Temples and Teahouses: Contemporary Buddhism

Temples and Teahouses delves into the daily lives of Buddhist monastics, lay practitioners, entrepreneurs, and government officials working to expand Buddhism in a highly secular country. Drawing on two decades of ethnographic research in cities throughout China, author Gareth Fisher explores how these determined visionaries collaborated to restore temples and open teahouses to meet growing demand for Buddhist practice spaces. Some sought to revive traditional practices such as devotion to Amitabha while others offered new programs that included charitable work and mindfulness meditation to address the changing needs of urban people.

Through an analysis of their efforts, Fisher examines the paradoxical relationship between Buddhism and secularity, defined by philosopher Charles Taylor not as religion’s absence but as an awareness of both immanent and transcendent possibilities of being. The urban Buddhist communities Fisher encountered challenged religion’s separation from everyday life under secularization while simultaneously establishing new boundaries between the religious and secular. They transformed temples and teahouses into refuges from the demands and materialistic values of modern city life—into "spaces of otherwise" where they could explore novel ways of thinking while navigating the cross-pressures of living both Buddhist and secular lives.

Temples and Teahouses will appeal to a wide range of readers interested in the role of Buddhism in modernity, the place of lived religion in contemporary Chinese society, and the relationship between religion and secularism.