Sacred Economies: Buddhist Monasticism and Territoriality in Medieval China

By Michael J. Walsh

Buddhist monasteries in medieval China employed a variety of practices to ensure their ascendancy and survival. Most successful was the exchange of material goods for salvation, as in the donation of land, which allowed monks to spread their teachings throughout China. By investigating a variety of socioeconomic spaces produced and perpetuated by Chinese monasteries, Michael J. Walsh reveals the "sacred economies" that shaped early Buddhism and its relationship with consumption and salvation.

Centering his study on Tiantong, a Buddhist monastery that has thrived for close to seventeen centuries in southeast China, Walsh follows three main topics: the spaces monks produced, within and around which a community could pursue a meaningful existence; the social and economic avenues through which monasteries provided diverse sacred resources and secured the primacy of Buddhist teachings within an agrarian culture; and the nature of "transactive" participation within monastic spaces, which later became a fundamental component of a broader Chinese religiosity.

Unpacking these sacred economies and repositioning them within the history of religion in China, Walsh encourages a different approach to the study of Chinese religion, emphasizing the critical link between religious exchange and the production of material culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Feb 26, 2010
• ISBN: 9780231519939

Michael J. Walsh

The author is an engineer / mathematician, born in Co. Meath, Ireland. He holds an engineering degree from University College Dublin and a Doctorate in Systems Theory from Trinity College Dublin. He has specialised in the design and management of large-scale computer and information systems in Europe, USA and Africa. He has held positions as Chief Engineer and Technical Director in some large organisations. His hobbies are classical piano, church organ, and sport

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The Sheng Yen Series in Chinese Buddhist Studies

Chun-Fang Yu, series editor

Following the endowment of the Sheng Yen Professorship in Chinese Buddhist Studies, the Sheng Yen Education Foundation and the Chung Hua Institute of Buddhist Studies in Taiwan jointly endowed a publication series, the Sheng Yen Series in Chinese Studies, at Columbia University Press. Its purpose is to publish monographs containing new scholarship and English translations of classical texts in Chinese Buddhism.

Scholars of Chinese Buddhism have traditionally approached the subject through philology, philosophy, and history. In recent decades, however, they have increasingly adopted an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on anthropology, archaeology, art history, religious studies, and gender studies, among other disciplines. This series aims to provide a home for such pioneering studies in the field of Chinese Buddhism.

Columbia University Press

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Copyright © 2010 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-51993-9

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Walsh, Michael J. (Michael John), 1968–

Sacred economies : Buddhist monasticism and territoriality in medieval China / Michael J. Walsh.

p. cm. — (The Sheng Yen series in Chinese Buddhist studies)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-14832-0 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-51993-9 (electronic)

1. Monastic and religious life (Buddhism)—China. 2. Monasteries, Buddhist—Economic aspects—China. 3. Buddhism—Economic aspects–China. 4. Tiantong si (Yin Xian China) I. Title. II. Series.

BQ6160.C6W35   2009

294.3’6570951—dc22

2009012521

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [e-mail].

References to Internet Web sites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

List of Illustrations

Preface

Dynastic Chronology

1.  Monastic Identity, Buddhist Religiosity, and Land

2.  A Square at the Center of the World

3.  Corporate Bodies

4.  A Culture of Estates

5.  Grains of Sand

6.  Cultivating Salvation

7.  Salvation and Survival

Appendix A.  Yin County Buddhist Monastic Land, c. 1226 C.E.

