Special Issue: Chinese Buddhism from Holmes Welch to the Present

Abstract

This special issue of Review of Religion in Chinese Society is devoted to an examination of the state of the field in scholarship on Chinese Buddhism since the death of Mao. It is based on a consultative meeting that was held at the Center on Religion and Chinese Society at Purdue University on April 28, 2018. The meeting featured a discussion among leading scholars in contemporary Chinese Buddhism whose revised work is presented in this issue. Drawing on our discussions at the consultative meeting, the articles in this issue extend the legacy of Holmes Welch, whose three monographs on modern Chinese Buddhism (Welch 1967, 1968, 1972) broke new ground beyond the textual studies of the time to present a rich picture of Chinese Buddhism as a lived tradition in early to mid-twentieth century China. All of the contributors to this issue have undertaken extensive longitudinal studies of Buddhism in the post-Mao era and here combine their own findings with a critical discussion of the growing corpus of social scientific studies of contemporary Chinese Buddhism. Three of the contributors have published their own monographs on the topic (Fisher 2014; Borchert 2017; Caple 2019) while the other two have published seminal articles and edited volumes (Gildow 2014; Travagnin 2016, 2019). Douglas Gildow begins the issue with a survey of developments in Han Chinese monasticism since the beginning of the post-Mao revival in the late 1970s. Drawing extensively from his own recent ethnographic research, Gildow questions the notion of a continuous revival of monastic institutions and lineages over the last forty years, suggesting instead that after an initial period of revival in the last two decades of the twentieth century, monasticism has plateaued and even may be now on the decline. Gareth Fisher’s article complements Gildow’s by discussing the evolution of the laity within Han Chinese