Richard Smith:
It is nice to see you here on this lovely Friday when you might
be doing other things. My name is Richard Smith. I am Director
of Asian Studies at Rice and I am very proud and pleased to introduce
our guest speaker, Professor David Ownby from the University of
Montreal.
This talk today is sponsored by a number of people: Asian Studies,
the Center for the Study of Cultures, the History Department and
the Transnational Project of the Baker Institute. I am not going
to spend a lot of time introducing our guest. What I would like
to tell you is that he is a very distinguished scholar who has
written widely and quite brilliantly on various aspects of Chinese
religion, theory and practice -- probably more practice than theory
-- and is currently working on a book on the topic of today's
lecture, Falungong. The formal topic that you may have seen advertised
is "Falungong as a Cultural Revitalization Movement: An Historian
Looks at Contemporary China". I do not know anything else
to say except that I am very pleased to have Professor Ownby here.
He is really one of the towering scholars in the field of religious
studies and we are very fortunate to have him here. Without further
ado, David.
David Ownby:
And thank you all for coming. I will try to live up to that. I
am not sure I have ever towered before. As Rich said, I will talk
about Falungong from an historian's perspective because that is
what I am. I am an historian. I have worked on China from the
18th Century to the present day. If you have encountered Falungong
only from media reports, what you find, of course, is a very black
and white description. Either Falungong is a cult or it is not.
Either it is apocalyptic or it is not. It is either political
or it is not. The media, although I feel no need to say nice things
about them, are pretty much victims of a war of competing representations.
They do not really know what to make of Falungong. Even when journalists
attempt to describe Falungon's beliefs or practices or doctrines,
they are unable to say much more than that they are a mixture
of Buddhism, Taoism and folk practices. That is true enough but
it is rather like describing Baked Alaska as a combination of
starch and dairy products. It does not tell you why anyone would
want to eat it, it seems to me.
This Baked Alaska metaphor suggests that I think Falungong is
good or good to eat so I should make the important point here
that I am not a practitioner. I have gone to practice sessions.
I have done the exercises quite badly, although the instructor
managed not to giggle at me. I have marched with practitioners
in the streets of Toronto. I have spent a lot of time with these
guys. I have read most, if not all, of Li Hongzhi's writings in
English and Chinese a number of times. I have enjoyed my experiences
but I did not feel moved to become part of the group.
To the extent that it is relevant, I could tell you something
about my own personal background. I grew up in rural Tennessee
in the Bible Belt and my family was pretty much fundamentalist
Christian. And I remember very distinctly when I was a kid being
pressured to invite Jesus into my heart, which I did, but he did
not stay very long, and I am in no way religious now. I do not
for example take my children to church. I suspect when I think
about my academic interests that there is some small part of me
somewhere that would very much like to be religious, and that
is what drives me to study groups like the Falungong or the other
groups that I have studied. But by the same token the same Doubting
Thomas that kept Jesus from staying very long keeps me from joining.
So that is my background.
So I am not looking at it as a practitioner but rather as a historian.
I should explain to you a little bit the path by which I arrived
at this research topic. My first work was on the history of secret
societies in China, their origins in the 18th Century. These are
the Triads, the people you may know from gangster movies, Hong
Kong martial arts films. I looked at where they first came from
the 18th Century and of that work what interested me most were
the religious elements at the core of initiation rituals and various
other symbolic practices that the Triads engaged in. So having
finished that project, the next substantial project that I got
involved in was a popular religious tradition in North China,
a religious tradition that had much more written material than
the Triads did. The Triads did not write a lot, which made it
hard for an historian to get at them.
This next group that I studied wrote a great deal more, so I translated
their scriptures, I rode around the Hunan countryside in the Audi
of my Chinese colleague's work unit, investigating their practices.
It was really quite a good gig. If we had time for two lectures,
I would talk about the sort of guerilla research in the North
China countryside in those days. From there it was a fairly quick
and easy leap to the Falungong as there are many resemblances,
in terms of scriptures and practicees, for instance, between this
earlier tradition and the Falungong. Not necessarily the same
style of scripture but some of the preoccupations were shared
with the earlier religious tradition that I worked on. As Rich
said, I am hopeful that this will become a book but I am much
slower than Rich so we do not have any idea when this might materialize
but the project that I envision is the following. There are some
parts that are already pretty well underway. One thing that I
try to do and I will talk about it today is to connect Falungong
with the history of Chinese religion, which is pretty well unknown.
You cannot find this written up in any meaningful way anywhere,
and since this is my academic specialty this is one of the things
that I want to do is to try to put it into some kind of context
and make it meaningful.
Another part of the project that is pretty far along is a content
analysis of Li Hongzhi's writings, which is a fancy way of saying
I read them and say what I think about them. And that is supplemented
by fieldwork among Falungong practitioners in North America, of
which I have done a fair bit. I would love to do it in China,
but my wife will not let me. It seems counter-indicated for a
number of reasons for the moment.
The other part of the project that is also pretty well along now
is a study of the sociology of Falungong in North America, by
which I mean I go, with or without colleagues, to experience sharing
conferences and other events that the Falungong organizes. And
I circulate questionnaires, I do interviews, to get a sense of
who they are and what their stories are. So those projects are
all pretty well along and I can talk to them in some detail either
in the talk that I give or after if there are questions that you
would like to ask of me. Other parts of the project that I have
begun but still have a lot work to do would include a study of
Li Hongzhi himself. This is somewhat difficult because he does
not talk much about himself. A lot of rather silly things have
been written about him. It is kind of hard to get past the propaganda
to get at what he may be, but we do have videotapes that can be
studied and we can get a sense of what he represents and who he
is.
