Attached to Paper Session
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The Tsz Shan Monastery and its Buddhist Art Museum in Hong Kong is the latest addition to a series of Buddhist open-air museums established across Greater China in the twenty-first century. Officially opened in 2019 to much fanfare, it represents the ambitions of its founder, Li Ka-shing (1928–), who through his philanthropic organization, the Li Ka-shing Foundation, has invested a whopping HKD 3.3 billion (USD 422 million) to first establish the monastery in 2015 and then the museum in 2019 at the base of a giant Guanyin statue. Despite its remote location and recency in the Hong Kong religious landscape, it has garnered a loyal group of devotees and volunteers with its events fully booked and its daily visiting slots snapped up by locals and tourists.
No scholarly study of Tsz Shan Monastery has been conducted so far but previous studies of Chinese Buddhist museums outside Hong Kong have focused on their monumentality (Irons 2020), state-temple relations (Hsueh 2021), pedagogical functions (Goh 2022), and similarity to temples (Wang and Gamberi 2023). Cora Wong (2017), who examined a different Buddhist park in Hong Kong, argues that it is an “accidental” Buddhist theme park drawing varied cultural expectations from local and foreign visitors. Except Goh (2022), none of these studies looks at the conditions and motivations behind the establishment of Buddhist museums in a religious landscape like Hong Kong. Based on multiple field visits in 2023, this paper not only casts light on the above desiderata but also contributes to the study of large religious parks (Paine 2019).
I first locate Tsz Shan Monastery within the socio-historical and political context of Hong Kong. In doing so, I use a holistic ecological approach where religions should not be studied in isolation outside the structure of its political, economic, and socio-cultural environment (Goossaert and Palmer 2011, 6). Following Bourdieu (1987, 126), I also approach religions as constituted on a micro level by the religious capital and habitus of individuals. Li Ka-shing is no ordinary philanthropist but the wealthiest individual in Hong Kong possessing enormous resources and clout. Unlike Buddhist luminaries, his charisma stems from his rags-to-riches story both admired and envied in neoliberal capitalist Hong Kong. I examine his goals for the project within the context of post-handover Hong Kong characterized by rising inequality and social unrest (Hung 2022). I suggest that his philanthrocapitalism is an instance of the “theodicy of privilege” whereby the super-rich engage in mega-giving to sanctify and legitimize their own elevated status (McGoey and Thiel 2018).
After founding Tsz Shan Monastery in 2015, the space beneath the giant Guanyin statue was converted into a museum populated by exclusive artifacts purchased from international auction houses. Colossal Buddhist statues have been considered extensively in Buddhist studies (Wong 2019) but what is the role of a Buddhist museum underneath one within a Buddhist monastery? I argue that by placing the statue at the rightmost end of the complex, it is positioned literally as the “highest value” landmark exhibit attracting visitors from all over Hong Kong. Practically, the museum serves as a venue for spillover human traffic and an air-conditioned respite after the climb up to the statue. However, the museum is also a “contact zone” (Clifford 1997) enlisted by religions to appeal to contemporary audiences through the co-option of a form associated with Western modernity (Abt 2006, 6–9). On one hand, I show how the display of religious art in museums riding on a heritage discourse constitutes a strategy (Morais 2020) to make religions more palatable to sophisticated audiences. On the other hand, I argue that the deployment of Buddhist images of spiritual exemplars embodied in the Guanyin statue and museum taps into a kalligenesis culture (Kidd 2017) thereby assuaging criticisms of the profligate multimillion-dollar complex.
References
Abt, Jeffrey. 2006. “The Origins of the Public Museum.” In A Companion to Museum Studies, edited by Sharon Macdonald, 115–134. Malden, MA: Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470996836.ch8.
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1987. “Legitimation and Structured Interest in Weber’s Sociology of Religion.” In Max Weber, Rationality and Modernity, edited by Sam Whimster, and Scott Lash, 119–136. London: Routledge.
Clifford, James. 1997. “Museums as Contact Zones.” In Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century, 188–219. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Goh, Aik Sai. 2022. “Enlightenment on Display: The Origins, Motivations, and Functions of Hagiographic Buddhist Museums in Singapore.” Southeast Asian Studies 11 (1): 79–114. https://doi.org/10.20495/seas.11.1_79.
Goossaert, Vincent, and David A. Palmer. 2011. The Religious Question in Modern China. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226304182.001.0001.
Hsueh, Meng-chi. 2021. “Religious Revival or Control? Reading the Spatial Politics of an Officially Atheist Country’s Planning of Religious Scenic Areas: Three Cases in Shaanxi, China.” Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space 39 (4): 818–837. https://doi.org/10.1177/2399654420964958.
Hung, Ho-fung. 2022. City on the Edge: Hong Kong under Chinese Rule. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108885690.
Irons, Edward. 2020. “Under the Gaze of the Buddha Mega-Statue: Commodification and Humanistic Buddhism in Fo Guang Shan.” Journal of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies 18: 96–122.
Kidd, Ian James. 2017. “Beautiful Bodhisattvas: The Aesthetics of Spiritual Exemplarity.” Contemporary Buddhism 18 (2): 331–345. https://doi.org/10.1080/14639947.2017.1386417.
McGoey, Linsey, and Darren Thiel. 2018. “Charismatic Violence and the Sanctification of the Super-Rich.” Economy and Society 47 (1): 111–134. https://doi.org/10.1080/03085147.2018.1448543.
Morais, Mariana Ramos de. 2020. “Cultural Heritage as a Religious Strategy. Heritage-making at the Candomblé Temples in Brazil.” In The Religious Heritage Complex: Heritage-making at the Candomblé Temples in Brazil, edited by Cyril Isnart, and Nathalie Cerezales, 143–156. London: Bloomsbury Academic. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350072541.ch-009.
Paine, Crispin. 2019. Gods and Rollercoasters: Religion in Theme Parks Worldwide. London: Bloomsbury Academic. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350046306.
Wang, Shu-Li, and Valentina Gamberi. 2023. “The Museum Is Like a Temple: The Fo Guang Shan Buddha Museum in Taiwan.” Asian Anthropology 22 (1): 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/1683478X.2022.2117963.
Wong, Cora Un In. 2017. “The Big Buddha of Hong Kong: An Accidental Buddhist Theme Park.” Tourism Geographies 19 (2): 168–187. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616688.2016.1158204.
Wong, Dorothy C. 2019. “Colossal Buddha Statues along the Silk Road.” Acta Via Serica 4 (2): 1–27. https://doi.org/10.22679/AVS.2019.4.2.001.
Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)
On March 27, 2019, a group of Hong Kong’s elites including Li Ka-shing (1928–), the richest man in Hong Kong, and Carrie Lam (1957–), the then Chief Executive of the Hong Kong SAR gathered at a monastery located in rural Tai Po. The occasion was the grand opening of the Tsz Shan Monastery comprising a colossal Guanyin statue and museum built by funds from the Li Ka-shing Foundation. This paper examines the sociopolitical conditions leading to its establishment and the motivations of its founder. I argue that although the place was ostensibly set up as therapy for stressed residents in post-handover Hong Kong, it is also a case of the “theodicy of privilege” whereby the super-rich engages in philanthropy to sanctify their status amidst rising social inequality. This is facilitated by tapping into museum culture to attract sophisticated audiences and kalligenesis culture through the display of Buddhist spiritual exemplars.