DYING GODS IN CHINA
Brook, Tim
DYING GODS IN CHINA TIM BROOK Religion since the Cultural Revolution One hot, dry summer day in 1975, when I was living as a student in Peking, I climbed the Fragrant Hills to the west of the...
...A secular and atheistic society has been structured accordingly...
...During these days I saw a range of emotional release, including weeping, which I have never seen among Chinese before or since...
...He now heads the only Christian theological college in China...
...He and his friends had teased her about it whenever she went off to the temple...
...For instance, the popular magazine New Construction in October 1965 suggested to its readers that religion would "rely on the force of custom to prolong its feeble existence and even plot to make a comeback...
...One very dose friend asked me cautiously whether I actually believed in religion...
...Scholars and peasants alike shared the vision of the Dao, the Way by which celestial harmony cotdd transform a strife-ridden social order into a peaceful unity...
...Farther down at the west end of the courtyard was the Great Ceremonial Hall, dilapidated with age, but waiting for the fresh tiles piled in front...
...Chinese society after liberation in 1949 left very little room for any religious authority...
...The Four OIds" The Cultural Revolution singled out for its targets the "Four Olds": old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits...
...In any case, the religions of gods are more and more finding themselves without any place to fall in modern Chinese society...
...It felt more like the mass bereavement that Americans experienced on the assassination of President Kennedy...
...Where foreigners make up the bulk of the congregation, as they do in Peking, the foreignness is respected, and so the old cathedral downtown is still used for Mass...
...Of China's other major religion, Taoism, I can say practically nothing at all...
...South Church, the Catholic Cathedral in Peking resumed celebration of Mass in November 1971...
...The college sponsors a limited amount of research, but supervises no students...
...Islam, Buddhism, and Taoism all continue in different ways to linger on in modern China, in some cases linking the present with a long tradition in the past...
...My life remained that way for the next two years in China...
...They have never been forced to confront the personal choice of being free or bound by one God...
...It offers fellowship...
...On the contrary, the newsreels showed him as he was, an aged and dying man...
...Almost immediately a middleaged Muslim came up to us and asked if we were looking for the mosque...
...Perhaps this welcome, reported in brief in the People's Daily, was largely a showpiece event, since the Association has not to my knowledge been men.tioned in the newspapers since that time...
...Agnosticism has been a common trend among the educated for the last two thousand years, and even atheism has its roots in the Chinese past...
...We get together to pray, to read the Bible in adoration and thanksgiving, and to share insights in a most informal and personal way...
...Without income from rents, monasteries could not afford to operate as they had in the past...
...I recall asking a cadre from a language institute in Peking soon after I arrived in China whether Buddhism was still being praoticed...
...They are frank enough to say that they don't agree with me or that religion is not a good thing...
...This is the generation that created the huge impact of the Cultural Revolution, when their appeal to Mao's philosophy turned for a time into the cult of Chairman Mao...
...It is hardly surprising that religion seems no longer a major force in Chinese life...
...Commonweal: 495...
...Yes, ,there were, and probably in other districts as well...
...Apparently, public opinion wen, t against economizing or revising funeral observances...
...Ding had studied abroad in the United States and Canada during the 1940s, returning to China in 1951...
...Ding unequivocally...
...The local people either didn't care or weren't allowed a say in the matter...
...Even Commonweal: 493 where there are congregations, their activities are quite limited...
...If any sort of religious Maoism were still alive, it would have been among this generation of my friends...
...I did find scattered evidence of traditional religious practice, roughly paralleling this limited revival of religious institutions...
...A few have been carefully restored at public expense, and opened to the public as testimonials to the craftsmanship of the Chinese people...
...They say it should be respected...
...But, when it comes to carrying out the divine dictates, I don't think we are in a position to brag any more than the Chinese people...
...I am not a Marxist," declared Rev...
...The most telling reform was the land reform, leaving monasteries only enough land for the monks themselves to till...
...The case for religion's suffering is easier to make...
...Only Islam still flourishes with a public life...
