"The Zen of communism"

by Hamish McDonald, ("The Age," September 21 2002)

            With the important congress of China's Communist Party coming up in just over six weeks, the party's 66 million members are being exhorted almost daily by party propagandists to study the newly published collected writings of supreme leader Jiang Zemin.

            Mostly these writings try to explain and justify the party's shift in the past 24 years from Marxist precepts like dialectical materialism and class struggle to a brand of capitalist materialism encapsulated in President Jiang's adage known as the "Three Represents".

            But one aspect of Mr Jiang's thinking is never mentioned in public.

            According to highly connected sources, the 76-year-old veteran communist is a frequent worshipper at Buddhist temples and shows a strong personal leaning towards the ancient religion, though it is unclear whether he would yet call himself a Buddhist.

            This places Mr Jiang among a growing number of Chinese - some estimates say 100 million of the country's 1.3 billion people - who show some affiliation with Buddhism, a religion introduced to China from India nearly 2000 years ago but suppressed on the mainland after the communists set up their People's Republic in 1949.

            Many talk of a "spiritual vacuum" in China following the collapse of adherence to Marxism and the death in 1976 of revolutionary leader Mao Zedong. A revival of religion is said to be filling this vacuum. "A few years back, a declaration that you were a Buddhist would earn you criticism," said one leading Chinese scholar of Buddhism, who asked not to be named.

            The signs are everywhere. Temples are being restored and reopened, and people come to burn incense and say prayers before Buddha images. More young people are shaving their heads and donning the yellow or grey robes of monks and nuns. "I took up Buddhism because of my belief," said Zhao Pei, 28, a monk from Szechuan province studying at Beijing University.

            "Our national religious policy is, everyone is entitled to religious freedom, and every Buddhist monk is also free to go back to the material world if he chooses."

            At the Badachu complex of temples near Beijing's Western Hills, a woman with grey hair prostrates herself before a pagoda housing a relic said to be a tooth of the original Buddha, Gautama or Sakyamuni. A former forestry professor from Harbin, she felt gripped by belief in 1994 and has since given up her career and marriage in her effort to renounce worldly concerns. "I haven't yet succeeded, and I feel guilty about it," she said.

            "So I am here to ask the Buddha to forgive me. If there are 10 degrees of Buddhist achievements, I think I am only at level two."

            The revival is being quietly encouraged by the communist authorities, at the same time as they crack down on religious or mystical trends that are seen as potentially subversive of their monopoly on power.

            Just this week it emerged that a leader of the underground Roman Catholic church, Bishop Wei Jingyi of Qiqihar in north-eastern Heilongjiang, had been arrested, while 15 members of the banned Falun Gong spiritual movement were handed prison terms of up to 15 years in Jilin province for putting their group's videotapes on local cable television networks.

            Yet, at a military-run hotel in Beijing, 400 abbots, monks and lay Buddhists were meeting for an occasional national convention of the Buddhist Association of China, one of five sanctioned organisations (including for Catholicism, other branches of Christianity, Islam and indigenous Daoism) through which Beijing permits and controls religious activity. Buddhism, say many political analysts, is regarded with the most favour.

            "The government's attitude towards Buddhism is more tolerant," said the scholar. "This is partly because it is so closely incorporated into Chinese culture - in everything from architecture to language - it is inseparable. But also because it poses less of a threat to the government.

            Buddhism advocates peace and benevolence and seldom takes violent form, and it has fewer connections to outside authority compared to other religions, such as the Catholics to the Vatican."

            However, "anything that concerns ideology and culture has the potential to be utilised", the scholar notes, adding that in countries like Vietnam and Sri Lanka, the Buddhist clergy have at times been politically active. In China, officials have been concerned to isolate Buddhism in Tibet from the ethnic identity and political sentiment of the Tibetans. Beijing is also using the official Buddhist Association in its drive against Falun Gong, a movement adapted from traditional Qigong ("life force") exercises by its charismatic founder Li Hongzhi, who now lives in New York. It spread rapidly in China in the 1990s before being banned in 1999 as an "evil cult". Many thousands of its followers have since been held in prison camps for "re-education through labour".