林中斌 部落格 / Blog Chong-Pin Lin

中國宗教興起與宗教局長七月中旬：禁止黨員信教

Guiding Buddhism in China

Ian Johnson, International New York Times, June 27, 2017

http://iht.newspaperdirect.com/epaper/viewer.aspx

 Turning to Taoism to Save the Trees

Javier C.Hernandez, International New York Times, July 14, 2017

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/12/world/asia/mao-mountain-china-religion-environment.html?_r=0

陸宗教局長：黨員禁信教 否則組織處理

2017/07/19 聯合報 汪莉絹

https://udn.com/news/story/7331/2591502

accessed July 19, 2017

教局紐約時報 最近發表數篇講中國大陸宗教擴散蓬勃的報導。佛教與傳統文化結合(2017.6.27)，道教的"天人合一"與環保結合，基督教與回教也與愛護自然結合(2017.7.14)。這些發展若無官方加持是不可能的。而2017.7.18 中國宗教局發表強硬無神論聲明 ，"黨員禁止信教， 否則組織處理"。兩者造成強烈的對比。其原因耐人尋味。宗教局長應該曉得習近平及家人與佛教的關係。難道宗教局長強勢禁止黨員信教的發言也是19大權鬥的延伸？

林中斌 2017.7.20

New York Times has published several articles on religion in China in stark contrast to what China's Religion Bureau's tough party line announcement on July 18, 2019.

-"Guiding Buddhism in China" International New York Times June 27, 2017

http://iht.newspaperdirect.com/epaper/viewer.aspx

-"Turning to Taoism to Save the Trees" International New York Times July 14, 2017

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/12/world/asia/mao-mountain-china-religion-environment.html?_r=0

-"陸宗教局長: 黨員禁信教 否則組織處理" 聯合報 2017.7.17

https://udn.com/news/story/7331/2591502

Faith-based group thrives by making compromises and avoiding politics

For most of her life, Shen Ying was disappointed by the world she saw around her. She watched China’s economic rise in this small city in the Yangtze River Valley, and she found a foothold in the new middle class, running a convenience store in a strip mall. Yet prosperity felt hollow.

She worried about losing her shop if she did not wine and dine and pay off the right officials. Recurring scandals about unsafe food or tainted infant formula made by once-reputable companies upset her. She recalled the values her father had tried to instill in her — honesty, thrift, righteousness — but she said there seemed no way to live by them in China today.

“You just feel disappointed at some of the dishonest conduct in society,” she said.

Then, five years ago, a Buddhist organization from Taiwan called Fo Guang Shan, or Buddha’s Light Mountain, began building a temple in the outskirts of her city, Yixing. She began attending its meetings and studying its texts — and it changed her life.

She and her husband, a successful businessman, started living more simply. They gave up luxury goods and made donations to support poor children. And before the temple opened last year, she left her convenience store to manage a tea shop near the temple, pledging the proceeds to charity.

Across China, millions of people like Ms. Shen have begun participating in faith-based organizations like Fo Guang Shan. They aim to fill what they see as a moral vacuum left by attacks on traditional values over the past century, especially under Mao, and the nation’s embrace of a cutthroat form of capitalism.

Many want to change their country — to make it more compassionate, more civil and more just. But unlike political dissidents or other activists suppressed by the Communist Party, they hope to change society through personal piety and by working with the government instead of against it. And for the most part, the authorities have left them alone.

Fo Guang Shan is perhaps the most successful of these groups. Since coming to China more than a decade ago, it has set up cultural centers and libraries in major Chinese cities and printed and distributed millions of volumes of its books through state-controlled publishers. While the government has tightened controls on most other foreign religious organizations, Fo Guang Shan has flourished, spreading a powerful message that individual acts of charity can reshape China.

It has done so, however, by making compromises. The Chinese government is wary of spiritual activity it does not control — the Falun Gong an example — and prohibits mixing religion and politics. That has led Fo Guang Shan to play down its message of social change and even its religious content, focusing instead on promoting knowledge of traditional culture and values.

The approach has won it high-level support; President Xi Jinping is one of its backers. But its relationship with the party raises a key question: Can it still change China?

AVOIDING POLITICS

Fo Guang Shan is led by one of modern China’s most famous religious figures, the Venerable Master Hsing Yun. I met him late last year at the temple in Yixing, in a bright room filled with his calligraphy and photos of senior Chinese leaders who have received him in Beijing. He wore tannish golden robes, and his shaved head was set off by thick eyebrows and sharp, impish lips.

