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BOOK REVIEWS
THE PRACTICE OF CHINESE BUDDHISM 1900-1950 by Holmes Welch, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1967, pp. xxii, 568.
Chinese religion is, to say the least, an exasperating field of study to enter for both specialist and general reader alike. You cannot but be fascinated by the richness of the material, but you cannot help your head spin either at the equal richness of controversy among the experts on the meaning of it all. Be it religion as a whole (was China essentially a religious country?), or one of its many parts, it is difficult to obtain a balanced picture.
In this beautifully written book, aimed at both specialist and general reader (I consider it a "must" for the specialist) Mr. Holmes Welch bravely enters the arena to examine the practice of Chinese Buddhism anew. Many of our readers will recall him as a former member of the Society's Council and author of an article on Buddhism in Hong Kong (Volume I of the Journal). His focus for attention here is Buddhist institutions in mainland China during the first half of this century, and his objects twofold: to give us new material and new detail, and at the same time correct some misleading statements and impressions which have been "echoed and re-echoed until now they are generally accepted".
As the author points out: "When modern Buddhism is discussed in almost any Western book about China, we find vivid descriptions of the commercialism, illiterates, and vice, but seldom a word about the piety, scholarship or discipline." But how to get a true picture? To discover if there is another side? Mr. Welch uses two methods. One is the increasingly popular "oral history" approach: by collecting data in intensive interview with Buddhist monks now living overseas. Here, as his anecdotes show, he came right up against the kind of scholarly prejudice concerning interview of people to obtain religious information known to all contemporary workers in the field. The other approach was documentary, using in some cases rare, or rarely known about, Buddhist monastic materials. Some of his data in the book then, is based on one type of information, some on the other, and he also sometimes combines the two.