There are many qualified candidates for the 2011 Grinch Award, but this year it’s going to the authorities of Xitan Village in Zhejiang Province, because you just can’t violently shut down a large public Christmas party in “Christmas Village” and not get a Grinch Award. Especially when you get caught on video and uploaded to YouTube:

• A very silent night: Chinese officials shut down outdoor Christmas party in toy-making town (WP)
• Video (BI)
• Video (YouTube)

There’s actually a lot of interesting details to this situation; what details we do get suggest a complex local relationship between Christians, Buddhists, local authorities, and Christians and Buddhists who have positions of local authority.

Previous Grinch Awards:

• China’s grinches play hardball
• “And the 2008 Tianjin Grinch Award goes to…”
• An UnChristmas party in Tianjin

“The core issue is not about ‘how much’ religious charities can contribute to China’s society, and it is certainly not about them substituting for state organizations… It is about the inventiveness and capacity to ‘feel’ social and personal needs not yet answered that characterize faith-based initiatives. It is about the quality of care and creativity that communities of believers are ready to contribute. It would be a shame for China to deprive itself any longer of a humane resource that till now remains untapped.” From Religions and Charities in China.

“The question is, can the State accept the idea that many of their citizens follow the word of their gods above the word of the Party?”

Watch the program and read a partial transcript here. See McDonell confront the agents trailing him — on camera — here.

It’s all interesting, but I was especially surprised by what they managed to film starting at 21:30.

I’m biking home from work tonight around 9:30. I’m on a two-lane road near our place, and it’s clogged up ahead. This barely registers because getting clogged is just what Tianjin roads do. But then I hear the music — looped Buddhist funeral chanting. As I get closer, I see what must be the relatives standing silently lined up in the middle of the road — there’s at least twenty of them, all in dark clothing. Several meters ahead of them are a about five guys piling Chinese funeral wreaths in the middle of an intersection (as they often do at Tianjin funerals), dressed casually and yelling, “Throw that there! Move that over! Don’t put those there!” There’s a big paper-maché-looking horse at the front of the pile. Mildly curious onlookers are scattered on the surrounding sidewalks and cars are waiting in both directions.

The pile is finally ready; it’s about six feet high. The last thing to go on is a white, paper something placed on top by the lead family member — looks like he could be the son. Then they light the pile and it flares up quickly. The family members are all kneeling on their hands and knees, heads bowed, in the middle of the road. The horse literally bursts into flames, and the flames from the pile threaten the overhanging tree branches and telephone and electrical wires. The lead pile-arranger has a long pole that he stokes and corrals and beats down the fire with.

Once the flames are on their way down (but still high; this is a full-on bonfire), the family gets up and the women start wailing. They slowly walk away down the road, arms around each other, crying, dabbing eyes, etc., following the amplifier on wheels that’s playing the looped Buddhist chanting and being pulled by some guy.

The guy in charge of the bonfire is trying to get the cars to start going around it. The drivers hesitate, but one nimble taxi cuts out of line and flies past like he’s afraid of getting his paint scorched. As the flames get lower, some of the onlookers chuckle and applaud and begin to disperse.

I didn’t have the camera with me, but you can see examples of what I saw here:

• Chinese funeral next door
• There’s hell to pay

On the 30th I had a free talk class of mostly college-age students from richer families. Since it was almost Halloween and a Party organ has listed the rise in superstition as one of seven symptoms of moral decay among government officials, I picked “superstitions” as the topic and asked the students to tell me about common Chinese superstitions. I was interested to see how they defined the term and what things they would consider “superstitious.” We also talked about why people do certain things, about how belief is only one of several reasons a person could have for their “superstitious” behaviours.

I asked about the stuff taxi drivers hang from their rear-view mirrors, and that led the students to produce, from around their necks and wrists, a surprising number of Buddhist trinkets. I see these things all the time, especially the round wood bead bracelets on men, but I was surprised at the number of Buddha (for the girls) and Guanyin (for the guys) necklaces. They said their parents buy them from monks in the temples — one girl said her mom paid 300元 for hers ($45!). The monks perform some sort spiritual service on behalf of the child, and there’s something about power being place in the object or released from the object — their English level wasn’t high enough for me to get the theological details out of them and I suspect they wouldn’t really know anyway. As visions of Martin Luther and medieval Catholic indulgences flitted through my mind, my students said: “But we’re not superstitious. We just have these for good luck. And protection.” I wish I’d had time to press them on that, but it was funny to see how they were serious; they didn’t seem to see any contradiction at all. Apparently we’re working with different definitions of “superstitious”!

“Superstition” is 迷信 (mouseover the Chinese!).
The Chinese term my students were translating as “protection” is 避邪 (“avoid evil”).

