1 00:00:01,560 --> 00:00:10,560 So I was ActionScript, I know. I'm so sorry, we do not speak. 2 00:00:10,560 --> 00:00:20,250 Such a that that. Gregory obtained his Ph.D. in Chinese cities and from university and was a great fellow. 3 00:00:20,250 --> 00:00:22,950 It doesn't say is my best judgement at that. 4 00:00:22,950 --> 00:00:33,930 While that can be found from the network, which later became the study that was written and have decided to return to Manchester. 5 00:00:33,930 --> 00:00:37,410 He is currently senior lecturer in Chinese culture and history, 6 00:00:37,410 --> 00:00:45,810 and so it's a great personal pleasure to welcome him to his presentation, which is almost ready. 7 00:00:45,810 --> 00:00:53,220 Any moment now, I will manifest it in a note on the subject of reading scriptures in China. 8 00:00:53,220 --> 00:01:03,080 The role of scripture addresses the is no, it's questions. 9 00:01:03,080 --> 00:01:10,570 And that's 30 minutes to. Wonderful. 10 00:01:10,570 --> 00:01:15,020 Thanks very much, Naomi. So welcome, everybody, thank you very much for being here. 11 00:01:15,020 --> 00:01:18,830 Whether you are manifesting yourself in person or online, 12 00:01:18,830 --> 00:01:25,700 my presentation is going to be a bit of a shift from Charles's were we're moving from Pandora to China and from the earliest, 13 00:01:25,700 --> 00:01:33,480 you know, some of the earliest generations of my Mahayana to a period that is much more recent, the 19th and 20th centuries tartly history at all. 14 00:01:33,480 --> 00:01:41,090 It's basically journalism. It's so recent. But one thing that connects it is this feature of my in the scriptures that they contain 15 00:01:41,090 --> 00:01:46,040 within them instructions for their own replication that they contained within them. 16 00:01:46,040 --> 00:01:49,790 This language that says if you cause others to read the scripture, 17 00:01:49,790 --> 00:01:54,140 if you cause others to have a copy of the scripture, if you distribute it, you oppose it. 18 00:01:54,140 --> 00:01:58,760 If you make more copies in the world than the merit accrue to you will be immeasurable. 19 00:01:58,760 --> 00:02:06,290 It would be so much more than any kind of a material donation or any kind of a material action you could do in the world. 20 00:02:06,290 --> 00:02:12,050 It's kind of like a virus has within itself the DEA instructions to make copies of itself and to spread. 21 00:02:12,050 --> 00:02:17,870 Although it might be a little early to start making some tweaks to viruses might maybe a little too soon for that sort of thing. 22 00:02:17,870 --> 00:02:22,850 So my what I look at is Buddhists in China in the 19th and 20th centuries, 23 00:02:22,850 --> 00:02:30,080 and especially those Buddhists who are very much involved in print culture in printing and the connexion. 24 00:02:30,080 --> 00:02:33,530 I think between my work and sort of the overall theme of the conference, 25 00:02:33,530 --> 00:02:37,850 this is basic question, but how do you make connexions between readers and texts? 26 00:02:37,850 --> 00:02:45,440 How do you get texts into the hands of readers and make sure that they can understand them once they have a copy in their heads? 27 00:02:45,440 --> 00:02:53,750 So I'm interested in people and institutions who are involved in creating Buddhist texts and distributing them in crafting them and editing them, 28 00:02:53,750 --> 00:03:02,150 getting them into the hands of readers. Even though it's it's arisen in quite a few presentations that it seems for a lot of these texts. 29 00:03:02,150 --> 00:03:07,730 They weren't actually read all that often, and often times the power of a text can be something that has nothing to do with Reading. 30 00:03:07,730 --> 00:03:13,040 Just holding it or having it. Having a physical copy in a place itself has its own kind of energy. 31 00:03:13,040 --> 00:03:19,310 It's its own, its own power that has nothing to do with actually looking at the text and interpreting it and reading the words. 32 00:03:19,310 --> 00:03:22,940 Although, of course, that possibility always remains open. 33 00:03:22,940 --> 00:03:29,420 But the types of people that I look at in in the modern period of Chinese history, we're absolutely concerned with reading. 34 00:03:29,420 --> 00:03:33,920 And the problem they faced in the early part of this period was that there weren't enough texts. 35 00:03:33,920 --> 00:03:38,150 There should be more of them. And how do we create more of them, get them into the hands of people? 36 00:03:38,150 --> 00:03:44,630 The problem that I'm dealing with, looking at the entirety of this period is quite different from what Charles is doing with I feel like Charles. 37 00:03:44,630 --> 00:03:46,940 When you find a new manuscript, you're really excited, right? 38 00:03:46,940 --> 00:03:52,250 You have these little tiny fragments and you try to you look at them in such detail and try to extract all the meaning you can. 39 00:03:52,250 --> 00:03:58,460 I am flooded with texts. I've got too many titles. There's just they printed too much stuff, especially in the 20s, in the 30s. 40 00:03:58,460 --> 00:04:04,100 It is just overwhelming a flood of text to try to get a handle on all of the authors and additions and things like that. 41 00:04:04,100 --> 00:04:05,540 So at the end of my presentation, 42 00:04:05,540 --> 00:04:12,620 I'll introduce to you a digital tool that I and a few colleagues are working on to try to get a better sense of the terrain of Chinese 43 00:04:12,620 --> 00:04:21,380 religious publishing and try to better navigate the this the sea of scriptures that they ended up that they ended up producing. 