one hundred years, the text has also become a source of knowledge of Buddhism in the West thanks to a number of English translations. After examining the early textual history of the two existing versions of the text, this article will offer some examples of its modern appropriation by a novel group of readers and interpreters, an appropriation that took place during the first decades of the twentieth century amidst efforts to re-envision Chinese and East Asian Buddhist history and the place of Buddhism in modern society. © School of Oriental and African Studies

Charismatic Communications: The Intimate Publics of Chinese Buddhism

I argue here that, secularization and state control aside, there has been in recent years a definite resurgence of interest in Buddhist practice in China (Fisher, 2014; Tarocco 2011, 2017). While other have examined its vital role in the production of national modernity and the institutions of the state, my analysis primarily tracks the work Buddhism performs within the everyday realms of media and technology. In looking at how Chuanxi’s charisma is at works in the intimate connections between Buddhism and technology at Huiri Temple, I follow David Palmer definition of charisma as a “relationship based on the expectation of the extraordinary, which stimulates and empowers collective behaviour” (Palmer 2008: 70). Although the mediation of religion in China is nothing new, only recently is the relationship between religion and mass media being more thoroughly discussed (Travagnin 2017; Clart 2016; Tarocco 2017). Outside of China, several scholars have analysed contemporary environments characterized by networked forms of electronic and digital communication and of religion and the age of media (de Vries and Weber 2002), radio evangelism (Hoover 1988), religious video games (Campbell and Grieve 2014) to understand how religious practice shapes and is shaped by mass media. By examining the spheres of pious self-making and social imaginary that are opened up by Buddhist technoculture, I suggest that deep-rooted attitudes towards the circulation of knowledge and charisma inform the current recuperation of monastic ideals and the production of digital “dharma treasures” (fabao 法宝). These are key to establishing and maintaining local, trans-regional, and international networks of online and offline followers. As James Taylor has remarked for Thai Buddhism, new articulations of Chinese Buddhism are “significantly implicated in local-global historical and sociocultural contexts” (2015: 219)

An Enchanted Modern: Urban Cultivation in Shanghai

China is in the midst of the fastest and largest process of urbanization in history. Alongside the dynamism of the region’s hyperdense cities however are alarming levels of air pollution, recurrent stories of toxic food, contaminated waterways and intensifying popular protests concerning polluting factories and plants. Issues surrounding a sustainable urban ecology have thus become paramount in the construction of Asia’s metropolitan future. This paper, which focuses particularly on the Shanghai region, suggests that the ideas and practices of ‘cultivation’ might be of value in the creation and imagination of a future ecological metropolis. We examine self-cultivation concretely, as a set of situated embodied practices in specific places and specific historical conditions. We also explore the abstract conceptual idea, by looking at how the modern philosopher Mou Zongsan, articulated the idea of ‘cultivation’ as a guide for life. Ultimately, we are interested in how the embodied cultural practices of cultivation can be harnessed as a strategy of re-enchantment, with the power to reconfigure urban nature in the Chinese megacity of the 21st century

Introduction: Swimming against the Tide

One of the aims of this special issue of Lagoonscapes is to counter and reframe established geographies, histories and temporalities

Reading Cai Guo Qiang's "Unmanned Nature"

On-line catalogue commissioned by the Whithworth Museum at the University of Manchester. A critical reading of Cai Guo Qiang's Installation "Unmanned Nature". http://www.whitworth.manchester.ac.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/pastexhibitions/caiguo-qiang

Shanghai Biennale

Review of the 11th Shanghai Biennale for Frieze. Crucially, Raqs and the other curators have determinedly resisted ethnocentric perspectives, foremost by avoiding what Rey Chow describes as ‘a kind of postmodern self-writing’ and the ‘primitivism’ that appeals to specific Orientalist discourses about Asia. Yet, they have also remained sceptical of the liberating possibilities that diasporic mobility, globalization and transnationalism supposedly present

Technologies of Salvation: (Re)locating Chinese Buddhism in the Digital Age

In looking at digital Buddhist communities in the Chinese-speaking world, this article joins Peter Van Der Veer in his call for “more poetic accounts” of urban life in Asia and the “practical, everyday urban aspirations to “self-cultivation” and “self-presentation” (van der Veer, 2015: 3). The phrase “technologies of salvation” is advanced as a potential cornerstone for contemporary urban Buddhist life. Following John Lardas Modern’s conception of “the ever-evolving habitus of techno-modernity” (2013: 184), this article argues that urbanites who live in post-secular China and Sinophone Asia’s city-regions––Beijing, the Shanghai-Suzhou-Hangzhou-Ningbo corridor, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Taipei––find solace and purpose in Buddhist technologies of salvation and digital religious goods that blur the boundaries between local and global, private and public. The study of the communicative fabric of the social media life of elite clerics sheds light on the role that digital technology plays in the processes of re-articulation of their relationship with practitioners. Examining the spheres of pious self-making and social imaginary that are opened up by Buddhist technoculture, this article suggests that deep-rooted attitudes towards the circulation of knowledge and charisma inform the current recuperation of monastic ideals and the production of digital “dharma treasures” (fabao 法宝). These are key to establishing and maintaining local, trans-regional, and international networks of online and offline followers. The hyperspace-biased conversations within and around urban Buddhism represent a development of significance and complexity. Buddhist lives, I argue, are produced and mediated by the ever-expanding incidence of clerical blogging and engagement with the smartphone-based social media platform WeChat (weixin 微信)