The Extraordinary Ordinary – Consequential Buddhist Patterns to Huaihai Region History, Circa 1880-1960

Event date:10:00–12:00 (Paris) / 16:00–18:00 (Taiwan) Friday, 31 May, 2024

Organizer: INALCO (French National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations)

If touching on the Buddhist network modes suggested by Welch, this paper primarily concerns patterns of discernibly Buddhist social-cultural practices, performances, and representations of consequence to local-regional histories of the end of the imperial era and the rise of the Chinese nation-state. It is not an attempt to tell a Buddhist or religious history, but recognises, within a “six-teachings-in-one” (Buddhist-Confucian-Daoist-local religion-Wu-ist-secularist) social-culture, distinctive Chinese Buddhist elements significant to the processes and leavening dynamics of local and regional history in these turbulent times. Shifting the focus away from the well-known Jiangnan metro-area and toward its peripheral and largely abstracted northern antithesis, Jiangbei and Subei, the analysis is situated in a culturally coherent subregion once known as Huaihai. Drawn mostly from non-Buddhist and non-religious sources and some fieldwork, the findings fit comfortably neither with Welch’s supposition of a predominant northern Jiangsu Buddhism nor with common postulations of a withered Buddhism, indistinct in the mélange of a “backward” culture. Many of the patterns discussed may seem hardly surprising, even ordinary. Yet, reflecting on stories of Buddhist monks, nuns, lay women and men, as well as those of people and places in more ambiguous relationships to Buddhism, the study detects Buddhist social-cultural resources extraordinary in their contributions to shaping and revealing historical change in this setting.

 Lecture Report: “The Extraordinary Ordinary: Consequential Buddhist Patterns to Huaihai Region History, Circa 1880–1960”

Yin-Cheng Distinguished Lecture Series 
INALCO, Paris, May 31, 2024, at 10:00–12:00 (Paris)
Lecture by Professor Jan Kiely (Geneva Graduate Institute) 
Response by Professor Vincent Goossaert (École Pratique des Hautes Études)

Report by Tzu Chi Charity Foundation

Supported by the Buddhist Tzu Chi Charity Foundation, this lecture was hosted by the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies on Buddhism (CEIB) at INALCO, Paris, as part of the Yin-Cheng Distinguished Lecture Series on Buddhism. Professor Jan Kiely of the Geneva Graduate Institute delivered the lecture entitled “The Extraordinary Ordinary: Consequential Buddhist Patterns to Huaihai Region History, Circa 1880–1960.” The discussant was Professor Vincent Goossaert of the École Pratique des Hautes Études. The event was introduced by Professor Zhe Ji, who holds the Inalco-Sheng Yen Chair of Modern and Contemporary Chinese Buddhism and serves as Director of the CEIB. Professor Ji situated the lecture within recent advances in the study of contemporary Chinese religions and noted Professor Kiely’s co-edited volume, Modern Chinese Religion II: 1850–2015 (Brill, 2015), alongside his monograph The Compelling Ideal: Thought Reform and the Prison in China, 1901–1956 (Yale University Press, 2014), as foundational reference points for understanding religious and social transformation in modern China.

Prof. Jan Kiely is Senior Lecturer at the Geneva Graduate Institute. He received his doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, and spent many years teaching and conducting research at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. A historian of modern China with a particular focus on religion, thought reform, and local society, he is co-editor of the journal Twentieth-Century China and of the volume Fieldwork in Modern Chinese History (2019). His current book manuscript, from which this lecture draws, employs the mixed methods of historical anthropology to narrate a local and regional twentieth-century Chinese history with religion at the centre.

Prof. Vincent Goossaert is Professor of Daoism and Chinese Religions at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. One of the foremost scholars of Chinese religious history, he is the author of The Taoists of Peking, 1800–1949 and co-author, with David Palmer, of The Religious Question in Modern China. His work pioneered the study of the institutional and social dimensions of Chinese religion in the modern period, and he served as co-editor with Professor Kiely and John Lagerwey of Modern Chinese Religion II.

Beginning in the Field: No Buddhist History Here

Professor Kiely opened by describing the fieldwork in Shuyang county, northern Jiangsu, that first prompted the research he presented. When he arrived in 2015 to look for temples in one of Jiangsu’s largest counties by population, he found only three Buddhist ones, all newly built in the twenty-first century, all lavishly appointed as symbols of cultural heritage, all managed primarily by nuns of non-local origin, all prominently displaying Chinese Communist Party propaganda alongside warnings against heterodox religious sects. The observation he recorded in his field notes was blunt: “There is no Buddhist history here.”