44 00:04:21,380 --> 00:04:25,400 So for me of this topic is it's kind of a return to what I wrote. 45 00:04:25,400 --> 00:04:34,070 My Ph.D. on my Ph.D. was kind of an initial study on different types of publications and publishers during the early 20th century. 46 00:04:34,070 --> 00:04:37,790 For a variety of reasons, I didn't end up turning that into a book. 47 00:04:37,790 --> 00:04:44,330 As Naomi said, I was a an in early career fellow and one of the requirements is that funding is that you do a project that's not your. 48 00:04:44,330 --> 00:04:51,410 So for a period of time, I moved away from books and I went to monasteries and I looked at temple destruction and rebuilding during this period, 49 00:04:51,410 --> 00:04:57,170 and that ended up being my first month. So now that's finished and I'm well established at the University of Manchester. 50 00:04:57,170 --> 00:05:02,420 So like, I kind of want to go back to this material and kind of do it right because now I'm more mature. 51 00:05:02,420 --> 00:05:08,270 I know at least a few more things. I want to return to this topic and eventually come out with my second monograph, 52 00:05:08,270 --> 00:05:16,820 which is really going to be looking in detail at this world of prints and world of text amongst Chinese Buddhists during the modern period. 53 00:05:16,820 --> 00:05:18,530 That's kind of my own interest in it. 54 00:05:18,530 --> 00:05:23,930 But looking more broadly looking to colleagues and the studies and colleagues in Chinese studies, more generally, 55 00:05:23,930 --> 00:05:31,280 the point of it in the kind of the what to answer the so what question the idea is that I make 56 00:05:31,280 --> 00:05:36,830 the case that Buddhists during the modern era were enthusiastic participants in modernity. 57 00:05:36,830 --> 00:05:40,130 It wasn't the case that the Buddhists doing Buddhist things over here and then the 58 00:05:40,130 --> 00:05:45,590 rest of China was having revolutions and and innovations and modernisation over here. 59 00:05:45,590 --> 00:05:52,790 They were intimately connected and Buddhists were concerned about current events, about the way that's the direction in which China was going. 60 00:05:52,790 --> 00:05:58,190 They wrote about political topics. There's no topic that they didn't address in some way in their own literature. 61 00:05:58,190 --> 00:06:00,860 They were embedded in history that were part of history. 62 00:06:00,860 --> 00:06:07,190 But unfortunately, most historians have butter in China, and other people think about modern China usually put religion to one side. 63 00:06:07,190 --> 00:06:13,150 They leave them out then. Stan, oh, yes, if were around and they were doing their thing, but they weren't part of the core story. 64 00:06:13,150 --> 00:06:20,740 It wasn't part of the story of literature and politics and war and destruction and technology that we know to be the story of modern China. 65 00:06:20,740 --> 00:06:27,400 Well, I want to rewrite put it's back into the story of modern China and make a case to say that they were front and centre in their own way. 66 00:06:27,400 --> 00:06:34,510 They were participating in all the various types of cultural innovations and modernisation that were happening during this time. 67 00:06:34,510 --> 00:06:40,150 So that's my kind of outward looking case and inwardly Typekit of studies and the 68 00:06:40,150 --> 00:06:44,950 ramifications of importance for Chinese Buddhism is I want to argue that engaging with print 69 00:06:44,950 --> 00:06:49,330 and engaging with producing texts that reflects the facts and Buddhists themselves and 70 00:06:49,330 --> 00:06:54,220 change the way that they understood their own tradition in ways that they did Buddhism. 71 00:06:54,220 --> 00:06:58,360 So it's not just a case that they printed stuff that was a reflection of what they were doing. 72 00:06:58,360 --> 00:07:04,860 The very act of printing producing these texts change what they did and change how we thought about themselves. 73 00:07:04,860 --> 00:07:09,310 Okay, so let's get started and we'll start with the war. 74 00:07:09,310 --> 00:07:13,180 The the period of time that I look at and it starts with destruction, 75 00:07:13,180 --> 00:07:19,030 it starts at this period of the war, which lasted about 14 years for most people. 76 00:07:19,030 --> 00:07:24,250 If they know about modern Chinese history and they think about the types of wars and conflicts that were important. 77 00:07:24,250 --> 00:07:30,910 Usually, they focus on things like the Opium War, maybe the Boxer Rebellion, Sino-French war, things like that. 78 00:07:30,910 --> 00:07:38,620 These colonial wars and wars with foreign powers are, of course, important to the history of colonialism and the history of empire, 79 00:07:38,620 --> 00:07:43,570 but they pale in comparison to the sheer destruction of the typing war. 80 00:07:43,570 --> 00:07:50,740 In terms of human lives lost, it is likely the most destructive human event in history so far. 81 00:07:50,740 --> 00:07:56,620 It doesn't receive as much attention because it doesn't fit as well into this kind of this modern history of China being the 82 00:07:56,620 --> 00:08:03,070 victim of colonial powers and then fighting back and standing up for itself and regaining regaining its debt to ruin the world. 83 00:08:03,070 --> 00:08:08,830 But for my purposes, it's extremely important and had a big impact on Buddhism because much of the fighting and 84 00:08:08,830 --> 00:08:13,990 the conflicts of the type of war took place in a region of China sort of near Shanghai, 85 00:08:13,990 --> 00:08:17,290 Nanjing, right in the central part of China, in the lower, 86 00:08:17,290 --> 00:08:23,050 lower reaches of the Yangtze River and in the early from the early modern period into the modern period. 