Another aspect that is surprisingly hard to write about is the
history of the movement. It is very recent, of course, but nonetheless,
people are now starting to put together a chronology so we know
at what point what happened. This would involve the history of
the organization in China, which is very interesting to me. The
matter in which the organization was set up. The problems that
Li Hongzhi may have had in controlling it. Many of his writings,
for instance, are addressed to people in the activities centers,
study centers, and cultivation centers in China, and he was dissatisfied
with the way that they were handling new recruits or new people
who came to cultivate, so it is very interesting to try to get
a sense of how that was set up, what the problems were. One aspect
that I will write is the State's suppression, in part from a historical
point of view, because the Chinese government has suppressed movements
like the Falungong hundreds of times over the course of Chinese
history. And having worked myself on the Triads and other religious
groups it is quite obvious that this is a repeat, even though
there are particular nuances, of course, that change with each
recurrence. Still I will be able to add some context, as well
as to try to put this in order. And one final aspect that I am
working on, together with a graduate student, is the Qigong movement,
the larger movement out of which Falungong emerged over the course
of the 1990s.
So I thought what I would do today would be to draw on two parts
of my study that are the furthest along and take questions on
other aspects or on those two as you wish. So I want to make two
big points. One is to try to describe where Falungong came from,
what it might mean in the context of modern Chinese religious
history. Not so much history as such, but just in the context
of Chinese religious history. And the point that I will try to
make there is that study of Falungong enables us to understand
a whole host of similar groups that we have known about in the
past but did not really know what their significance was. And
I am tempted almost to talk about a sort of Chinese popular fundamentalism
that would be a largest category into which we could place Falungong,
certain practices of Qigong, a whole range of historical examples
that I will go through today. And the second big point I will
try to convey, if we have the time, is to give you some sense
of how I read Li Hongzhi. Or in other words, to give you some
sense of what I think is his version of this fundamentalism, or
of what this larger category might be.
So let me begin then with the first big point I want to make,
that is to describe the larger religious context from which Falungong
emerged and to comment of the significance of this. In my opinion,
the Falungong, or the Qigong movement as a whole, are contemporary
reincarnations, with numerous and important alterations of a popular
religious tradition, or a number of related traditions, that date
back in their organized form to the middle of the Ming Dynasty.
We are talking about the 14th, 15th century here. In Li Hongzhi's
writings or in talking with practitioners, they will talk about
cultivation as the larger category to which Falungong or Qigong
belong. And that, of course, can go way back. They are all aspects
of cultivation that can go back to the very origins of Chinese
civilization probably. And we can find bits of what Li Hongzhi
talks about certainly in the very earliest Taoism and Buddhism.
But as an organized phenomenon this did not really happen on a
regular basis until after the mid Ming.
What we call this tradition is problematic. And for me as an historian
one of the most exciting things about working on Falungong is
it gives us a chance to rethink or to re-characterize a body of
knowledge that we have possessed for some time, but which has
been, in my opinion, inadequately characterized. What I mean by
that is, if you tried to go and read up on the antecedents to
the Falungong you would find in the existing literature basically
two terms to describe things that looked like Falungong prior
to the 20th Century. One term is the White Lotus.
Historically, White Lotus was a set of folk Buddhists lay practices
that dates back to the Song Dynasty. At the beginning it was holy
orthodox and it was simply designed for lay people who were deeply
interested in Buddhism, but not to the point of joining a monastery
or devoting their entire life to it. Over time it came to have
other connotations added to it. For instance, when you read in
the literature about this we find the following set of characteristics
attached to what is called White Lotus Folk Buddhism. The basis
of daily practice of this kind of faith would be moral behavior
very broadly defined. Mantras that were chanted, protective talismans
that were used for health or other purposes. Certain breathing
practices that often went with meditation, magical or folk means
to cure illness and to maintain health.
At a scriptural level, because this was a tradition that often
had scripture attached to it, we find a sort of universal salvation,
the idea that most people, if not everyone, should be saved. There
was evocation of a goddess known as the Eternal Venerable Mother
who had created mankind and now waited in her heaven to welcome
the elect back to her paradise. There was also a belief in a Buddhist
theory of history that saw time enfolding in terms of huge eons
known as kalpas or "jie"in Chinese. Many groups associated
with this tradition believed that the final kalpa was coming and
that its arrival would be accompanied by the descent of a particular
Buddha called the Maitreya, or future Buddha, who would usher
in a new age. This Buddha was often seen as having been sent by
the mother figure to save her children. Other times they were
seen as sort of separate figures, it depended on the group. Most
groups possessed scriptures of some sort that would have been
composed by group leaders. These would not be scriptures that
were orthodox in the sense that they would have been produced
by people belonging to the Buddhist clergy. Instead it would be
generally lay figures who compose their own scriptures. Sometimes
they were handed down in hereditary ways, so it was not the case
that every group had to write its own scripture. That would be
rather demanding, it seems to me. The contents of these scriptures
emphasize morality, magic, and a whole variety of other themes.
These groups were also, on several occasions, implicated in rebellion.
Now the thing to note about this, and I am being sort of unclear
about it because the whole thing is rather unclear, is that there
were groups that resembled the composite that I just described
for you. But more often when you find the word "White Lotus"
used in a Chinese historical document, it was a document written
by the State and used to label groups that they did not like.