A decade of subsequent research proved that initial judgment entirely wrong. What he had encountered was not an absence of Buddhist history but its erasure: a break so thorough that no physical continuity remained between the institutional Buddhism of the late Qing and Republican periods and the state-Buddhist institutions of the post-2000 revival. Understanding what had been lost, and why, became the animating question of his book project. The lecture presented the first systematic account of what, in Huaihai, that lost history contained.

Professor Kiely was careful from the outset to position his work as history rather than religious history. He is not a scholar of Buddhism, he said, and does not claim to be. What he brought to the Huaihai material was a historian’s training in using non-religious sources to understand religious phenomena, and a commitment to taking religion seriously as a dimension of social and political life rather than treating it as epiphenomenal to the main story of modernity. The framework he employed was that of a “six-teachings-in-one” social-culture, the interweaving of Buddhist, Confucian, Daoist, local religious, shamanistic (Wu), and secularist elements that characterised the social-cultural life of this region, and the question he asked was not which strand was “really” dominant, but how their interactions generated the particular institutional forms and social dynamics that shaped Huaihai’s modern history.

The Buddhist-Preeminent Model in Late Qing Huaihai

The first major contribution of the lecture was the identification of what Professor Kiely termed the “Buddhist-preeminent” model of temple institutions in late Qing Huaihai. This model does not mean that all temples in the region were Buddhist in a doctrinal or liturgical sense. Many of the temples managed by Buddhist monks and nuns housed a diverse array of deities, including local gods, river dragons, the Three Kingdoms generals Liu-Guan-Zhang, the Ox Deity, and various other local cults. What the model asserts is that Buddhist clerics occupied the leading institutional role across the full range of temple institutions in the region, managing property, conducting rituals, cultivating relationships with local elites and clan networks, and providing the organisational framework within which the multiplicity of local religious life was housed and sustained.

This pattern, Professor Kiely argued, has been noted for the Song period but its continuous presence through the late imperial era and into the early twentieth century has not previously been documented in scholarship on northern Jiangsu. His contribution is to demonstrate, through a systematic reading of non-religious sources, including county gazetteers, clan genealogies, judicial records, local memoirs, and his own fieldwork, that the Buddhist-preeminent model was a durable and consequential feature of Huaihai’s social organisation, and that its collapse in the Republican period constituted a major rupture whose implications extended far beyond the institutional history of Buddhism itself.

Abbot Jingyi and the Dragon King Temple

Professor Kiely opened his case material with the figure of Abbot Jingyi, who died in 1883 at the Dividing the Waters Dragon King Temple in Shuyang, and whose tomb and pagoda, built at his direction, marked the preeminent significance of Buddhism within this ostensibly non-Buddhist institution. The temple occupied a strategically critical location at the point where the Shu River split into its northern and southern branches, a hydrological pivot essential to the flood-control infrastructure of the entire county. County magistrates patronised and conducted rituals there; the wealthiest clan in the county, the Dongguan-Cheng, financed its major reconstructions; and the temple’s safety and the security of its resident monks received explicit state protection in a carved stone order posted on site, banning “pettifoggers, bandits,” and troublemakers.

What Jingyi had achieved at this temple was not merely administrative competence but something more subtle and more significant: a cultivation of relationships with influential elites through shared aesthetic practices, a piety that commanded respect across sectarian lines, and a cosmological framework capacious enough to include the Dragon King and the full range of deities present in the temple within a form of Buddhism that was conspicuously loyal to the empire and aligned with elite social ideology. He was also a painter and calligrapher of considerable skill, and the garden he created within the temple grounds attracted admiration from local literati who had no particular devotion to Buddhism. His ability to make Buddhism culturally compelling to non-Buddhist elites was, Professor Kiely argued, precisely what the institutional preeminence of Buddhism in this region required. A monk who was also an aesthete, a community organiser, and a trusted partner of the local state could secure the position of his tradition in ways that doctrinal authority alone could never accomplish.

