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How China's past spiritual fusions secrete into its present
"Is it really true that all Chinese are atheist?" they often ask in tones that mix disgust and incredulity. Coming from a country where religion does not influence life so much as form the substratum upon which life is acted out, the lack of a constant and visible religiosity in China is understandably striking to them.
Yet to the perspicacious it is clear that atheism is not the whole story. The scarlet flash of a monk’s robes punctuating the consumerist armies that invade Beijing’s bazaars; the glint of the rooftop of a newly renovated temple, framed on each side by phallic skyscrapers; the click of prayer beads barely audible amidst the exuberant aural mosaic of construction and traffic of Chinese cities: are all clues that point an observant eye to a more complex reality. It is this thorny complexity that Poonam Surie attempts to unpick in China: A Search For its Soul, with mixed results.
Her quest is to study the "mindsets, intrinsic characteristics, beliefs, faith and spirituality" of the Chinese. She aims to explore both the historical evolution of religion in China as well as its modern-day form, drawing out in the process the religious and civilisational connections between India and China.
Much emphasis is placed on Buddhism’s journey across the Himalayas. In her search for the ghosts of India’s past in China’s present, Surie travels across the country, from the deserts of Xinjiang to the grottoes of Henan, tracing in large part the route taken by 7th century monk Xuan Zang (better known in Indian schools as Hieun Tsang) on his 16-year-long journey to India.
In her emphasis on the ancient links that bind the Himalayan neighbours, Surie follows the recent trend amongst Chindia boosters who flog the connections of a religion that is now all but dead in its country of origin and so fundamentally altered as to be only generically recognisable in its adopted land.
Stressing Buddhism as evidence of the commonalities between India and China obfuscates the fundamental differences between the two civilisations. Indian religions, including Buddhism, were steeped in metaphysics with questions of an ontological and epistemological nature at their heart. What is the soul? How do we know what is real? How does inductive reasoning compare with deductive reasoning? Such issues created a lively debate between the schools of thought in India, firmly implanting a tradition of argumentation in the culture. Territorial integrity and notions of empire were not as central to India’s self-image as much as metaphysical beliefs. As a result, its civilisation was more a conceptual than geographic entity.
In contrast, China was more coherent territorially. Its empire was underpinned by philosophies like Confucianism that tended less to the metaphysical and more to the practical, legalistic and political; conducive of uniformity and discouraging of debate. In her scrutiny of how Indian Buddhism was Sinified—assimilated into and changed by Confucian thought—Surie alludes to some of these core differences.
Particularly interesting is her explanation of how Buddhism’s otherworldliness, its emphasis on renunciation, was reconciled with the Confucian preoccupation with the here and now. She discusses how Buddhist tenets of celibacy encroached upon the authority of the emperor in a society where differences between the sacred and profane were not pronounced.
Surie fails to bring out the connections between these historical tensions and the contemporary concerns of the Chinese Communist Party as it struggles to channel resurgent religious energies towards its own ends. On the one hand, the ccp is using spirituality to counterbalance the social anomie perceived to have been brought in by market reforms. But it is also aware of the need to protect its secular power from religious challenge and thus polices strict boundaries within which religious practice is permitted.
The book is filled with vignettes that hint at modern China’s hybrid of the commercial and spiritual. Yet its reluctance to touch upon the highly politicised nature of religion in the country deprives the account of any real bite. Its main service lies in potentially whetting a few appetites to learn more about the circles that China is busy squaring.