The Power of Wish-Vows: Ethics and Ritual Transformation in Buddhist Temples in Contemporary China

ABSTRACT Among the most noteworthy practices in Buddhist temples in China today are yuan or wish-vow actions. Wish-vows encompass both wish-making (xuyuan 许愿) and vow-giving (fayuan 发愿), with both modalities embraced by average temple-goers from a general population. Chinese Buddhist liturgies encourage ritual performers to adopt a bodhisattva stance, wishing/vowing for the well-being of all beings. This introduces an ethical dimension to yuan performances. This paper analyzes the continuity in practice between wish-making and vow-giving, exploring how popular and Buddhist understandings of ritual entangle and how ritual generates meaningful narratives for practitioners. The article shows how the human pursuit of ritual effects and ethical self-transformation are not contradictory but rather complementary processes. Considering this Chinese ritual situation deepens our comprehension of votive practices in syncretic religious traditions. Additionally, it offers a new direction for considering religious potentialities in late socialist societies. Furthermore, it usefully challenges the use of the term “prayer” in Chinese contexts. In this way, the article bridges anthropology, Chinese studies, and religious studies and enhances our conceptual toolkit for studying ongoing human transformation.


Volume 19 Issue 3 The Power of Wish-Vows: Ethics and Ritual Transformation in Buddhist
Temples in Contemporary China Yang Shen

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Witnessing a temple-goer kneeling before a god statue, who maintained a controlled posture and closed his eyes-oblivious to his surroundings, gives us pause: how can we aptly describe this brief, fleeting encounter that typically lasts mere seconds?(Figure 1).Approaching such a common scene in Chinese Buddhist temples, ethnographers confront a challenge to translate between forms of life.Native Chinese speakers, regardless of religious or atheist attitudes, find the concept of yuan self-explanatory.In various contexts, the idiom translates to wishes, vows, desires, aspirations, prayers, hopes, willingness, readiness, and more-not to mention the polysemy of all these English terms.Moreover, since no single phrase in conventional Euro-American cultural-religious traditions encapsulates the entirety of yuan actions, observers often overlook or misinterpret the meaningful worlds as unfolded within the dynamic ritual spectacles in Chinese temples.The paper demonstrates and clarifies that the brief moment of encounter observed is a profoundly humanistic interaction within the human-divine relationship.
The article focuses on a simple gesture widespread in Chinese temple spaces, exploring how this paradigmatic ritual action, xuyuan, undergoes a critical transformation of meaning within the syncretic context of Chinese Buddhist temples.It is well known that popular religious participation in Chinese society typically stems from pursuing divine power or
numinous efficacy (ling) (Feuchtwang 2003;Chau 2008;Lin 2015).Additionally, participants in Chinese Buddhist temple activities come from the general public, often without formal religious affiliation or a belief in the necessity of religious identity for their ritual engagement (Overmyer 1990;Leamaster and Hu 2014).Despite scholarly consensus on the popular face of Chinese Buddhist temples, limited research has investigated the interaction of co-existing ritual processes.Consequently, the ritual effects at work remain unclear, especially when private worship, group rituals, and public liturgical assemblies transpire simultaneously in Buddhist temples in late socialist China.
We begin by discussing the utility or insufficiency of anthropological insights on ritual for explaining the ritual dynamics in Chinese Buddhist temples.Next, we present the concept of yuan or wish-vows as an alternative framework for understanding what is referred to, from an etic perspective, as "praying."Ethnographically, we examine (1) Chinese temple-goers' generic wish-vow performances and how wishvows, as ritual framing of actions, transform the objects of average human desire; (2) the resignification introduced by Mahayana Buddhist monastics to temple-goers' yuan practices, and (3) the narrative and liturgical framework supporting the Mahayana Buddhist reframing of wish-vow actions.The materials were collected from Temple Commons, a major urban temple, and its rural branch Temple Hillside, in the City of Glory, a metropolis of ten million residents in eastern China during 2015-2016. 1

Chinese Worshippers and Ritual as a Framing of Actions
The article draws from performance studies to analyze the process and effects of ritual transformation (Austin 1975;Schechner 2010;Y. Shen 2015).While scholars agree that rituals maintain and creatively transform social structures through patterned practices over time (Gluckman 2017;Turner 2018;Turner 1977;Bloch 1992), the implication of non-membership-based rituals, such as those in Chinese Buddhist temples, are not always self-evident.Additionally, under the historical conditions of state secularism, which subordinates religious institutional frameworks under the constitutional authority of the modern state, the conventional assumption of coextensive ritual spaces and life spheres is often untenable (Asad 2003(Asad , 2015)).
