The Practice of Chinese Buddhism, 1900-1950 (Harvard East Asian) [Paperback]

Holmes Welch (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 592 pages
• Publisher: Harvard University Press (January 1, 1967)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674697014
• ISBN-13: 978-0674697010
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 5.5 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,849,481 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Amazing amount of detailed information, October 15, 2005

By 

C. Blomberg (Seoul, Rep. of Korea) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Practice of Chinese Buddhism, 1900-1950 (Harvard East Asian) (Paperback)

I wrote this for a class I am in: I've adapted it somewhat for this page.

Reading Professor Welch's book it is impossible not to feel deep admiration for the man. He has gone into the field to find elderly monks displaced by political changes from their home, scattered in the world. They were losing their memories of the time period he was studying, speaking to him in dialects of Chinese difficult for anyone not from the region to understand, and discussing a highly specific and complicated world which Professor Welch himself never got to experience before it was destroyed by the advent of Communist China. The work that he did, both in breadth and depth is fantastic. The resource that he constructed for students of Buddhism or Chinese history is invaluable. This does not mean however that the book is perfect.

Structurally the book is too much, and yet, too little. The level of detail is amazing, and yet, I repeatedly felt that the book should be divided and expanded so as to focus more thoroughly on things that were more similar. In this way we could have had several books (or books and academic articles) and each of them would have been able to keep closer to a single theme, allowing for stronger composition and making the book more accessible to the reader. A 569 page book is hard for the reader to tackle and even harder to see through to the end. There was (and is) such a variety of manifestations of Buddhist practice in China that a single book (even limited to one 50 year period) cannot properly encapsulate them all. The book tries by making generalizations, but then undermines each generalization with modifying statements about how this did not hold true in such and such a situation or location. This large amount of sometimes contradictory information being thrown at the reader was the largest downside to the book in my opinion. In order to confine the book more narrowly I would have considered separate books for the model monasteries and the rest, or a separate book for Kiangsu and the rest, and separate articles could have been devoted to analyzing motivation to become a monk, attitudes of lay people towards the temples, and the financial aspects of supporting large temple organizations. Though I appreciate how Welch has tried to weave all of this information into one book, the fact that he would spend just a few pages dealing with one issue (ordination of lay people) and a hundred pages dealing with the administrative structure of the temples made it clear that some of the information contained here might have been more appropriate for a separate article and brief mention in the book.

Naturally, after the previous week's examination of Wijayaratna's book on the Theravada texts we could see many similar topics (food, dress, interactions with laity) being carried out in very different ways by the Chinese monks. This should not be surprising, though. While Wijayaratna was discussing the ideal as described in the texts (not what was actually practiced) of the Theravada tradition, Welch confined himself to the practice by individual Mahayana monks more than 1,500 years after the Theravada texts were recorded. One author used texts as a source, the other individuals. One author covered the southern branch, another the northern (shouldn't that be called eastern?). While the differences were interesting, and certainly came to mind as I read, having been exposed to the differences between the two practices in real life (not in texts) I did not find it surprising, with one exception.

I hate to dwell on the issue of ascetics, since obviously that's the flashy thing that sticks in everyone's mind, but I am not familiar with any ascetic practice other than hermetic retreats being accepted in Theravada today, and yet in Mahayana there is (contrary to the Vinaya) a certain degree of respect for flashy (self-indulgent?) ascetic practices. Being an ascetic is, in my understanding, not following the Middle Way, and therefore it means being a poor Buddhist, and yet, asceticism is something that I cannot help respecting. How else but with awe can we encounter the stories of monks who took vows of silence, or even the monks who immolated themselves? It would be interesting to know if asceticism has had any resurgence within Theravada as well.

As I already pointed out during class, the part of this book that moved me the most, and again I begin to cry thinking of it, is the amazing dedication and faith of a man who can devote his entire life from the teenage years on to achieving understanding in this Buddhist method, make no major progress, and yet, never give up. The beauty that we can see in any monastic, be it Buddhist or not, is the purity of belief that allows one to give up so much of what makes life what it is for laypeople in order to attain an understanding that is not essential to the organism in which our souls are housed. Becoming a monk or nun has an undeniable pure beauty.

The life-changing decision to become a monastic restricts not just job prospects but interactions with the entire rest of the world so drastically that I could compare it to choosing your spouse, job, dwelling place, and university major all at once. Welch, despite admitting that he could not make a clear pronouncement of reasons to become a monk; due to the varying recollections, the desire to make worthy answer, and the long passage of time still attempted to draw some conclusions. The individual case studies he included were something I read with interest. When I myself encounter a monk (a Mahayana monk) this is always one of the first things I want to ascertain. What led them to decide they didn't need all these comforts, all these regular attainments? Did they never feel the need for a house to call their own to modify as they wish? Or a family with children to pray at the ancestral tablet, sexual relations, freedom to dress, freedom to move, freedom to change careers? I could go on, but it's beyond doubt that it takes a special sort of person to give up lay life, even though they may say they did so to escape the hardships of keeping food on the table and a roof above I feel more likely that they felt a deep affinity with temple life, perhaps unvoiced or unrealized even to themselves. Otherwise they could easily have chosen a different path to escape the stress of being a layman. I cannot think of any true way to study the motivation in joining a monastic order, but it would be interesting to try a long-term panel study tracking their feelings towards giving up lay life, entering and an order and their level of satisfaction. I tend to think that most monks must have a higher level of satisfaction than the lay people scrambling to get by. After all, how often does one meet a depressed monk?

Welch spends a disproportionately large stretch of the book explaining the financial realities of the temples and life as a Chinese Buddhist monk. I am sure this is in large part because of the frequent accusations of monks as parasites, or businessmen, often leveled by Christian missionaries who wanted to discredit their competition. I found this part of the book interesting, but it left many unanswered questions. How did the monks justify money lending? Welch says that they offered a fair rate of interest, but at the start, what was their feeling about the appropriateness of money-lending? Did they feel like what they were doing was a sort of micro-credit community support effort similar to some of the exemplary efforts in India and Bangladesh today, or were they merely making money in another way? What about their business as landlords, were rents for temple-owned land higher, lower or the same as rents for other land owners? An interesting study, though now impossible, would be to see how the rate of rent payment was better or worse to the temples than to other land-owners. Did the locals feel they had a higher responsibility to a temple that would use their rice or barley to feed many chanting and meditating monks or did they feel it was safer to stiff the monks than it would be some other landlord who might more quickly resort to extortion to get his money back?

I cannot conclude my evaluation of this book without mentioning that "The Practice of Chinese Buddhism" was not written for a beginning student of Buddhism, it would be hard for someone without some background study under their belt to understand everything here. I am not criticizing the book for this, I enjoy not having `dharma' explained to me in every book on Buddhism I read. It has excellent resources for further study in the many exhaustive appendices. I would hazard a guess though that if Welch had published some of these appendices as separate articles in journals they would have gotten a wider readership, for example, the appendix on the Meditation Hall schedule is incredibly detailed, a marvelous stand-alone resource. Though we cannot reproduce Welch's research since these old monks he used as sources have now passed on, with the even handed approach Welch took to the subject matter and the way he clearly explains his research methods I am confident that he has drawn an accurate picture of Kiangsu Province Buddhist practice in the first 50 years of the Twentieth Century. I am grateful for his hard work and am sure I'll refer to this book again in the future.