87 00:08:23,050 --> 00:08:31,270 This was very much a cradle for Buddhism, very wealthy monasteries, monks, owners located right in this region of China. 88 00:08:31,270 --> 00:08:39,760 It was very culturally productive, who was relatively wealthy. And when the typing more happens from 1850 onward, it devastated this entire region. 89 00:08:39,760 --> 00:08:48,490 So the tapings were Christians. They were led by a Christian leader who famously considered himself to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ. 90 00:08:48,490 --> 00:08:54,700 Foreign missionaries, when they heard about the Taiping Rebellion, thought, Oh good. All of our decades of work in China are finally paying off. 91 00:08:54,700 --> 00:09:01,300 The Chinese are finally going to mass convert to Christianity, and our work will be will be completed. 92 00:09:01,300 --> 00:09:04,900 And then they heard what the tapings actually believed. And they were like, Wait, wait, needed to to that. 93 00:09:04,900 --> 00:09:10,330 That's not what we believe. And they were actually quite quite upset. But the Typekit had their own theology. 94 00:09:10,330 --> 00:09:17,110 They had their own version of Christianity. They were very good Protestants and as good Protestants, they knew that religious images were bad. 95 00:09:17,110 --> 00:09:21,800 So anywhere that they went in China, they destroyed whatever religious images that they found. 96 00:09:21,800 --> 00:09:27,280 And as you know, images are very important for Buddhism. They're very important for other varieties of Chinese religion as well. 97 00:09:27,280 --> 00:09:37,210 Untold monasteries and sacred images. Sacred statues of the 80s were destroyed, burned, chopped up on mats at the hands of the Chinese. 98 00:09:37,210 --> 00:09:45,430 Some Buddhist monastic institutions were also destroyed because, unfortunately, many times in China, monasteries will be built on the top of the hill. 99 00:09:45,430 --> 00:09:51,430 Unfortunately, hills are also excellent points for spotting artillery and for directing military operations, 100 00:09:51,430 --> 00:09:56,950 so sometimes monasteries would be destroyed so they could be used as a base or an observation point during 101 00:09:56,950 --> 00:10:03,490 the over the decade of fighting the customs between the Taiping Rebels and Chiang loyalist troops. 102 00:10:03,490 --> 00:10:08,530 So in terms of the modern history of Chinese Buddhism, which I think war is a period of untold destruction, 103 00:10:08,530 --> 00:10:11,620 some of the things that they destroyed, as I mentioned, were religious images. 104 00:10:11,620 --> 00:10:17,170 The institutions themselves, the physical monasteries, the buildings, and of course, they burned Buddhist scriptures as well. 105 00:10:17,170 --> 00:10:24,670 So some of the the most wealthy and well-equipped Buddhist libraries in China were located in the area taken over by the typing forces. 106 00:10:24,670 --> 00:10:28,720 And these texts were destroyed and they were lost. 107 00:10:28,720 --> 00:10:37,660 So this kind of becomes this period of destruction and revolution forms the kind of the intro to the period that I studied. 108 00:10:37,660 --> 00:10:40,360 And I look at what Chinese Buddhist stood in the wake of this. 109 00:10:40,360 --> 00:10:49,990 What did they do to reconstruct and rebuild after the typing forces were finally finally pacified and to rule was was was re-established? 110 00:10:49,990 --> 00:10:55,000 So my book, which came out in March of last year, which is not great timing, but it came out anyway. 111 00:10:55,000 --> 00:11:00,640 In my book, I look at what happened to monasteries, how did they rebuild the physical homes for monks and nuns? 112 00:11:00,640 --> 00:11:06,370 How do they rebuild the physical institutions that they keep a home for Buddhist play? 113 00:11:06,370 --> 00:11:12,430 But as I said in this new project? And look, I want to look at what they did with texts. 114 00:11:12,430 --> 00:11:16,960 So let me tell you a little story about a fellow named young woman. 115 00:11:16,960 --> 00:11:23,410 This is him pictured here. Young was born in 1837, so when the typing war broke out, he's basically a teenager, right? 116 00:11:23,410 --> 00:11:31,120 He was a young man. Young had grown up in a relatively well-off, but a certainly very scholarly family based in Nanjing. 117 00:11:31,120 --> 00:11:35,200 Nanjing was eventually taken over by typing forces and lost for a very long time. 118 00:11:35,200 --> 00:11:42,730 So young and his family had to flee as refugees, and they ended up in the city of hunger, which wasn't taken over by. 119 00:11:42,730 --> 00:11:48,280 I mean, if you've ever been to Hong Kong, you know, it's very beautiful. This much worse places end up as a refugee. 120 00:11:48,280 --> 00:11:52,630 So young is in NGO. He's a young man. He's had to leave his home. 121 00:11:52,630 --> 00:11:58,600 There is death and destruction going on all around, all around him, as we've experienced in the last 18 months. 122 00:11:58,600 --> 00:12:03,820 It's one of those periods when it seems like the entire world is being overturned and you really start to question, 123 00:12:03,820 --> 00:12:09,280 what am I doing and what will I do in the future? I can't just assume that things will always be as they were. 124 00:12:09,280 --> 00:12:11,350 Are there other possibilities for me? 125 00:12:11,350 --> 00:12:17,080 There's also a story that Young had wanted to marry this one woman, but his family set him up with an arranged marriage with another woman. 