If you are familiar with anti-cult literature of any sort, it
is the kind of labeling that you find in there. Or if you look
at the history of anti-semitism, for instance, the way that the
Christian church talked about Jews over the centuries, it is a
kind of labeling that has very little to do with the Jews in question.
In this case it had relatively little to do with the White Lotus.
So you had on the one hand a body of people practicing things
that were sort of like this, although it is very hard to say to
what degree. And then on the other hand you had the state that
did not like these people because they did not like unorthodox
groups and labeled any group that even vaguely resembled this
with this kind of appellation in order to brand it as heterodox.
So, in other words, it is very hard using the Chinese historical
record to reconstruct what these people really were because the
records that we have are the records of suppression. The state
would go out and arrest these people and torture them until they
confessed. And the questions they usually asked these people were
not very interesting. They wanted to know who led you to this
group, how many pitchforks did he have in his house, when were
you going to rise up, who told you to rise up. If they found scriptures
they usually destroyed them. They did not want them to circulate.
And if they copied bits of the scriptures into the historical
record, the bits that they copied, of course, were the most incendiary
bits, the bits that were the strangest.
And I suspect, and my own research bears this out to some degree,
that in the process of suppression, all the moral elements of
scripture or of believers' statements, the morality that could
have had either a Confucian or a Buddhist base, was just left
to one side because it was not seen as very interesting. It did
not make their court case to read the parts of the scriptures
that talked about "It is important to be nice to your father".
What made the court case were the parts that said, "The end
of the world is coming tomorrow, let us get ready to meet the
coming of the end of the world".
So if you tried to understand where Falungong came from and you
looked in the historical record about it this is one label, White
Lotus. And this is problematic for the reasons that I just described.
That is not a value neutral description. It is very hard to get
past what the state described, to get a handle on the historical
reality of groups who may have been peacefully cultivating in
a way that was fairly similar to Qigong or to Falungong but which
wound up being labeled, in spite of themselves, as a subversive
group. There were, of course, groups that did use these ideas
to foment rebellion. Let us not brand them all as completely innocent,
but my suspicion is that there was a wide range of these kinds
of peaceful groups and that we have had a very narrow fix on them
because of the Chinese state's preoccupations.
The second term that you find if you want to try to understand
from an historical vantage point where Falungong came from is
Folk Buddhist Sectarianism. A very academic term obviously. This
did not come from the Chinese government. They never would have
used that word. Folk Buddhist Sectarianism comes from academics
who write about sectarianism and who have borrowed the idea of
sectarian from Western religious history.
Now there is nothing really wrong with this term except that sectarian
means a branching off from something else. That is the whole idea
of what a sect is. But this tradition of people practicing cultivation,
if they are sectarian, what tradition are they branching off from?
It is not Orthodox Buddhism. Orthodox Buddhism had within it its
own sectarian traditions. The people I am talking about, the cultivators
if you will, would not have been recognized by the orthodox Buddhist
establishment. So what is missing when you talk about folk Buddhist
sectarianism is the larger entity from which the sects branch
off. We have never had a word for it and we have just sort of
taken it for granted. So both of these things are to my mind very
limiting in their ability to convey the historical reality. In
other words, we have just described bits and pieces that have
been left to us by the Chinese state on the one hand or we have
sort of reconstructed a tradition based on western ideas of sectarianism
on the other.
When we look at the early 20th century Chinese history we find
another set of evidence that will tell us something about the
history of Falungong or its origins. The history of 20th Century
China is generally written as the history of revolution, and rightly
so, as there has been any number of them. It is unclear whether
the Chinese Revolution has reached a final point of equilibrium
or not. In any case, when you turn to textbooks on Chinese history
of the 20th Century you find almost no discussion of religion
at all, particularly in the Republican period. These are the years
from 1911 to 1949 on the Mainland, and then Taiwan, which remains
the Republic of China. None of the textbook treatments even mention
religion in any meaningful way with the exception perhaps of the
missionary presence and the Christian Chinese.
More recent work, however, has illustrated that there was a huge
religious presence in China or religious, what we call it "ferment",
if you will. There were dozens of new religious groups founded
during this period. If we count the branches that went from a
national center out into localities there were probably hundreds
of new religious branches founded during this period. There were
probably millions if not tens of millions of people enrolled at
one time or another in these sorts of religions. Now what were
these religions? There was a wide range of them. What is important
for out point of view is that many of them inherited much of the
orientation of the cultivators, the White Lotus. There is no other
term for them so I have to use the term that I do not like. So
we find in some instances that in the Republican period they borrowed
from the "White Lotus" complex the whole set of gods,
the cosmology, the idea of the end of the world, the idea of universal
salvation. That it is just the same thing repackaged in a slightly
different way with different scriptures.