...But the trend over the last thirty years is decline...
...Perhaps in our terms death brought forth a need for transcendence, a need to which the service gave form and expression...
...A few temples may be reopened...
...The mosques belonging to the Muslim minority, which were important centers of their cultural life, had already opened by 1969...
...For the vast majority of the Chinese people, Christianity is at most a vague memory of missionaries...
...Religion the world over is of course more than just deism...
...That this criticism was justified I can attest to from my own experience...
...For a time, many monasteries had to be put under the protection of the army, to curb the defacing of what other Chinese regarded as an important cultural heritage...
...The Judeo-Christian tradition in the West bequeaths to all of us preoccupations about belief in a single God, and about the freedom of the individual in a universe created and controlled by this figure...
...Since 1975, other foreigners have found their way to the mosque, more than the elders are prepared, or perhaps allowed, to see...
...There, kneeling on prayer mats, were over a hundred men, ranging in age from 12 to 80...
...This religiosity may find its place in the People's Republic, though the new chairman Hua Kuo-feng is less likely to inspire the passionate loyalty which Mao commanded...
...He had come across this term for a Buddhist saint while reading a story from the 1920s...
...The Chinese Buddhist Association and later a Taoist Association were set up to guide the development of religion under socialism, carefully pruning away those aspects which could be considered "superstitious," and following the direction of the Communist Party...
...The extreme anti-religious trend set off by the Cultural Revolution gradually dissipated during the 1970s...
...I asked him what con, tact he had had with religion, growing up in Shanghai in the 1950s...
...Ding Guang-xun, principal of the Nanking Theological College...
...This was about the closest I ever got to Buddhism in the People's Republic of China during by two years' residence there from 1974 to 1976...
...I was interested in history, especially the historY of religion...
...As the Imam of the Muslim mosque in Hangzhou told Donald Maclnnis, director of the China Program of the National Council of Churches, young Chinese "have a new belief system which precludes religion...
...I was somewhat prepared not to see any practice of religion in China, and to be unable to study religious history...
...The few who still practice regularly "prefer to meet in their own homes or in schoolrooms to avoid the stigma of Western-style churches built during mission expansion and linked to foreign imperial penetration...
...The rest of Mao's successful appeal to the Chinese people was that he provided a program for~action...
...Some must maintain their faith privately, living in smaller cities without organized congregations...
...Though freedom of religious belief is guaranteed by the constitution, a mixture of encouragement, education and coercion has been used to wean people from religious practices and beliefs...
...This preposterous suggestion encouraged us to go out and investigate on our own...
...I was with a group of foreign students that visited Xian in the summer of 1975...
...The Gang of Four were removed from power in the fall of 1976, just after I left China...
...They were looking for information on lumber production in Fukien province, but the question of religion intruded when they asked about wood consumed 4 August 1978:492 for making coffins...
...The most I saw were three of four converted or abandoned temples...
...But the basic attitude against religion, at least officially, has not changed from what I saw in China two years ago...
...For the Chinese, on the other hand, the universe has never been monotheistic...
...The generation now in its late twenties is the first to have lived entirely within postrevolutionary China...
...Many had been wrecked or pilfered long before the Communist Party came to power...
...The busts and statues fetched good prices from museums and colleotors around the world...
...Ding...
...Service is highly valued in China, but it is channeled in other ways...
...But they were opened primarily to serve the foreign diplomatic community...
...These structures still loom, strangely out of place and time, on the skylines of the east-coast cities like Shanghai and Canton...
...Generally religion has not been singled out as one of the inalienable rights of man...
...New social structures and ideologies have been attempted, often with considerable daring...
...He was once the Bishop of Nanking, but relinquished this title in the late 1950s when the Christian churches in China declared themselves independent of clerical authority from the rest of the world...
...Some have been converted to other uses, as factories, meeting-halls, or schools...
...At one point I tried to get some help...
...It was the only place where a foreigner could step out of the densely human environment of China into an empty, natural setting...