126 00:12:17,080 --> 00:12:24,310 So he's also heartbroken as well. And I mean, we've all been teenagers at some point, and you know how intense and strong those emotions can be. 127 00:12:24,310 --> 00:12:30,850 You feel like you're the only one in history to ever feel like this. And then you figure out, no, you're just a human being like the rest of us. 128 00:12:30,850 --> 00:12:38,980 So Yang is wandering around in the streets of Punjab. He's young man. He's fled the war and as the story goes, happens into a Buddhist bookstore. 129 00:12:38,980 --> 00:12:44,950 And he's had no interest in Buddhism before. He is aware of it, but he's not a Buddhist follower or anything special like that, 130 00:12:44,950 --> 00:12:50,980 and something prompts him to take a book off the shelf and just start to read through it and look through it. 131 00:12:50,980 --> 00:12:54,160 And it's this moment that sparks something in them, 132 00:12:54,160 --> 00:12:59,920 and it's likely the kind of the background of death and destruction and the kind of the revolution that's going on around him. 133 00:12:59,920 --> 00:13:02,800 But this encounter with the Buddhist book changes his life. 134 00:13:02,800 --> 00:13:08,920 And from that point onward, he dedicated his life to printing and reprinting Buddhist scriptures in China. 135 00:13:08,920 --> 00:13:14,560 And as I said, after the typing war, it's finishing up and typing forces are pacified. 136 00:13:14,560 --> 00:13:16,450 Many Buddhist scriptures have been destroyed. 137 00:13:16,450 --> 00:13:22,870 If they don't exist anymore to print up so young one way and others start projects to try to replace them, 138 00:13:22,870 --> 00:13:30,460 to print new copies, to replace the copies that had been lost. So in the seminal work on this period at home as well in his book, 139 00:13:30,460 --> 00:13:37,960 The Buddhist Revival describes it that's so young and his collaborators considered that the only hope for this age of drama and decay, 140 00:13:37,960 --> 00:13:43,810 so this is the more remarkable era, was the circulation of sutures to save all sentient beings. 141 00:13:43,810 --> 00:13:45,400 The long song scriptures in the North. 142 00:13:45,400 --> 00:13:52,750 So that's the Chen Long canon that have been printed a few decades earlier, they considered to be a dead letter. 143 00:13:52,750 --> 00:13:58,750 The twanging library had been burned by my writing troupe, so this is one of the major Buddhist libraries have been destroyed during the war. 144 00:13:58,750 --> 00:14:06,400 Therefore, this type of therefore he resolved to cut printing blocks for the trip in order to give it a wider circulation. 145 00:14:06,400 --> 00:14:09,690 So it's very interesting as well. 146 00:14:09,690 --> 00:14:16,460 Melchior is drawing upon the recollections of young granddaughter who wrote a book in Chinese about about her grandmother grandfather. 147 00:14:16,460 --> 00:14:23,170 So it's kind of Second-Hand. But at the same time, I find it rather interesting that the canon of the official canon at that time that been 148 00:14:23,170 --> 00:14:28,210 circulating in China and still existed outside of the area been destroyed by Typekit forces, 149 00:14:28,210 --> 00:14:31,450 they considered a dead letter. And for a lot of these printers, 150 00:14:31,450 --> 00:14:37,870 they're not interested in Kenyans because Kenyans are these kind of these dusty things that sit on a shelf and nobody ever actually reads, 151 00:14:37,870 --> 00:14:43,270 it just kind of sits there like a monument. They wanted living books that got into the hands of people that people would 152 00:14:43,270 --> 00:14:47,440 actually open up and read and young would play throughout all of his life. 153 00:14:47,440 --> 00:14:54,760 He died in 1911, sort of just just at the point when the revolution was happening in the dynasty was falling. 154 00:14:54,760 --> 00:15:01,580 He, for all of his life, wanted to produce new versions of the Chinese canon, but he could only produce individual scriptures. 155 00:15:01,580 --> 00:15:06,640 But he did print over a period of his life. He did print hundreds of it. 156 00:15:06,640 --> 00:15:08,140 So starting with young wooden play, 157 00:15:08,140 --> 00:15:17,720 there was an entire movement through the latter part of the 19th and early 20th centuries to reprint Chinese Buddhist scriptures using using books. 158 00:15:17,720 --> 00:15:19,550 So my main thesis, 159 00:15:19,550 --> 00:15:26,810 my main argument looking at figures like young men and looking at others who throughout this period produced Buddhist texts in China distributed them, 160 00:15:26,810 --> 00:15:32,240 got them into the hands of readers is that they had one foot in the past and one foot in the modern era. 161 00:15:32,240 --> 00:15:39,800 We see very much that they are working within an established understanding and established tradition of texts within Buddhism using Buddhist texts. 162 00:15:39,800 --> 00:15:44,520 At the same time, they did not shy away from innovation in the modern era. 163 00:15:44,520 --> 00:15:48,500 We never produced an unprecedented explosion in the number and types of texts, 164 00:15:48,500 --> 00:15:53,450 and I would argue a deeper penetration of these texts into all levels of society 165 00:15:53,450 --> 00:15:58,160 so that the canon would no longer be something that exists in the library, the only kind of flip set. 166 00:15:58,160 --> 00:16:02,960 But it would be something you could have in your very own couch that would be accessible to readers. 