Others, by contrast, drop the specific mentions of gods. In other
words, the Mother disappears, Maitreya disappears, but you have
still the same cosmology, the notion that the world is coming
to an end, that moral behavior will help to save yourself and
perhaps even save the world. So in other words, it is sort of
a secularized version of the religious vision even though people
are being saved by means other than the old Mother and the Maitreya
Buddha. Many of these groups also added to their practices all
sorts of charity works, famine relief, education, opium-addiction
cures, women's education, what have you. And this suggests one
of the important changes that occurred in this period, which was
that a more elite presence came into these groups. We heretofore
thought of White Lotus or folk Buddhist sectarianism as being
a very vernacular tradition. In the Republican period, by contrast,
we find considerably more presence of middle class and, even perhaps
upper class participation in these groups. One of the reasons
they were able to do this, that we have this religious growth
or multiplication, is that the state was no longer strong enough
to really govern or regulate religion in the same way that it
had under the imperial regime. In fact many of these religions
emerged during the warlord period when the governments were specifically
searching for sources of legitimacy and they gave their imprimatur
to these new religious movements. So you find very famous politicians
and warlords in Republican China standing together with religious
groups that in many of their practices are carrying forward the
ideas, practices, rituals, etc. of these groups that I talked
about a minute ago.
Most of the groups that emerged in the Republican period were
eventually suppressed right after the Communist Revolution. There
was a wide-scale suppression then from 1950 through 1953 or 1954,
depending upon the region. But we are talking about again, millions
of people. We do not have good numbers about how many people were
involved and what do you do with millions of people? You cannot
put them in jail for very long. You do not have that much jail
space. So what they did, the Communists, was the same thing the
imperial state had always done, which was to arrest and generally,
not always, execute the leaders and pretend to reeducate the others
and send them back home and hope that they would be good people
from there on. That is all they could do. There were just too
many people involved and there were too many other things to do.
So this did not really put an end to it.
We have not paid a lot of attention as scholars to these trends
in China because we did not have much information. But we have
information now that has come out since Mao died and historical
research has been opened up in many ways. And we now know that
there were any number of rebellions, dozens, perhaps a couple
of hundred, rebellions between say 1955 and the beginning of the
Cultural Revolution that were organized by these same religious
groups that had been suppressed during this period. Many of them
were ancestors of the Republican period groups and you can trace
some ancestry even further back.
After the Cultural Revolution and Mao`s death, the lid was taken
off of Chinese society, lots of these things came back again.
In many instances it was people who got out of jail and, to look
at it cynically they had no other thing to sell. They could sell
their religious practices. Less cynically they remained convinced
that their practices had value. So groups such as the Yiguandao,
for instance, which is one of the better-known and least-liked
groups in China, emerged very rapidly in the 1980s after the Communists
basically removed themselves as a constant presence in the rural
areas. But there were all sorts of other groups too.
So you can find books on the religious revival in China during
the 1980s and 1990s and it usually covers Taoism, Christianity.
Those are the two big things, the most popular religions at that
point as discussed by Western scholars. But the revival of the
traditions we are talking about today was occurring as well. And
in fact the big example of the reemergence of the tradition that
I am talking about was the Qigong movement that started even before
the end of the Cultural Revolution on a smaller scale but then
really blossomed in the 1980s and 1990s. Qigong, as many of you
know, was at that time, and remains so, largely a set of technical
practices involving exercises, breathing, meditation on occasion.
There are a number of different forms of them. It is very much
oriented toward the body, and health, and supernormal powers and
this emerged because it could emerge at this time.
The Chinese government supported Qigong at the very beginning.
Why would the Chinese government do something like this? First,
these beliefs that one can, through exercise and through proper
technique, channel certain forces, are widely shared in Chinese
society. It is like jogging in the West. In the same way we think
that is good for our heart, the Chinese believe that Taijichuan
or any kind of Qigong is good for muscle tone, good for what ails
you. So the Chinese State saw nothing at the outset in it to suppress.
Secondly there was during this period a whole host of experiments
done on Qigong masters and Qigong practitioners. These experiments
were supported by the Chinese state for a variety of reasons.
First, I think they were very proud. This was a variety of Chinese
science. They were trying to make it into a scientific practice.
So there were research grants given to institutes in China to
work on proving on how Qigong works this and Qigong works that.
Or people would bring seeds and have a Qigong Master do his Qigong
over them and take the seeds back and plant them and check and
see whether they grew better. And there was sort of a national
pride, I think, both on the part of the government and on the
part of practitioners and Qigong masters. And why not? It is ancient
Chinese wisdom. It has now come back. We can display it to the
world. And also I think the Chinese government believed that if
large numbers would practice Qigong, and this may well be true,
that it would reduce systemic health care costs. Everyone would
get healthier. The hospitals would be emptier. People would be
happier. There is nothing wrong with that. So let us support Qigong.
So for a certain period, for a good 10-15 years anyway, Qigong
was given the go ahead and groups were allowed to organize legally.
You could sign up with a Qigong research institute as a legal
organization and what began to happen was quite remarkable, a
phenomenon of modern marketing. It came to be very much like what
you see on televangelism in the United States. In other words,
Qigong masters would go around the country and give lectures in
all the major cities, and minor ones as well. And they would charge
entry fees, then they would sell books, they would sell audio
cassettes, video cassettes, just like morning talk shows in America
- you know, Julia Child sells her latest cookbook or whatever
-- and these guys made a ton of money. They even got outside of
China, went to Taiwan, to Hong Kong. It got to be a major phenomenon
to the point that again, there were, I do not know how many millions
of people involved, but it was a very widespread phenomenon. Many
people here I am sure can confirm this.
On college campuses in the 1980s and part of the 1990s there was
what was called the "Qigong re" the Qigong craze. Everyone
was sort of into Qigong and there were ideas that you could capture
the Qigong from trees. Later on they decided it was not nice to
the trees so they moved on to something else. But it was just
a craze that hit and it was seen as entirely normal, I think,
by most people. I think most young people just thought it was
sort of fun -- the people I talked to anyway. They did not really
know why these things worked but they certainly seemed to work
for certain things, certainly for health. This all comes back
to health, pretty much.
