The Space of Religion

Based on three decades of ethnographic research, The Space of Religion takes readers inside the Nanputuo Temple in order to explore the practice of Buddhism in modern China and the complex relationship between Buddhism and the Chinese state.

Yoshiko Ashiwa is professor emeritus at Hitotsubashi University and visiting professor at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, Tokyo.

David L. Wank is professor emeritus at Sophia University and visiting researcher at the Oriental Library, Tokyo.

Ashiwa and Wank have worked together extensively, including coediting Making Religion, Making the State: The Politics of Religion in Modern China (2009).

Peter van der Veer, author of The Modern Spirit of Asia: The Spiritual and the Secular in China and India:
Ashiwa and Wank have written a superb account, both historical and ethnographic, of Nanputuo, one of the most important Buddhist temples in southern China. Based on decades of intensive study, this immensely readable book offers insights into the developments that have shaped the political environment in which the temple's clerics operate. It also gives a theoretically astute interpretation of the semiotics of space in the temple that allows the reader to get a feeling for the ways in which the teachings of the Buddha take material and ritual shape in the temple's space. For anyone interested in Buddhism or contemporary Chinese society this book is invaluable and a must-read.

David N. Gellner, coauthor of Rebuilding Buddhism: The Theravada Movement in Twentieth-Century Nepal:
The Space of Religion is far more than just a very valuable account of institutional change in a Buddhist context. It also outlines a fresh and important critical analysis, grounded in historical detail and exemplary ethnography, of how the concepts ‘religion,’ ‘superstition,’ and ‘culture’ emerged and were enacted (and contested) between the state, clerics, and the people over the last hundred years of Chinese history.

Ji Zhe, coeditor of Making Saints in Modern China:
The Space of Religion provides a detailed description through extended fieldwork of the functioning of an important Buddhist monastery in China and how the temple 'space' became recomposed on three levels—physical, institutional, and semiotic—after the Cultural Revolution. In doing so, Ashiwa and Wank produce an analysis of the transformation of state policies and related public perception of religion in China.

Richard Madsen, coeditor of The Sinicization of Chinese Religions: From Above and Below:
Based on extraordinarily rich ethnography, deep historical research, and a subtle theoretical framework, The Space of Religion shows how one of China’s most important temples reemerged, changed, and caused transformations of its political and cultural contexts over the past several decades. It makes a major advance toward understanding the surprising and consequential rise of a dynamic space for religion in China.