Appendix B.  Population Figures for Yin County, Ming Prefecture

Appendix C.  Land Totals in Ming Prefecture

Appendix D.  Major Structures in Tiantong Monastery’s Compound

Notes

Glossary

Bibliography

Index

Contents

1.1. Old Tiantong (gu tiantong).

2.1. Main road leading to the compound.

2.2. Arriving pilgrims.

2.3. The monastery’s many roofs require constant repair.

2.4. Early morning.

2.5. Incense altar. The inscription reads TIANTONG CHAN TEMPLE.

2.6. The library.

2.7. Early woodcuts of Tiantong monastery.

2.8. On the road to Tiantong monastery.

2.9. Republican-period woodcut of Tiantong monastery.

2.10. Tiantong monastery’s reflecting wall.

2.11. Seven pagodas (stupas).

2.12. Buddha Hall.

2.13. One of many passageways on the side of the monastery that eventually leads to the central axis.

2.14. Zhongguo

2.15. A schematic of the Forbidden City. The bottom part of the map is the southern end.

2.16. Plan of Tiantong monastery’s main compound as a luoshu.

2.17. Baoguo Temple schematic (Zhejiang province).

4.1. Jing

4.2. Tian (field with irrigation channels)

4.3. Lingyin monastery today. The precious hall.

7.1. The end of the day.

Appendix D. Major Structures in Tiantong Monastery’s Compound

Illustrations

Preface

Anumber of years ago I hiked the slopes of Mount Emei, one of China’s four famous Buddhist mountains, located in Sichuan province. At the foot of the mountain, I entered Baoguo monastery, where monks’ chanting voices trailed upward into the pine trees along with their incense smoke. As I strolled along an outdoor corridor, I peered through one of the round doorways into a room. There, a pile of money almost two feet high lay on top of a table. The next moment the head of a monk peeked from behind the stack and smiled at me. As I watched him counting money, any naïve sentiment I may have had about Buddhist materiality was shattered. Weren’t monks supposed to be penniless? Wasn’t their daily terrain devoid of production, their lives ascetic?

I spent the next few days climbing up and down Mount Emei. On my last morning there I stood in a People’s Liberation Army trench coat rented from a young entrepreneur (it gets cold at the peak, even in August), waiting for the rising sun to appear above the famous sea of clouds, and thought about how religious institutions support themselves—economically, socially, politically, doctrinally. What type of space could allow for all these activities, many of which seemed contradictory in principle, if not in practice? What type of space was conducive to producing an income as well as a salvific outcome? So began a long journey of exploring the relationship between Buddhist ideas and the institutions Buddhists build to project and protect those ideas.

Many teachers and friends have helped me on that journey. With a profound sense of debt, I would like to thank all of you in Taipei, Sapporo, Santa Barbara, Tacoma, Poughkeepsie, New York, London, and Cape Town, who have supported me over the years. I will spare the reader the details of my gratitude but emphasize that karma is infinite, and what are meritorious debts if not a form of love? A few names need to be named. To Chang Che-chia, Chen Laoshi, Chen Yuan-peng, David Chidester, Ron Egan, Roger Friedland, Allan Grapard, Richard Hecht, Michael Hegner, Huang Min-chih, Paul Katz, John Kieschnick, David Leeming, Wendy Lochner, Peter Lorge, Jeffrey Meyer, Lu Miaw-fen, John McRae, Tracy Miller, Christine Mortlock, Bill Powell, Qiu Pengsheng, Gil Raz, Eric Reinders, Shimomoto Hironobu, and Yu Hsiao-rung; to my home department, specifically, Mark Cladis, Marc Epstein, Rick Jarow, Jonathon Kahn, Max Leeming, Lynn LiDonnici, Larry Mamiya, Deborah Dash Moore, Judith Weisenfeld, Tova Weitzman, and Chris White; to my students, past and present, here at Vassar College in New York, and to Vassar’s Research Committee, as well as the National Endowment for the Humanities, which awarded me a summer stipend at a crucial point in time, thank you. I especially wish to thank the reviewers who read my manuscript, and Leslie Kriesel for her copyediting skills. Finally, this book is dedicated to two extraordinary persons: Elspeth West Walsh and Brooklyn Elspeth Walsh.

Dynastic Chronology

Among all the donations given to the monastery the most important has been land.

