[
    {
        "id": 204335,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1961",
        "page_number": 103,
        "title": "RAS-1961",
        "content_text": "Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Hong Kong Branch ORASHKB and author\n\nVol. 1 (1961)\n\nISSN 1991-7295\n\n99\n\nIn general, lay Buddhists have been increasingly active here over the past twenty years, particularly in social welfare work. The Sangha, which had declined almost to the vanishing point by 1949, was restored in size and quality by an influx of refugee monks (estimated at 800-1,000) in the early 1950's. Most of these, however, gradually moved on to other areas. With one or two exceptions the monasteries now tend to be static and withdrawn. Though nunneries, like lay organizations, have taken an increasingly active role in social welfare, the initiative in many cases has come from laymen.\n\nThus we may say that Buddhism in Hong Kong fits into the pattern of Chinese Buddhism as a whole over the past hundred years; revitalization of faith and practice among laymen, sparked by a few really able monks, whose talents stand in all the greater contrast to those of most of their brethren.\n\nII. ORGANIZATION OF THE SANGHA\n\nThe monastic institutions of Hong Kong, like those of China proper, are individual entities, not subject to the authority of a patriarch or any other central organ of the school to which they belong. It is best, in fact, not to think of them as belonging to distinct and separate schools. In any given monastery one monk may \"study Ch'an\" while another \"studies Pure Land\". Monasteries are usually classified according to the school of the abbot and a change of abbot can mean a change of classification. Thus the Chuk Lam Monastery in Tsuen Wan was once Ch'an, is now Pure Land, but shelters monks of other schools, like the Esoteric disciple of the great T'aai Hui [T'ai Hsü], who was himself of the Idealist School. Generalizing, one might say that whereas religious tolerance in India and Tibet is usually based on an awareness of the difference between one's own doctrines and those of one's neighbour, tolerance in China is more often based on a desire to unify all religious doctrines and a belief that it can be done. That is why I spoke above of \"3,400 purportedly Buddhist laymen.\" Some of them may be equally interested in or influenced by Taoism or one of the popular syncretistic sects in Hong Kong. This is not to assert that there is no awareness in Hong Kong that Buddhism is divided into schools. At the Tung Wah Hospitals Prayer Meeting, last held September 6-13, 1958, there were separate altars for Wah Yim [Hua Yen]; Pure Land; Mat Tsung [Mi Tsung or Esoteric School]; Faat Wah [Fa Hua]; while monks of other schools participated in prayers at three common altars. The place of honour in the entire meeting was given to the venerable abbot T'aam Huilt [Tan Hsü], whose school is T'in T’oi [T'ien T’ai or Fa Hua].",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1961.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/vd6724704",
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    {
        "id": 204422,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1962",
        "page_number": 54,
        "title": "RAS-1962",
        "content_text": "# THE BUDDHIST CAREER\n\n45\n\nAt the top of the hierarchy was the abbot, fang-chang 方丈. He was chosen in such a variety of ways that I shall only mention two. The first was called selecting the worthy, hsüan-hsien 選賢. It meant that at the end of the old abbot's three-year term (there was a limit of three terms) the head monks of the monastery and the elders of the neighbouring monasteries would consult with one another to decide who would make a worthy successor. It was not easy because someone had to be found who was qualified both as an administrator and as a teacher, and the trouble was that, even when found, he might be unwilling to serve. Very few monks wanted the responsibility of running a big monastery. What they wanted was hsiu-hsing, to practise religious exercises. So if they heard that they were about to be named abbot, they would silently depart by night. As a last resort those charged with finding a new abbot might get half a dozen candidates to draw lots in front of Buddha's image. This way Buddha himself made the selection and there was no escape for the reluctant.\n\n3\n\nA simpler and far more widespread method than the \"selection of the worthy\" was for the abbot himself to decide which of his disciples should succeed him and then to train him for his future responsibilities. In some famous monasteries this would always be one of his dharma disciples fa-t'u 法徒, not a \"tonsure disciple, t'i-tu ti-tzu 剃度弟子\" and, of course, not a Refuges disciple, kuei-i ti-tzu 歸依弟子. A dharma disciple was a younger monk to whom, in theory, the master had handed on his understanding of the dharma in a direct “imprinting of mind on mind, hsin hsin hsiang yin 心心相印.” In testimony thereof the master gave him a dharma certificate fa-chüan 法券 which stated that he, the master of such-and-such a generation, had received the dharma from so-and-so of the previous generation, who received it from so-and-so of the generation before, all the way back through forty or fifty generations to patriarchs like Nagarjuna or Bodhidharma, the founders of the T'ien-t'ai and Zen sects. The dharma certificate was the highest document conferred in the monastic career. It established formally that a monk belonged to a given sect, though there was nothing to prevent him from...\n\n* i.e., not a monk whose head he had shaved and whom he had trained before ordination,",
