and an anonymous reviewer. I have changed all the names of my informants and of some locations.
For many Chinese speakers in China and elsewhere, experiencing or connecting with matters of religion often includes mediation through or with material objects. Such mediation is readily accessible to larger and larger audiences and often occurs through the consumption of religious material goods, thanks also to media technologies and the Internet. In this article, the author seeks to complicate the notion that the production and consumption of novel Buddhist religious goods can be analyzed solely in terms of 'market theory.' While on the one hand the author shows that Buddhist technologies of salvation are historically associated with materiality, she also contends that the 'aura' of Buddhist-inspired modern religious goodsin the spirit of Walter Benjamin's essay 'On Some Motifs in Baudelaire' (1939)is not so much effaced as it is reconfigured and transformed by technological mediations. KEY WORDS Chinese Buddhism; religious goods; media and religion; consumption For many people, experiencing or connecting with matters of religion includes mediation through or with material objects or religious goods. In modern China, such mediation, often intensely personal, is readily accessible to larger and larger audiences. But what religious goods are consumed and who consumes them? At the more general level, a growing body of evidence suggests that religious goods are reaching millions of Chinese and Sinitic-language-speaking audiences both in their homes and hand-held devices, through all manner of audiovisual digital production and dissemination (Chandler 2004; Tarocco 2012). By beginning to map out the diffusion of some Buddhist-inspired religious goods, practices and strategies, I wish to complement ongoing research on the qualitative/symbolic significance of religious goods and shed further light on material religion in China. I will show that modern technologies and socioeconomic factors have contributed to the multiplication, accessibility and variety of Buddhist-inspired religious goods. By focusing on a few specific case studies related to the practice of Chinese Buddhism, I will argue that religious consumption is not a new or recent phenomenon. I will argue, too, that the production and consumption of religious goods defy a simple 'market-theory' model because it also encompasses Buddhist technologies
This chapter explores the multidimensional relationship between exceptional sites and the contexts in which they function by focusing on the emergence of the so-called Shanghai buddhascape of the 1920s and 1930s and its influence on the contemporary urban fabric. It describes Shanghai as a privileged site for understanding Buddhist-inspired self-fashioning and, more generally, the spatial tactics of Buddhist practitioners in the context of colonial modernity as well as global capitalism. It also considers the sensitivities of the urban cultural elite toward Buddhism and its presence in China's modern cityscapes. It argues that ordinary Shanghai urbanites find solace and purpose in Buddhist technologies of salvation.
The Treatise on the Mahāyāna Awakening of Faith, an indigenous Chinese composition written in the guise of an Indian Buddhist treatise, is one of the most influential texts in the history of East Asian Buddhism. Its outline of the doctrines of buddha nature (foxing), buddha bodies (foshen), and one mind (yixin), among others, served from the medieval period onwards as one of the main foundations of East Asian Buddhist thought and practice. The Treatise is putatively attributed to the Indian writer Aśvaghoṣa, and its current Chinese version was traditionally conceived of as a translation from an original Sanskrit text. In the course of the twentieth century, however, many important scholars of Buddhism have called into question the textual history of the Treatise. Even if the specific circumstances of its creation are still largely unknown, the view that the Treatise is an original Chinese composition (not necessarily written by a native Chinese) is now prevalent among scholars. Meanwhile, and for more than one hundred years, the text has also become a source of knowledge of Buddhism in the West thanks to a number of English translations. After examining the early textual history of the two existing versions of the text, this article will offer some examples of its modern appropriation by a novel group of readers and interpreters, an appropriation that took place during the first decades of the twentieth century amidst efforts to re-envision Chinese and East Asian Buddhist history and the place of Buddhism in modern society.
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