The Mixed Metaphors of Religious Modernity: Charity and Lingxiao She in Shaoxing Prefecture, Zhejiang Province (1920s-1940s)

• In Event: Communication Strategies within Asian Religious Movements

Abstract

Buddhist monasteries of the Tang Dynasty were long involved in providing various kinds of charitable activities before the establishment of charitable organizations by government and local elites. It was not until the early twentieth century that institutionalized charity came to be undertaken by the sangha. The monks began to organize social-welfare institutions on their own initiative in order to spread the dharma for its own sake. This paper first reviews Buddhist charities in a historical setting. Further, the study examines the efforts by the sangha to appeal for radical self-reformation under the suppression by governments during the late Qing and the Republican period. To establish a permanent and professionally managed charitable organization with local elites is not only a sufficient way to articulate values and principles, but also a strategy for survival under the anti- superstition movement in the late 1920s. This study thus traces the development of Lingxiao She-Shaoxing’s famous benevolent organization, established to support patients and victims of disasters and the cooperative relations with local merchants and laymen from 1924 to 1949. Lingxiao She- Shaoxing has a strong Buddhist orientation in terms of the deities honored and the rites observed, while the Taoist and Confucian components are still visible in the practice of planchette divination (fuji) as well as in the collection and ritual burning of waste paper bearing written characters. The case thus illuminates important features of religious charity and a mixing of metaphors in the unfolding of modernity.

Author

• Ye Cao, The University of Hong Kong