Lay Buddhists and Moral Activism in Contemporary China (当代中国的佛教居士与道德能动主义)

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 247-270 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gareth Fisher

The last few decades have seen the rise of grassroots groups of lay Buddhists in post-Mao China who, through the composition, exchange, and discussion of Buddhist-themed media, foster moral discourses that critique what they perceive as the materialistic direction of contemporary Chinese society. Disseminated at legal but unregulated spaces within Buddhist temples, these discourses empower the economically marginalized lay practitioners who gather there and provide them with new purpose in life. Practitioners are also able to transmit these moral discourses through networks to other temple spaces. However, they do not yet possess the means to use them to influence the social direction of Chinese society at large. This is due to (1) political restrictions against the circulation of religious-themed materials outside of approved religious activity sites; (2) economic obstacles faced by the practitioners who seek to spread anti-materialistic messages; (3) a lack of organizational cohesiveness among the practitioners; and (4) the influence on practitioners of doctrines within Buddhism that caution against proselytizing to those who do not already possess a pre-fated bond with the Buddha and his teachings. As a result, lay Buddhists do not as yet constitute a social movement in the way the term is conventionally used by sociologists.佛教居士组成的草根社会团体在毛时代之后的几十年快速发展。通过书写、交流与讨论与佛教主题相关的文献,他们促进形成了一套批判当前中国社会拜金主义倾向的道德话语。这套话语在合法且相对自由的佛教寺院中传播,鼓励了经济窘迫的信徒,帮助他们获得新的生活目的。这一道德话语也借由信徒进一步传播给其他的寺院。但是因为以下原因,这些草根团体无力影响中国社会的整体方向:1)宗教政策限制了宗教思想在寺庙以外的传播;2)信徒的经济地位较低,难以宣传反对拜金主义的话语;3)信徒中间缺乏组织凝聚力;4)反对向那些与佛陀无缘的人宣传佛家思想的信条。因此到目前为止,佛教居士团体还没有形成社会学意义上的社会运动。

1974 ◽  
Vol 59 ◽  
pp. 491-517 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. Gordon White

This paper sets out to examine various aspects of the contemporary Chinese social system and their political implications by studying the social and political attitudes of a subgroup of Chinese society. The general area of interest is social stratification in China: the bases of social differentiation in the new society and how these are perceived by its citizens; the extent to which changes in the structure of society have been accompanied by changes in social attitudes; the extent to which ideological campaigns to change attitudes have been successful; the limitations placed by the stratified nature of society in its transitional stage of socialism on the effectiveness of ideological and political education.


Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 212
Author(s):  
Ngar-sze Lau

This paper examines how the teaching of embodied practices of transnational Buddhist meditation has been designated for healing depression explicitly in contemporary Chinese Buddhist communities with the influences of Buddhist modernism in Southeast Asia and globalization. Despite the revival of traditional Chan school meditation practices since the Open Policy, various transnational lay meditation practices, such as vipassanā and mindfulness, have been popularized in monastic and lay communities as a trendy way to heal physical and mental suffering in mainland China. Drawing from a recent ethnographic study of a meditation retreat held at a Chinese Buddhist monastery in South China, this paper examines how Buddhist monastics have promoted a hybrid mode of embodied Buddhist meditation practices, mindfulness and psychoanalytic exercises for healing depression in lay people. With analysis of the teaching and approach of the retreat guided by well-educated Chinese meditation monastics, I argue that some young generation Buddhist communities have contributed to giving active responses towards the recent yearning for individualized bodily practices and the social trend of the “subjective turn” and self-reflexivity in contemporary Chinese society. The hybrid inclusion of mindfulness exercises from secular programs and psychoanalytic exercises into a vipassanā meditation retreat may reflect an attempt to re-contextualize meditation in Chinese Buddhism.


1971 ◽  
Vol 46 ◽  
pp. 331-349 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joe C. Huang

Novels reflect social realities at given times and under given conditions. When the direct survey method cannot be applied to the study of Chinese society, novels constitute one of the available sources from which useful information concerning the structure, order and conditions of society and interpersonal relations may be inferred. However, the difficulty of reconstructing the social conduct of Chinese people from such elusive source materials is enhanced since Communist novels reflect less the realities as they are than the realities as they should be. The theory of the combination of revolutionary realism and revolutionary romanticism demands that the plots and characters must be “romanticized” to give a picture of the society corresponding to the needs of ideology. Even if this is so, the stories still have to be based on social realities for the readers to appreciate them. A somewhat modified interpretation holds that romanticization is based on the foundation of realism. It is from the discernment of this element of realism in Chinese Communist fiction that we may attempt to reconstruct the nature of Chinese society.


2021 ◽  
pp. 0920203X2110496
Author(s):  
Xiao Han ◽  
Giselinde Kuipers

This article examines a humorous meme that emerged on Chinese TikTok during the COVID-19 pandemic in China. Using #workfromhomewithchildcare, Chinese working mothers shared humorous clips of their experience of working from home with their children who were also at home during the pandemic lockdown. By analysing the themes, protagonists, and humour techniques of a sample of 85 videos, we ask why the mood of these clips is so strongly marked by humour, and what this tells us about contemporary Chinese society, particularly about the position of women and mothers. We show that these memetic clips consist of three distinct genres of mothers working from home: (1) ‘balancing mothers’ who balance between work and childcare, (2) ‘pedagogic mothers’ who give childcare tips, and (3) ‘commercially oriented’ mothers who offer tutorials by means of product placement and advertisement. While these memes express what Mary Douglas called ‘a joke in the social structure’ without offering either relief or critique, they do create an online joking culture that offers temporary relief as well as awareness that others are in the same position. Our analysis tempers enthusiastic claims about both the critical potential of humour and the new ‘liberating’ affordances offered by digital platforms to produce liberating female spaces.