At age 89, he is nearly blind, and a nun often had to repeat my questions so he could hear them. But his mind was quick, and he nimbly parried questions that the Chinese authorities might consider objectionable. When I asked him what he hoped to accomplish by spreading Buddhism — proselytizing is illegal in China — his eyebrows arched in mock amusement.

“I don’t want to promote Buddhism!” he said. “I only promote Chinese culture to cleanse humanity.”

As for the Communist Party, he was unequivocal: “We Buddhists uphold whoever is in charge. Buddhists don’t get involved in politics.”

That has not been true for most of Master Hsing Yun’s life. Born outside the eastern city of Yangzhou in 1927, he was 10 when he joined a monastery that he and his mother passed by while searching for his father, who disappeared during the Japanese invasion of China.

There, he was influenced by the ideas of Humanistic Buddhism, a movement that aimed to save China through spiritual renewal. It argued that religion should be focused on this world, instead of the afterworld. It also encouraged clergy to take up the concerns of the living, and urged adherents to help change society through fairness and compassion.

After fleeing the Communist Revolution, Master Hsing Yun took that message to Taiwan and founded Fo Guang Shan in the city of Kaohsiung in 1967. He sought to make Buddhism more accessible to people by updating its fusty image and embracing mass-market tactics. He built a theme park with multimedia shows and slot machines that displayed dioramas of Buddhist saints.

The approach had a profound impact in Taiwan, which then resembled mainland China today: an industrializing society that worried it had cast off traditional values in its rush to modernize. Fo Guang Shan became part of a popular embrace of religious life. Many scholars say it also helped lay the foundation for the self-governing island’s evolution into a vibrant democracy by fostering a political culture committed to equality, civility and social progress.

Fo Guang Shan expanded rapidly, spending more than $1 billion on universities, community colleges, kindergartens, a publishing arm, a daily newspaper and a television station. It now counts more than 1,000 monks and nuns, and more than one million followers in 50 countries.

GOVERNMENT SUPPORT

But the group declines to offer an estimate of its following in China, where the government initially viewed it with suspicion. In 1989, an official fleeing the Tiananmen massacre took refuge in its temple in Los Angeles. China retaliated by barring Master Hsing Yun from the mainland.

More than a decade later, though, Beijing began looking at Master Hsing Yun differently. Like many in Taiwan of his generation born on the mainland, he favored unification of China and the island — a priority for Communist leaders.

In 2003, they allowed him to visit his hometown. He pledged to build a library, and followed through a few years later with a 100-acre facility that now holds nearly two million books, including a 100,000-volume collection of Buddhist scriptures, one of the largest in China.

Under President Xi, who started a campaign to promote traditional Chinese faiths, especially Buddhism, as part of his program for “the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” the government’s support has grown. He has met with Master Hsing Yun four times since 2012, telling him in one meeting: “I’ve read all the books that master sent me.”

While Mr. Xi’s government has tightened restrictions on Christianity and Islam, it has allowed Fo Guang Shan to open cultural centers in four cities, including Beijing and Shanghai. The organization’s students include government officials, who don gray tunics and trousers and live like monks or nuns for several days.

But unlike in Taiwan, where it held special services during national crises and encouraged members to participate in public affairs, Fo Guang Shan avoids politics in China.

“We can keep the religion secondary but introduce the ideas of Buddhism into society,” said Venerable Miaoyuan, the nun who runs the library in Yangzhou. She describes the group’s work as “cultural exchange.”

“The mainland continues the ideology of ancient emperors — you can only operate there when you are firmly under its control,” said Chiang Tsan-teng, a professor at Taipei City University of Science and Technology who studies Buddhism in the region. “Fo Guang Shan can never be its own boss in the mainland.”

That limits its influence, but many Chinese express understanding given the reality of one-party rule.

A ‘MORAL STANDARD’

Carved into two valleys of lush bamboo forest, the temple on the outskirts of Yixing features giant friezes that tell the story of Buddha, a 15-story pagoda and a 68,000-square-foot worship hall.

Since construction started in 2006, Fo Guang Shan has spent more than $150 million on the facility, known as the Temple of Great Awakening. On a nearby hill, track hoes hack away at trees to make way for a new lecture hall and a shrine to the goddess of mercy, Guanyin.

