Abstract
In pre-communist times, the Temple of Universal Rescue (Guangji Si) functioned as both a nationally prominent Buddhist temple and a center of local community activity. Following the rise to power of China’s communist party, however, the temple was closed as a site of popular worship. While its prominent status spared the temple from destruction during the most oppressive years of the Maoist regime, it did not reopen to the public again until the early 1990s. Since that time, the temple has become a lively civic space frequented by a growing number of lay Buddhist converts. However, it no longer functions as a center for community activity for the neighborhood surrounding it; because the number of temples in the surrounding area remains scant compared to imperial times, its worshippers come from all over the Beijing area. Over the last ten years, many of the old neighborhoods whose residents once frequented the temple have been demolished to make room for a new subway station—a project that erodes what remains of the temple’s traditional role in the surrounding neighborhood while making it more accessible to its present population of geographically dispersed worshippers. At the same time, the population of temple-goers has changed from syncretic worshippers of both local and national gods within a circuit of neighborhood temples in the pre-communist period to a more self-consciously sectarian community of lay Buddhists. While the orientation of pre-communist worshippers was located specifically in the local place, temple worshippers in the post-Mao period are attracted to the non-locative vision of Buddhism and, concomitantly, see little significance to particular temples as place-defined spaces. In this way, transformations of space at a single temple site in Beijing highlight complex changes in urban Chinese religiosity from locally based religiosity to translocal and yet exclusivist religious orders.
The ethnographic research on which this paper is based was made possible through IIE-Fulbright and Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Awards and from a research fellowship from the College of Arts and Sciences at Syracuse University. My thanks go to Joanne Waghorne and Norman Kutcher for their thoughtful suggestions on earlier drafts.
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- 1.
For more detailed analyses of the Temple of Universal Rescue , see Fisher 2014.
- 2.
The cults to both Dongyue and Bixia were ultimately centered on Taishan in modern-day Shandong province.
- 3.
As in many other regions of China, place-based forms of religiosity have enjoyed a more significant revival even in suburban areas surrounding Beijing. Goossaert and Ling note that, in the case of Daoist temples, urban expansion has played an important role in a greater connection between suburban (and formerly rural) “neighborhood temples” and those in urban centers (Goossaert and Ling 2009, 32–41). Yet there remain significant barriers between these neighborhood temples and their counterparts in urban areas, particularly in comparison to pre-communist times. In the case of Buddhism , in both Beijing and in some other cities I have visited (such as Huzhou in Zhejiang province), while sometimes providing funding and support for suburban temples, clerics and laypersons often view their counterparts at these temples with significant condescension precisely because they view their practices as “polluted” with “superstitious” elements such as fortune-telling, divination, and the worship of local deities, that is, precisely those elements that keep their temple communities more place-based and less exclusivist than their urban counterparts.
- 4.
It is by no means certain that these claims are genuine. In some cases, they may reflect an embarrassment about not engaging with Buddhism as a holistic religion in what has been defined as a “Buddhist ” temple. Yet even this embarrassment and the accompanying impression of dissonance between their particularistic religiosity and that of a holistic religious system like Buddhism reflects the influence of their modern socialization that the practice of “placeless” religiosity is more worthy than that of emplaced religiosity.
- 5.
The name Teacher Zhang is a pseudonym.
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Fisher, G. (2016). Losing the Neighborhood Temple (Or Finding the Temple and Losing the Neighborhood): Transformations of Temple Space in Modern Beijing. In: Waghorne, J. (eds) Place/No-Place in Urban Asian Religiosity. ARI - Springer Asia Series, vol 5. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-0385-1_6
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