In late socialist China, for example, religious engagement is institutionally marginalized in "Religious Activity Venues" (zongjiao huodong changsuo), meaning that spatial policies are imposed to separate so-called religious activities from a presumably secular, mainstream life (cf.Anagnost 1994;Yang 2004;Fisher 2011Fisher , 2014;;Y. Shen 2020).Contrary to expectations for ritual engagement by "members of a confessional Buddhist In the context of Chinese Buddhist temples, the question arises regarding a temple ritual's ability to alter social relationsbeyond rituals' reputed capacity to "reproduce" a given establishment.My proposition is to build on the work of anthropologists and ritual theorists who focus not only on ritual behaviors as embodied practices but also on ritual framings as providing an orientation to action (Bell 1992;Humphrey andLaidlaw 1994, 2007;Seligman et al. 2008;Seligman andWeller 2012, 2018;van der Veer 2020).My goal is to look beyond defined ritual programs and examine how people may contingently alter their ethical and practical stance as a result of their participation in yuan activities.In such an action-oriented ritual analysis, what is at stake is apprehending the realities that ritual activities construct in situ.
The distinction between ritual practices per se and ritual as a framing of contingent actions allows us to reconsider the utility of the idiom of "prayer" in cross-cultural contexts.Recent anthropology has given much ethnographic attention to acts of prayer, particularly in relation to their effects on reconstituting ethical and moral subjectivities in Christian and Islamic cultural-religious lives (Mahmood 2011; Henkel 2005;Simon 2009;Luhrmann and Morgain 2012;Bandak 2017).Especially building on Mauss (2003) and later Foucault (2019), scholars of prayer practices productively explored the interplay between agency and authority and revealed how the embodied capacities of the self are formed within specific traditions or ways of life.However, it is crucial to note that in these studies, prayer as a ritual technique is rooted in an understanding of "prayer" that is already a product of ritual framing specific to Christian and Islamic liturgical traditions.It means that the idiom of prayer tends to carry the weight of a Creator/Creature divide prevalent in Islamic-Christian ontologies, which can overwrite other conceptions of divine power and agency when used interchangeably (c.f.Song 2018).
Regarding Chinese temple practices, it is misleading to view supplications as communication with a transcendental God because it fails to recognize the humanistic presupposition of the human-divine relationship (Mair 2014;Teiser 2009Teiser , 2022)).A prominent case illustrating such Chinese acceptance of the divine capacity of humans is the worship of apotheosized humans, sometimes directly through their flesh or body parts preserved in Chinese temples, including in my field sites. 3In this context, the ritual acts through which Chinese worshippers articulate their hopes and desires to a broad range of human-divine beings are rather indistinct from one another.In other words, the vernacular idiom of "praying/prayer" does not adequately capture what is happening or the effects produced during yuan activities. 4

Wish-Vows as a Ritual Framing of Desire and Action
Considering ritual as a frame of action, rather than a set of embodied practices, addresses the limitations of applying categories from one tradition to another and enables alternative ontologies to emerge conceptually.This approach requires us to examine each case in situ, taking into account the empirical processes of ritualization that refine the ritual actor's self-definition.This perspective is especially relevant when exploring Chinese ontologies that emphasize humans' innate transformative potential.As Sangren observes, for considering Chinese cultural-religious practices like yuan, "worship" should be viewed as an idiom of self-construction and desire as intimately connected to the pursuit of a growing awareness of innate divinity.He writes: Although many devout lay worshippers are fond of recounting how the god or goddess miraculously intervened in their lives, such stories are often prefaces to an additional recounting of how these miracles were merely the beginning of a more profound process of learning and self-transformation.I was often told how gods employ miracles as a means to recruit individuals to a commitment to this transformative process.In other words, what starts out as an engagement with a reified, alienated divinity becomes a more reflective engagement with the self; "enlightenment" amounts to the discovery that the self is itself divine and for some, divinity is but a projection of the self…Those who sincerely seek guidance [from gods] are thought inevitably to learn eventually that prayer for solely individual benefits is only the beginning of the [self ] cultivation process (xiude).(Sangren 2020, 80-86) It would be redundant to repeat that indigenous Chinese theories tend to postulate ritual as a means of transforming human agency (Cua 2005;Neville 2008).The key for cross-cultural observers is to maintain an empathetic attitude; so that one can be aware of the heterogeneous possibilities that can arise when encountering a personal project in which a human being is realizing his or her innate goodness.In the words of a comparative philosopher, recognizing desire as a motivation for ontological movement illuminates that the first movement is the "nascent orientation to the desirable, " and that desire itself "always constitutes a dynamism towards…the realization of the good" (V.Shen 2018Shen , 43, 2019)).From this perspective, a distinctive aspect of Chinese religious psychology lies in the unique sense of agency expressed through a human yearning for ontological self-transformation.