...Many of my Chinese friends were politely dubious about my own interest in the history of religion...
...The only living memory I encountered among my friends came out once when I was walking with one of them past a tree hung with colorful clothes drying in the rare sunlight of Shanghai...
...I have even seen one or two standing forlorn in the fields of the countryside...
...By 1974, when I arrived in China, it was no longer evident...
...According to ,their interviewee, a peasant who left his commune in 1972, funerals were performed in his home village by Taoist priests who otherwise lived inconspicuously and anonymously among the villagers...
...The Association head...
...A pillar standing in the inner courtyard was inscribed with an imperial dedication and dated 742...
...That time, it appears, has passed...
...Zhao was certainly the man to know...
...Most religious institutions, including the Muslim mosques, were closed...
...There were long funeral services, eulogies and mourning processions, lasting for several days...
...Much has happened to China in the last fifty years...
...If Chinese socialism ever became a full functional equivalent of religion, it was at that time...
...In turn, they are generally ignorant about religion...
...Religion for many Chinese was a prime amalgam of all these...
...I was told that he was not well, and suffered easily from eye strain...
...And the constitutional right to "preach atheism"--a right which is spelled out in the same clause of the Constitution as the right to believe in religion--has had a strong effect on the Chinese people...
...There is still the one religion with a briefer tradition, about which something can be said: Christianity...
...As Wallace Muhammad, Imam of the World Community of Islam, said, 'q'll put it this way: I know religion is not given any boost or send-off in China...
...Eventually, though, I gave it up, and turned to other questions in Chinese philosophical history...
...It was a sense of loss...
...It involves a comprehensive conception of the universe and often an ideal of human society...
...The Gang of Four's chief error, he maintained, was that they had not carried out a thorough secularization of thought...
...The following Easter, Peking's Protestant church near ,the Rice Market began to hold services again...
...How do you know what a Christmas tree looks like...
...This r response was gratifyingly open, given what I was later to observe as a great reticence on the part of Chinese officials .to acknowledge departures from modern norms...
...The former conviction that religion would eventually sink into its own grave under the impact of socialist education and modernization was abandoned, and the calm persistent confidence was pushed aside...
...That must be twenty years ago now...
...pulling together, and introspection was noticeably absent in this world where striving always meant action...
...by perceiving this the individual could put himself in phase with the entire cosmos...
...In a sense, it has competed successfully against the traditional religions...
...Cloth is sold in the east wing, and meat and vegetables in the west...
...Head of the Chinese Buddhist Association since its founding in 1953, Zhao has been Buddhism's longest-lasting represen,tative in China...
...Many of their dogmatic and coercive policies on culture and education have since come under fire...
...Even a Party member had sought out a Taoist priest to perform funeral rites for his father...
...But I was not prepared for a society that seemed to be completely divorced from all religious traditions...
...We were amazed at what we saw...
...Yes, but a few younger people too, a very few, were still joining religious orders...
...Buddhism in particular managed to maintain a limited presence in Chinese society up until the mid-1960s...
...I went as one of twenty Canadian exchange students to learn Chinese and study the history and culture...
...Some people used to have them in the winter...
...It did so via a news clipping in 1974, when the Chinese Buddhist Association hosted a Buddhist goodwill tour from Japan...
...I saw a few here in Shanghai when I was a kid...
...The head of the Chinese Buddhist Association may continue to publish his poems in Guangming Daily...
...It is difficult to believe that Christianity, despite its continued existence, lives on in anything more than a twilight way in China...
...My guess is that he thought we were Muslims too...
...Ah, a Christmas tree...
...Mao's vision of socialism in the Chinese context was a real factor in assuring the success of the Chinese Revolution...
...Was this the last resurgence of a dying cultism...
...Were the monks mostly elder people...
...The Christian churches were next to follow suit...
...What...
...It was not one courtyard but two set end to end, separated by an ancient gazebo...
...We asked our local guides whether we could be taken to see the mosque, but one of them said he thought it had been converted into office space...
