This article offers a preliminary estimate of what has happened to Buddhists and Buddhist organisations in mainland China during the eleven years since the Chinese People's Republic was founded. Much of the data belongs to the year 1958 when the most rapid changes occurred. Early in 1959, the China mainland press, from which nearly all the data comes, began to give less news on Buddhism. In November 1959 the most important single source, Modern Buddhism, was withdrawn from general circulation abroad. Several sentences in the October number, suggest that Peking had become increasingly sensitive to stories of a persecution of Buddhism, and had resolved that the mainland press, at least, would not supply any more evidence of it. The picture is fairly complete, however, with the evidence already in hand.
On 3 August 1966 a brief dispatch was included in the English service of the New China News Agency. That day, it said, the Chinese Buddhist Association had given a banquet in honour of a group of visiting Japanese Buddhists, members of the Shingon sect, led by Juncho Onozuka. The day before they had joined in performing a religious ceremony at the principal Peking monastery; and the day after, 4 August, they were received by Kuo Mo-jo.
China was the second country in the Buddhist world to have a Communist government. The first was Mongolia. But Mongolia was isolated both geographically and by its form of Buddhism (shared only with Tibet). Chinese Buddhists, on the other hand, had been building closer ties with their brethren in South-East Asia for more than half a century. Their form of Buddhism was less remote from South-East Asian forms and they felt the same need as South-East Asian to fit Buddhism into a national revival.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.