167 00:16:02,960 --> 00:16:09,380 And I think the larger ramifications of this is that Buddhists were able to introduce innovations into their own tradition into Chinese Buddhism, 168 00:16:09,380 --> 00:16:15,940 but also participate more broadly in Chinese security through print culture. 169 00:16:15,940 --> 00:16:19,720 So I'm going to be looking at the titles come up a little bit, 170 00:16:19,720 --> 00:16:26,650 but I'll be looking at three different types of institutions that produce text during this period, the first of which is scriptural presses. 171 00:16:26,650 --> 00:16:31,180 There's also scripture distributors and finally more modern style bookstores and publishers. 172 00:16:31,180 --> 00:16:35,020 So for the rest of my talk, I'll just give you kind of an outline as to what you said. 173 00:16:35,020 --> 00:16:42,010 And then at the end, I'll talk. I'll mention that new digital tool that I'm currently developing to try to get a handle on what they've produced. 174 00:16:42,010 --> 00:16:49,090 So as critical presses were a new form of institution placed under the first one in about the 1860s or 1870s. 175 00:16:49,090 --> 00:16:54,820 But it was quickly followed by other independent presses. It was based on the model of the temple spectrum, 176 00:16:54,820 --> 00:17:00,190 so monasteries had often had a workshop where they could carve blocks and print scriptures on a small scale, 177 00:17:00,190 --> 00:17:07,270 not entire tenets, but just individual particular titles. They use this to use the same technology wouldn't block printing, 178 00:17:07,270 --> 00:17:13,840 but rather than being based in temples and led by monastics, these presses were led by laypeople usually. 179 00:17:13,840 --> 00:17:20,890 Sometimes they would have a monastic advisor. But these were very much a lay institution by institution. 180 00:17:20,890 --> 00:17:25,870 They relied on donations and volunteer labour. They were not for profit. If you wanted to have the text produced, 181 00:17:25,870 --> 00:17:31,990 you had to donate the money to cover the cost for the materials and the labour to produce the blocks and print the works. 182 00:17:31,990 --> 00:17:37,480 They didn't have a kind of a rolling budget or anything. They took a donation and. 183 00:17:37,480 --> 00:17:42,120 And up until into the 1940s, they almost exclusively used this traditional technology. 184 00:17:42,120 --> 00:17:50,230 You would like their book catalogues. They sometimes use movable type, but the scriptures themselves were always printed using wood lines. 185 00:17:50,230 --> 00:17:51,280 And as I said at the bottom here, 186 00:17:51,280 --> 00:18:01,210 this is just a selection of five or so I've identified over a dozen major spiritual presses that were founded during this period. 187 00:18:01,210 --> 00:18:03,520 So these prices, especially in the 20s and 30s, 188 00:18:03,520 --> 00:18:10,940 developed into complex organisations because the lay people who are renting them had day jobs as professionals in modern industry. 189 00:18:10,940 --> 00:18:19,290 And so they bring in things like issuing stock, taking advantage of modern financial technologies, opening bank accounts, producing prospectuses. 190 00:18:19,290 --> 00:18:26,470 So you can see just this is like an IPO. They're asking for donations in the form of buying stock in their company. 191 00:18:26,470 --> 00:18:36,040 And if you buy stock in their companies, you will also get merit to return because they're producing success of these scripted presses, 192 00:18:36,040 --> 00:18:39,410 especially in the later period from the 1910s. The 40s was massive. 193 00:18:39,410 --> 00:18:47,500 One of these presses in 1928 reported that they distributed over a million copies, 1.4 million copies of over one hundred and seventy titles. 194 00:18:47,500 --> 00:18:50,530 So this is a huge amount of production that's happening during this period. 195 00:18:50,530 --> 00:18:54,550 And if you luckily a lot of your book catalogues have been reproduced and reprinted, 196 00:18:54,550 --> 00:18:59,930 so they're relatively easy to access, the sheer number and variety of titles they produce is simply staggering. 197 00:18:59,930 --> 00:19:06,910 It's it's very much it's it's very much a huge endeavour that they were involved in. 198 00:19:06,910 --> 00:19:12,850 The kind of the network that held all these together was another form an institution called Scripture distributor. 199 00:19:12,850 --> 00:19:19,120 These distributors link together scriptural presses and a kind of a network that spans the entire Chinese nation. 200 00:19:19,120 --> 00:19:26,470 In contrast to the presses, many of these if you read their book catalogues, many of these distributors welcome in-person customers. 201 00:19:26,470 --> 00:19:33,370 You can go into their shop, you can browse the titles they have on display. You can put in an order if they don't have the stock and pick it up later. 202 00:19:33,370 --> 00:19:35,780 The presses instead were more like distributors. 203 00:19:35,780 --> 00:19:41,860 They would they would send out text, but they didn't necessarily have their own bookstore that you could actually walk into. 204 00:19:41,860 --> 00:19:47,560 And the distributors did. Scripture distributors are interesting because many of them are associated with the particular temple. 205 00:19:47,560 --> 00:19:51,610 This one, I reproduced the front page of the book catalogue. 206 00:19:51,610 --> 00:19:56,170 Here they are based in the Gospels, up and in between. 207 00:19:56,170 --> 00:20:00,670 So this is from the inspiration for Saudis is called Beijing. 208 00:20:00,670 --> 00:20:05,050 So a lot of these distributors are located within monasteries, but the printers are not. 209 00:20:05,050 --> 00:20:10,120 The printers are separate institutions led by laypeople, a small number of commercial presses. 