Unlike most temples in China, it bans hawkers and fortunetellers, and it does not charge an entrance fee.

Last autumn, Fo Guang Shan welcomed 2,000 pilgrims at the temple to celebrate China’s National Day. Over the course of a long afternoon, they walked along a road to the temple in a slow, dignified procession: taking three steps and kowtowing, three steps and kowtowing, on and on for about two hours.

Ms. Shen said that when she took over the tea shop she had a hard time understanding what being a good Buddhist meant. At first, she admitted, she wanted to make more money for the temple by using low-grade cooking oil.

But her husband objected. China is rife with scandals about restaurants using unsafe or cheap ingredients, and he argued that good Buddhists should set a better example.

“This made me realize that faith gives you a minimum moral standard,” Ms. Shen told me.

Many followers say they want a cleaner, fairer society and believe they can make a difference by changing their own lives.

Yang Jianwei, 44, a kitchenware exporter who embraced Fo Guang Shan, said he stopped attending the boozy late-night dinners that seem an unavoidable part of doing business in China. “I realize that you might lose some business this way, but it’s a better way to live,” he said.

This idealism is why the authorities support Fo Guang Shan, said Jin Xinhua, an official who helped the group secure the land for the new temple.

Far from the smog-belching power plants of nearby cities, on a hillside covered in solar panels and blossoming magnolias, Yang Shihua speaks of the need for a revolution.

Mr. Yang the abbot of Mao Mountain, a sacred Taoist site in eastern China, has grown frustrated by indifference to a crippling pollution crisis that has left the land barren and the sky a haunting gray. So he has set out to spur action through religion, building a $17.7 million eco-friendly temple and citing 2,000-year-old texts to rail against waste and pollution.

“China doesn’t lack money — it lacks a reverence for the environment,” Abbot Yang said. “Our morals are in decline and our beliefs have been lost.”

Hundreds of millions of people in China have in recent years turned to religions like Taoism, Buddhism, Christianity and Islam, seeking a sense of purpose and an escape from China’s consumerist culture.

Now the nation’s religious revival is helping fuel an environmental awakening.

Spiritual leaders are invoking concepts like karma and sin in deriding the excesses of economic development. Religious followers are starting social service organizations to serve as watchdogs against polluters. Advocates are citing their faith to protest plans to build factories and power plants near their homes.

“Certainly it is a very powerful force,” said Martin Palmer, the secretary general of the Alliance of Religions and Conservation, a group that works with Chinese spiritual leaders. “People are asking, ‘How do you make sense of your life?’ An awful lot are looking for something bigger than themselves, and that is increasingly the environment.”

The Chinese government, which regulates worship and limits activism, has so far tolerated the rise of religious environmentalists.

President Xi Jinping has championed the study of Chinese traditions, including Taoism and Confucianism, in part to counter the influence of Western ideas in Chinese society. Mr. Xi, in articulating the so-called Chinese dream, has called for a return to China’s roots as an “ecological civilization” — a vision he has described as having “clear waters and green mountains” across the land.

Mao Mountain, with its stretches of untouched land, stands as a monument to nature. Chongxi Wanshou, Abbot Yang’s eco-friendly temple, opened in August 2016. Its 20 acres include an organic vegetable garden. Nearby is a giant statue of Lao-tzu, the founder of Taoism, who is worshiped here as a “green god.” Bees’ nests hang undisturbed, and signs remind passers-by that branches and trees are synonymous with life.

The mountain’s spiritual leaders say they are seeking to define a distinctly Chinese type of environmentalism, one that emphasizes harmony with nature instead of Western notions of “saving the earth.”

Xuan Jing, a Taoist monk with a black beard, said Western notions of the environment were focused on treating symptoms of a problem, not the underlying disease.

“You must cure the soul before you can cure the symptoms,” he said. “The root lies with human’s desires.”

As he sipped tea, he jotted down Taoist teachings: “Humans follow the earth, the earth follows heaven, heaven follows Taoism, Taoism follows nature.”

Many spiritual leaders are also energized by what they see as an opportunity for China to become a global leader on environmental issues, with the United States showing new skepticism toward causes like combating climate change.

“We all live on earth together — we are not isolated,” Abbot Yang said in criticizing President Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris climate accord. “As Taoists, we have to work to influence people in China and overseas to take part in ecological protection.”