In ordinary lives, this yearning for ontological agency is poignantly manifested through a Chinese cultural fascination with understanding the movements of one's fate (mingyun) (Lupke 2005).Underlying such obsessions is "the wish to control the future…a psychologically more fundamental desire to claim ownership of one's being-or, in contemporary parlance, to assert agency" (Sangren 2012, 117)

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that desire in the Chinese religious world is a human universal, "with little need of explicit elaboration or justification" (Sangren 2012, 122).While this is true, we still need to add that desire as a mode of human orientation must be understood within the contexts of possible actions and the ontological stakes one sets for oneself.In the absence of a radical boundary between the human and divine, the Chinese desire for agency and self-enhancement is simultaneously fraught with an ontological risk regarding what one might become.Thus, while Sangren draws on Freud and Lacan to argue for recognizing desire as a human condition, I take a more performative approach to the unfolding of rituals.As the ethnography demonstrates, suspending universalist expectations and lending space to ontological uncertainties can be productive in clarifying the transformative ritual process of human desire in Chinese temples.By tracing the moments of ritual framing, we can observe how the human condition of desire undergoes experiential re-orientation and how tentative, interactive interstices eventually help render certain desires more meaningful and desirable than others.
In short, employing the analytics of ritual as a frame for action allows us to identify that the Chinese idiom "yuan" encompasses more than just "desire, " which Sangren elaborated extensively.Etymologically, yuan is a compound character consisting of characters for "source/origin" and "heart." Since Chinese grammar does not distinguish between singular and plural nouns, it denotes both concept and object.Moreover, yuan functions as a transitive verb, indicating the actions of the heart-mind, which are broadly regarded as a source of life. 5As both a noun and a verb, yuan denotes a critical action essential to the capabilities of a hearty spiritual being, which includes humans and anthropomorphic beings (such as spirits and animal fairies), as well as humane-divine beings (such as celestial deities, buddhas, and bodhisattvas). 6 The particular framing of narratives and rituals in Chinese Buddhist temples leads me to translate and conceptualize yuan as "wish-vows." Admittedly, from a liturgical and scriptural perspective, yuan in Chinese Buddhism refers specifically to the aspirational commitments of buddhas and bodhisattvas, who wish/vow to benefit all beings.However, as mentioned, given the broad spiritual-divine continuum of the Chinese temple space, there is a critical continuity rather than a radical discontinuity between various divine instantiations.Therefore, to the extent that yuan acts run through all activities in Chinese Buddhist temples, the term allows us to consider a more general mode of agency manifested in a free human being's vision and commitment to action and realization.Returning to the scene in Figure 1 with this new insight, we can now observe that the man is giving a wish-vow.

Spiritual Efficacy and the Ritual Effects of Plausibility
Rooted in what scholars refer to as the prominent Han "traditional expectations of miraculous powers" (Palmer 2007, 84;Feuchtwang 2008), numerous ordinary temple-goers have worshipped for their unique ends at Temple Commons, an illustrious Buddhist temple in the City of Glory.Recalling its history since the sixth century, the temple enjoys a far-reaching reputation as amazingly efficacious.
