Commercialized Contextuality

A highlight of my vacation back to Southeast Asia is my foray into Hong Kong, and by "foray", I meant I I left the airport and entered Kowloon.  It was wonderful.  The historic Peninsula Hotel had a special online offer, so we snagged a room at a relatively affordable price (relative to other hotels in Hong Kong).  And yes, the stereotype is blissfully true: Hong Kong is a sinful place - sinfully good place to eat!  Even the Starbucks here is more "roasty" that the ones I've had in Singapore, Malaysia, and in some places in the USA. 

My grandmother is Buddhist, so we took her to Po Lin Monastery.  Now, I must clarify that by "Buddhist", I really am saying that she's an "opportunistic Buddhist".  She's the type that goes to the Temple only when she needs to ask something of the gods (which is strange, because Buddhism technically is non-theistic, but more on that later).  Before we criticize her, we must note that many Christians are like that too - they go to church only because they want God to do something.  I suppose such is the effect of the modern market economy - the temptation is to commoditize everything and to reduce religion into a means to obtain material things.  One of the things we need to be wary of in Christianity is precisely that - that we see God as a means to achieve something, be it material wealth or even grace, love, and salvation!  For these virtues, these graces have been already made available to us.  In fact, it is because God extended grace to us, because God loved us, because God saved us that we can really reach out and own that grace, love, and salvation.

Po Lin Monastery is an example of religious commodization gone terribly awry.  It is one of the wealthiest religious institutions in Hong Kong, if not the wealthiest.  The monastery dates from 1906, but as it drew the attention of progressively wealthier Buddhists, it received gifts of art and relics, prompting even more donations.  Eventually enough donations (totaling $6.8 million) were secured to build the Tian Tan Buddha, the world's largest outdoor and sitting Buddha made of bronze.  Underneath the Buddha, the monastic authorities built two funerary complexes and a museum to house the gifts of art.  The first floor (a funerary complex) consists of walls with small marble slabs with names on it.  Families pay upwards of US$ 750 for each slab with their beloved's name on it, for Chinese Buddhist necrology suggests that when people die, their souls need a place to reside.  Without those named slabs, these souls would wander, thereby becoming the ghosts that afflict the living.

This commodization becomes apparent on the third floor (second floor is the museum).  The third floor consists of walls with those marble name-slabs, but they are bigger and cost much more.  That's because there's a reliquary on the floor (one of the 15 known fragments of the Buddha left after his cremation).  I do not know how much it costs to secure one of those marble slabs near the reliquary, but my guess, given that only 1/8th of the floor's walls were covered, it must be more than US$5,000 per slab.  And that's not all.  The monastery has financed the construction of their large assembly room called the Halls of the Ten Thousand Buddhas, which promises to be yet another tourist trap as well as a glamorous worship place.

I'm not one to lambast Buddhism per se, but there's something awry when religious institution evolves into a business one.  Now, I suppose there's not much of a problem if the religion is all about business, but Buddhism is not one of them (and neither is Christianity).  If I'm correct, Buddhism is a personal quest towards enlightenment, which is a metaphysical divorce from the aspects of the world that bring trouble and instability.  Prince Gautama, the Buddha, was the first to achieve this enlightenment through meditation under a bodhi tree after seeing a lot of social injustices.  Yet, Buddhism at least in China is far from this.  On the second floor of the Tian Tan Buddha (the museum) there was a huge wooden mural painted by a Sri Lankan artist.  The centerpiece of the mural was Buddha, of course, but around him were about a hundred Chinese deities, each in charge of an aspect of Chinese life, from war to fertility to learning to any and everything.  I'm sure, if you look hard enough, there's one that governs GPA and another with Drew Gilpin Faust on it (she's the president of Harvard University).