Environmentalism is infusing other religions in China as well, inspiring Buddhists, Christians and Muslims to take action.

In Nanjing, the capital of Jiangsu Province, about an hour from Mao Mountain, Li Yaodong, 77, a retired government worker and a Buddhist, is the founder of a nonprofit called Mochou, or “free of worries,” dedicated to cleaning up polluted lakes.

Mr. Li said that he saw parallels between his faith and protecting the environment. He leads by example, wearing secondhand clothes given to him by his children and collecting used staples to send back to factories.

“From an environmental protection perspective, saving means reducing carbon emissions,” he said. “From a Buddhist perspective, it means accumulating merits and doing good deeds.”

Muslims and Christians are also speaking up on environmental issues, drawing on their faith to galvanize the masses. China is home to more than 60 million Christians and more than 20 million Muslims by some estimates.

Shen Zhanqing, a pastor who works for the Amity Foundation, a Christian charity, said many church members felt inspired by religion to help protect the environment. The foundation has held study groups on issues like reducing carbon emissions and climate change, and it encourages members to take buses to church.

“The decadence of human beings has destroyed the environment in China,” Pastor Shen said. “Our purpose is to protect God’s creation.”

At Mao Mountain, the monks gather each morning to read ancient texts and to write calligraphy next to the trees and stones. Hundreds of visitors climb the stairs each day to pay respect to Lao-tzu. To limit pollution, they are prohibited from burning more than three sticks of incense each.

Abbot Yang devotes much of his time to persuading local officials across China to set aside areas for natural protection, an unpopular idea in many parts. He has also worked to attract young, wealthy urbanites to Taoism. Many of them are eager for a spiritual cause and have responded warmly to Taoist leaders’ embrace of environmentalism.

Taoist officials have also spoken up at national leadership meetings in recent years, calling on the government to take more action to prevent environmental catastrophes.

The abbot acknowledged that it might seem strange for Taoists, who practice a philosophy of wu wei, or inaction, to be leading a call for change. Still, he said it was important to set an example.

“Taoism has almost 2,000 years of history — environmental protection isn’t new for us,” he said. “We have to take action.”

「共產黨和上帝（佛祖），只能選一個」。大陸國家宗教局長王作安近日在中共黨刊「求是」撰文強調，黨員不准信教，對「已信教」的黨員，要透過思想教育使其放棄宗教信仰，經教育後仍堅持不改者，必須進行組織處理。

共產黨是無神論者，加入共產黨者不准信奉宗教，只能信馬列主義。王作安在最新一期「求是」撰文強調，中共黨員不僅不能信教，還要積極宣揚馬克思主義無神論。這篇文章顯示，中共不僅嚴控言論，也正加強宗教信仰以及意識形態領域的控制。

這篇題為「做好宗教工作必須講政治」的文章稱，近年來，在受到中共黨紀國法處理的高層幹部中，有的人不信馬列信宗教，必須引起高度警醒。

王作安在文章中強調，「關於新形勢下黨內政治生活的若干準則」明確規定，黨員不准信仰宗教，這是每個黨員不能觸碰的一條紅線。共產黨員要做堅定的馬克思主義無神論者，嚴守黨章規定。

王作安稱，「對已經信教黨員幹部，要通過思想教育使其放棄宗教信仰，經教育後仍堅持不改的必須進行組織處理。」他表示，中共黨員幹部不僅要堅持馬克思主義無神論，還要積極宣傳馬克思主義無神論，幫助民眾特別是青少年正確看待自然現象和社會現象，正確對待生老病死、吉凶禍福等人生際遇，樹立科學的世界觀、人生觀、價值觀。

王作安指出，中共黨員幹部不僅不能信仰宗教，還要做執行黨的宗教政策的模範，嚴守宗教政策法規紅線。不得支持參與「宗教搭台、經濟唱戲」，不得以發展經濟和繁榮文化名義助長宗教熱。禁止黨政領導幹部違規干涉宗教內部事務、參與經營活動，禁止黨政機關和工作人員從宗教事務管理中謀取利益。

他指稱，宗教的根源不在天上，而在人間。人類社會發展的歷史證明，宗教與政治雖是不同範疇，但兩者有緊密的聯繫。人們是否選擇信仰宗教，個人可以自主選擇，應當尊重。但是信仰宗教的人數眾多，使宗教具有鮮明的群體特徵，形成廣泛的社會影響，任何國家和政黨都不會忽視。