The Chinese Buddhist Ritual Field: Common Public Rituals in PRC Monasteries Today

Abstract

For centuries the performance of rituals has been one of the most common, complex, remunerative, and controversial activities in Chinese Buddhism. This article lays out the contours of the contemporary Chinese Buddhist “ritual field,” focusing on rituals called “Dharma assemblies” (fahui�!<}�¬ ) in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Based on a selection of announcements and ritual schedules posted in monasteries during 2009-2013, I show which rituals are performed and how they are marketed. I also show when and how frequently certain rituals linked to the annual cycle of festivals are performed, and analyze and suggest categorization schemas for the rituals. Finally, I discuss the relationships between ritual activities on the one hand and commercial activity, monastic revenue, and seminary studies on the other. Annotated translations of six announcements and ritual schedules, followed by transcriptions of the source Chinese texts for these translations, are included in the appendixes.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 6 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.