As part of the monastery tour we had lunch at the monastery's vegan restaurant, where the moist serviettes had a ditty written on it: "Do Good, Meditate Peacefully, Store up Merit."  The "store up merit" part is, in my understanding of Buddhism, a later theological addition to Buddhist teachings.  I suspect it is always a part of human nature - the idea that if we do something, we get something good after death.  Death, indeed, is quite scary because it is the ultimate uncertainty.  In a world where science has demystified many unexplained aspects of life, we have often reconfigured religion to make certain that ultimate uncertainty.  My conjecture is that original Buddhism offered no quantitative solution to the question of death.  And so, as it evolved, the "storing up merit" theology entered Buddhism, particularly in utilitarian-leaning China, in order to fill in that "deficiency."  Thus, in a way, the "storing up merit" is a contextualized Buddhism that adapted to a new culture so that the Chinese could still call Buddhism a "native" religion even though its origins were Indian.  Buddhism changed from a quest for self-removed quest for metaphysical divorce from the world to achieve enlightenment to a self-involved pursuit of merit by attaining the acts necessary to attain enlightenment. The same can be said of Japanese and Tibetan Buddhism, which is very different than Chinese Buddhism.

Of course, as religious people we cannot withdraw from participation in the market economy.  But we must be careful and ensure that we choose what is traded on the market instead of letting all aspects of life be commoditized.  Religion is one of them.  The theology of merit attainment is particularly susceptible to commoditization because it feeds easily into the free market rhetoric of those who work and risk more earn more.  The more you risk in life by giving more to the Monastery, by sending a son to be a monk, to spin prayer wheels instead of running a business, to ensure your descendants buy choice marble-slab property, the better afterlife you will attain.  The Catholic Church immediately prior to the Reformation crossed the line by misconstruing the institution of indulgences - an act of grace - as a means for financial income.

But then again, perhaps what I saw at the Po Lin Monastery is a form of contextualized Buddhism - contextualized to a capitalist Hong Kong.  Of course, a "capitalist Buddhism" is not the same as the Buddhism that originated from Prince Gautama Buddha.  Buddha himself left a life of great wealth and comfort precisely in his search for enlightenment.  Which takes me back to the question of a contextualized Christian theology.  One can ask whether Christianity can indeed be so contextualized.  Technically, yes, but we risk decoupling Christianity from its orthodox roots.  Christian theology speaks and interprets the present from the perspective of the God who is spoken of in the Scriptures.

The trouble, however, is that we don't realize that how we read the Scriptures is often conditioned by our cultural contexts.  Chinese parents easily misconstrue the Fifth Commandment to mean absolute obedience when the Hebrew word for "honor" does not imply blind obedience.  But the fact that Chinese exegeses of the Fifth Commandment fail to note this nuance since the first missionaries entered China shows how difficult it is to realize that our exegeses are not really exegeses but eisegeses (reading our views into the text, therefore forcing the text to say what we want it to say).  That bibles such as "The American Patriot's Bible" can be published is yet another example of that.  Even the erroneous notion that our faith revolves around Scriptures (note: it revolves around God) is a product of the fundamentalist resurgence in the 1960s.  Luther, to be sure, was careful that sola Scriptura did not devolve into a worship of the Bible.

Yet, we cannot but read Scripture from our cultural contexts.  Thus, it is absolutely important that Christianity (and the art of reading Scripture) is (1) lived out corporately, not individually, and (2) we can only know how to interpret our present on the shoulders of our theological forebears.  Evangelicals, to be sure, were notoriously poor at building on the theological foundations of Christians in the past, although the fact that there is a Institute for Early Christian Studies at Wheaton College shows that this weakness may be a thing of the past.  The Chinese on the mainland are struggling with moral issues on many fronts, and building a Confucius statue (as the government did) ain't gonna help.  What is needed is an appreciation of the past and using it to interpret the present.  This, of course, is ideologically difficult as the Communist Party came to power as a rebellion against the past.  But when we understand our past, we are able to view rightly the issues of the present.

Methinks that the Buddhists at Po Lin Monastery have precisely lost this important concept, that the past speaks to the present.  And as a result, Po Lin is not so much a temple to Buddhism than it is a tourist trap.  Just like the relic of Gautama Buddha, which we awe and gawk at but have no access to his teachings through it, Po Lin has become a place where tourists awe and gawk at while gaining no knowledge of what Buddhism really is about.  To put it frankly, you won't find Buddhism at Po Lin Monastery. And if the Church does not understand her past, she, too, could end up becoming like Po Lin.  Unfortunately, in many places around the world, it's already happening.