—Ma Tingluan¹

I have heard that Buddhists made nirvana the focus of their doctrine…. We plow the fields and produce goods to support ourselves; Buddhism wants none of this. Thus, a monk may not even stay under a tree for three days lest he begin to like the place too much; he can only walk the streets and beg for his food. This becomes the monk’s entire life. Parinirvana consists of nothing whatsoever. This is their doctrine of tranquil extinction. Now, however, monks are no longer like this; they still need to nourish their physical body. They still gather together to substitute for their real families, and [appoint] chiefs and monastic administrators in imitation of [secular] governmental hierarchy. They use land to feed themselves and live under shelters. They seem no different from the ordinary people, sometimes even so far as to have better accommodation and food than the common people. This is quite the opposite from their former doctrine.

—Huang Zhen²

When in 301 of the Common Era the monk Yixing made his way up the slopes of Mount Taibai in eastern Zhejiang province, he must have been impressed.³ The scenery was beautiful, and he decided to build a small hermitage on the side of the mountain, tucked into the slope for shelter, a few hours’ walk from Dongjian Lake. Peaks and valleys surrounded the breathtaking site, all blanketed in thick trees that in winter would occasionally be painted white with snow. To the east lay what later would come to be called Dinghai county. To the north was Hangzhou Bay. Still farther north, the Yangzi (Yangtze) River poured into the East China Sea. Shanghai would later develop in this region. Dozens of islands—Liuheng, Taohua, Zhoushan, Zhongjieshan, Dayang, Xiaoyang—speckled the coastline, and a day’s journey by boat took one to Mount Putuo, a site where the Bodhisattva Guanyin came to reside. These waters, rich in fish, also had navigable sounds and channels that would ensure their location a name in China’s histories for centuries to come. Following the thirty-degree parallel from the coastline would take one due west of Mount Taibai, through Cixi county, and eventually across the Yangzi River in two places. Beyond lay modern-day Sichuan province and Tibet. South of Yin and Fenghua counties, across the Tiantai mountain range and Tai and Wen prefectures, lay a region that would become Fujian province, flanked by the Taiwan Straits to the east and the so-called barbaric southern interior, uncultivated and wild. The area immediately surrounding the new hermitage eventually came to be named Mingzhou (Ming prefecture) and some eight centuries later, during the Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279), was home to many of China’s most prominent families. A few days’ journey westward from Yixing’s hermitage was a site that would be declared the new capital of the Southern Song dynasty, Lin’an, today known as the city of Hangzhou.

Not long after Yixing had opened (kaishan) Mount Taibai and begun constructing his hermitage (really more of a thatched hut), a child was said to appear on the mountain who declared the following to Yixing: "I am the Greater White Star.⁴ The emperor has sent me to be by your side."⁵ The location of this conversation can be visited today and is called Gu Tiantong, or ancient Tiantong (see figure 1.1).⁶

FIGURE 1.1

Old Tiantong (Gu tiantong). The temple is located about fifteen minutes’ walk from the main compound.

Yixing accepted the boy’s offer. Taibaixing collected water and wood and took care of the monk until one day the boy suddenly left. This child was a tiantong, a child of a heavenly being (tianshen), sent down to protect the Dharma, the cosmic law and teachings of the Buddha. Whether Yixing knew this or not, we have no idea. His followers suspected it, however, for Yixing’s name spread far and wide and his disciples increased in number. The thatched hut became a small temple and in due course a monastery growing in size and in number of resident monks. Although the monastery’s official name changed many times over the centuries, it became most well known as Tiantong si, the Monastery of Heaven’s Child.⁷

One thousand seven hundred years have since come and gone. How does a religious institution last that long? Which activities ensure such longevity? There are many ways to answer such questions, but the angle of inquiry this book takes is to focus on Buddhist monastic territoriality, a spatial strategy to influence resources and people by controlling land. This book is a study of monastic land acquisition in China and the implications of this practice. To answer the above questions, as well as the more economically oriented question as to what kind of exchange mechanisms were required to ensure the survival of an institution, which is also to say its ability to socially reproduce itself, for over a thousand years, I explore a number of monasteries, but Tiantong monastery serves as an excellent example, as it held a powerful position in local social hierarchies.⁸ Much of my attention will be on the thirteenth century; however, some careful extrapolations beyond this time period serve well to show the translocal and transtemporal nature of Chinese Buddhism.⁹

