Welcome, everybody. This is the ninth lecture in our course on Asian Buddhist Women, organized
and hosted by the Lumonta Center for Buddhist Studies at the University of Hamburg in collaboration
with the Damendram Institute of Liberal Arts. And it is my great pleasure today to welcome
Sara Kirchberger, who will speak to us on the topic of Women and Buddhism in Communist China.
Sara Kirchberger is a research associate in Synology at the University of Hamburg's Asia
and African Institute. Her areas of expertise include China's political system
and Chinese and Taiwanese history during the 20th century. In 1999, Sara Kirchberger graduated
with an MA degree in Synology, Political Science and Archaeology from the University of Hamburg
after having studied Chinese language at Taipei during 1997-1998. Following postgraduate studies
in political science at Trier University, she completed a PhD degree in Synology in 2004.
During 1994 until 2003, she was a scholar of the German National Academic Foundation.
From 2007 to until 2010, Sara Kirchberger served as a naval analyst with Schöbbeleb Lömenbosch in
Hamburg. Ordinary specialist in Chinese domestic politics and comparative government, her first
monograph had been an analysis of informal institutions in China and Taiwanese politics
that was published in German in 2004. After becoming an assistant professor of Synology at
the Asia-Africa Institute at the University of Hamburg in 2010, Sara Kirchberger began focusing
on China's naval development and in 2015 published a book on this topic. She has so far published
various book chapters and articles on topics including China's political system, CCP party
history, Chinese domestic politics and Chinese foreign policy and with this introduction I now
hand over to Sara Kirchberger. Thank you very much for the kind invitation to be part of this lecture
series. This is a great honor of course and also thank you everyone for attending this lecture.
I'm very sorry that this is recording only and that I'm not going to be personally present
during the classroom meeting to answer your questions directly. This is because I'm going
to be traveling on the 16th and there was no other way to do this. Okay so let's get started.
My task in this lecture will be to provide you some historical and political background
knowledge to basically the next lecture by Esther Bianchi who is a real specialist on Chinese
Buddhist women. So what I'm going to do as a political scientist who is concerned with modern
Chinese history is to describe the structure and development of the communist revolution
and in what way it pertains to Buddhist women. Hopefully these remarks will be able to help you
understand a little bit better the framework within which Han Chinese Buddhism has to operate.
Let me begin with a few general remarks. I must also say that I'm going to leave Tibetan Buddhism
out of this lecture because we are going to have two dedicated lectures on Tibetan Buddhist women
so I think it would be not very good to try and cover this as well. Beginning with the topic at
hand the first remark has to be that the history of China during the 20th century was in general
exceptionally violent. After the founding of the People's Republic in 1949 the Communist Party
of China attempted no less than a complete restructuring of society down to even the
cultural roots and this whole thing happened with an aim to create essentially a new man
and a new society. This had massive consequences for all the traditional social structures in China
including of course the Buddhist Sangha and it also strongly affected women as a group
because the role of women in society under way massive change.
Sorry I'm going to yeah this is the next slide. So to provide you a little bit of historical
background this table basically shows the major alternating phases of Communist rule
since 1949. The red faces are the more radical faces, the blue or gray faces, the more quiet
faces and for those of you not too familiar with 20th century Chinese history I will now
first give a brief overview of the earliest stage of Communist rule which is called consolidation
of Wuhan slide and happened between 1949 and 1955. This era which directly followed the Communist
takeover is officially called socialist construction and it's sometimes glossed over almost in the
Western literature and usually described as a relatively peaceful time paired with a directly
preceding war years. However what actually happened during those few years was a very violent
restructuring of the local society that took a large toll in terms of human lives and this
restructuring of course directly concerns the topic of this lecture. The driver behind the
land reform campaign was an attempt that was more or less successful at first to eradicate
the traditional social structures and the traditional parents of loyalty between people.
My colleague Kaifou Ghazan at the Asia African Institute in his recent book about
China's history has chosen the following way of characterizing this period. I cite from his book.
Two to five million people are estimated to have died as a result of the land reform campaign
between 1950 and 1952 while other estimations say it was more than 10 million people who were killed
and by no means only landowners and rich peasants. Rather this number encompassed also many
Christians, many suspected Gomendang collaborators, former policemen and other so-called class enemies.
The decisive factor was not the actual situation of land ownership,
rather there were prescribed quota of so-called privileged people that had to be liquidated
within each region ranging between 10 and 20 percent depending on the locality. End of the quote.
Kaifou Ghazan concludes that this land reform campaign was in actuality a mass murder of the
local population that was comparable in scope to Stalin's liquidation of the Collax.
