1 Chapter 1 Introduction As a Chinese Buddhist in Malaysia, I Have Been

Chapter 1 Introduction As a Chinese Buddhist in Malaysia, I have been unconsciously entangled in a historical process of the making of modern Buddhism. There was a Chinese temple beside my house in Penang, Malaysia. The main deity was likely a deified imperial court officer, though no historical record documented his origin. A mosque serenely resided along the main street approximately 50 meters from my house. At the end of the street was a Hindu temple decorated with colorful statues. Less than five minutes’ walk from my house was a Buddhist association in a two-storey terrace. During my childhood, the Chinese temple was a playground. My friends and I respected the deities worshipped there but sometimes innocently stole sweets and fruits donated by worshippers as offerings. Each year, three major religious events were organized by the temple committee: the end of the first lunar month marked the spring celebration of a deity in the temple; the seventh lunar month was the Hungry Ghost Festival; and the eighth month honored, She Fu Da Ren, the temple deity’s birthday. The temple was busy throughout the year. Neighbors gathered there to chat about national politics and local gossip. The traditional Chinese temple was thus deeply rooted in the community. In terms of religious intimacy with different nearby temples, the Chinese temple ranked first, followed by the Hindu temple and finally, the mosque, which had a psychological distant demarcated by racial boundaries. I accompanied my mother several times to the Hindu temple. Once, I asked her why she prayed to a Hindu deity. She explained that the Chinese shared some deities with Hinduism. My mother 1 represented a Chinese elder with a tolerant attitude towards most religion. Her attitude, however, differed towards Islam because of the historical ethno-religious divide between Chinese and Muslims in Malaysia. I never ventured into the mosque. My only contact consisted of overhearing the complaints and prejudices from some older men and women about the “morning call” of Azan (morning prayer) and the heavy vehicular traffic caused by weekly Friday prayers. The Buddhist association was a typical terrace house. Architecturally, it did not conform to my perceptions of what a Chinese temple should look like. It also lacked the temple’s traditional functions. I did not attend its religious activities. Unexpectedly, the Buddhism promoted by the Buddhist Association significantly influenced my sister and me while we grew older. I soon realized that the association was a member of a national Buddhist youth group, the Young Buddhist Association of Malaysia, which has promoted the establishment of Buddhist doctrinal classes for Chinese communities to cultivate a new Buddhist generation that could better understand the Buddha’s teachings. My mother’s flexible religious attitude was not a problem of family until my oldest sister and I received informal Buddhist education in a dharma class that was offered by a Buddhist society in our secondary school. “Religious tension” between my mother and my oldest sister erupted on several occasions when my sister criticized my mother’s practices as Mixin (superstitious). In later years, I echoed my sister’s beliefs. My mother could not understand why the Chinese belief practices she inherited and maintained were being challenged by her children. My thesis departs from my personal interest of family’s “religious conflict” and reactions and seeks to explore the context of a new way of understanding Buddhism amongst Malaysia’s ethnic Chinese communities. It looks at the processes 2 and outcomes of the Buddhist revitalization movement and its associated transnational connections. Lee and Ackerman (1997) associate Buddhist revitalization in Malaysia with the Chinese communities’ ethno-cultural assertion starting in the 1970s. By contrast, Tan (2000 & 2006) problematizes Lee and Ackerman’s hypothesis by arguing that Buddhist revitalization is not simply an ethno-cultural assertion. He encourages exploring the internal dynamics of Chinese Buddhism as possible contributing factors to the process of revitalization. Lee, Ackerman, and Tan have limited the studies scope of Buddhist revitalization in Malaysian context. My research advances Lee and Ackerman’s initial contribution and Tan’s hypothesis by focusing on the revitalization’s internal dynamics of its religious, political, and transnational dimensions. Buddhist revitalization in Malaysia is a religious modernization movement that has directly or indirectly linked with the reformism or revivalism of larger Buddhist world. Lee and Ackerman (1997) and Tan (2000, 2006) use the term Buddhist revitalization to signify the aggregate phenomenon of the reassertion, rationalization, reorganization, and