...It strikes many Westerners as ironic that only when the Communists took control could this 1400-year-old statuary be protected from such vandalism...
...The one religion which is still visibly alive throughout China is Islam...
...All 26 years, I've worked as a Christian...
...It seemed that they wanted us to see their work and know how strong their culture is...
...Knowing that I knew something about the subject, one friend once made a point of asking me what a bodhisattva was...
...Though they co-exist, Marxism and Christianity lead mutually exclusive lives...
...Islam has this strength as the cultural heritage of a minority, which enables it to live on in the People's Republic of China...
...Their faces are squarer and more heavily set, sometimes edged with dark beard...
...But his main point was unexpected...
...They were proud to be Muslims, and proud of their mosque...
...It had stood there, protected by a canopy from the scorching sun, for 1,233 years...
...He told us how proud he was to be a Muslim...
...Life wa s bustling and vigorous, everyone seemed to be TIM BROOK spent two years as an exchange student in China studying history and literature at Peking ond Fudan Universities...
...DYING GODS IN CHINA TIM BROOK Religion since the Cultural Revolution One hot, dry summer day in 1975, when I was living as a student in Peking, I climbed the Fragrant Hills to the west of the city...
...The young Cultural Revolutionaries responded to such calls passionately...
...Aside from events such as the funeral for Sihanouk's mother, however, Buddhism does not wear a public face...
...For some of these religious sites, the task of restoration has been immense...
...Religion in China, among the educated classes at least, has not generally had the kind of compelling power which it has had in the West...
...It offers religious practice, but a practice that cannot effectively engage in social service...
...There is also an internal reason for this eclipse of religion...
...Without hesitation he said it was...
...The Temple of Dark Mystery in the old commercial center of Suzhou stands in its own small square, boarded up...
...He had the general idea, but thought he should just check out his guess by asking me...
...The people were lectured on superstition, images were confiscated and usually deCommonweal: 491 stroyed, and religious practitioners were subject to public humiliation...
...The drift of the article was at first glance rather weak...
...Holmes Welch, who is an authority on Chinese religion and practice in the twentieth century, passed on to me material collected from a refugee in Hong Kong by Ivan and Miriam London...
...The Cultural Revolution seems to have brought the gods of China to death's door, and I see no one who will call them back...
...Ding, "The churches have never accepted Communists as church members...
...Though a Taoist Association was set up in 1957 to draw a fine line between Taoist religion and subversive superstition, since the Cultural Revolution it has faded from view...
...They were preparing for the noon ceremony, and waited patiently while the white-capped and white-whiskered elders showed us their place of worship...
...According to Rev...
...A few places have schools to teach Arabic to Muslim children, though this was seriously cut back during the Cultural Revolution, and no public move has been made to revive the schools...
...The Muslims can sometimes be picked out from their Han brothers...
...For the first time in my life I was in what appeared to be an entirely secularized society...
...Though I did see and hear of scattered instances of religious practice, the environment I was living in-the urban university--did everything to strengthen this feeling of secularization...
...Were there practicing monks in the Peking area, I asked...
...It was flanked with two smaller halls...
...He led us to a modest door in a wall, and we passed into the Great Mosque...
...Fascinated like so many other students in the early 1970s by the strange aura of oriental religions, I was attracted to Chinese Buddhism by a number of fortuitous accidents, and in the end was drawn all the way to China, a modern nation of which I was initially relatively, ignorant...
...But," he maintained, "we can still work together...
...This belief in socialism, if we can call it belief, is still relatively new in China...
...Red Guards entered monasteries and temples, castigating the monks and nuns for their backward thinking and driving them out into lay life...
...What Mao perceived fifty years ago was not exaotly the collapse of religion as a personal, spiritual orientation, but the collapse of religious authority in the countryside...
...Institutional reform has done away with the social and economic bases on which the traditional religions of China have relied...
...All he could recall was his grandmother, a devout Buddhist, bowing before an image of Maitreya, the next Buddha to come...