What I find remarkable from a psychological perspective is that the Communist Party took
care to actively involve the local population in the denunciation, the class struggle and the killing
of the so-called privileged. By appealing to ambient greed and by scaring those who were not
yet targeted, the party managed to accomplish its major aim which was to destroy any remainders
of the traditional bonds of loyalty within the local population by involving and thus making
accomplices of the survivors in order to replace the old ties between people and between families
with an individual loyalty to the Communist Party only. As Mao Zedong, the Chinese
Communist leader, has famously remarked at one point,
revolution is not a dinner party and indeed in China it wasn't.
Sun Sun is a famous filmmaker from China who grew up in the 1960s as the daughter of a
Communist functionary and she also had a Buddhist grandmother who lived in the same house.
She recalls from her childhood memories. I quote, in those days there were many campaigns one after
another. Right after the revolution, for example, we as the new government, the Communists, we would
make sure that none of the old people stayed on. By that I mean those who served in the old
government, the landlords who were regarded as the class enemies, the bureaucrats who were in
the old government and people who served in the old army. All these people were rooted out,
millions of them. Then the industrialists, the owners of shops and factories, were the next
target. That was in 1954. After that in 1957 it was the turn of the intellectuals.
A million of them were sent to labor camps just because they spoke out. Then, of course,
there were the people who were sent to the countryside to be re-educated. In each of
these campaigns Mao's target was three percent of the population. China had 600 million people in
1949, so three percent each time was quite big. My grandmother, that's the Buddhist grandmother
who lived with her, was constantly worried that my father would become one statistic in the three
percent because he was originally from a landlord family. End of the quote. Sun Shui-Yin describes
how her Buddhist grandmother practiced her faith in private and thereby scared the whole family
to death. She tried to practice kindness and generosity and it's a climate of chaos and violence.
She recited Buddhist formula. At the time this seemed reckless to Sun and her parents and they
did not appreciate what the grandma did and frequently scolded her for behaving that way.
The land reform with the land requisition, land redistribution, of course, strongly affected the
entire Buddhist Sangha because most Buddhist temples at the time depended economically on
their land and its rent. The temple elders were also classified as landowners and as part of the
exploited class. To show the magnitude of the change that was inflicted upon China as a whole
and upon women and the Buddhist Sangha in particular by this massive communist revolution,
I will start by describing a few constants of Chinese culture of the directly preceding era.
As you can see, I've structured the remainder of the lecture into four parts.
The last of the four parts, however, will only be touched by me very briefly
since I expected Esther Bianchi will elaborate on that much more competently than I could hope to do.
So let's start with the first point and with traditional Chinese ideas of femininity and
womanhood. Traditional Chinese notions of womanhood and the role of women in society
had always reflected a deeply ingrained patriarchalism. The likely reason for this
is that China has since antiquity had a tradition of ritualistic ancestor worship,
that is the sacred duty of all the male direct descendants of any clan or family.
Women are traditionally thought to be subordinate to the men and they are therefore, of course,
also not able to perform these ancestor worship rituals. Women were also not equal before the law
and they were punished much more heavily for the same crimes than a man would be.
To give an example, adultery was punishable by death and women who were raped or sexually
assaulted were expected to fight to their own death or to commit suicide right afterwards to
prove their innocence before the law. Otherwise, there would be sentenced for adultery. This means
that a woman who was raped or assaulted had basically no chance to escape death, either by
being killed for adultery if she dared to survive or through suicide. The latter option would, however,
redeem her memory posthumously. So in many ways, ancient Chinese models of ideal womanhood
sent her around chastity and seemed somewhat familiar in the context of what we've already
heard in the first lecture by Biko Navayo about women, for instance, in ancient India.
To give a textual example from Chinese antiquity, I'd like to show you a first century BC text from
the Lian Yu Zhuan by Liu Xiang, a Han Dynasty official who wrote a compilation of biography
for virtuous women who are being extolled as examples, positive examples. It's a collection
of biographies of historical women which later became a standard work that was used in women's
education, basically for the whole imperial era. So let's have a look at one of these biographies.
It's the second biography in the fourth chapter, which is titled The Chased and the Obedient,
and it describes the voluntary death of a sixth century person, a sixth century BC,
a widow named Boji, in the following way. I quote,
Boji was a widow. Once she found herself at night in a house that had caught fire, those nearby
cried, lady flee. But Boji said, the rule for women is that when the matron and the governess
are not present, they do not leave the house at night. So I await the coming of the matron and
the governess. Then the story goes on to say that the matron arrived, but the governess did not,
and so Boji continued to stay in the burning house until the fire reached her and she died.
The story concludes with the words, thus did Boji fulfill to the utmost the duty of wifehood.
We see here, I think, a strange resemblance to the old Indian ideas of ideal widowhood.
