Organizer: Vivienne Shue, Cornell University
Chair: P. Steven Sangren, Cornell University
The Accumulation of Merit in a Taiwanese Spirit-Writing Cult
Philip Clart, University of British Columbia
Even though "merit" (gongde) is a concept central to religious practice in several Chinese traditions, it has so far been given little attention by scholars. The reason for this may be that scholars have traditionally been more interested in the intricacies of religious doctrines than in the (apparently) simpler patterns of lay religious practice. The paper seeks to fill this gap by exploring the meanings and functions of merit accumulation in the system of religious belief and practice of a central Taiwanese spirit-writing cult (luantang). This involves examining the relationship between the concepts of merit and karma, the role of merit as a "compensatorial currency" in the cult's religious economy, and the contributions of merit accumulation to the individual practitioner's religious cultivation. Source materials include the cult's revealed writings (including a new "ledger of merit and demerit") and other publications, as well as observation, interview, and questionnaire data collected during a period of field research between 1993 and 1994. This study demonstrates that the accumulation of merit plays a crucial role in the cult in question, integrating beliefs concerning the cosmos, fate, and religious cultivation with a wide range of ritual and charitable activities, carried out both individually and collectively.
Labrang Monastery: Ethnic Identity and Political Authority, 1900-1949
Paul Nietupski, John Carroll University
Labrang Monastery is located on the historically varying border of the former Tibetan, Chinese, Muslim, and Mongolian empires. This location resulted in its becoming a meeting, mixing, and battle ground for a number of distinctive ethnic cultures, religions, and political systems.
This paper will restrict itself to a description of the ethnic identity and political authority at Labrang Monastery, in its properties, and on its borderlands in the first half of the twentieth century. Religion played an important role in the construction of ethnic identity among the Tibetans and Muslims in particular, and it, with other factors, often determined political affiliations. Political authority at Labrang was at times contested, resulting in several bloody conflicts. Labrang itself, though often threatened, managed to avoid destruction by using an interesting collection of strategies.
Sources for this paper include the memoirs of a prominent Tibetan of the period, archival data collected by missionaries and travelers in the region, Chinese and Tibetan records from the period, and information collected in interviews with residents of old Labrang. This paper will show some of the interactions and conflicts between the cultures on this particular border, and will be useful for comparison with other border cultures. The results of this work will be a description of early twentieth-century ethnic identity and political authority at Labrang, and some insights into the interfacing of cultures at borderlands in general.
Identity Negotiated Between Allah and Chinese Modernity: The History of Women,
Women's Mosques, and Women Imams in China's Islam
Maria H. A. Jaschok, Hong Kong University
Although Chinese and Western scholars have explored in some depth history, ethnogenesis and diversity of the Islamic Hui Nationality in China, its accommodation and resistance to policies of state-formation and zhongguohua as well as continuity of cultural, religious and social traditions, the factor of gender has been hitherto almost entirely neglected. The paper addresses itself to the genesis, popularization and diversity in development, in the course of a nearly 300-year history, of women imam-led sites of religious worship for women (qingzhen nu si, women's mosque) in Islamic communities in Central China.
Fieldwork carried out on selected women's mosques in Henan Province (the location of some of their earliest forms and today the center of the most active women's Islamic culture) supplies the data for exploration of the symbolic and social significance of women's mosques and their challenge of patriarchal gender-definitions in religious teaching and praxis. Mosques are firstly treated as sites of a continuous social and political experience which is both situated and dynamic, because predicated on state gender and nationality policies; and secondly as sites of personal identification and valorization for its members.
In order to explore the dynamic of women's agency in China's Islam, the study foregrounds the rise of the nu ahong (woman imam) as a contested figure of authority. Her impact on the interpretation and application of the Qur'an in her teaching and her leadership of the women's mosque are viewed against the debate in both Islamic and secular-political circles over legitimacy and culture-specific implications of such developments.
Christianity and the Chinese Mind
John S. Peale, Longwood College
The story of the relationship of Christianity and Chinese culture is an up and down affair. Four times Christianity was introduced into China. Four times it apparently disappeared. There are factors in the Chinese point of view which militate against the deep rooting of Christianity in the Chinese soil. This paper is about these factors.
I will present a Chinese point of view of human life and the world, the leading philosophical concepts for which are humanism and naturalism. The Chinese pivotal in this is Lin Yutang, and specifically his views in My Country and My People, The Importance of Living , and From Pagan to Christian.
In the first two books, Lin argues that within the Chinese point of view there are facets that contradict traditional Christianity. In the third book, Lin presents his "grand detour," which led him back to a Christianity different from that of his father.
During Lin Yutang's time in China the current system of state control of Christian churches was not in place. In his experience, however, is reflected, indirectly, a quite contemporary movement in Chinese theology, the "contextualization" of Christianity into Chinese culture. Such a process went on in Lin as the Christianity of his father was incluturated in him through his own journey. I will consider how the current system of control is yet another roadblock to the rooting of Christianity in China, and I will consider the program of contextualization as one step in a process which could help dismantle that roadblock.