The earliest qigong writings to emerge were both symbolic and
practical with no real description of anything except the movements.
I have not read many so if I am giving you a bad impression, please
forgive me. But it is not like Li Hongzhi's writings. Li Hongzhi's
writings, for instance, have a great deal of moral content. The
earliest qigong writings did not. They would be like downloading
a proper exercise routine from the internet as opposed to getting
a book on physiology. You know, one describes how cells and bodies
and muscles work as opposed to lifting the ten pound barbell twenty
times, then go have a drink of orange juice, come back and do
it again. That is what the Qigong books were, very mechanical,
it seems to me.
But within this larger movement, as I said, such people as Li
Hongzhi, or Yan Xin, another Qigong master, began to develop larger
bodies of writing, almost scripture, I guess, to go with it. And
these had a much more moral-religious aspect to them than did
the original Qigong books. So this then is the overview of where
Falungong came from. It can be traced back as an organized form
I think to the mid-Ming, as I just said. What happened in the
mid-Ming was that religious thinkers began to write their own
scriptures and circulate them. That is a central phenomenon that
begin then and which has marked popular religious history ever
since.
All of these groups are bound together in varying ways by the
following characteristics. All of them have what you might call
a discourse of the body, so they are all body oriented. On the
one end you have the discourse of the suffering body, that through
some kind of practice, be it moral or technical, one can reduce
suffering, make it go away, and become healthy. At the other end
of the spectrum we find what we would call in the West the discourse
of limitless human potential, the notion that we can fundamentally
change the biological elements of who we are to become some kind
of superman. Be it the superman you see in Gongfu movies or Wushu
movies, where they can do magical things with their fists and
their feet or, certain characters in popular fiction. I do not
know if you know the Monkey King and all the feats that he could
accomplish. That sort of ties into the limitless potential. And
the Qigong masters too who could do all sorts of things once they
had mastered these techniques or in the case like others like
Li Hongzhi had become enlightened. So there is this discourse
of the body that is very central to all of these groups, in varying
degrees of course.
A second major feature that binds together all of these groups
is that physical transformation is affected first and foremost
through moral practice. In other words these things are based
on morality. And again there is a range of emphasis from groups
that do not really care much about whether or not you are a good
person--they just emphasize proper hand techniques and proper
manipulation of qi--to other groups for whom morality is very
central. So to me those two are very central, the discourse of
the body and the discourse of morality.
There is a larger structure on which these are grafted. This larger
structure includes of a discourse of exile and return. The notion
that we once were good, we once were happy, and something has
happened. The world has become a bad place and we should go back
to where we were. This comes up over and over again in a whole
range of scriptures. The notion that we have been exiled, that
someone is waiting to take us back, that we will find once again
who we once were.
This ties into all sorts of mythologies, cosmologies, cosmogonies.
I talked about the world renewal through Maitreya , intervention
or simply through the mechanics of the turning of the Kalpa .
So there was this redemptive, salvationist impulse built in. Obviously
this ties into apocalyptic beliefs or millenarian beliefs as well.
I suspect that these millenarian beliefs were as incendiary as
similar beliefs in the West. Which is to say they could be very
incendiary on occasion. I remember growing up as a child we sang
"Jesus is coming soon every morning or night or noon,"
pretty much every Sunday but the bankers in the audience still
made loans and people went on about their lives. So people can
incorporate these apocalyptic notions into their heads and live
with them as sort of a metaphor without necessarily going out
and acting on them. So I think in China probably these ideas were
very, very widespread. The Chinese government has acted as if
the Falungong made them up, or recycled an unknown, esoteric discourse.
This is simply historically ungrounded. These things go way, way
back. They are very widespread. Everyone in China, virtually everyone
would have known about these ideas and, I do not know, probably
the same percentage of people took them seriously in China as
take them seriously here. These discourses, mythological or cosmological,
were heavily indebted to institutionalized religions such as Buddhism,
particularly Buddhism, and to Taoism, as well as to common sense
moral discourse. In other words they did not create a lot of new
moral precepts. They drew heavily on what existed already. Although
they were self-consciously often sectarian in the sense that they
criticized existing religions, be it Buddhism or Taoism, for not
living up to their own self image.
Another feature that binds all of these groups together is the
unregulated creation of scriptural truth. In other words most
of these groups or many of these groups felt the urge to create
their own scripture. There was no authority to tell them how to
do it. Hence, it is unregulated. And you find a wide range of
this kind of scripture over the centuries from what were called
"Precious Scrolls" in the Ming/Qing period. Then there
were other practices whereby someone goes into trance and writes
on a sheet of sand. The gods speaks to them in trance and then
someone reads those and they make books out of those. They are
called morality books, those books, and many of the themes that
come up in those sorts of books are the same sorts of things that
I have been talking about here. Li Hongzhi's transcripts of his
speeches are another variety of this sort of thing. So these are
all unregulated, as they would have to be, because there is no
one to regulate them other than the state and their sole regulation
is to suppress. So there is a sort of embrace of accretion or
bricolage of putting together what they can put together for their
own specific purposes.
Again, these are the characteristics that I think describe a much
larger tradition that we have known existed in the past. I cannot
prove it without giving you chapter and verse about a lot of them.