From the point of view of the family, women became part of the husband's family after
their marriage and were therefore considered worthless to the birth family in terms of
ancestor worship rituals. And well, they had a certain value because they could be used
to forge new family connections, new family ties through the marriage. So arranged marriages for
daughters were the norm and their status in the husband's family then depended almost entirely,
depended upon their ability to produce male children. For women, there was the rule of being
subjected throughout their lives to the so-called three obedience, son-son. First, they had to be
obedient to the father, then to the husband, and as a widow at last to their son. Only as the widowed
mother of at least one son, and as the highest ranking woman in the household, could a woman
hope at the end of her life to at last achieve some sort of independence from other people's
interference. Joining a nun, really, and becoming a nun, of course, theoretically offered a woman a
way out of this system, but since women had no right to determine their own fate and could
just be married away against their will, this was not really an option for most women to take.
The social role and even the physical range of movement that was available to women in the
period of China in the public was severely restricted throughout the entire imperial era,
and there is even a very fitting physical symbol for this. As you probably are aware,
starting from the Sun dynasty, that was about 1000 in the year, from the year 1000,
the customer foot binding took hold in China, and this put a physical obstacle in the way
of women's mobility. So to show you a few pictures, maybe you can imagine how difficult it is to walk
on such crippled feet. This intentional crippling of young girls' feet was later fought against by
various governments, and it was also made legal in the 20th century, but the last cases of young
girls having their feet bound were still being reported in the 1950s in some areas.
The legal status and the societal role of women changed, however, markedly after the empire came
to an end. The Republic of China, which was established in 1911, finally granted women many
of the modern rights that we are accustomed to, such as having the right to freely choose their
own marriage partner, equality before the law, economic rights and so on. Nevertheless, even
under communism, in China society we can still to this day find some lingering remnants of the old
prejudices against women. Looking, for instance, at the power center of the political system,
one must conclude that the Chinese Communist Party is very clearly a male-dominated organization.
Of its about 83 million party members, only 23 percent are female. However, the higher up
in the hierarchy one looks, the smaller the female percentage becomes. In the central committee,
the last one was chosen in 2012, only 16 percent of the full members are women. In the Politburo,
there are only two women alongside 21 other members, and no woman has ever served as a member
of the Politburo Standing Committee, which will be China's highest leadership organ during the
entire past 60 years. Among local leaders, the woman quota is also very low and is estimated to be
around 5 percent. So it's clear from this alone that the political system is still very much a
man's world, and this kind of calls into question China's true commitment to the communist ideal of
gender equality, especially when comparing this situation with the situation of women
in politics in capitalist Taiwan, which has just elected a female state president.
So looking at China's society, despite numerous advances for women in terms of their legal rights,
their living conditions, their reproductive health, and also their ability to participate
in the workforce, there are still clearly a few remnants of old misogynist ideas detectable.
The most drastic symptom of this problem is probably the very large gender gap, which means
the fact that many more children of a male gender are born in China than female children,
leading to a very uneven gender distribution in demographics today. One major factor
causing this is selective abortion. This problem became most acute as a result of the
one-child policy, which was adopted in 1978. Daughters, as I already explained, were traditionally
considered more or less worthless to the family, as it is traditionally the lot of the oldest son
and his wife to support the aging parents and to perform the ancestor worship rituals,
while the daughters are married away and become part of another family. And so many newborn girls,
after the adoption of the one-child policy, over the decades were either killed or abandoned
after birth, and many female fetuses were selectively aborted if an ultrasound exam
during the pregnancy revealed the female gender of the fetus. All these discriminatory practices
are forbidden by law in China, but they are very difficult to eradicate in practice.
On this photograph you can see a roadside sign in Sichuan, rural Sichuan, that says
it's forbidden to discriminate against, to mistreat, and to abandon baby girls. And the
existence of such signs at the side of the road basically proves that these unfortunate things
still happen on a regular basis. China's National Population and Family Planning Commission
officially estimates that there will be 30 million more men than women in China by 2020.
So the government is actually worried that this could lead to social instability when
increasing numbers of young men can't find a woman to marry, which might increase certain
types of crimes such as kidnapping and sex trafficking. It could also cause young men to
emigrate. Okay, so now turning to the topic of Buddhist notions of a female birth being
somehow bad that we've already heard about in the first lecture,
for instance the one about karma or female birth, I must say that I have found symptoms of this same
type of thinking also described in the literature on China.
