Lost religion

I’ve visited several temples in China in the last couple of years, and it has always been an uncomfortable experience. It doesn’t seem right that they charge entrance fees, tourists outnumber practitioners 10 to 1, and local people only seem to visit when they are praying for a good test score. Temples seem to be historical artifacts more than they are religious centers.

Much of what is going is probably due to China’s recent history. Though no longer to be abolished, religion is still tightly controlled in China, so there are few practitioners. If temples didn’t charge entrance fees, donations would not be enough to support them. The current culture in China is too economically competitive to foster a culture of charity, as prosperity is still a new concept that only members of the youngest generation are used to.

People find China fascinating for many different reasons. For me, it is observing the phenomena today that play out like social experiments no one would ever dare implement: What happens when a country is so overpopulated that it limits the number of children per family? What happens when you try to erase your entire history, then try to go back and claim it? And, the principal question here, What happens when you deprive an entire country of religion? If you look at a religious map of the world, China is a big black hole. Though one of the most ancient civilizations in the world, it is still searching for an identity.

It was during my trip to Korea that I realized that religion may not have been erased from just recent memory, but from China’s entire history. Religious symbols can be seen on old Korean buildings and artifacts, a Korean folk museum’s food section displayed Buddhist food, casual signs of a religious people that I never remember seeing in China. It is as if rulers were not religious, or that religion wasn’t a central force in their lives. Does China have such a different history, or has history been rewritten? It may be the former, but I never thought to even ask this question before, even as the CCP still controls freedom of information in China.

At least in terms of temples, going to Korea helped me resolve some of these feelings. Most of the population is religious (mostly Christian and Buddhist), and temples offer religious services on a regular basis, since they actually have congregations. Jogyesa was a bustling center when I visited. Stores sell Buddhist items as more than souvenirs, including jewelry with religious symbolism. Funny how much I didn’t notice when I was used to religion in modern China. I wonder what it’s like to grow up in an “atheist” nation your entire life?