That would be very tedious. So whether we call it fundamentalism
or something else, and we could discuss what would be the proper
term for it, my suspicion is that studying Falungong enables us
to understand how all these other groups I have talked about as
being part of a larger phenomenom that we had not really known
existed in the past. And it is sort of like a cuisine, if you
will, if you think about these groups forming their own versions
of the practices or of the beliefs. In other words you have a
set of ingredients and a set of elements that grow in your neighborhood
and you sort of pick the ones you like and you make your own variety
of them. And the elements that I just listed, this discourse of
the body and the rest, those are the basic ingredients. So they
vary substantially. And since there has never been recognition
of this tradition, the people that belong to it do not recognize
it either because no one has ever made it into a larger thing.
No one has ever called it the Baptist Church or the Buddhist Establishment.
It is just a whole body of inchoate, yet still logically connected,
practices that are brought together by a variety of people for
a variety of purposes, so they will quite readily criticize another
group as being heterodox. For instance, Li Hongzhi was once asked
by a practitioner in his talks, I think in Yanbian, close to the
Korean border, about the Venerable Mother, the unborn Venerable
Mother, the one that I talked about here. Li Hongzhi was extremely
angry, saying, "what are you talking about? These things
do not exist at all. Where did you get this heterodox stuff?"
Because it had been branded as heterodox throughout history, so
it is very hard to get a sense of the reality behind the propaganda
wars that had been waged long before Falungong came along.
I do not want anyone to go out of here thinking that what I am
saying is that the Falungong simply reorganized the White Lotus
beliefs. That is not it at all. What I am saying is that both
of these groups and all of these groups belong to something considerably
larger that we should get a sense of for reasons both of historical
understanding and of our understanding of Falungong and China's
future. Because, what I think this means, if I am right about
the existence of this larger tradition, is that popular fundamentalism
was neither an inconsequential religion of coping in the village,
as it has often been characterized, or as a self conscious tradition
of dissent because there were rebellions organized around them.
It was instead fairly widespread, even if there is no way to know
what the membership was. Second, this has been able to evolve
and to sort of roll with the punches. It is not confined to peasant
villages or North China nor to the Ming and Qing periods, nor
to the uneducated. It is here now and it will probably stay into
the future.
I see I have already used forty-five minutes. I will quickly go
through how I understand Li Hongzhi's version of this fundamentalism
so as to leave time for questions.
In my reading of what other people have said about Li Hongzhi
they are very quick to single out strange remarks that he has
made and to make fun of him. He has made remarks that I find very
hard to understand and I confess to having chuckled on occasion
in reading some of his books. However, too often I feel that the
journalists who have done this, or the scholars who have done
this, have done this at the expense of careful analysis. So what
I try to do when I read through him is to put aside the things
that make no sense to me and to try to find a logical coherence
that could explain why so many people could have been drawn to
Li Hongzhi in a fairly short period of time. And to boil down
to what is a fairly long analysis, I find there are four core
elements that help to explain Li Hongzhi's appeal.
First, his message is profoundly moral. This is something that
I feel modern journalists, just like the Qing state before them,
just do not care about. They find all the discussion about being
good to be irrelevant because it is boring. So they focus on something
else. But when you read Li Hongzhi's writings, when you talk to
Falungong practitioners, over and over and over again they come
back to the notion of being good, that the universe itself is
good. When we behave in a moral way we align ourselves with the
forces of the universe and, thereby, other things happen to us
that I will get to in a minute. But this is the first point. And
what I have found when I talk to people is that there is a great
pleasure in being able to devote oneself to being good. In China
over the past decades socialism offered that at one point. I remember
asking a friend in China once what she thought socialism meant
and she said, "being nice to people". I remember thinking
that Marx wrote a lot of books to have it boiled down to "being
nice to people," but socialism offered the same possibility
or many people in the world, be they Chinese or others, simply
want to be good people. Falungong gives them a chance to do it
as well.
My second point is that Falungong, Falun dafa, or Li Hongzhi's
message, is not only moral, not only a return to a neglected spiritual
tradition, it is also scientific. And if you look at Li Hongzhi's
writings you will find over and over again he returns to the themes
of the blindness and arrogance of modern science, the limitations
of the scientific paradigm, and his own vision that replaces scientific
understanding. His point, I think, is to relativize the value
of science, to suggest that the absolute truth that scientists
claim cannot be absolute. And he proves this by bringing in evidence
from what we might call the frontiers of para-science, a field
I do not know well, and I do not want to make fun of it, it is
too easy to make fun of it. But you all know these theories about,
you know, runways left by aliens in Peru or the Andes, this kind
of stuff. And there are many things that scientists cannot explain.
He brings those forward and says, look, scientists cannot explain
this, I can, even if you do not believe me, it is obvious that
science cannot do what it says it is going to do. So what he is
doing is making a space for his own vision. That is one very obvious
thing that he is doing.
But the reason that I think he comes back over and over again
to science, in addition, is because of the sort of iconic status
that science has had in modern Chinese history. Science was to
be China's savior for a very, very long time. Beginning in the
19th Century science sort of meant learning western trigonometry
and artillery so they could fight back against the West. Then
science came to be paired with democracy for a certain period,
sort of a twin pair of saviors who were going to come into China
in the early 20th century and make China a modern competitive
country again. They tired of democracy in large measure because
of the behavior of the Western democracies around the time of
the end of the First World War. This has to do with the May Fourth
Movement and the Versailles Conference. If you want details we
can talk about that.