I would like to very shortly present the results of a recent ethnographic study
that was done among Hakka Buddhist lay women in Ninghua in southeastern China,
Fujian province, where Nikki Zhang describes a particular local ritual that is called
Jeju, receiving a prayer beads or receiving the mala and this ritual is performed by women upon
reaching the age of menopause and it is supposed to cleanse them from the filthiness of the female
bodily existence. According to Zhang, the so-called uncleanliness of the female body relates to two
things. First, sexual desire is said to be aroused in men by a female body, by the female body,
and this body is therefore regarded as being responsible for sexual temptation, which
Buddhists are of course required to refrain from. And second, menstruation and child birth,
basically the bodily discharges of the female anatomy are presumed by these people to make a
woman polluting to the environment and to other people. So according to Zhang, the local Hakka
lay Buddhist view is that the nature of women is morally defective and that they have to be
indeed reborn as men before they can ever attain Buddhahood. As to the curious view of the female
bodily discharges, there she explains that menstrual blood is seen as dangerous because of
it having the potential to become a person and is thus likened to a dead person who has not lived.
I must confess I don't fully understand what is meant by that. I'm just reporting the findings.
Child birth is also seen as defiling, however, so giving birth to a live child is also defiling.
In this Ninghua locality, therefore menstruating women and pregnant women and also new mothers
are seen as a menace to the sacred. They are not allowed to light an incense stick or to enter a
temple. Moreover, it is also thought to be bad luck for others to sit on a chair that has previously
been occupied by a menstruating woman or by a new mother and brides avoiding countering pregnant
women on the street because it is said to bring bad luck to them. Therefore, the age of reaching
menopause when menstruation ceases and fertility ends is seen as a blessing by these Hakka women
because effectively this frees them from numerous taboos and restrictions. Through this
dear Jew ritual of receiving prayer beads, they receive a mala and they receive a new Buddhist
name, so-called forming, and this name they also use socially. Whereas before, they were effectively
nameless in the public sphere, only using their husband's family names, Mrs. Chen or Mrs. Wang,
or a family title such as Aunty or Granny in public, but never their own given name.
I find this study very interesting because the prejudice and also the fear concerning the female
reproductive organs is so surprisingly strong in this example, and moreover this is a description
of the current social situation, it's not historic, which shows that there are still very
many negative stereotypes and also curious superstitions attached to the female anatomy
among a group of Buddhist lay practitioners even today. So this dear Jew ritual was apparently
even performed in secret during the Cultural Revolution, which was a time in China when
all so-called feudal superstitions were strictly prohibited. From this we can see
how deeply ingrained and local society such customs and ideas truly seem to be.
I'd like now to return to the Communist attempts at transforming traditional Chinese society
including the rise of Buddhist notions and customs. I'll point out Marxist and Maoist
evaluations of Buddhism and of religion in general, and then I'll try to explain how the
Chinese colonists attempted to create a new social order for China. After that I'll describe what
this meant for the Buddhist Sangha and how Buddhists at the time tried to cope with it.
So as many of you probably know, the basic Marxist notion of religion is that religion is
completely dependent on a society's mode of production. It is part of the so-called
superstructure that develops according to Marxism only as a result of a particular economic base.
In 1859 Karl Marx wrote the mode of production of material life conditions, the general process of
social, political and intellectual life. It is not the consciousness of men that determines
their existence but their social existence that determines their consciousness.
So the economy and in particular the modes of production and the patterns of ownership
are seen as the factors that determine people's consciousness. What this meant in practice is that
for instance land ownership such as the land owned by Buddhist temples
constitutes the economic basis for creating a so-called feudalist ideological or religious
superstructure. So according to Mao Zedong, the single most influential Chinese thinker
in communism, Mao's thinking has of course been largely aligned with this very basic Marxist
viewpoint that I just described. In 1938 Mao wrote the following thing that you can see on that
slide about Buddhism. It's a quote from his text Dialectical Materialism. He wrote Christianity
says that God created the world, Buddhism and all of China's various fetishist religions
attribute the movement and development of all the myriad phenomena
to spiritual forces. All of these doctrines are fundamentally incompatible with dialectical
materialism. So this is probably not surprising that this will be a communist view on religion
including Buddhism. I actually searched the entire writings of Mao for references to Buddhism and
I found only a handful and almost all of them are part of my lecture. Buddhism was not a topic
that Mao wrote a lot about. He's surprisingly silent on it actually. Anyway in another text
from 1940 named on New Democracy, a very famous text by Mao, he elaborated a little further.
That text Mao wrote, new democratic culture is scientific, opposed as it is to all feudal and
superstitious ideas. It stands for seeking truths from facts. On this point the possibility exists,
writes Mao, of a united front against imperialism, feudalism and superstition
between the scientific thought of the Chinese proletariat and those Chinese bourgeois
materialists who are progressive. But in no case is there a possibility of a united front with any
reactionary idealism. In the field of political action communists may form a united front with
some idealists and even religious people but we can never approve of their idealism or religious
doctrines. So this was written during the so-called anti-Japanese war and the so-called united front
refers to the efforts of forging a national front against Japanese and of uniting all forces in
society under this umbrella and of course under behind the leadership of the communist party.