Women, Clans, and the Guanyin Cult

A second dimension of late Qing Huaihai Buddhism that the lecture foregrounded was the central role of women, both as Buddhist nuns and as lay patrons, in the establishment and maintenance of Buddhist institutions in the region. The temple-founding stories that clans preserved in their genealogies consistently feature young women of talent and virtue who refused marriage in order to pursue a religious vocation, prompting their clans to build temples to house them and endow them with family property. These are simultaneously stories about clan property management, the creative resolution of tensions within the patriarchal family system, and the assertion by strong-willed women of a form of spiritual subjectivity that the Buddhist institutional framework made possible.

The Guanyin cult was the most visible expression of this female-inflected Buddhism. Women drew Guanyin’s presence into temples whose primary dedications were to other deities, transforming through their everyday devotional practice the religious character of institutions that the records identify primarily through their official or clan-patronage function. One striking example was the Iron Granny, a metal Guanyin statue at the Ladies of the Three Stars Temple near Tanjia Stockade, described as arriving by water in the early Qing. Local women treated it as a manifestation of Guanyin for all matters of marriage, childbirth, and even childcare, reportedly leaving children in the care of the Bodhisattva during the busy agricultural seasons. The temple was nominally Daoist; its effective religious life, shaped by female devotional practice, was Buddhist. Patriarchal clans funded the institutional frameworks; women, through their practice, determined the spiritual contents of those frameworks.

The Guangxu Temple Construction Boom

Professor Kiely presented tabular evidence of a significant temple construction and reconstruction boom in Shuyang county during the Guangxu reign period, spanning from 1877 to the 1890s. The table he assembled from county and sub-county sources listed over a dozen major Buddhist-affiliated construction projects during this relatively brief period, almost all of them jointly undertaken by Buddhist clerics and local clan networks. This boom was not an isolated phenomenon but reflected wider patterns of late Qing institutional consolidation in which Buddhist monks served as indispensable partners for clans seeking to build enduring local institutions, extend their influence, and project philanthropic prestige.

The monk Jizhou, working in the markettown of Xintiaohe during the 1880s, exemplified the kind of monk-builder whose skills made such projects possible. Like Jingyi before him, Jizhou combined institutional ambition with practical organisational talent, cultivating relationships with local clans and securing the material and social conditions necessary for major construction. The Huayan Temple he renovated in 1888, a clan temple of the Zhang family of Zhang village, maintained the Zhang ancestral spirit tablets in its precincts before and after the renovation, illustrating the degree to which Buddhist institutional management and clan ancestor veneration were not competing but complementary functions in Huaihai’s social order.

The Collapse of the Old Order and the Republican Crisis

The lecture’s second major movement traced the disintegration of the Buddhist-preeminent model in the turbulent decades following the fall of the Qing dynasty. This disintegration, Professor Kiely argued, was neither sudden nor the product of a single cause. It resulted from the convergence of multiple destabilising forces: the collapse of the imperial state that had provided Buddhist institutions with their most important source of legitimacy and protection; the violence and social chaos of the warlord period; the emergence of new forms of lay Buddhist activism that drew financial resources and ideological energy away from local institutional Buddhism; aggressive temple property confiscation campaigns by the KMT revolutionary state in the late 1920s; and the internal dynamics of temple institutions themselves, which, under the new conditions, became vulnerable to precisely the kinds of conflicts over property, succession, and clerical conduct that had previously been managed within a stable framework of external support.

The judicial records of the Republican period tell a story of accelerating institutional crisis. Legal cases brought by monks against one another over temple inheritance and property seizure appear with increasing frequency in the county court records of the 1930s. A particularly striking example involved the monk Qingxu suing the monk Juexian for “seizure of inheritance and usurping property” in January 1932, a suit thrown out summarily and so requiring resolution outside the formal legal system. In the same month, another monk faced criminal charges as an accomplice in concealing a crime. Even conservative KMT officials found it difficult to suppress their stereotypical prejudices against Buddhist clerics in this environment, and their contempt for monks further diminished the institutional standing of Buddhism in local society.

