Rebirth Control: Contemporary Inner Mongolian Buddhism and the Religious Authority of the Chinese State

Abstract

The regulation of religious affairs by China’s Communist state is often presented in European and American media as paradoxical and absurd. The reaction to Order Number Five, passed by the Chinese State Administration of Religious Affairs in 2007 is a case in point. The new regulation stipulated that Tibetan Buddhist monasteries intending to mount a search for the reincarnation of a “living Buddha” would be required to apply for permission for the lama to be reincarnated. An anonymous editorial in The Economist, published under the headline “Reincarnation Rules, But Only If the Chinese Communist Party Says So” described the provision of “living Buddha permits” as “bizarre” and condemned the Chinese government’s intervention in religious affairs as “odd meddling” (“Reincarnation Rules,” 2007). Meanwhile, in the New York Times, no less a commentator than Slavoj Žižek described Order Number Five as a “paradox” because it stipulated that “your religious belief, a matter of your innermost spiritual experience, is regulated by the whims of your secular leader” (2007).

The fieldwork on which this chapter is based was supported by the William Wyse Fund for Social Anthropology; it was presented at the Buddhism and the Crisis of the Nation State conference at the National University of Singapore in August 2008. I would like to thank the organizers and participants of that event and the editors of this volume for their comments. My attendance at the conference was funded by St John’s College, Cambridge. An earlier draft was presented to the Magic Circle Seminar at the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge. I am grateful to Piers Vitebsky, Grégory Delaplace, Olga Ulturgasheva, Eleanor Peers, and other members of the seminar for their suggestions. The finished chapter benefited greatly from conversations with Hildegard Diemberger, Gareth Fisher, Jane Heal, Caroline Humphrey, James Laidlaw, and Hans Steinmüller. I am also grateful to Palgrave Macmillan’s anonymous reviewer.