Democracy lost some of its cachet during this period, but science
kept it and I am quite sure part of the allure of socialism was
that socialism claimed to be scientific. And if you read literature,
any kind of literature in China from the 1950s, it was all sort
of a science fiction kind of atmosphere where through proper planning
and through, you know, bringing tractors to the countryside, people's
lives were going to be transformed magically overnight. Or if
you think of the Great Leap Forward, which again was sort of a
magical application of very bad science to a very large range
of the population, this again was a romance of science.
So science has had this notion or this status in Chinese history
in a way that it does not have in the West. Or in the West I think
it is already won. It won so long ago that it does not have the
same status. Thus Li Hongzhi has crafted his message in a way
to appeal to Chinese intellecutals and others who share this view
of science. And he said explicitly many times when he is talking
with Chinese intellectuals outside of China, "People wonder
why I talk about science so much. Well it is because you guys
are all trapped within the scientific paradigm and I am helping
you to get past it." So in other words it is sort of a neat
rhetorical trick. On the one hand he offers morality in a way
that is a throwback, a fundamentalist throwback to being the kind
of people we want to be. At the same time he claims that this
is a scientific vision.
So you get the best of both worlds. We are traditional Chinese
and good, but by the same token we have got science that makes
us modern. To give you one more image that came to mind about
the iconic status of science in China, I was wandering around
Beijing one time and saw what was obviously a peasant woman who
had a sign that said "kexue kanxiang," which means "scientific
fortune telling". So this is how she was trying to sell her
wares. Again this tells you what science means. Science means
"new and improved," "the best you can possibly
have." So when Li Hongzhi inserts scientific verbiage into
his argument my suspicion is that it comes from this.
The third way that I understand the appeal of Falun Dafa is that
moral practice brings supernatural powers. So you do not be good
just to be good. There is a real payback at the end of the line
even if the supernatural powers can be very limited. It can return
you to health, which is not so limited, I guess. I got up very
early this morning and I am very tired. I wish I had supernatural
powers right now so I could wake myself up. That is one part of
it but as you go on in your cultivation you develop other powers.
The Heavenly Eye that enables you to see into a variety of levels.
The powers of distant vision, clairvoyance, levitation, a whole
variety of things. He mentions at one point that there are some
10,000 supernatural powers.
He does not list them, of course, because that would be rather
tedious. But what basically happens, as he says, is as you cultivate
properly under the guidance of a master, your basic body chemistry
begins to change and you become younger at first, but then you
sort of transcend being human. It is not clear whether this all
happens at the same level or whether you retain your body and
are transformed at another level. But again the first step toward
gaining these powers is being moral. Being moral will burn off
your Karma, will set you in the right direction. You cannot do
it yourself. You have to have a master. That is what he is there
for. If you just do it yourself you can have limited results,
you will never get to anything very powerful.
But still, there are controls over this as well. He says that
if your design is to have supernatural powers they go away immediately.
So in other words you cannot pretend to be good, be nice to your
mother, take your dog out three times a day, and get supernatural
powers because that is what you wanted. No, it does not work that
way. You have to be wanting to be moral to be rewarded with these
powers. And if you ever abuse them they go away. Otherwise, he
says, people will go to Qigong classes and then go rob a bank
because they can do whatever they want to. They can pass through
walls. They can do anything. And to me this is the embodiment
of what must be one of the oldest desires in the world, that the
righteous have the power. And that is quite obvious in terms of
the interviews that I have done. It is quite obvious that this
is one of the things that people talk about and what interests
them.
On the other hand, survey data proves that most practitioners,
that I have dealt with anyway, consider themselves at a relatively
low level. In other words we do not find everyone claiming that
their Heavenly Eye has opened or that these other things have
happened to them. You can cultivate for a long time before this
stuff happens. Some people are gifted. They are born with less
Karma than others, and they can progress more rapidly. Other people
need to start on a tricycle and work up very slowly. So most people,
while they accept the reality of this, also accept that it is
going to take a long time and are quite content. This means then,
that they are content with the moral aspects of just being a good
person and the rewards of that.
Fourth and finally, I think it is important Falun Dafa has remained
completely unabashedly Chinese. I think this is a big ingredient
in its success. Even as it spreads throughout the world the message
that is conveyed remains wholly Chinese. I have met many Western
practitioners and I have talked to them and they have arrived
at an understanding of Li Hongzhi's message that I think is better
than mine. But I am always astounded because the vocabulary of
Li Hongzhi's writings is almost completely Chinese. Almost all
of his references to anything are Chinese. He talks about Jesus
Christ. He has read the equivalent of Time magazine, so he sort
of knows what is going on in the world, but his universe is extremely
Chinese. And to go even further, he will say things like, "You
cannot really understand the meaning of Zhuangfalun or any of
my writings unless you read in Chinese".
The translations are just the first step done for Westerners,
who do not understand as well anyway, and Chinese is the only
language capable of expressing this kind of richness. He talks
about the glories of Chinese civilization as seen from a cultivation
point of view, that ancient Chinese medicine was far more powerful
than modern Western medicine. For example, that doctors who had
cultivated to the point that their Heavenly Eye opened to do what
a CAT scan could do, but they were portable. This is what he said.