Typically, temple-goers' yuan-acts consist of expressing their most cherished desires or feelings through a para-narrative beginning with "I wish…".Within this genre, the content of each wish is contingent on individual biographical experiences.Meanwhile, wish-making in a Buddhist temple space assumes a communal performative aspect that is socially intelligible.Particularly when temple-goers visit temples with relatives and friends (in the cities) or neighbors (in the countryside), a unique inter-subjective moment arises when they hear the wishes of others.Ioana, a 28-year-old participant in a Buddhist summer camp, shared her first memorable experience of Buddhist temples during a tourist trip, saying: I did not expect to find myself so touched when hearing my mother and father, in a Buddhist temple, saying they only wished me to own happiness.They held their wish card as if carrying gold.I saw what was in their eyes when they looked at the bodhisattva's statue; I watched every movement as they knelt to pray, despite my mother's waist injury.It was an expression of genuine concern for me.We were traveling and on the edge of fighting after having spent too much time together.They were unsatisfied with my job [in a small private business]; "too insecure." I cannot tolerate their banal security within state institutions either.Stuck there.However, I am convinced by how they care.
Clearly, Ioana would have been aware of her parents' concerns even without the temple encounter.However, the ritual situation, which required affective commitment and physical alignment, allowed Ioana to perceive her parents' care through their careful movements, despite her mother's physical pain.In a ritual setting not directly oriented to interpersonal communication, Ioana was touched by an attitude fostered by the ritual orchestration of mind and body, which demonstrated a regard for others.One might wonder what elements contributed to this effect of plausibility.
Besides the momentary act of prostration, Ioana's story highlights the significance of wish-cards as relational tokens.The occurrence of votive texts is widely noted by historians, archaeologists, and philologists of ancient religion (C.f.Lubin 2001, 566;Pinch and Waraksa 2009).However, the ritual production and effects of votive texts are not always clear when examined outside their situational context.Ethnographic methods can provide valuable insights in this regard.In contemporary Chinese temples, wish-cards are essential tools

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for soliciting and sanctifying the desires of ordinary wishmakers (Figure 1).Beyond transient bodily movements, temple-goers inscribe their speech acts onto wish-cards, giving their wishes a tangible form.Through votive practices, these cards are transformed into personal monuments.Depending on each temple's layout, wish-cards can take different forms, such as cloth slips tied to tree branches, wooden tablets affixed to a wall, small cards attached to the tails of great lanterns, and so on.Regardless of their specific form, these materialized wishes accumulate massively.
Inscribing wishes on wish-slips generates a distinctive genre of "text act" (c.f.Chau 2008, 95-98) and a surplus of collective orality.The act of inscription obliges wish-makers to articulate their relationships with their wish-addressees using relational terms.Not surprisingly, family collectives (hejia) are among the most common agents in making or receiving a wish in the text-act.Companies, and occasionally pets, also frequently appear on lists of concerns.Other regular topics in the wish texts at Temple Commons and Temple Hillside include the future of Buddhism, the nation-state (written as "ancestral nation"), and general references to an international community (shi jie).Yet few wish-makers nominate voluntary associations or other social organizations in their wish-writing.As the inscriptions appear in semi-public Buddhist temple spaces, we should note that their contents reflect current social imaginaries, and that the ritual writing act serves as a productive nexus for social discourse.This generative impetus resonates with Bourdieu's observation that, "Private" experiences undergo nothing less than a change of state when they recognize themselves in the public objectivity of an already constituted discourse, the objective sign of recognition of their right to be spoken and to be spoken publicly.(Bourdieu 1977, 170, italics in original) Such discursive affirmation provides wish-makers with the confidence that their private wish is part of a collective and shares a pre-existing source of authority.Indeed, the act of writing or performing "text acts"-such as writing, inscribing, or bidding for characters-is a heavily power-laden drama in Chinese political and religious stories (Santos 2013).Katz's study of Chinese vows also suggests that wishing/vowing "legitimize[s] one's claims, and if successful, can help to create or reinforce facts in ways that are considered culturally sanctioned" (Katz 2008, 61).In a temple setting, we may view the extravagant display of wishes as an assembly of non-elite voices from ordinary people, validated and supported by divine forces.As bold authors of their wishes, ordinary wish-makers authorize their works of the self through the unveiling of their innermost desires.
The sheer volume of wish-cards also plays a crucial role in signaling ritual efficacy.In the context of Chinese village religions, the public recognition of spiritual efficacy depends on the measure of scale-which, in Chau's Durkheimian analyses, amounts to a condition of collective effervescence (Chau 2008).That is, gods as collective representations are energized by human veneration; the more worshippers, the more powerful the gods (Chau 2008, 153-156).Although we cannot assume a pre-given collectivity (in terms of sociological membership) in the case of Chinese Buddhist temples, the vast number of wish-slips presents a spectacle of effervescence and symbolizes a sense of relational engagements on its own terms.