So ultimately this text already showed that before the revolution in 1949 the communist view
finds Buddhism alongside all the other so-called feudal superstitions and fetishist religions
fundamentally incompatible with a correct or scientific world view.
And one has to concede that this line of thinking is in line with the general intellectual trend in
China that started already during the republican era 1911 of secularism where the national
government had already started to differentiate more strongly between so-called organized religions
and superstitions and there was a large-scale conversion movement already in the republican era
that converted temples to schools and other types of public buildings during that republican time.
For instance in Dingxian and Hebei province we know that there have been about 430 temples
in the year 1900 but only 116 a little more than a quarter of them remained 15 years later.
Buddhists at that time already began to organize themselves into larger federations to counteract
such attempts at reducing their land holdings and other Buddhist venues.
Much later after the founding of the People's Republic and on the eve of the great leap forward
end of the 1950s Mao then said the following thing about Buddhism he said having cleared away
blind faith we no longer have any spiritual burdens. Buddhas are made several times life-size
in order to frighten people. Marxism-Leninism looks at everyone on equal terms and all people
should be tweeted as equals. This quote just shows that Mao apparently thought that Buddhism
was primarily a means to frighten people.
Before and during the communist liberation as it is called influential Buddhist leaders nevertheless
thought it was possible or rather they hoped to be able to cooperate with the communists
for the sake of preserving the Buddhist Sangha. They were probably encouraged to think that this
might be possible by certain utterances that had been made by communists during the civil war
about a possible united front of all progressive forces in China even among the religious people
such as the one that I have already mentioned and such as the following one which Mao had made in 1945.
In 1945 Mao had in his text on coalition government basically given a statement in favor
of religious freedom where he said that all religions are permitted in China's liberated
areas in accordance with the principle of freedom of religious belief. All believers in Protestantism,
Catholicism, Islamism, Buddhism and other faiths enjoy the protection of the people's government
so long as they are abiding by its laws. Everyone is free to believe or not to believe neither a
compulsion nor discrimination are permitted so this sounded relatively encouraging to many
religious people at the time. However, unfortunately there can be no doubt that
in the long run the party expected people to shed their feudal superstitions as it was called
and to become true atheists. Some so-called progressive Buddhists at the time,
the most prominent perhaps the venerable Zhu Zhan who had Marxist leanings and who later became
active in the leadership of the Chinese Buddhist association before himself becoming a victim of
class struggle during the Cultural Revolution, attempted to reconcile Buddhist doctrine with
Marxist ideas. As Xu has remarked in a recent study on this particular phenomenon,
I quote from Xu's study now, progressive Buddhist thinkers in the early 1950s enthusiastically
sought to discover Buddhism in Marxism and to recreate a Buddhism based on Marxism. However,
only Marxist criticisms of religion were allowed while the Buddhist criticism of Marxism was
strictly forbidden. To a large extent Buddhists avoided such criticism and ignored the differences
and instead they devoted their efforts to searching for common ground scientific not
feudal and reactionary but eminently compatible with Marxism. End of the quote. A letter written
by the venerable Zhu Zhan and 21 other eminent monks to Mao Zedong himself offering their
complete support to the new people's government and praising Buddhism's similarity to Marxism
received no answer.
In a very recently published study of Zhu Zhan's policy, Xu you remarks,
you can see on the slide, according to Mahayana doctrine observed the leading progressive Mao
Zhu Zhan for Buddhists to support Chairman Mao is not just right but an obligation that was what
Zhu Zhan publicly said. He further noted for the welfare of all beings for the benefit and
happiness of the world for supreme and perfect enlightenment we unreservedly and unconditionally
yet not aimlessly or in an unprincipled manner support Chairman Mao the savior of the people of
all nations and religions. So Mao is here even called a savior which seems rather
an extreme degree of veneration extended to Mao Zedong by this monk Zhu Zhan and other
progressive Buddhists like him had the hope that this show of loyalty would be rewarded
and the Sangha preserved by clearly taking sides with the new people's government and pledging
allegiance to the communists against the so-called class enemies. It seemed to them that Buddhism
could perhaps prove to be a worthy ally to the ruling Communist Party. Mao seemed indeed to
have extended some sort of invitation to Buddhists specifically in his remarks stating from August
1952 that were titled let us unite and clearly distinguish between ourselves and the enemy. This
is very central point of this communist worldview there is always an enemy that one has to
guard against and defeat. In this text Mao said the following thing it is necessary to carry out
education among the democratic parties and in religious circles so that they will not be taken
in by the imperialists that would be the Americans by the way and stand on the enemy's side. Take
Buddhism for example it has not much contact with imperialism not much contact to the US and its
ties are chiefly with feudalism. As a struggle against feudalism involves the land problem
it affects the monks and those who come under attack are the abbots and the elders of the
monasteries. Once this small number is overthrown ordinary monks will be emancipated. So here we
can see that there's a struggle between ordinary monks and elders is envisaged. Mao continues
though no believer in Buddhism I am not against forming an association of Buddhists to get them
united and enable them to distinguish clearly between the people and the enemy. We should unite
with everyone provided he truly makes clear distinction between the people and the enemy
and serves people. According to Surya's research on the vendor of the Jhudan this particular Buddhist
leader reacted to this by willingly letting Buddhist monastics be labeled non-proletarians
which means that they were seen collectively as part of the exploitative clause
and this in the middle of an ongoing class struggle movement. Basically according to
Surya, Jhudan argued in the following way having received the kindness of Mao and other communist
leaders monks and nuns should repay them by willingly undertaking socialist transformation
of their feudalist nature. The first step was to admit according to the research of Surya
that they had in fact lived parasitic lives before and to repent for this through self-criticism.
