Is Buddhism a part of a civil religion to Chinese?

 

When I told my mother about the tragic story of students’ death from the fire disasters in Old Kenyon decades ago and the myths that some locations at Kenyon were haunted when I was about to move into Old Kenyon for my sophomore year, certainly I felt really sad for the students in the fire, but I didn’t really believe anything about the haunted myths. Still, my mother gave me the red pack in the picture. This is a pack of sand. Devout Buddhists had chanted the scriptures thousands of times to the sand and it is believed that the sand helps transcend the souls of deceased people to stop their sufferings and grant them happiness and peace. I’m not a Buddhist; neither do I know much about this religion. Still, I carried packs and packs of sand like this from half the world away to Gambier. In fact, there are countless people like me in China: we aren’t completely believers of Buddhism because we don’t regularly study Buddhism or spend time on ritual practices, but it’s also hard to say that we are not believers at all. We say “Amitabha” just like Americans say “bless you”. There is hardly anyone who’s disrespectful to Buddha because the influence and belief in the existence of Buddha are pervasive in China which sounds very similar to the status of Christianity and God in America. It makes me wonder whether there is also a modern religious reality beyond Buddhism but with sacred concepts from Buddhism that holds Chinese people together by reinforcing common social goals, values and cultures which would be termed as a “civil religion” in Bellah’s sense. It’s rare to see people associate Buddhism with politics in China. For example, Bellah points out times when American presidents mentioned God in their speeches, but Chinese presidents never talk about Buddha in their speeches. American civil religion also unites Americans by stressing that God is an American, but Chinese people aren’t usually concerned about the nationality of Buddha. The way Americans transformed their common beliefs in God into a civil religion that contains God but is more than the traditional religion leads them to believe in the same American dream and to pursue a pathway to a more prosperous, democratic and liberal society; this is probably not the case for China. Therefore, the pervasiveness of a traditional religion on a nation is a necessary but insufficient requirement for the birth of a civil religion based on a traditional religion. China, however, might have other civil religions that are not based on the concept of Buddha, but it must be something more implicit, which makes American civil religion such an explicit and outstanding case for research.