210 00:20:10,120 --> 00:20:17,200 So these are for profit. Non Buddhist presses also kind of styled themselves scripture distributors and would sometimes offer in their book 211 00:20:17,200 --> 00:20:25,440 catalogues and special section a selection of Buddhist texts that have been produced by by the scriptural questions. 212 00:20:25,440 --> 00:20:32,250 These distributors produce absolutely massive book catalogues because they provide titles from multiple different presses. 213 00:20:32,250 --> 00:20:36,780 So here's the first page of the book catalogue for the region's future distributor. 214 00:20:36,780 --> 00:20:43,260 You can see it gives you the title the translator, the number of festivals, the number of books, the price for printing. 215 00:20:43,260 --> 00:20:49,620 So it's still kind of if you are not doing this for a profit and not to make a profit on these books. 216 00:20:49,620 --> 00:20:55,680 Rather, you put up the money to have it printed, and that covers the materials and labour to produce a certain number of. 217 00:20:55,680 --> 00:21:00,000 And then finally, at the bottom, it shows you which of the three professors originally produced it, 218 00:21:00,000 --> 00:21:05,520 which one carves the blocks and created the edition, which they are offering for sale. 219 00:21:05,520 --> 00:21:09,630 And as I mentioned these these for the standards of the time, these catalogues are enormous. 220 00:21:09,630 --> 00:21:15,390 The Beijing scripture to look for nineteen twenty three has about 300 titles, 221 00:21:15,390 --> 00:21:19,260 so you can see this is a massive this is almost a constellation of Buddhist text. 222 00:21:19,260 --> 00:21:27,240 Imagine in the nineteen twenties having this in your hand, you have access to a huge amount of potential material and both distributors and 223 00:21:27,240 --> 00:21:32,670 presses made use of the postal system as a way of further expanding their network. 224 00:21:32,670 --> 00:21:37,800 So even if you couldn't physically make it into a city to visit a distributor and buy a copy, 225 00:21:37,800 --> 00:21:44,790 you could send in a postal remittance and a request for a title. They would post it to your local post office and you could pick it up. 226 00:21:44,790 --> 00:21:51,610 So this is an unprecedented level of access for ordinary people to put his text. 227 00:21:51,610 --> 00:21:57,490 And it wasn't just looks. Some of the did offer attendees lots of different sex frictions, but Chinese, 228 00:21:57,490 --> 00:22:04,690 you can see from the right here to sell images, printed images of deities and other scenes about cheat. 229 00:22:04,690 --> 00:22:08,200 So these are like dharma implements, wooden fish bells, 230 00:22:08,200 --> 00:22:14,860 all of the various little doodads that you need to run rituals or do Buddhist things in your own home. 231 00:22:14,860 --> 00:22:20,860 Meet some insects you can order, you know, famous types of incense from these distributors as well. 232 00:22:20,860 --> 00:22:28,090 So it's kind of like a if people nowadays, especially if they're Buddhist sells and they look at Buddhism, they say, Oh, it's so commercialised. 233 00:22:28,090 --> 00:22:34,360 You know, Tricycle magazine, it's all about, you know, buying a fancy new meditation cushion or buying this incense. 234 00:22:34,360 --> 00:22:42,660 Here is commercialisation already happening in China in the 1920s? So the final type of institution I might talk about is publishers and bookstores, 235 00:22:42,660 --> 00:22:49,050 and these more than any other really spend the boundary between secular and religious. 236 00:22:49,050 --> 00:22:55,770 There's a lot of them are located within non-religious companies and presses, but they produce religious stuff. 237 00:22:55,770 --> 00:23:04,710 So most of the big commercial presses in modern China, the the commercial, the commercial press don't have books and world books. 238 00:23:04,710 --> 00:23:08,430 So-called Big Three didn't really publish a lot of Buddhist material. 239 00:23:08,430 --> 00:23:11,430 It's very small, and it's usually about Buddhist philosophy or something. 240 00:23:11,430 --> 00:23:15,390 If you read their book catalogues, they don't publish much about Buddhism at all. 241 00:23:15,390 --> 00:23:22,890 However, the same technology that they use in print shops that they used were used by some to produce modern style texts, 242 00:23:22,890 --> 00:23:25,620 such as periodicals and Moneyfacts. 243 00:23:25,620 --> 00:23:30,600 There were over 200 different types of Chinese periodicals ever produced during the early half of the 20th century. 244 00:23:30,600 --> 00:23:35,880 And I don't know how many dozens of individual monographs writing about Buddhism. 245 00:23:35,880 --> 00:23:41,850 These aren't scriptural texts. These are Buddhist scholars and others that are writing about Islam and the world of these publishers. 246 00:23:41,850 --> 00:23:44,640 Bookstores is definitely centred in Shanghai. 247 00:23:44,640 --> 00:23:51,450 They have locations elsewhere, but most of printing during the early 20th century was based in Shanghai for a number of reasons. 248 00:23:51,450 --> 00:23:56,340 And the number of interesting ways was kind of the broader world and culture. 249 00:23:56,340 --> 00:24:04,290 So I just recently found this photograph, and it was very happy to. This is the the first building of the Times newspaper. 250 00:24:04,290 --> 00:24:10,590 Sure, both very important modern style newspaper founded I believe in the late 19th century in Shanghai. 