So there is a cultural pride that is written into this. I do not
think it was conscious by any means. I think that is just who
Li Hongzhi is and that is his background. He studied with people
who have emphasized that sort of point. And I am not sure there
was consciousness of it on the part of practitioners in China
either. But I think this is where the cultural revitalization
stuff comes from. I mean it is already implicit in what I said
about the fact that Falungong goes all the way back to the Ming
in a certain sense.
But here too this is a very obvious Chinese thing that emerges
in the period immediately after Chairman Mao has died and China
is searching for a new sort of direction, both culturally and
politically in all sense of the word. And here is a very powerful
entity that is very clearly Chinese, although it is not reserved
for the Chinese. And in my mind I wonder if the Chinese government's
decision to suppress Falungong may not eventually bring out these
elements that Falungong members may wind up thinking, "Well
I am at least as Chinese as those guys are". I do not know
if you have read the web page lately of Falungong but some people
have begun to refer to Jiang Zemin, the president of China, as
a "mogui" a devil. This is an example of the politicization
of the movement, and it would not be a very small step from politicization
to claiming the banner of nationalism based on the utter Chineseness
of this vision. And once another group claims nationalism then
the Communist Party will have a very hard time in China because
it has been their only remaining banner for some time.
Okay, I have probably confused you sufficiently now, so I will
stop and take questions or comments. Thank you very much for coming
on this Friday afternoon.
Man:
How does Falunggong compare to other Buddhist groups?
Ownby:
I am not a scholar of orthodox Buddhism so I do not know that
I could answer that with much insight. The basic differences are
simply that they do not use the Buddhist scriptures. So Falungong
or other groups like them simply have taken what they like from
them and drop the rest of it. Li Hongzhi is quite explicit in
criticizing certain kinds of Buddhism such as Zen, or Chan as
it is called in Chinese, feeling that it has become a moribund
tradition. It does not really speak to the moral concerns of anyone.
He is very explicit in criticizing the current Buddhist establishment
in China saying, with some justice I believe, that it is become
a money-making operation, that monasteries have turned into tourist
attractions and that not much cultivating goes on in there. But
it would take a better scholar or a different scholar than I am
to tell you exactly what the differences are between mainstream
Buddhism and what Li Hongzhi advocates.
Man:
Could you speculate on the future of the movement in China?
Ownby:
It is very hard to say what the movement itself will become but
this larger tradition, there is simply no way to get rid of it.
The basic ideas are so widespread that even if Falungong is successfully
suppressed, which strikes me as doubtful, what I imagine may happen
though, it is pure speculation, is some other crisis may come
along to sort of wipe it off the front pages. I mean that is always
what happens in any society, really, that any government targets
one thing and something else comes along and they have to drop
it to deal with that. But again something like this will come
back in one form or another. Things like this have been in Taiwan
both before and after the democratization of Taiwan. It was very
interesting. I met, there is no leader, one of the important figures
in Falun Dafa from Taiwan, who is an economics professor at Tai
Da, Taiwan University. A very well-spoken man, and he described
things in many ways the way I did here. So in other words, it
works in Taiwan too. And for the same sorts of reasons, health
reasons, moral reasons. And they like Falungong because they did
not ask for money. They dispensed the wisdom gratis. So that is
all I can say about it. I do not know about the future. It looks
pretty bleak at the moment but there are a lot of practitioners
who are still there and at some point, one imagines, the Chinese
government's attention will be distracted or diverted.
Woman:
Do they have places to meet, churches?
Ownby:
No, in North America they meet wherever they can, in practitioners'
homes or in common areas of apartment buildings. In China it was
the same sort of thing. Wherever they can get a common space.
Despite the image that one gets from reading the media or listening
to the Chinese government accounts, it is very decentralized.
I mean there is Li Hongzhi and a web site and then there are practitioners
all over the place. In Montreal where I live they practice in
the parks, even in the dead of winter. I do not join them. They
practice in community centers. They practice in, just wherever
they can get space. The meetings are usually on a weekly basis,
although it sort of depends. They do not take names or membership
information. So it is hard to know exactly who comes and who does
not. It is very informal. But no there is no church. In fact they
say they are not a religion. Many practitioners would be very
upset at my depiction of Falungong as a religion. But I think
from any Western academic point it is quite clearly a religion.
Man:
Do you have any idea what the Chinese people think of Falungong?
Ownby:
I have seen surveys, polls done on a very limited scale, which
suggest that the Chinese government has succeeded in planting
the idea that the Falungong is a bad thing. So in other words
I think the general attitude was quite negative at the beginning
for the same reason that people in the United States did not like
David Koresh. If you call somebody a cult no one likes it. It
is a bad word. You cannot say, "It is a nice cult".
There is no nice cult. It is a negative labeling term. The word
that they use in China, "xie jiao", is a very negative
term. "Xie" means crooked or heterodox, and it is a
term that goes way, way back and that the state has always used.
I do not have a lot of information on that because I have not
been to China to do this sort of thing. Practitioners who have
gone back say that many people's ideas have changed, having watched
how brave the Falungong people have been in resisting the suppression.
I think it is an uphill battle though. Once the idea is implanted
that a group is a cult then it is very hard. I think the Falungong
practitioners in North America had a difficult challenge. They
were practicing peacefully here before the suppression began and
no one knew anything about them. There was just no information.
No one cared. They were just doing their own thing just like anyone
else. Then all of a sudden after April 1999, it shows up in the
news and they have to go out and say, "We are really not
a cult". And if that is your first phrase it is very hard
to get past that. That is sort of like saying, "I really
do not hit my wife." It is just really tough.