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    },
    {
        "id": 205144,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1966",
        "page_number": 100,
        "title": "RAS-1966",
        "content_text": "FOREIGN RELATIONS OF BUDDHISM\n\n11 Yin-shun, T'ai-hsü, p. 213.\n\n12 Eastern Buddhist 3.2 (July-September, 1924), 190.\n\n95\n\n13 Chinese lay devotees went to Japan to learn Tantric Buddhism from Shingon masters. Chinese monks went for academic study (two in 1936 and two more in early 1937; see Chinese Year Book 1937, Shanghai, 1937, p. 73.\n\n14 That is, the Chung-jih fo-chiao hui. At about the same time the Sino-Japanese Tantric Association (Ching-jih mi-chiao hui) was established. See Chinese Year Book 1937, p. 73.\n\n15 Takada, p. 14.\n\n16 Takada, p. 24-36, lists a total of eleven temples established between 1876 and 1937, but on p. 14 he speaks of ten temples having been set up before 1937 and of forty-nine (not forty-six) being in operation as of December, 1942. It seems clear that he does not include temples that have gone out of operation, like those in Nanking and Changsha (see note 2), and possibly those in Fukien. The only temple outside Shanghai that survived from the era before 1937 was the Honganji temple in Hankow, established 1906, which in 1942 had 1,200 Japanese and 150 Chinese parishioners.\n\n17 For example, in 1942 at the original Honganji temple in Shanghai the number of Japanese parishioners was 4,930 and the number of Chinese was zero. This temple was obviously not engaged in missionary work, but exclusively in serving the Japanese community.\n\n18 Two officers of the Ching-an Ssu in Shanghai are said to have been arrested and in Canton the abbot of the Liu-jung Ssu, T'ieh-ch'an, was executed.\n\n19 H. G. Quaritch Wales, \"Buddhism As an Instrument of Japanese Propaganda\" Free World 5.5 (May 1943), 428.\n\n20 Takada, p. 1, states that the alliance was set up in April 1937 in accordance with the policy formulated in October 1938. Perhaps the first date is a misprint.\n\n21 Takada, pp. 1, 4, 5. The changes in the bureaucratic status of the Great Harmony Religious Alliance appear to have been as follows. After being set up under the military authorities, it was transferred to the liaison office of the Central China Liaison Office of the Office for the Resurgence of Asia (Koain), which had been set up in December 1938 directly under the Cabinet in order to formulate policy on and handle relations with China. In April 1942 the Alliance was placed under the supervision of the Foreign Ministry through its representatives in Shanghai. In November 1942 it seems to have been returned to the Office for the Resurgence of Asia, when the latter was integrated into the Ministry for Great East Asian Co-Prosperity.\n\n22 Takada, pp. 24-36.\n\n23 The most significant absentee was Yüan-ying, the national head of the Chinese Buddhist Association (Shanghai, 1929).\n\n24 H. Hackmann, A German Scholar in the East, pp. 118-119. John Blofeld, who visited Wu-t'ai Shan in 1937, describes a monastery with several hundred monks where \"the main pavilion... was arranged in the Chinese way, but many services were held in a smaller building where purely Tibetan rites were performed\" (Jewel in the Lotus, London, 1948, p. 97).\n\n25 Fa-p'u, a disciple of Ta-yung, is stated to have reached Lhasa and earned a ko-hsi degree. Yin-shun, T'ai-hsü, p. 17.\n\n26 Chinese Year Book 1937 (Shanghai, 1937), p. 73.\n\n27 Shirob Jaltso, for example, was a member of the People's Political Council (1938-1949); an alternate member of the Kuomintang Sixth Super-",
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        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/bz60k0811",
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    },
    {
        "id": 216041,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-2002",
        "page_number": 340,
        "title": "RAS-2002",