At one point a monk asked the venerable Jhudan whether monastic members shouldn't be considered
proletarians because they had already renounced the world and given not worthy things but Jhudan
categorically rejected this idea. He pointed out that monastic members of China had not lived their
lives begging for food nor had they participated in agriculture and although an ordinary clergy
might not be taken for the feudal class they certainly could not be considered members of
the proletariat because they had benefited from the rent of temple lands without themselves
tailing this land. Abbots on the other hand were representatives of temples and they belonged to
the land-owning class because anyone who did not perform productive labor was a member of that
exploitative class. These utterances are taken from the from Shindai Foshio magazine that was
founded at the time. This attempt to accommodate the communists went even farther than that.
The venerable Jhudan for instance argued that monks and nuns should willingly enter
production productive activities become workers in factories and he even argued that they should
volunteer monks and nuns for military service in the Chinese anti-american war effort in Korea
and he maintained that taking part in in this war was to be seen as a form of justified killing
and this is of course a very serious departure from Buddhist doctrine that is very problematic.
So we can see that the progressive Buddhists went out of their way to be accommodating
and they hoped no doubt that this gesture would be appreciated and the Sangha would not be seen
as an enemy of the people. Unfortunately these attempts to secure a place for Buddhism in the
new order were ultimately not successful during the Mao era. Jhudzan and his peers probably
underestimated the radicality of the new regime and they probably misunderstood the aims of the
Communist Party which ultimately did not see any future for Buddhist life in China. Jhudzan himself
came under attack as a counter-revolutionary during the Cultural Revolution and was detained
imprisoned from 1967 until 1980 and died only four years later. Therefore sadly the conclusion that
you draw us from from these studies is that I quote Chinese Buddhists collaboration
with the Communist regime actually helped shape the socialist transformation of the Chinese Sangha
a process that laid the foundation for full-scale persecution of Buddhism
during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 70s.
So to turn to a new topic I think it is important to understand a little better some key characteristics
of Chinese Communist rule besides the Marxist ideological viewpoints on religion
that I have already described. So let me now turn to some of the organizational
principles and tenets and the actual practice of ruling that affects all social organizations in
China in all religious organizations to this day. The key principle for organizing the communist
state in China was directly adopted from the Russian leader Vladimir Lenin who had led the
first ever successful socialist revolution in the world. Lenin had devised principles
for the establishment of a revolutionary organization that was essentially a secret
society not unlike a terrorist cell and had explained these principles in a pamphlet named
What is to be done. What emerged from Lenin's writings and from his actual revolutionary
practice was the main principle called democratic centralism which is a much more
centralist than it is democratic. Basically this principle calls for a party composed of members
of undying loyalty of every single party member towards the party leadership and for a strict
military hierarchy within this organization a strict adherence to secrecy towards outsiders
and unquestioning obedience and encounters coming from the higher acronyms. The aim of Lenin was to
create an organization that would be able to survive in a hostile environment to take over
power and state and afterwards to pervade the whole state and whole society with its organization
in order to prevent any attempts by rival organizations to support this. So this is
the background I need to have in mind. The idea was to have many completely independent party cells
at the grassroots level that would perhaps not even know of each other but that would effectively
pervade all social organizations and would be subordinate to the party groups at a higher
hierarchical level. In this model that you can see here you see the pyramidal structure of the party
the strict hierarchy and you can see on the left side that free discussions before a central
decision is made public to the party members is theoretically allowed in practice it was mostly
not allowed but theory was and after the party central has declared its policy then strict
obedience is a requirement. The punishments against transgressions were very severe members
of the party are thus effectively functioning like soldiers in an army expected to carry out
orders unquestioningly. This ideal type of an organization which I just described is called
Leninism and it has been widely copied by communist movements all over the world.
Today China's communist party has over 83 million people million members 83 million members.