reinterpretation of Buddhism (Lee & Ackerman 1997: 57-58; Tan 2000: 299 & 2006: 303). In fact, they refer to similar practices of religious revivalism in other parts of the world under the rubric of increasing rationalization. I define Buddhist revitalization as a phenomenon of strengthening Buddhism as a more organized religion through exchanges of new ideas of Buddhism from historically and contemporarily connected regional ties. This religious revitalization transplants elements of modern religion to different parts of the Buddhist world from Buddhist majority societies. The revitalization is triggered by the social and political transformations and the related processes used to control and 3 negotiate the discourses and resources to transform Buddhism to fit the modern category of “religion” as defined by the dominant discourse of modernity. No explanation is provided for the choice of the term by Lee, Ackerman, and Tan who used it as an accepted term in their studies. However, they cautiously choose the term “revitalization” rather than “revival” or “revivalism”. Tan (2006) explains the preference for the word “revitalization” to “revivalism”. Tan (ibid. 303) urges scholars to remove the “preconceived idea” of using the term revivalism. The term is problematic because “Islamic revivalism has a long history involving the conflict between the Muslim world and the Christian industrialized countries” (ibid). By referring to existing scholarship on this matter, I suggest two reasons to justify the choice of the term in the case of Malaysian Buddhists: the level of revivalism and the lack of a revivalist religious leader. Ling (1992) suggests that Chinese Buddhism in Malaysia was “revival without revivalism”. He argues that there are different levels of revivalism in Buddhist community and explains that in Malaysia, it happened “quietly and unobtrusively” (ibid.326). In other words: “The word ‘revivalism’ usually indicates that the noisy kind is the subject of discussion; it may indicate also that a strongly ideological element is present, just do the word ‘conservatism’, ‘socialism’, ‘Marxism’, and so on. The twentieth century revival and growth of Buddhism that has taken place in Malaysia can be seen as an example of the basically quiet kind” (Ling 1992: 326). According to the Encyclopedia of Religion, the main emphases of revivalism will be “denunciatory, militant, utopian, millenarian, etc” (Burridge 2005: 7784-7790). In comparison with religious revivalism, the Buddhist revitalization in Malaysia is “the quiet kind” that happened peacefully and carefully avoided and tolerated the sensitive issues that have arisen. 4 The emergence of a charismatic revivalist religious leader is important in many cases of religious revivalism, not only in Christian and Islamic traditions but also in Buddhist majority countries such as Sri Lanka.1 Malalgoda (1978) investigates the main “spiritual genealogies” of the Buddhist revivalist group in Sri Lanka from 1750 to 1900. Religious leaders were significant in reforming declining Buddhism in Sri Lanka with “impressive achievement” (ibid.262). Revivalist leaders in Sri Lanka are important in the religious rebuilding process. The reformist leader Anagarika Dharmapala redefined Buddhism in Sri Lanka and the role of monks to be more engaged with society and even involved in some political parties (Seneviratne 1999: 25-55). Dharmapala reinterpreted Buddhism “to give up the ritualism characteristic” (ibid.29) as it was currently practiced. Seneviratne (1999: 29 & 30) describes Dharmapala’s “past society image based on the Mahavamsa” as “utopia”. Dharmapala was actively involved in the Buddhist Theosophical Society. He also founded the Maha Bodhi Society to restore the site of Buddha’s Enlightenment in Bodh Gaya. By contrast, religious leaders in Malaysia use resources from larger Buddhist majority societies to promote their reformist agenda. Their reformist agenda is imported, borrowed, and reproduced and not internally created. With this transplantation of a reformist agenda from beyond Malaysia, religious leaders could only selectively promote suitable programs to the Buddhist community in Malaysia. Hence, the scope and depth of “revivalism” have been interrupted or possibly sobered after arriving of first generation Buddhist monks and nuns in Malaysia Since Malaysia’s independence from the British in 1957, the country has been plagued by contestations and tensions among different ethnic communities. The four main pillars of the foundation (Sida Zhizhu) of the Chinese communities, i.e., Chinese 1 Taixu served a similar role in the reinterpretation of Mahayana Buddhism in China. He influenced the future development of Mahayanists in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Chinese communities

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