I’ve written several times about this kind of thing, including:

• ‘Tis the season for… RED PANTIES!
• Sending Winter Clothes to the Dead in Tianjin
• There’s hell to pay
• Chinese funeral next door

Or maybe Santa Claus is the Western money god…

财神到
cái shén dào
“The god of wealth arrives”

This just went up at the subway station/shopping center that I walk through to get to work (小白楼). He faces a McDonald’s. Chinese New Year’s decorations are going up everywhere.

You can see lots of Chinese money god （财神 or 财神爷） images by doing a google image search for 财神。

For details on the story behind one particular incarnation of the Chinese money god, see Bi Gan Temple 比干庙 near Xinxiang, Henan 新乡，河南 – 2010 Feb 22.

The Frog in a Well Chinese history group blog visits a temple in Xi’an depicting the various specific torments in Chinese Hell. It’s not uncommon for temples to depict Chinese hell with large, grotesque statues. WARNING: disturbingly graphic.

Imagine for a minute what it would be like if your university prof, sports coach, or Sunday school teacher taught like a Zen master. From The World’s Religions (1991), by Huston Smith (emphasis mine):

…it has its own texts… but one glance at these distinctive texts will reveal how unlike other scriptures they are. Almost entirely they are given to pressing home the fact that Zen cannot be equated with any verbal formula whatsoever. Account after account will depict disciples interrogating their masters about Zen, only to received a roared “Ho!” for answer. For the master sees that through such questions, seekers are trying to fill the lack in their lives with words and concepts instead of realizations. Indeed, students will be lucky if they get off with verbal rebuffs. Often a rain of blows will be the retort as the master, utterly uninterested in his disciples’ physical comfort, resorts to the most forceful way he can think of to pry the questioner out of his mental rut… Zen masters may order their disciples to rip their scriptures to shreds and avoid words like Buddha or nirvana as if they were smut. They intend no disrespect. What they are doing is straining by every means they can think of to blast their novices out of solutions that are only verbal… Zen is not interested in theories about enlightenment; it wants the real thing. So it shouts, and buffets, and reprimands… [to] force the student to crash the word-barrier. Minds must be sprung from their verbal bonds into a new mode of apprehending.

Zen masters are determined that their students attain the experience itself, not allow talk to take its place (131-132).

I wonder how often our profs wished they could just haul off and smack us on the head with a meter stick. Probably best not to ask.

But regarding the bolded parts… I think all us grad students ought to be banished to monasteries to meditate on those bolded parts before we’re allowed to open our mouths (or blogs), but I’m in a good mood and this is supposed to be a happy place. :D As a wiser man than me pointed out, I don’t want to end up like those two old guys on the Muppets. Still, I think there’s a point or three to be made here.

After a delicious lunch of famous Taiwan noodle soup, thousand-year-old egg, and stomach strips, we had a good time at the Museum of World Religions in Yonghe, Taipei, Taiwan. There was a class of elementary age kids visiting from Nantou who had never seen foreigners before (according to one of their teachers). I wondered why we were being followed and stared at as if we were one of the museum’s exhibits! We had a fun time talking with them, taking pictures, and of course, letting them measure how tall their were compared to me, how big their feet were and the obligatory “sure, rub my arm hair all you want! Yeah wow. Look at that!” It was fun.

The Museum
The MWR is all about atmosphere. The elevator on the way up dims the lights, plays a moody welcome message, and opens to a display about purification beside a transparent waterfall. This leads to the entrance hallway called “Pilgrim’s Way,” where esoteric questions (in several languages) are played over a background of ambient music and the walls light up with the same questions in Mandarin and English beside life-size pictures of people praying. The hall ends at a heat-sensitive wall on which you can leave your hand prints. All this is probably the least-impressive part of the museum experience, but it sets the mood.

The museum is designed to make a strong impression and send a message, rather than primarily convey large amounts of cognitive information (though there is a lot of info to be had). It’s an engaging multi-sensory experience; it’s easy to get “lost” among the displays. In addition to the main hall profiling ten major world belief systems and traditional Taiwanese religion, there is: a small movie theatre showing “Creations,” an artsy story-telling of various creation myths; a globe-style theatre that attempts to help visitors “grasp the spirit” of the Avatamsaka sutra (“one is all; all is one”) through an audio-visual experience; a tatami-style “meditation gallery” with a giant video screen on each wall and banks of meditation instructions for various religions; a “Hall of Life’s Journey” show casing religious paraphernalia associated with birth, coming of age, marriage, old age, death, and afterlife; detailed replicas of famous religious architecture with movable internal cameras; and more. In the main hall, each world religion has a wall with text, a floor to ceiling video screen, a large, tall display case set in wall with audio selections corresponding to various numbered and encased religious paraphernalia, and a touch-screen computer database.