This party organization this state party actively tries to co-opt the most gifted people the most
gifted students and successful elites even nowadays successful private entrepreneurs
into the party so it tries to be an elitist organization of the most advanced
echelons of society. Most membership applications to the communist party are actually rejected
and successful applicants are scrutinized undergo a two-year probation or period
and only afterwards effectively become immune before the law that's one of the benefits of
being a party member you can't just be punished by the court the party has to give permission
that you are expelled from the party before you can actually become well sent to prison
by a court of law. The preamble of the Chinese state constitution actually contains a passage
that states that the Chinese communist party leads this state so it is an organization that
stands effectively above the state is the true sovereign of the Chinese state.
The political system that was set up in China after the revolution is therefore
fully under party control all the state organs every administration every state-owned enterprise
every federation every school every university and of course every military unit has a party cell
has a party cell that effectively controls this organization and reports directly to the next
higher level of the party leadership the party thus creates a shadow hierarchy that pervades
the entire country so the flow of authority in China is always from the party organization
on the same level to the state or societal organization on the same level all political
power in China is effectively concentrated within the standing committee of the Politburo
which is currently only seven exclusively male members organizations that are concerned with
overseeing religious activities such as with local branches and various affected localities
several official organizations today take part in the administration of religious affairs
including Buddhism on various different levels national provincial or local levels
the commission of religious affairs the united front work department and the buddhist association
there is however a great gray area today of unofficial organizations that are not strictly
um sanctioned but are tolerated so long as their activities are seen as non-threatening
in a political sense and as beneficial for society for instance by providing social services
so after describing these um basic characteristics of the of the state system
how did buddhism fare under this type of communist rule especially given Mao Zedong's very radical
utopian experiments that followed in the 1950s and the 1960s as you can see on this on this table
to describe this from a buddhist perspective i have chosen to um give you some quotes from
eyewitness accounts dating from the 1960s but to illustrate this with a few pictures
here you can see examples of contemporary propaganda materials next to photographs of
the actual conditions here on this slide during the great leap forward and on the next slide
during the kosher revolution the following observations that i'm going to cite
again from the recollections of the filmmakers who was already mentioned the female film producer
who was born in the 60s and grew up during this time who had a buddhist grandmother but her parents
were atheists and communist functionaries and she grew up with this mindset
during a lecture in 2005 Sun Shuyen recall this time on the following way
i grew up in china in the 1960s many of you will know what a strange time that was
just about everything was turned upside down and buddhism was very much a synonym for anything
that was bad about our society buddhism was regarded as feudal reactionary and something
that gave china a lot of its old evils in primary school we had compulsory classes on political
studies three times a week during which times we studied mouse works and religious religion
was always a target of attack communism regarded buddhism i would say as the main competitor
for the control of faith for the control of people's minds indeed we had a saying
one more buddhist one less communist throughout china even today the one thing that you can
definitely see in most villages and cities is a temple it could be very small or big as a palace
and this i think is the symbol of buddhism so this is what sunshuyen describes from memory how
religion was constantly attacked but she recalls buddhism as being particularly strongly attacked
and suspects that the communists actually feared buddhism as a potential rival
for people's faith this is quite interesting soon also recalls in some detail the destruction
of the buddhist sangha during the so called great proletarian cultural revolution you can see
two photographs here and the struggle meetings where individual people were identified as
counter-revolutionaries or class enemies were publicly humiliated fought against
sometimes tortured and killed this happened also to very many monks and nuns
sunshuyenu goes on to recall this and she she basically describes the process starting from
49 in the following way very soon after 1949 when the communist party came to power one of the first
things that they did was to remove two symbols of buddhism the monastery the outward symbol
and the monks and nuns who wore orange robes and who could be seen throughout the country
i have to ask you for a tiny moment of patience because i have to um the power of my notebook
is going to fail very soon so i i will just replace the cable just a moment
okay very sorry i forgot to attach attach the power line okay so um they removed these
two symbols of buddhism the monks and nuns disappear from public view and the monasteries
were dismantled sun also says that prior to 49 china had about a quarter of a million temples
but by the end of the cultural revolution in 1976 there were only about 100
she says that they were not preserved because they were buddhist temples they were preserved
because they were important historical or cultural or archaeological monuments and very old
but the other form of destruction that was maybe even more um harmful to the sangha
of course was the physical removal of she writes the great masters and teachers
sun says we have a saying in china if you want to kill a snake you have to cut off the head
and the great masters used to have and still have an extraordinary number of followers and it has
been a consistent policy of the government to remove them first they were sent to labor camps
then to prisons and then they were killed sun says that she thinks that the whole country
by 2005 had no more than five really good buddhist teachers dating from pre-1949