The drama created by a seemingly endless array of wish-offerings is as indicative of a Buddhist temple's success and credibility as the unceasing incense fire (xianghuo).Like the red-hot incense fire, the sensorial quality of abundant wish offerings bespeaks human-divine communications untrammeled by the passage of time.As visible traces of past and present human engagement within a shared ritual space, wish-slips make wish-making acts both contiguous and contagious, enticing more participants to join the carnival to express their unique yearnings.Fortune, health, career success, passing national exams and entering higher education, lasting marriage, domestic peace, joy, and happiness are just a few common themes that repeatedly appear on the wish-slips; each has their own unique signature.In this way, the apparent repetition carries inexhaustible layers of emotional force, creating an intertwined blend of social visions and hope. 7

Ritual Technologies for Efficacy and Its Reframing
The expectation of efficacious outcomes is crucial to ordinary Chinese temple-goers who place less emphasis on Buddhist doctrines.This prioritization is clear when many temple-goers visit Buddhist temples to seek lottery divination (qiuqian).Hatfield's research on lottery divination suggests that it is a form of self-help that "involves the patterning or configuration of agencies and their relative positions" (Hatfield 2002, 861).This understanding helps us view wish-making and divination-seeking as complementary ritual technologies that aim to facilitate human-divine breakthroughs during moments of stagnation, confusion, or quandary.Underlying both practices is a desire to improve one's current condition.
At Temple Commons, eyes glimmering with desire, temple-goers making wish/vows under divine witness ask continuously and expectantly-"I have heard Temple Commons is extraordinarily effective (ling)!Are there bamboo sticks [tool for divination] too?" Shifu ("Venerable") Lofty, a well-educated Buddhist nun in her late fifties, had cut the bamboo herself because "so many people had asked about and needed it." The Shifu believed that a lottery divinatory revelation she received years ago had accurately predicted the course of her life.Although she had spent time studying various divination Encountering a ritual device that sparked both excitement and suspicion in late socialist China, one might wonder about the opinions of a religious specialist.Without delving into an ideology of modern rationality that dismisses many ritual engagements as "superstitions" (mixin), Shifu Lofty admitted that negotiating complex human lives requires many ritual techniques.Rather than distinguishing between justifiably "proper" religious practices and suspiciously "irreligious" customs, the Shifu and her like have formulated their views in line with the widespread social concern for ritual efficacy.Noticing that the Shifu positioned the self-help divination practice along a fine continuum of ritual means for producing desired effects, I further inquired, "One must pray/worship (bai) very sincerely to achieve effectiveness, isn't that correct?" Praying/worshipping (bai) is not really the best word [to speak about efficacy]!When I was a new monastic, I also prayed/ worshiped (bai).Only much later, I realized that if you look for effectiveness (ling), you must give a wish-vow (fa yuan).You must raise your heart (fa xin).The power of wish-vows is most critical.To own the power of wish-vowing, you must be sincere (cheng) in your heart.It is like swearing an oath (fa shi).In general, people dare not take an oath.When they do it, their purpose must be utterly determined.
Here the Shifu introduced a re-interpretation of wish-vows that is not commonly evidenced by average temple-goers.It pertains to a claim that a petitioner should strive to become a bodhisattva personally and persevere in their commitment to benefit all sentient beings.In this sense, the evidence of wish-vow powers lies in the perseverance that encompasses old and new circumstances over a long-term trajectory of a wishvow commitment.Indeed, Chinese Buddhist monastics often recount how Guan-yin is ready to respond to the cries of anyone because the bodhisattva has given a wish-vow to respond to everyone's wishes.In popular memory, many buddhas are venerated precisely based on the wish-vows the then buddhas-to-be made in their past lives-when they were still cultivating a bodhisattva way.
At the time of my conversation with the Shifu, I had observed the prevalence of wish-vows and wish-vowing power in temple spaces, although I did not grasp the concept.So I parroted the common idiom used when discussing monastic individuals.I asked the Shifu, "Was it a great wish-vow-giving act (fa da yuan) for you to go monastic?""Absolutely!"The Shifu burst out, before returning to a casual tone, "It also demands a lot of felicitous conditions (fu fen) to walk out of the household life (chu jia).Even with this intention, many people could not make it happen in their current lifetimes (zhe yi beizi) because formidable obstacles prevent them.