The most dramatic external intervention was the KMT government’s assault on the largest visible institutions in the late 1920s. In 1929, the county authorities moved to secularise the Dividing the Waters Dragon King Temple by converting it into a Sun Yat-sen Park. The monks moved out, though Jingyi’s garden remained open for some years to religious and leisure use. The temple’s last elderly caretaker monk in the 1930s and 1940s, the monk Cheng, was known for living with his wife in a nearby village and consuming meat and alcohol, while still wearing his threadbare monastic robe and remaining celebrated for his calligraphy, poetry, and painting. When the Japanese built a fort at the temple in early 1945 and CCP forces attacked it, the temple burned to the ground. In 1947, amid ongoing civil war fighting, the monk Cheng was killed, the record using the euphemism “killed by bandits” to refer to CCP guerrilla forces.

The Perdurance of Local Buddhism

Against this narrative of institutional collapse, Professor Kiely devoted significant attention to documenting the persistence and adaptation of local Buddhist practice through the 1930s, 1940s, and into the 1950s. This perdurance took forms very different from the grand institutional Buddhism of the late Qing, but it was real, rooted in mutual commitment, and far more consequential than the official surveys of the period, with their dismissive assessments of rural “superstition,” were prepared to acknowledge.

In the Chan Buddhist Temple in ChanWu village, twenty-plus monks continued to reside in the 1930s, maintaining their community through a period of extraordinary external violence and pressure. A government survey in 1935 found twelve temples in a small area of villages supporting fifty-five Buddhist monks and six nuns, with more than half of the monks at the Chan Buddhist Temple being quite young men at the start of their monastic careers. The temple’s abbot had received his ordination training at the prestigious Jinshan Monastery in Zhenjiang, maintaining a connection to the wider world of Chinese Buddhist institutional culture even in this rural setting. When war and revolution reached the village in the 1940s, the monks processed their great bronze Buddha through the streets of the village during a severe drought, as they had done in similar circumstances before, a gesture that affirmed the continuing centrality of the temple to the life of its community to the very end.

The bonds between individual monks and their communities were also, in many cases, deeply personal and irreducible to institutional function. The monk Zongqi, caretaker of a temple in eastern Shuyang for decades, was beloved not for his temple’s official status or his doctrinal learning but for what those who remembered him described as his “wisdom about human feelings,” his gifts as a storyteller and comedian, and the subtle moral wisdom embedded in his jokes. A nun in the Shuyang countyseat was still in her small temple in 1953–55, regaling the students building a nearby high school with tales of ghosts, spirits, and the great fish-spirit in the temple pond they were supposed to fill in with dirt. A nun known as Monk Liu, despite her title, was celebrated as the host of women pilgrims to a regional temple festival, a role whose communal significance the revolutionary state found far harder to suppress than the formal institutions themselves.

Even the last remnants of institutional Buddhism made their commitments visible in ways that testify to what remained at stake. In the early 1930s, the ailing monk Zhuojing returned to his tonsure temple to prepare for his Buddhist death. In 1948, as KMT troops awaited evacuation from the CCP siege of Lianyungang, the monks at the Yuntaishan Three Primes Temple offered the soldiers a lesson in the Three Officers and the importance of their temple’s annual festival. After everything had been lost, the last monk of the Big Buddha Temple in Sand River Temple village, whose temple had been destroyed, lived out the rest of his life among the villagers, maintaining his personal bonds with the community to which his institution had belonged. His disciple, Juezhao of the Gao family, is the last link Professor Kiely can identify to this history.

Response by Professor Vincent Goossaert

Professor Goossaert described the paper as a groundbreaking contribution to the religion-centred local history of modern China, the first sustained historical-anthropological study of the Huaihai region, and a valuable counterpoint to existing local histories focused on very different parts of China. His response raised three substantial methodological and analytical questions designed to extend and refine the analysis.

The first concerned the relationship between the Buddhist-preeminent model Professor Kiely had identified and other possible frameworks for modelling the same evidence. If the lens shifted from institutional management to ritual practice and god worship, a different pattern might emerge. The major local pilgrimage site in the region is devoted to the Three Officers, a cult with strong Daoist associations. If one focused on which gods were most present in household shrines, which ritual specialists conducted healing rites and funerals, and who in practice spoke through mediums, one might encounter what could be called a “Daoist-preeminent” model, even though Daoist priests are almost entirely absent from the historical records. Professor Goossaert emphasised that such alternative models would not contradict Kiely’s findings but would be equally valid and would enrich understanding of the full complexity of Huaihai’s religious ecology. He also asked how the picture might change if one shifted from the chronological approach of the paper, which focuses on moments of institutional rupture, to a longue durée perspective on deep local patterns of ritual organisation around specific cults.