the death of mao in 1976 finally ended this radical and violent phase in china's history
which has brought unfathomable suffering to millions of people
a full three decades after the founding of the new china in 1978 100 million people in the
countryside were still on the brink of starvation according to official statistics can this really
be socialism exclaimed one central cadre named onely after visiting the impoverished peasants
of anhui province in the late 1970s for the first time this situation of poverty changed only when
two years after mao's death dong xiaoping emerged victorious from the succession struggle and laid
the foundation of the reform era that we can see today which has brought unprecedented wealth
to large parts of the chinese population but the Leninist power structure that i have
described before as an ideal type including the political control mechanisms and the shadow
hierarchies that pervade the entire society still remains firmly in place and every challenge to
the party's monopoly of power has since been met with violent suppression as was for instance
visible in 1989 during the Tiananmen incident and many other instances as well meanwhile however
many ordinary chinese experience a spiritual crisis of sorts communism as an ideological
as an ideology has been quietly pushed into the background the economic practices
that were adopted by the new government to counter poverty seem to contradict the principles of
socialism they are basically capitalist methods while um the increasing wealth gap between the
winners and the losers of the reform also shows a clear departure from these ideals of fairness
and egalitarianism that capitalism holds so many people report feeling lost in the face of increasing
consumerism you can see here a quote by a philosophy professor at a prominent at a
at a well-known Shanghai university who basically says that to quote him verbatim on the surface
we've achieved the goals but no one is happy there is no love no hope for more than 100 years
we chinese have been trying to catch up with western countries we want science technology
and military power but the most important thing is the soul of the culture the mind is based on
soul and we've lost our souls so there's just one voice obviously among many and there are of course
winners in the reform era that would not perhaps attach the sort of importance to spiritual
values but many people have said similar things and it is a fact that wealth has not eliminated
china social problems rather it has created a fair number of new ones and as a result um
perhaps of this situation interest in buddhism and in other religious communities
and religious traditions has basically exploded during the past three decades
about 185 million chinese now following buddhism this is a finding of the center of religion and
chinese society at perdure university in the u.s that was published in 2010
but um according to a different survey that was done uh by a chinese research center
for religious culture at east china normal university um they found that um sort of
questionnaire they found that 33 percent of the people taking part in survey in 31 different
provinces claimed to believe in buddhism so one third of the survey population claimed to be buddhism
the research team's leader said that buddhism is the major belief among intellectuals and young
people in china he said that there are more than 300 million chinese who are likely to believe in
buddhism ten years earlier the official statistics of the state rule of religious affairs had put
this number much lower at 100 million yujong attributed the growing interest in buddhism
primarily to social instability to pressures and anxiety caused by the rapidly developing
market economy in china so changing changing situation caused uncertainty the chinese academy
of social sciences blue book on china's religions said that buddhism has basically experienced a
golden period during the reform era the three decades of reform during this period nationwide
organizational systems have been created and buddhists have conducted summer camps
and public education activities in all parts of the country this development was also commented
upon by the filmmaker that i've already already quoted several times she has observed the following
things from the mid 1980s when i left university buddhism grew fast from 1985 to 1995 just in a
decade about 25 000 temples were rebuilt in china mostly in the coastal areas in the rich areas
where people give large donations if the party allows it i think each village could now have
three monasteries the joke of it is however that the principal task of a party official in charge
of religious affairs in china is to try to stop monasteries and temples being built in a particular
place centurion says that if you as a party official allow a temple to be built
or to be repaired in your county then you won't become promoted to the municipal level
in the case of a city you won't go up to the provincial level so the party officials according
to her basically compete with each other to see who is the most successful most notorious
in cutting down the number of temples there are
there are never nevertheless now numerous buddhist communities and activities throughout china
and many people among them very many women participate in buddhist summer camps they
connect with buddhist teachers sometimes via the internet they distribute pamphlets to gain
merit or they might practice meditation at home alone while studying manuals that they have bought
in regular bookshops they come from all kinds of socioeconomic backgrounds and from all chinese
regions han chinese connect with teachers in tibet or in hong kong or taiwan or further abroad
the state has so far tolerated the huge buddhist revival for the most part not least because of
the philanthropic services that are provided by many buddists in poor areas where this is seen as
beneficial for harmony of society today's buddhist communities are in fact extremely
multifaceted and i will now conclude this lecture to leave the remainder of this topic
of chinese buddhist women and their life in more detail to an expert that will be of course
expert that will present in the next week so thank you again for attending my lecture and as i'm
already said i'm extremely sorry that i can't be here to answer everyone's questions i do hope that
i've managed to make clear under what kind of political framework the buddhist sangha has to
operate in china during the past 60 years and what kind of political influences are still at work
that continue to shape it today thank you
man
yeah i think i think if we leave it for the chat we get the feeling that you would say