Critique
The museum was founded by a Buddhist master for the purpose of promoting peace, tolerance, inter-religious dialogue, and for providing a “department store of religions” where people can learn about and choose a religion. On the whole it’s really well done. It didn’t seem to be overly pushy with the Buddhism, though there is a pervasive message of Buddhist inclusivism, or maybe pluralism. Judging from the Christianity displays, they’ve done a lot of homework, but I don’t think someone would have a balanced or basic understanding of Christianity if all they knew was what the MWR told them. It seems to go out of its way to emphasize the similarities and inconsequential differences of each religion at the expense of fundamental, mutually incompatible differences. For example, the Christian meditation instructions in the Meditation Gallery say, “As the aspirant progresses in the ascent to God, he/she experiences a breakthrough en route to a dazzling darkness beyond all desires and concepts” and uses the quote “My being is God” while referring to kenosis. In an Eastern, Buddhist/Daoist context, this will likely be understood to mean things that are actually more Buddhist than Christian.

I should also mention that St. Nicholas gets much better treatment at the museum than he does on their English website.

See our photos here.

Right now there’s a funeral/memorial/what they do when someone dies in Taiwan going on a couple doors down from our apartment complex on the route to work. These things go for 49 days; this one’s been going for about 10.

The front of a business has been turned into a memorial site with chairs and tables spread from the door to the street. Inside has a table with offerings (food, wine, incense) on it. On the walls are photos of the deceased and pictures of (I’m assuming) the ancestors, with lots of flowers and lotus decorations made from folded spirit money. Outside on the sidewalk around the tables and chairs are big flower arrangements, large specially decorated packages of gifts (like beer and pop) and a big metal holding bin for burning large amounts of spirit money. When we walk through it at 12pm on the way to work, relatives are there eating and talking. When we walk back through it at 9pm, people are also there, eating and talking.

We asked our practicum advisor for information during our last practicum debriefing meeting. Turned up some interesting (and unexpected) details, some of which I’ve bolded. ***These are just tidbits from our notes – the terminology isn’t accurate and it’s not a general representation of Taiwanese funeral rites. We often only learn about things bits and pieces at a time, through experiences like this. Somewhere in our pile of reading I know there is a whole big explanation of funeral customs – but this isn’t it. Still, some interesting stuff.

[Discussion Notes]
Jessica asks about the ongoing funeral/memorial near our apartment, about last night when they were wearing KKK-looking white hoods. White hoods: worn by relatives of the dead. Special ceremony is performed every 7 days for 49 days. Doesn’t know why 49 days (7 7′s?). By the end of 49 days they will perform a ceremony that transports the dead to the place “sort of like heaven.” Fundamental differences: Taiwanese believe people have three souls: one stays with the shrine, one goes for reincarnation, one goes to “heaven.” The body stays there for 49 days: behind the wall of the memorial there is a big freezer with the body in it (if they can afford it they don’t go for cremation).

They want to consider the fung shui of the tomb, and after 5/10 years (unsure how many) or so they check the tomb to check the bones (if there is flesh attached it means there is something unfinished… more ritual/ceremony/sacrifices are required).

Probably offensive not to burn the incense to the dead, although Christian pastors would tell you not to burn the incense. He says this is not the right place to claim your own religious distinction; it’s rude not to burn the incense.

Purposes of the funeral: show respect, and also it’s the final act of your life, everyone has to be there to go through the final stage of the person’s life to lead them to “the West.” It’s a necessary act – step to take – or else the person would be uninitiated (unable to reincarnate, go to the West, or rest in peace, they would be a wandering ghost).

About 90% of the population does this kind of ritual we’re talking about. South and North may have details that are different. When these times come, the service providers have the whole systems worked out.

Is it Buddhist, Daoist, Confucian? They probably wouldn’t even know.

There’s a way to communicate with the god or the spirits – casting new moon shaped lots (jiao1 bei1) on the ground in the temple – the results of their throw tell them what they need to know.

Christian funerals seem disrespectful. Less days waiting, you don’t hear people bawling at the Christian funerals. Who decided what Christian funerals are supposed to be like? Missionaries? Local pastors? He doesn’t know. There is some wiggle room. Death and funerals is a generally avoided topic.

Departed (recent Hollywood movie) based on a Hong Kong movie (English title: Infernal Affairs) that has this very Buddhist message re: suffering and death (Chinese title actually refers to the worst part of hell, but as a metaphor for the life we experience and its suffering): death is a relief from suffering if you’ve cultivated yourself.