251 00:24:10,590 --> 00:24:20,530 And if you look just to the back there, you can see my cursor. Within the building of this press, there's also an institution called Yeonjung Books, 252 00:24:20,530 --> 00:24:26,110 your junk food, you and your gym should you did produce Buddhist books and Buddhist publications. 253 00:24:26,110 --> 00:24:31,060 So they're kind of like a little institution within the larger institution of Surabaya. 254 00:24:31,060 --> 00:24:37,840 Now, the founder of Shabelle was very interested in Buddhism himself. He was a kind of a a patron for Buddhist causes. 255 00:24:37,840 --> 00:24:42,580 But the company as a whole is not a Buddhist company. It's a for profit newspaper publisher. 256 00:24:42,580 --> 00:24:50,130 They just happen to use their presses from time to time to run off a few copies of Buddhist books. 257 00:24:50,130 --> 00:24:56,760 One institution that I've written about before in which I'm really looking forward to returning to this new project is trying to Typekit its books. 258 00:24:56,760 --> 00:25:02,280 Founded in 1929 and this is a modern style publisher that is devoted to Buddhism, 259 00:25:02,280 --> 00:25:11,250 set up on the model of a commercial publisher but a specialist in producing Buddhist books, and they were a for profit company that issued stock. 260 00:25:11,250 --> 00:25:17,640 And if you read their prospectus, they make the argument saying, Oh yes, you can invest in like a mine or you can invest in a mill. 261 00:25:17,640 --> 00:25:23,280 But if you invest in us in a Buddhist bookstore, you'll not only make monetary profit, you will also accrue merit. 262 00:25:23,280 --> 00:25:29,970 What other business can give you that? I mean, they really they're giving you the hard sell in terms of investing in the company. 263 00:25:29,970 --> 00:25:36,300 The board of directors, it was set up very much on the model of the Motor Company Board of directors of Typekit. 264 00:25:36,300 --> 00:25:40,170 Its books include some of the leading Buddhist laymen in Shanghai at the time. 265 00:25:40,170 --> 00:25:46,440 It's kind of a who's who of the late Buddhist community in Shanghai, and they used modern mechanised movable type. 266 00:25:46,440 --> 00:25:51,780 They didn't use wood blocks. They used what was then the cutting edge technology to produce their works. 267 00:25:51,780 --> 00:25:55,800 So that's one of the logos that they include in a lot of their books and of the portray logo. 268 00:25:55,800 --> 00:25:58,950 And then this is an image of the storefront of their branch in Punjab. 269 00:25:58,950 --> 00:26:08,910 So that's some kind of Southeast China, and they see the advantage of having an enormous screen, as you can see by 1935. 270 00:26:08,910 --> 00:26:18,930 They had a network of local distributors that spend almost the entire nation, right even out in Gansu, in the south and southwest, in the northeast. 271 00:26:18,930 --> 00:26:23,220 They have local branches where you can buy Shanghai for this book's production. 272 00:26:23,220 --> 00:26:26,700 On the right there, there's just a list of some of the local branches. 273 00:26:26,700 --> 00:26:30,540 Some of these are kind of directly owned like it's Shanghai with his books photo branch. 274 00:26:30,540 --> 00:26:34,680 Others are just local bookstores with whom they have a distribution agreement. 275 00:26:34,680 --> 00:26:42,200 So they don't necessarily own or control them, but they have their books. They send them there and they can be bought from their shops. 276 00:26:42,200 --> 00:26:49,850 So summing up reflection and future directions for this material during this period, this very modern period of Buddhist history, 277 00:26:49,850 --> 00:26:55,820 of course, the rhetoric and benefits of producing and reading Buddhist texts remain, they still use the same language. 278 00:26:55,820 --> 00:27:00,230 You will accrue merit if you cause these texts to be reproduced and be distributed. 279 00:27:00,230 --> 00:27:06,650 That much has not changed. Is still core to the modern Chinese Buddhist experience of dealing with texts. 280 00:27:06,650 --> 00:27:12,740 However, the technologies and systems that they use for distributing and promoting them are much more modern. 281 00:27:12,740 --> 00:27:20,060 They're very new, they're innovative. They draw upon the legacy of the past, but they are very different from what had existed before. 282 00:27:20,060 --> 00:27:25,640 And I find this very interesting. It's a nice example of innovation without losing connexion with tradition. 283 00:27:25,640 --> 00:27:34,580 There is no kind of worry that using a modern technology would be betraying the patent of the patrimony or the history of Chinese production. 284 00:27:34,580 --> 00:27:39,110 They were very happy to use the most modern technologies to get their texts. 285 00:27:39,110 --> 00:27:42,830 There were also new genres that had not existed before in Chinese Buddhist literature, 286 00:27:42,830 --> 00:27:48,290 such as the periodical, and this kind of idea of a book for beginners like Buddhism for Dummies. 287 00:27:48,290 --> 00:27:51,880 You know nothing about Buddhism. You can pick up this book and learn a little bit about it. 288 00:27:51,880 --> 00:27:58,550 Four steps. These are looking to extend the reach of Buddhism beyond those who are already Buddhists. 289 00:27:58,550 --> 00:28:01,880 Get them into the hands of people who maybe have a passing interest like young. 290 00:28:01,880 --> 00:28:04,820 One way he didn't have any special connexion to Buddhism, 291 00:28:04,820 --> 00:28:11,000 but through the experience of eating up a book that sparked something in which led to a lifelong engagement with them. 292 00:28:11,000 --> 00:28:15,350 And throughout this period, there were dozens of producers and thousands of texts. 