The second question concerned division of ritual labour. What Professor Kiely describes for the late Qing is a model in which Buddhist clerics managed all kinds of temples and maintained the ancestral cults of local clans, a pattern with parallels in Song dynasty scholarship but not previously documented as a continuous feature through to the early twentieth century. This raises the question of what Buddhist clerics did not do, and who else did it. Professor Goossaert was particularly curious about the role of tongzi mediums and vernacular ritual masters, who are mentioned in passing in the paper and who have been documented by scholars for other nearby parts of Jiangsu. Understanding the specific articulation between Buddhist institutional management and other forms of ritual expertise would sharpen the picture of what exactly made the Buddhist-preeminent model distinctive, and how it related to the full range of religious practice in Huaihai.

The third question addressed the possibilities of social network analysis. Since the lecture was presented within a framework concerned with social networks, Professor Goossaert asked whether Professor Kiely’s source material might allow for a more formal and systematic analysis of the networks connecting local elites, clans, and clerics. He added, characteristically, that he would want to include networks between humans and gods within such an analysis: the relationships of patronage and intercession that bound human communities to specific deities were themselves a form of social network, and one that structured the institutional landscape of Huaihai’s religious life as consequentially as the human networks Professor Kiely had documented.

Discussion

The discussion addressed a broad range of themes emerging from the lecture and the discussant’s response.

Questions about the specific role of nuns within the Buddhist-preeminent model prompted a reflection on the evidence for female clerics as institution builders and community figures. The lecture had shown that nuns occupied a central role in specific types of institutions, particularly those devoted to the Guanyin cult and founded originally for women of privileged families who had chosen a religious vocation. Professor Kiely noted that the persistence of female clerics into the 1950s, visible in sources that had largely ceased to notice male monks, suggested that the community bonds formed around certain nuns were especially durable. The continuing presence of a nun in the Shuyang countyseat in 1953, entertaining the students who came to fill in her temple pond, offered a small but vivid example.

Questions about the relationship between the local Buddhism Professor Kiely described and the reformist Buddhism associated with figures like Taixu and the broader Republican-era revival movement prompted a nuanced response. Local Buddhist institutions in Huaihai existed in some relationship to the wider networks of reform-minded Buddhism, but that relationship was not one of simple derivation or alignment. The local Buddhism of Huaihai was, in Professor Kiely’s account, primarily responsive to local social conditions, local elite patronage, and local community needs, rather than to the ideological programmes of metropolitan reformers. This localism was both its strength, the source of the deep community bonds that sustained it through decades of external pressure, and its vulnerability, the reason why the eventual destruction of those community bonds constituted not a political problem but an existential one.

Questions about the prospects for recovery and continuity after 1949 led to a sober assessment. The material, human, and epistemological destruction that erased Buddhist institutional culture in Huaihai was close to total. The monks who had built their careers within that culture had mostly left the region by 1949 and did not return. The physical temples were destroyed in waves of violence spanning the late 1940s, the early 1950s, and the Cultural Revolution. The county-level government surveys that might have preserved some record of what existed in the 1930s and 1940s were largely dismissive of what they saw, categorising it as superstition rather than religion. And the local knowledge and memory that might have survived was itself erased by the rupture of the Cultural Revolution generation. What appeared in Shuyang when Professor Kiely arrived in 2015, the new, externally financed, state-supervised Buddhist institutions he documented at the beginning of his fieldwork, was not a recovery of the earlier Buddhism but its replacement by something categorically different, connected to it by neither personnel nor memory nor institutional continuity.

Professor Kiely closed by returning to the methodological principle of micro-history from which the lecture took its title. Many of the patterns he had described were, when encountered individually and in fragments, entirely ordinary: a monk tending a garden, a clan rebuilding a temple after a flood, women praying to Guanyin for healthy pregnancies, a nun telling ghost stories to passing students. Their extraordinariness, he suggested, lay not in their individual character but in their cumulative significance, in the evidence they provided, when assembled with patience and care from a mass of non-religious sources, of a Buddhist social-cultural formation that played a consequential and largely unrecognised role in shaping the modern history of an entire region. Recovering that history, and understanding what was irretrievably lost in its destruction, is among the most important tasks facing historians of modern Chinese religion.

Bibliography