Buddhist Association Of China

Key Facts

Title in Chinese: 中國佛教協會 (zhōngguó fójiào xiéhuì)

Founded: 1953

Headquarters: Guangji Temple, 25 Fuchengmen Street, Xicheng District, Beijing, China

Website: www.chinabuddhism.com.cn (archive)

Official journal: Voice of Dharma (法音; Fayin)

Profile

The Buddhist Association of China (BAC) is one of the five officially sanctioned “patriotic religious organisations” overseen by China’s State Administration for Religious Affairs (SARA) and operating under the ideological guidance of the United Front Work Department (UFWD), the party organ that manages relations non-Party groups to ensure their support for Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rule. The work of these religious organisations is not limited to the national territory of the People's Republic of China (PRC), but expands wherever its interests are at stake, especially in connection with the overseas Chinese, the exiled Tibetans being officially included in this category.

In 1953, most of Chinese Buddhism was organised into the BAC to ensure that Buddhism would support the Communist agenda. A key founding figure was Zhao Puchu, who also served as its president from the 1980s until his death in 2000. Zhao was proponent of “Humanistic Buddhism” which priorities the involvement of its practitioners in the formation of a modern, wealthy and powerful society under the guidance of the CCP. Zhao was the guiding hand behind the adaptation of Buddhism’s profound theoretical system of religious thinking and compassion to China’s socialist polity. For example, he used the concept of the “Bodhisattva ideal” as justification of Chinese social concerns and interpreted the idea of a “Pure Land” as a relentless human pursuit of well-being on earth rather than in a transcendent sense.

The CCP has created its own system of speech and discourse, which has included altering religious vocabulary, to distort the content of important terms and influence religious followers to unconsciously accept the ideology it intended to instil in them. For example, the original Chinese word, used since before the Qin Dynasty (221 to 206 BC), referring to the enlightenment of the Buddha is Juéwù (觉悟), deriving from the characters Jué (觉), “Bodhi” in Sanskrit, literally “awakening” and wù (悟) meaning “realise”. In the revolutionary era of the 20^th Century, Juéwù was changed to refer to “consciousness” and today it holds more political connotations such as “political consciousness” or “revolutionary consciousness”. In the context of the CCP’s Buddhist revival, it was used to connote “Socialist consciousness” (shèhuì zhǔyì juéwù; 社会主义觉悟), i.e. the extent of one’s understanding of the Party and its rules and policies.

The BAC became the official supervisory organ of Buddhism in the PRC. Its basic tasks are to support the implementation of religious policy and heighten Buddhists’ awareness of socialism and patriotism. The BAC shares jurisdiction over Buddhists in China with SARA, which regulates all recognised religions. Specifically, the BAC is charged with serving as a “bridge,” linking Buddhists to the Chinese government by communicating government regulations to Buddhists and mobilising them to comply with national laws. In 2012 for example, Beijing, via the BAC, implemented a regulation giving government and Party organs the authority and power to appoint Buddhist religious instructors in Tibetan Buddhist Monasteries. The regulation stipulates that to be certified by the BAC, a religious instructor must support the CCP and the socialist system, “safeguard national unity”, uphold religious and social “harmony”, and not engage in activities organised at the behest of private individuals or overseas outfits.

Starting in the Deng Xiaoping era, the Communist Party and government realised the importance of the cultural and religious issue, and adopted a two-pronged strategy: to ally and to regulate. They kept tight control on ideology while compromising with, absorbing and supporting other mainstream ideologies – including those of the functional religious organisations – with the goal to engage religion in a Han cultural hegemony. In the case of Buddhism this involved the merger of the “three language” systems of Buddhism (the Mandarin Mahayana, the Tibetan Vajrayana and the Pali Theravada) and the development of a Han Buddhist system of study and practice, meaning that this merger be subordinated to the Han system (bearing in mind that Tibetan and Pali relate also to ethnic minorities among the Chinese population).

China has invested heavily in presenting itself as the defender and benefactor of Buddhism par excellence, and the creation of the World Buddhist Forum, in which the BAC has been instrumental, should be seen in this context: this outstanding triennial event, launched in 2006, attracts thousands of participants from scores of countries and is a key platform for China’s soft power. The fact remains, however, that all Buddhist temples in China are controlled by the government and the clerics accredited by the BAC are either government employees (if based on the mainland) or controlled agents (if based overseas e.g. Taiwan or the Tibetan diaspora).