every year there is a huge bunch of chinese scholars and professors publishing new books exploring issues of religion and faith behind the scenes in the everyday life of chinese. seeing them struggling with this issue in an atheist country has made me believe it a wise decision to give up being a researcher in religion and spirituality.
i do not count rosary beads, daven or meditate, though i would definitely worship Buddha if given the chance at no cost - unlike churches, Buddhist temples in China usually require visiting fee, and sometimes even more. still all the incomes are to be shared with local authorities, forming a weird bond in between.
as an undergraduate majoring in liberal arts, i often took courses in ethnography such as "medical sociology". but, i admit, the classes that i enjoyed most engage more-specific subjects, like rehabilitation of drug addicts through religion in minority groups in southwestern China. i want to know the ethical decisions that the poor minority chinese had to make and document the hard conversation with state laws prohibiting religious or spiritual activities that precede their decisions, when things were inevitably getting difficult.
i tried to learn how these minorities lived, based on the importance of religion and spirituality to them, and the things they cared about. i was interested in how these very different sets of Chinese people could stick to their spiritual traditions and practice them in their very day-to-day lives, after being controlled by the atheist communist ruler after half a decade.
No comments:
Post a Comment