Large Buddhist monasteries in China sought to produce and perpetuate a monastic space by accumulating land to provide economic capital and secure their social position. As a commodified object, land was the key component in an exchange environment instituted by these powerful monasteries. On a material level in the Chinese monastic context, land was the source of food and the sustenance of monks. On a more ideological level it was part of a discourse on Buddhist practice: to donate land was to be a good Buddhist. This material logic was vital not only to the long-term success of Buddhism in China but also to anything else we might wish to term Chinese religion. By the thirteenth century, Tiantong owned at least thirty-six estates. The monastery enjoyed economic wealth (it operated water mills and grew tea); was frequently visited by wealthy patrons, famous poets and literati, and Japanese monks (such as Dōgen); and was well known throughout the empire. Housing upward of a thousand monks during the thirteenth century, the monastic complex was enormous; so too were its efforts to sustain itself. Buddhist land, both imagined (as, for example, the Pure Land, or fodi, Buddha land) and material (as, for example, a source of income and crops) played a foundational part in the development of Chinese religiosity in general and Chinese Buddhism in particular.

T I M E  A N D  P L A C E

An examination of monastic land exemplifies and problematizes the traditional dichotomy of the material and spiritual in Buddhism. It is a false dichotomy: monks and nuns seeking wealth (for the community) was, and still is in some ways, the very salvation of Buddhist monasticism. From at least the fifth through the early twentieth century, land formed the primary economic foundation of the sangha, the social body of monks and nuns. This began to change during the Republican period (1911–48), and especially after 1949 with China’s communist revolution. During the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), all temple lands were confiscated, thousands of temples destroyed, and every effort made to eradicate Chinese religiosity.¹⁰ These efforts ultimately failed. Since the 1980s and Deng Xiaoping’s reforms there has been a remarkable revival, reinvention, and re-creation of Chinese religiosity and Chinese Buddhism,¹¹ which has grown at a pace comparable to that of China’s economy. In some cases temples sought to get their land back, but for the vast majority of China’s Buddhist temples and monasteries new, innovative sources of income had to be found. The most common solution was to become a tourist center, a fact that today is often criticized by more conservative Buddhists as negatively affecting monks and nuns and distracting them from their practice. This sentiment is echoed in Huang Zhen’s epigraph at the beginning of the chapter.

While challenges continue to the present day, nevertheless, there has been a true renewal of Chinese Buddhism and Chinese religiosity across the board. Land will probably never play the central role it once did in China’s religious economy, although, in the case of Taiwan, for example, Buddhist groups like Tzu Chi (ciji), Fokuang shan (foguangshan), and Dharma Drum Mountain have amassed a fortune in real estate and assets, pouring much of this into the local economy, establishing hospitals and orphanages, and promoting international relief efforts and alternative welfare systems to the state. When I was living in Taiwan during the 1990s, I experienced firsthand the devastating earthquake in the fall of 1999. It was terrifying: so many buildings collapsed, so many lives lost. Buddhist organizations responded to the suffering even before the state could, handing out blankets, food, and karmic consolation.

Ideally I would want to push a medieval case study of Tiantong monastery all the way into the early twentieth century, but that is not possible in the space of this book. I will therefore focus primarily on the Song dynasties (960–1279 C.E.), a creative, watershed period in Chinese history that is essential to understanding the impact of Buddhism on Chinese society.¹² My journeys to Tiantong monastery, and my research of medieval Chinese monasteries in general, do nevertheless suggest a historical continuation of important themes in the study of Chinese Buddhism. My own observations and a wealth of information from gazetteers break some basic stereotypes about what a monk is, and the space he produces and inhabits.¹³ Casual Western observers, students of religion, and even comparative religious histories of monasteries conjure up images of the solitary monastic engaged in silent devotions, or else in communal but definitely noncommunicative rituals carried out on a strict timetable. Historical materials about monks indeed reveal these aspects of the sangha, but they also unquestionably reveal a more complicated reality. Monks, and the monasteries they live and lived in, were part of a much larger geographical, economic, and religious fabric in society. Tiantong and its mountain were part of a chain of monasteries and mountains that were not simply solitary and isolated retreats but sites that participated in the construction of the physical and geographical backbone of an imperial religiosity. Monasteries were important stopping points and destinations for the emperors for a number of reasons. Beyond this, the monasteries existed and participated in a complex network of commerce, some of which became integral to the lives and salvation of people who visited these great institutions. Monasteries were, and still are today, sacred centers to solitary monks seeking their own salvation or equanimity; but equally important, they also represent a series of interconnected centers for the religious lives of lay Buddhists and for economic exchange bolstering the religious vitality of an empire.

