From Comrades to Bodhisattvas: Moral Dimensions of Lay Buddhist Practice in Contemporary China, by Gareth Fisher

Corresponding author: Brian J. Nichols, Mount Royal University, bnichols@mtroyal.ca This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ ISSN 1527-6457 (online). Since the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 and the reform and opening of China under Deng Xiaoping in the early 1980s, religious traditions have been revived and scholars have gained access to mainland China for the first time in decades. While there have been book-length studies of popular religion and Christianity in contemporary China, and edited volumes focused on religion in modern and contemporary China, there have been no book-length studies dedicated to Han Buddhism until now. The focus of this book is on lay Buddhists who gather in the outer courtyard of an important Buddhist temple in central Beijing during dharma assemblies (fahui), which are held four times a month. Fisher attended, in his words, “nearly every” dharma assembly during his 27 months of ethnographic research, conducted over a period of ten years from 2001 to 2012. This book provides a window into the aspirations, challenges, and failures of lay Buddhists who are establishing what Fisher describes as “islands of religiosity” (204-213) in contemporary China.