Barend J. ter Haar. Practicing Scripture: A Lay Buddhist Movement in Late Imperial China. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2014. 312 pp. $50.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8248-3927-7.

Reviewed by Beverley F. McGuire (University of North Carolina Wilmington, Philosophy and Religion Department)
Published on H-Buddhism (October, 2015)
Commissioned by Gregory A. Scott (University of Edinburgh)

In Practicing Scripture, Barend J. ter Haar presents an extensive study of a religious movement commonly known as the Non-Action Teachings (wuweijiao 無為教)—also referred to as the Great Vehicle Teachings (dachengjiao 大乘教) and the Dragon Flower Gathering (longhuahui 龍華會)—that began in the late sixteenth century and continued until its repression by the Chinese Communist Party in the 1950s. Members of the movement were vegetarian, abstained from drinking alcoholic beverages, rejected statues and ancestor worship, and hoped to gain entrance into the Pure Land of Amitābha, which they called the Dragon Flower Gathering. Ter Haar argues that the movement was an innovative and intense form of lay Buddhist practice, rejecting traditional historiographical depictions of the movement as rebellious or deviant. He reiterates a point made in his previous book White Lotus Teachings in Chinese Religious History (1992) that one cannot assume traditional labels to be the proper names of real religious movements. He emphasizes the importance of distinguishing between labels that are the products of persecution rather than reliable analytical categories, and he insists that the Non-Action Teachings be studied separately from groups with a messianic orientation.

As a scholar whose research has focused on elite Buddhist monks in late imperial China, I enjoyed learning about a movement whose patriarch, early leaders, and later members came from less privileged backgrounds and considered themselves lay Buddhists, taking the Three Refuges and upholding the Five Precepts. I am impressed by the scope of the book, which spans the late Ming to the modern period, as well as the wide range of primary and secondary sources analyzed, including new sources, such as a late Ming/early Qing collection of conversion stories, two traditions of ritual manuals, Christian sources, a Precious Scroll (baojuan 寶卷) from the late Qing, and local gazetteers. I also appreciate ter Haar’s close reading of those sources, although readers who prefer tightly structured arguments may experience some frustration with his tendency to foreground the primary material instead of his own argumentation.

The title Practicing Scripture alludes to the central religious practice of the movement: reciting a text entitled the Five Books in Six Volumes (Wubu liuce 五部六冊), which members of the Non-Action Teachings attributed to a figure named Patriarch Luo 羅. Although we lack historically reliable information about him, Five Books in Six Volumes describes his journey from being a soldier to taking the bodhisattva precepts and attaining insight into emptiness. His religious narrative is written in vernacular Chinese and interspersed with quotations from the Buddhist canon, and ter Haar characterizes the members’ reading experience of the Five Books in Six Volumes as reverent and attentive, resembling Paul Griffiths’s notion of “religious reading” as opposed to a “consumerist” approach of critical commentary (p. 222).

The book is structured roughly chronologically, with the first half focusing on the early history of the movement, which ter Haar calls “the period of the charismatic leaders” (p. 119), and the second half discussing the Qing and Republican periods, and briefly the People’s Republic of China and postwar Taiwan. The first chapter gives a brief introduction to the movement and shows that sources on it provide a glimpse of local life, and proceeds to review previous scholarship and highlight this book’s contributions to the field.

The second chapter examines Patriarch Luo and the Five Books in Six Volumes. Ter Haar argues that the purpose of the text was to make the Buddhist canon accessible and to present an individualistic route to enlightenment that did not require external validation, a stance criticized by Buddhists in southern China, such as Mizang 密藏 (fl. 1581-93).

The third chapter discusses the lives of Ying Ji’nan 應繼南 (1527/1540-82) and Yao Wenyu 姚文宇 (1578-1646), who were accepted as important leaders by many in the early Non-Action Teachings movement. Based on a source produced from within the Yao lineage—the Overall Record of the Circumstances under Which the Three Patriarchs On-High Traveled and Taught (Taishang sanzu xingjiao yinyou zonglu 太上三祖行教因由總錄)—ter Haar examines their social networks, their competition with religious specialists, and their purported performance of rituals and miracles that attracted followers and political patrons, providing maps showing the geographical distribution of their pupils.