W E A L T H  A N D  S P A C E

One of the great ironies of monastic Buddhism was that renouncing materiality and the self through a series of metaphysical and bodily strategies resulted in the accumulation of material wealth in abundance and a communal identity forged through discipline and practice. Buddhist monks and nuns were often represented as being poor and socially withdrawn, but we know the reality in Asia was quite the opposite.¹⁴ Throughout East Asia, and particularly in China, the sangha became, among other things, one of the most powerful economic forces in society. Those Buddhist monasteries in the Chinese empire that sought to accumulate wealth increased their chances of institutionalized longevity. A large Buddhist monastery was thoroughly institutional, that is, a social and physical structure that defined, imposed, and maintained sets of social values, and sought to acquire and distribute capital—economic, cultural, or otherwise—in a competitive manner. The relations a monastery codified were by no means mutually exclusive and were contingent on other groups within the social arena. Buddhist social agency that produced a monastic space favored certain codes of behavior and sought to reproduce and perpetuate this space and subsequent social ascendancy in the political hierarchies of the day. The sangha always prevailed and ensured the process of exchange and human interaction, more than a modicum of worldliness in the Dharma-prescribed otherness of monastic reality.

European Christian monasteries, by way of contrast, have long been understood as sites of socioeconomic production.¹⁵ Producing an income, and preferably owning property, was a necessity for early Christian monastic institutions; so too, it turns out, with Chinese Buddhist monasteries. Since at least the fourth century of the Common Era in China, and certainly well before that in central Asia and India, the institutions Buddhist monks and nuns constructed, inhabited, and shaped, and were shaped by, required substantial capital to sustain them in the this-worldly realm. Attempts to attain the imaginative and material requirements to build religious institutions that could empower, enrich, define, and support Buddhist monks over centuries were remarkable, all the more so considering, for instance, the arduous task Buddhist monks faced on first entering China, a realm that claimed cultural and geopolitical priority with a sophisticated and clearly defined cosmology. In so many ways the task before Buddhist missionaries was (and today, still is) a spatial process. In part, it required a particular kind of produced space imbued with a language and architecture that legitimated that space (sometimes in contradistinction to Chinese imperial space); in other words, it was a highly complex process of signification, of assigning meaning to symbols in very creative ways so that which was textually represented could be perceived as real. Between the representational value of texts, however, and the everyday practices of living human beings lies a space of interaction in which people necessarily produce, maintain, and reproduce a meaningful existence. This must be taken into account when exploring acts of religiosity. A monastery needed funding, donors, lay supporters, monks to inhabit it, an abbot to oversee it, offices, bookkeepers, workers, farmers, wood, and tiles. To acquire these necessities, it depended on a reciprocal exchange process between institution and social agent, which in turn produced a space of consumption; meaning infused into that process made it sacred. Monastic space, one component of which was directly lived space, was about the forces of monastic production. Another component incorporated a monastery’s estates. Yet a third component came to be delineated by a monastic institution’s authority, legitimacy, and local and translocal power. With all three, protecting the sangha was paramount, for without the sangha there could be no perpetuation of the Dharma. Promoting the stability and growth of a Buddhist monastery was tantamount to ensuring the survival of Buddhism.

To deepen our discussion, let us understand Buddhist material action as a form of religious discourse, and as part of a religious economy. Pierre Bourdieu’s work