        "content_text": "274\n\nThere also used to be an early Buddhist shrine dedicated to the former abbot of renown, Fa Hai, concealed in a cave on the hillock. In recent times the few foreign tourists visiting Zhenjiang have been perplexed by the description of Jin Shan being an island when it is so obviously part of the mainland. The reason is all too obvious. Alluvial silt left by the Yangzi floods down the past hundred and fifty years has not only completely joined the island to the mainland but also reclaimed part of the River, land now used for agriculture. 19th century western accounts of the town usually tended to begin with a description of the view from the Yangzi of the pagoda of the temple on the island of Jin Shan or, during the storming of the town by British forces in 1842, of troops being disembarked on the mainland across the strip of water at that time still separating Jin Shan from the mainland.\n\nAccording to Doré's description of the Jin Shan temple following his visit during the early days of the twentieth century, \"the visitor was confronted on entering with the Falstaffian figure of the Buddha Maitreya [Mile Fo], the Buddha of the Future, squatting in his turret as guardian of the precincts. Behind him opens out a vast vestibule at the sides of which are four gigantic statues - about fifteen feet in height - of the Four Heavenly Kings, Si Da Jingang, inner guardians of the monks and the monastery. Crossing the inner court, one entered the great Hall. On the altar were two Buddhist triads. Facing North are gigantic statues of Sakyamuni, Yao Shi Fo and Mile Fo, the Buddhas of the Present, Past and Future. Beside Sakyamuni in the centre, stand his two disciples, the old Kasyapa and the young Ananda. Right and left of the altar are the two guardians Li, the Pagoda-bearer and Wei Tuo. Facing South is the Triad San Da Shi: Guan Yin, Wen Shu and Pu Xian. Guan Yin rides over the waves on a sea monster; near by are the rocks of her sacred isle, Pu Tuo and, in between these, sundry immortals and Buddhas were housed. The Golden Boy, Shan Cai and the Naga Maiden, Long Nu are conventionally in attendance on Guan Yin whom the authorities in the temple recognise as formerly having been a god - not a goddess\".\n\nThe second large Hall was the Hall of the Yangzi Spirit, Jiang Shen [Spirit of the River]. Serving as a military barracks at the time of Doré's visit “it retained of its former glories only one ordinary-sized statue of the god, in a lateral niche, viz. a fish about three metres in length carved in wood with a copper plaque providing the honorific",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278",
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    },
    {
        "id": 216043,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-2002",
        "page_number": 342,
        "title": "RAS-2002",
        "content_text": "276\n\nThe fight between Lady White Snake and the monk Fa Hai leading to the flooding of Jin Shan\n\nA popular and well-known opera, Bai She Chuan, tells of Lady White Snake's fall from grace and of her eternal imprisonment under a pagoda. It begins with a small white snake which, having been both virtuous and devout for many thousands of years, became immortal and could change at will into the form of a beautiful young maiden. As a snake she had been saved from death by a compassionate man and would have to repay the debt at a future date. She discovered that the man, in his latest incarnation, was a young scholar, Xu Xian, living in Hangzhou and after recruiting as her maid a small blue snake who too could change into a young woman, she returned to Earth having been warned by the Xi Wangmu, the Goddess of the Western Heaven, not to abuse her magical powers.\n\nShe met the young scholar and they promptly fell in love. She explained that she was the daughter of a deceased army officer and lived in some style in a large house, produced by her magic, on the lakeside at Hangzhou. They were soon married and set up a herbalist store in which all three helped prepare and sell the medicines. White Snake enabled her husband's recipes gain widespread fame by the addition of a small addition of a magical powder and their fortunes were made. However, Xu began to be suspicious of the personality and origins of his wife and went to consult his old teacher, the Abbot Fa Hai at his monastery, Jin Shan Si, on the island in the Yangzi and sought his advice. The Abbot too was suspicious and gave Xu a potion to add to his wife's drink which would change any non-human back into its true self. To his horror his wife was revealed in her herpetological form and he, petrified, dropped dead with fright.\n\nThe power of the potion soon wore off and when White Snake found that her beloved husband was dead she went off to the Western Heaven to obtain herbs of resuscitation. Her husband, now recovered, was unable to get over his experience and lived a life of nervous apprehension. He returned to his teacher and explained what had happened. The Abbot explained that he too feared for Xu as both his wife and her maid must be transformed snakes who could do him great harm. Xu remained in the monastery in hiding. His anxious wife set out to find him and was met by the Abbot who ordered her away.\n\nShe",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-2002.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/mp4901278",
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