The fourth chapter claims that the Non-Action Teachings movement was a self-conscious community based on conversion stories from a text entitled Causes and Fruits of the Seven Branches (qizhi yinguo 七支因果), the dating of which is discussed in an appendix to the chapter. Members of the movement considered themselves Buddhist, evidenced by the fact that almost all of the conversion stories end with the ritual of Taking Refuge (guiyi 皈依) and the composition of a poem of enlightenment or gatha (jie 偈). Ter Haar argues that the movement was not marginalized but in fact appealed to different layers of the population, including women and those who were educated, even though it was demeaned and even actively persecuted at the end of the Ming dynasty.

The fifth chapter presents ter Haar’s case against previous scholars who insist that the movement was messianic since its members believed in Dragon Flower Gatherings (longhuahui 龍華會) associated with the prophecy that Maitreya would come to earth in the very near future. Ter Haar claims that such gatherings were instead understood as a kind of Western Paradise of Amitābha, and he emphasizes that no mention is made of a savior or concrete date in the near future when the world would come to an end, elements he considers to be part of a “complete messianic message” (p. 118). He argues that morality and devotional practice were central to the movement and reflected in their rituals: the Rituals for Taking Refuge initiating its members into its core doctrine and lifestyle, the Vegetarian Fast creating its community through a social meal, Lighting the Candles celebrating its scriptures, and the funerary ritual enabling its members to enter the Western Paradise. He discusses the ritual sequences in incredible detail. He further suggests that the creation of such fixed rituals facilitated the routinization of the movement during the Qing dynasty, and he discusses the dating of the ritual manuals in an appendix to the chapter.

The sixth chapter examines the case of the Old Official Vegetarians, a group repressed by the local government in 1748 and cited by some scholars to support their characterizations of the Non-Action Teachings as a messianic tradition. Ter Haar insists they were not messianic because they did not depict Maitreya as a savior, nor did they allude to apocalyptic disasters. Instead he notes the movement’s continued emphasis on religious practice reflected in an internal source from northern Fujian, “Transmission of the Dharma by the Patriarchs through the Ages” (lidai zushi chuanfa 歷代祖師傳法), which chronicles the Yao lineage from the mid-seventeenth century to the nineteenth century. He highlights a recurrent theme of the biographies being the degree to which individuals upheld the teachings by the “sacrifice of their body and bitter practice” (sheshen kuxing 捨身苦行) and by “protecting the Way” (hudao 護道), terms with strong Buddhist connotations (p. 180).

The seventh chapter discusses how in mainland China the Non-Action Teachings went from a widespread and well-established movement—evidenced by figures and a map showing the wide distribution of its groups in the early 1950s (p. 214)—to face eventual persecution, occasionally precipitated by Buddhist monks who deemed it heretical. It also gives a brief overview of the history of the movement in Taiwan.

The eighth chapter summarizes the arguments advanced in the course of the book. Ter Haar suggests that insofar as it was bound by a single text or textual community, the Non-Action Teachings was a relatively new type of movement in Chinese religious history. After exploring the social, gender, and geographical background of the movement, he reiterates his claim that the violent incidents caused by the Non-Action Teachings did not stem from a messianic or rebellious impulse, but rather from escalation arising from others’ intolerance. He concludes the book by noting important differences and similarities between the Non-Action Teachings and the European Reformation.

Although ter Haar admits that his study would have benefited from fieldwork that might have given a thicker ethnographic description of contemporary communities in mainland China and Taiwan, Practicing Scripture presents an otherwise comprehensive and impressive study of the Non-Action Teachings. It will be of particular interest to scholars of Buddhism and Chinese religions, as well as historians of late imperial and modern China.

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Citation: Beverley F. McGuire. Review of Haar, Barend J. ter, Practicing Scripture: A Lay Buddhist Movement in Late Imperial China. H-Buddhism, H-Net Reviews. October, 2015.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=45152

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