2019 ◽  
pp. 109-132
Author(s):  
Helal Uddin Ahmed ◽  
Zhang Jielin

Confucius (551-479 BC) is considered to be a great philosopher and educator in Chinese society and one of the greatest scholars ever in world history. He was the founder of Confucianism, which constitutes a major part of traditional Chinese culture and made tremendous contribution to the unfolding of Chinese civilization over the centuries. In this study, the authors have presented a comprehensive outline of Confucianism and have attempted to gauge the attitude of contemporary Chinese people towards Confucian concepts, values and attributes as well as their influences on the social lives of present-day Chinese population. The Likert Scale was applied in the study to assess the attitude of the Chinese educated class belonging to the educational institutions like the universities in Beijing towards Confucianism. It was found from the survey that the Confucian concepts still wield substantial influence on the social outlook of the modern-day Chinese people and these attributes are still relevant in the day to day lives of the Chinese society. Philosophy and Progress, Vol#61-62; No#1-2; Jan-Dec 2017 P 109-132


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 183449092199329
Author(s):  
Tulips Yiwen Wang ◽  
Allan B. I. Bernardo

The present investigation explored Chinese people's attitudes toward the social practice of going “through the back door” or zouhoumen. Zouhoumen is an informal approach to achieve one’s goal through personal connections (called guanxi). We propose that Chinese people distinguish between different acts of zouhoumen and propose at least two types that differ in terms of social cognitive aspects, and that the two types evoke different perceptions of fairness that shape attitudes towards zouhoumen. Two experiments (total N = 414) provided evidence for the differentiation between facilitative zouhoumen and expropriative zouhoumen and also explore the role of type of guanxi in attitudes towards the two types of zouhoumen. Both experiments indicated that facilitative zouhoumen was less unacceptable than expropriative zouhoumen, but there were no marked differences in attitudes between zouhoumen involving expressive or instrumental guanxi. The results support a more nuanced theoretical account of a pervasive social phenomenon in Chinese society that we assume is adaptive responses to features of Chinese historical socioeconomic context.


2021 ◽  
Vol 56 (1) ◽  
pp. 112-130 ◽  
Author(s):  
Haifeng Huang

AbstractFor a long time, since China’s opening to the outside world in the late 1970s, admiration for foreign socioeconomic prosperity and quality of life characterized much of the Chinese society, which contributed to dissatisfaction with the country’s development and government and a large-scale exodus of students and emigrants to foreign countries. More recently, however, overestimating China’s standing and popularity in the world has become a more conspicuous feature of Chinese public opinion and the social backdrop of the country’s overreach in global affairs in the last few years. This essay discusses the effects of these misperceptions about the world, their potential sources, and the outcomes of correcting misperceptions. It concludes that while the world should get China right and not misinterpret China’s intentions and actions, China should also get the world right and have a more balanced understanding of its relationship with the world.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Changchun Fang ◽  
Xiaotian Feng

Abstract The impact of social origin on educational attainment is conditioned on the social context in which people live. In recent decades, with changes in the Chinese society, how has the impact of social origin on educational inequality changed? Based on an analysis of 70 birth cohorts, this study details the effect of social origin on educational inequality and its trends over the past 70 years. The results of this study also indicate that the historical stages hypothesis (HSH) and model-shift hypothesis (MSH) emphasized in previous studies cannot fully describe the historical changes in educational inequality. In addition to macrosocial processes, there may exist other structural factors that also affect educational inequality but are neglected. The social context and its transformation, which shaped the relationship between social origin and educational inequality, need to be examined in more detail.


2017 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 24-49 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yafei Zhang ◽  
Li Chen

Purpose The purpose of this study is to explore possible factors leading to a successful mediation in Chinese mediation shows. In China, media always play an indispensable role in information dissemination, morality advocacy and policy explanation. Design/methodology/approach This paper employed content analysis of 166 episodes of one representative mediation show, Gold Medal Mediation, and regression technique in data analysis. Findings Results of ordinal regression suggested that “secret talking”, rather than transparency, between disputants had significant influence on successful mediation. Function of mediators is limited in reaching full mediation. The effective factors leading to full mediation include compromise of rights, secret talking, attitude of the observer cohort. It suggests that the role of mediator is limited, rather than being over-exaggerated, in successful mediation. The successful mediation is largely dependent on disputants’ motivations. Additionally, “compromise of rights” by disputants is a key factor in solving disputes. Research limitations/implications Findings of this study revealed the role of Chinese mediation shows in propagating mediation in contemporary Chinese society and supporting upheld morality values. Due to the nature of the chosen mediation show, some disputes take more than one episode to solve. However, this study looks at each episode without considering the integrity of the dispute. That is, if the disputes take two episodes, the coder codes the two episodes as two separate disputes instead of looking at it as one dispute. Originality/value By exploring various aspects of mediations shows, including the role of mediators, disputants and a cohort of observers, this study can both explicitly show predicted factors to successful mediations on the shows, and can implicitly examine the power and perceived justification of mediation in contemporary China via media.


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