...He is currently completing his Doctoral studies in history and East Asian languages at Harvard...
...The south side Hall was in the process of careful restoration, done by the mosque members with their own time and money...
...A striking example is the Dragon Gate Grotto south of the old capital of Loyang...
...At least with Buddhism I can speak from personal experience of what is still on view...
...This was the first article on religion that I know of in a Chinese newspaper since the Cultural Revolution ten years ago...
...A guidebook led us into a Muslim neighborhood just a few blocks from the main city square...
...In this sense the Chinese have been as religious as any other civilization...
...The fact that religious freedom has been specifically mentioned in every draft of the constitution from 1954 to 1978 suggests some persistence of religion...
...Such an environment has not been conducive to religious or social activism on the part of Chinese Christians...
...Buddhism is no longer the force mitigating the violence of the natural world, and in a land of paddy agriculture the floods and droughts of nature can be violent indeed...
...Christianity here is mainly a worldview and a fellowship of this worldview," said Rev...
...And I am sure that the attitudes of university students have not changed...
...The contradictions within the human mind or within society worked themselves out for Mao exactly like the contradictions in the universe...
...but I detected no special reverence beyond the respect accorded him as a leader...
...My newly acquired meditative habits felt entirely out of place, and gradually I abandoned them and fell into step with the Chinese around me...
...I exclaimed...
...Urban youth went out into the countryside to uproot old customs...
...Its presence in the Chinese Constitution probably stems more from constitutional traditions learned from the West than it does from internal impulses...
...Most monks and nuns were obliged to return to lay life, now that the economic base for their practice had been removed...
...Something of its fate was revealed last November in a remarkable interview with Rev...
...I walked to the northernmost end of the ridge, and from there looked down into the basin below me...
...Yet recently I have come across evidence quite to .the contrary...
...Where can religion in China go from here...
...Much of Mao's success was because his philosophical writings captured this very ideal, which is rooted in the Chinese tradition...
...I pursued my own studies on the beginnings of Chinese Buddhism for a while, and had all the reference materials I needed available to me in the history reading room of the Peking University library...
...For some, that fellowship has offered respite from the at times difficult demands of the Chinese political world...
...Islam was brought to China a thousand years ago by Muslim traders and slaves from Inner Asia...
...In my own experience, Taoism was a closed chapter in China's religious history...
...These recent reports are encouraging to those who feel religion should be dealt with in a balanced and above-board way...
...Xian is a kind of Muslim home, with everything from Muslim restaurants observing the religious custom of serving mutton instead of pork, to the Great Mosque, the largest Islamic religious center in China proper...
...The vast majority of the hundred thousand stone Buddhas were removed or decapita, ted by foreign art collectors at the turn of the century...
...I inquired informally whether I might be able to confer with the noted historian of religion Ren Ji-yu...
...Religion had been too tied in with other forms of civil and landlord power to avoid becoming a target of the revolution...
...He was embarrassed to bring it up, and relieved when I said quite truthfully that I was interested in it as a historical phenomenon...
...No Communist has come to say I should relinquish my Christian faith...
...This decline was due in part to the suppression of secret societies and "heterodox sects"-most of them Taoist in orienta.tion--in ,the 1950s...
...Far off in the distance gleamed the white marble of the Temple of the Azure Clouds, cordoned off and unapproachable, visible only from the crest of the Fragrant Hills...
...My sadness is not just from the death of one man," said a friend after the service for Chou En-lai, "'it touches much more deeply...
...idealistic young Chinese today...
...Every major city has a mosque and an active Imam in charge of it, ministering as much to the cultural as to the religious needs of his community...
...Zhao Pu-chu, is getting his poems published, but not under the auspices of the Association...
...As children of ,the revolution, they had no reason to understand why people might be religious...
...Mao Tse-tung's view back in the 1920s--that religion would collapse as a natural consequence of political and economic struggle --has been the underlying assumption to the present day...
...Still, these efforts rested on Mao's convictionD one that he shared with Marx--that religion would die out with the challenge of socialism...