293 00:28:15,350 --> 00:28:21,230 So accessing this world for us, at least as a historian, can be difficult because it's almost a flood of texts. 294 00:28:21,230 --> 00:28:27,980 It's not just one single text you can focus on and look at. There are multitudes of them, but it's this third point. 295 00:28:27,980 --> 00:28:32,420 I think it's it's quite interesting and might be most interesting to to the participants in 296 00:28:32,420 --> 00:28:37,250 this conference that these new genres picked up on the language and the values of Buddhism, 297 00:28:37,250 --> 00:28:41,570 but present them in very different ways and can do new things with Buddhist ideas. 298 00:28:41,570 --> 00:28:46,580 So, for example, in these periodicals, Buddhist, we're able to inform each other of threats to temples. 299 00:28:46,580 --> 00:28:52,730 So a lot of state authorities in modern China wanted to destroy temples or take them over and turn them into schools. 300 00:28:52,730 --> 00:28:59,810 Well, Buddhists in their periodicals warn each other of emerging threats like this band together and make the case to stop it. 301 00:28:59,810 --> 00:29:03,440 There was a new focus on essentials. What is essentially Buddhism? 302 00:29:03,440 --> 00:29:06,350 What is the core Buddhism? What is most important to learn? 303 00:29:06,350 --> 00:29:13,310 How do you boil it down to something that can be accessible to a beginner, to somebody who hasn't yet been immersed into the world of Buddhism? 304 00:29:13,310 --> 00:29:17,240 Also, modern science and philosophy is becoming much more known. 305 00:29:17,240 --> 00:29:22,760 How do you articulate Buddhism in terms of modern science? My colleague Eric Trump, of course, 306 00:29:22,760 --> 00:29:30,050 has done a great deal of work on this on what would have stood to articulate their own tradition in terms of the values of modern science. 307 00:29:30,050 --> 00:29:33,320 But his masters could become national figures within their lifetime. 308 00:29:33,320 --> 00:29:40,310 For much of history, famous monks and nuns, their writings would really only be collected and reprinted after they were dead. 309 00:29:40,310 --> 00:29:43,280 And if you read about them without having met them, they were already gone. 310 00:29:43,280 --> 00:29:48,650 Well, during this period, we have Buddhist masters who become almost Buddhist celebrities during their own lifetime, 311 00:29:48,650 --> 00:29:57,860 and then they're invited to go around and give lectures. Some, like Thai, who were masters of self aggrandisement and self-promotion, 312 00:29:57,860 --> 00:30:03,380 and they used publications to make themselves out to be a much bigger deal than they actually were. 313 00:30:03,380 --> 00:30:12,010 But you know, as with influencers and TikTok nowadays, if you keep telling that lie eventually becomes true because enough people pay attention to. 314 00:30:12,010 --> 00:30:16,930 And finally, support from highly placed people is also important. This new technology. 315 00:30:16,930 --> 00:30:20,950 Printing a modern book with a modern press isn't something that's very simple. 316 00:30:20,950 --> 00:30:24,130 You need special technology. You need special expertise. 317 00:30:24,130 --> 00:30:31,750 And having highly placed elite lay people, supporting your efforts became very important as well. 318 00:30:31,750 --> 00:30:35,260 So finally, I just wanted to Lessing want to talk about, is this new? 319 00:30:35,260 --> 00:30:41,440 Is this new sort of online resource digital resource which a few colleagues and I are putting together? 320 00:30:41,440 --> 00:30:46,600 You can access it right now if you want to create an insult. We're calling it the Chinese Religious Text Authority. 321 00:30:46,600 --> 00:30:55,330 And it's an attempt to map the territory of Chinese texts, Buddhist and otherwise throughout all of history up until about 1950 or so. 322 00:30:55,330 --> 00:31:00,550 And my own little part in this, of course, is adding entries on Chinese Buddhist texts from the modern period. 323 00:31:00,550 --> 00:31:05,230 But I have colleagues working on those and working on a text review textbook. 324 00:31:05,230 --> 00:31:14,560 And as you can cut, you can probably see the background. The back end of it is media software, so it's the same software that runs Wikipedia. 325 00:31:14,560 --> 00:31:16,750 Anybody with an account can go on and edit it, 326 00:31:16,750 --> 00:31:22,660 and we're trying to make this a kind of a map of all of the various and interesting Chinese sects that are out there. 327 00:31:22,660 --> 00:31:28,450 Just to give you a sense of what it can do, all of the data that we add, it's not just sort of encyclopaedia entries, 328 00:31:28,450 --> 00:31:34,210 it's also specifically formatted data so you can export it in a way where you can see a list of titles, 329 00:31:34,210 --> 00:31:40,000 list of involved persons, whether they're orphans or editors, place of publication publisher in your publication as well. 330 00:31:40,000 --> 00:31:43,570 So this is the Shanghai which contributes the Shanghai bookstores. 331 00:31:43,570 --> 00:31:48,430 You can see just a selection of some of the earliest books monographs that they're producing. 332 00:31:48,430 --> 00:31:52,240 And again, these aren't spiritual works. These are commentaries guides. 333 00:31:52,240 --> 00:31:57,100 These are discourses on topics having to do with Buddhism as well. 334 00:31:57,100 --> 00:32:04,062 So that's all I have for you today. Thanks very much.