...Many Western religious leaders who have visited China recently have acknowledged this, yet still look toward that society for hope...
...It continues to be a vision shared by many 4 August 1978: 494...
...When foreigners were prevented by law from taking these art treasures, they hired Chinese to sneak in at night and do the illegal removals for them...
...However, we had no idea of how to penetrate the maze of alleys running between the plain mud-plastered walls...
...Like the tombs of forgotten emperors, they serve to remind Chinese tourists of the past...
...But in a city like Xian in west central China, their numbers are still considerable and their culture very much alive...
...An older, bearded man, quite tall, welcomed us cordially and invited us into the main courtyard...
...Vegetarian Taoists of former days would have been surprised and shocked to find their sacred place now used for the butchering and selling of meat...
...Elsewhere, Chinese Christians do not use the foreign buildings...
...There was simply no support from people who shared my interest...
...The problem of atheism and the decline of religion have been less of a crucial issue for the Chinese...
...Then the Cultural Revolution began, changing the face of the Chinese world...
...There are never more than half a dozen Chinese present...
...He was not specific about what he meant, but the article did suggest that there was a lot of mystification going on under the Gang of Four, and that this was rooted in the still lingering religious tradition of China...
...They believe in socialism and see no need for religion...
...This was the Association's first public event since 1966...
...Oddly enough, both secularization and religion are claimed to have suffered in the days when the Gang of Four held power...
...Ren's book on Buddhist thought up to the Tang dynasty was the only work on religion available in any bookstore...
...As of the summer of 1977, a "No Visitors Allowed" sign had been hung up outside the door...
...Taoism is no longer the call of brotherhood against the oppression of the imperial throne...
...Fifty yea,'s ago it would have been common knowledge...
...A search was initiated to recover what pieces remained in China, and the slow process of repair and restoration is still going on...
...I have presented China in this article as I discovered it: a nation where a larger and larger sector of the population lives without the overt observance of religion...
...he laughed...
...Two weeks after Ren's article, Zhao Pu-chu published a poem which mentioned that the Gang had allowed extremists to damage the Monastery of the Dark Middle Way, in the province west of Peking...
...The decline of religion in .China has not of course been entirely the natural consequence of reforms to the political and economic structure...
...4 August 1978:490 He criticized the Gang of Four for failing to support research on religious history...
...He is also a noted poet, and has been able to use this skill to add his voice to the chorus of denunciations against the intimidation and destruction which followed for a time in the wake of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s...
...And somewhere beneath the carapace of urban China the young may still give the old a religious burial...
...Their descendants live on in China today, almost entirely submerged within the Han racial majority...
...And Christianity has become a limited and private fellowship...
...So it came as a real surprise to me last fall when I read an article of his printed in the national newspaper Guangming Daily, entitled "Carry on research into religion, criticize theology...
...but there are many other organizations which offer it just as well...
...The north side, however, was literally in working condition...
...There are many temples still standing, but most of them are closed...
...But the cult of Mao has been dead for 8 or 9 years...
...If this single story is true, it shows that folk religion may be far stronger than I, or even my Chinese friends, realize...
...Ren was simply participating in this critical trend...
...His death in 1976, along with the death of Premier Chou En-lai, had a powerful emotional impact for most Chinese...
...He said that Marxism and Christianity have been able to co-exist, and gave himself as an example...
...At the same time, the Chinese Communist Party would not accept church members as members of the Party...
...Would we mind if he took us there...
...I suspect that its appearance had more to do with the fall of the Gang of Four than with an improvement in Ren's eyesight...
...His philosophy encompassed everything from the movement of the universe to the workings of the individual...
...Most of us were students of modern China, but I was the exception...
...I doubt that...
...Buddhism took much longer to resurface to public attention...
...Christianity carries with it the stigma of being foreign...
...there is no suggestion of any amalgamation into a Christian Marxism, though some attempts were made in the 1950s...
...Perhaps in this sense it was religious...
Vol. 105 • August 1978 • No. 15