According to the Shifu's account, the difference between monastic and non-monastic ways of life is a function of both personal determination and favorable circumstances.
It is important to emphasize that bodhisattva practices are central to the Chinese Buddhist monastic way.Mahayana Buddhist monks and nuns (the great majority of Chinese Buddhist monastics) only obtain fully-fledged monastic status after pledging a set of Bodhisattva Precepts (pusa jie) in addition to the standard monastic precepts they share with their Theravada counterparts. 9Thus, besides adhering to disciplinary rules that distinguish a celibate monastic life from average lifestyles, Chinese Buddhist monastics are also required to commit to acting like a bodhisattva in everyday circumstances and maintaining a sense of kinship with their fellow human beings.While the same bodhisattva precept-taking ritual is available to qualified laypersons, most non-monastics do not take these precepts.Nonetheless, the universal human potential for self-perfection is widely recognized.In fact, monastics use the term "bodhisattva" as a general form of address when interacting with people from all kinds of backgrounds, including illiterate men and women from rural areas, government officials, and educated urban professionals in a shared temple space.Shifu Lofty's narrative exemplifies a common approach Chinese Buddhist monastics use to encourage an ethical shift during popular yuan performances.As temple-goers pursue efficacy in honoring the power of buddhas and bodhisattvas, the monastics recommend a self-obliging power working upon one's desired outcomes.However, without dismissing the quest for efficacy, the monastics recognize that ordinary desires carry a self-uplifting potential and, thus, are openings for selftransformation.The act of petitioning a god could become an act of pledging self-authorial agency, particularly if temple-goers were to broaden their mindsets and consider making wish-vows for others and taking a path in the bodhisattva tradition.Our next focus will be how ritual structures support this narrative reframing.

Buddhist Attunement: Performative Bodhisattva Wish-Vows as a Ritual Stance
In Chinese Buddhism as a discursive tradition, the ideal of bodhisattva practice for attaining Buddhahood is what sets Chinese Buddhist traditions (Mahayana traditions, including the Tibetan Buddhist traditions in China) apart from Theravada Buddhist traditions (informed by the "Pali imaginaire, " c.f. Collins 1998).The ideal of the bodhisattva way is, above all, expressed through honoring the wish-vows characteristic of a bodhisattva, which are systematically integrated into Buddhist temple liturgies.Every day, during both resident ritual sessions and various public assemblies, a diverse array of buddha and bodhisattva wish-vows are recited.The best-known and most generic group is the Four Immeasurable yuan (si hong shi yuan), typically translated into English as "the Bodhisattva vows." The vows reads, All beings beyond measure, (Bodhisattvas/I) vow (shi yuan) to liberate.
Methods without a count, (Bodhisattvas/I) vow (shi yuan) to learn.
The great way of Buddhas, (Bodhisattvas/I) vow (shi yuan) to accomplish.
In Chinese, the yuan-text lacks a pronoun, thus allowing for a dual agency to be incorporated into its recitation. 10In the textual context, the collective bodhisattvas are agents giving these four immeasurable wish-vows.However, during ritual enactment, the speech-act performers utter the speech in the first person, while ritual participants-during their small talks in a temple-keeping daily life-constantly encourage one another to take ownership of their speech acts.Recalling the ideogramic composition of the character "yuan"-an "origin" arising from a "heart" -we can observe that it is precisely the elasticity of the folk usages of "yuan" that makes its semantic boundaries remarkably malleable.Thus, individuals who recite the bodhisattvas' yuan are often urged to envision these conventional formulations as their own wish-vowing orientations, that is, as the ideal shape or emerging direction for their formless, unexpressed, or suppressed desires.
Another example can further illustrate the duality of bodhisattva yuan performers.In residential Buddhist temples, the community begins and ends daily with bell striking and bell-verse singing.When monastic novices or lay Buddhists first take up the task, veteran practitioners teach them not to forget to give their personal wish-vows before singing the verse.It is Notably, the Chinese Buddhist yuan verse highlights the human protagonist as the speaker who claims to penetrate the realms of heaven and hell and who offers their commitment to live with every kind of being across time and space.This emphasis serves to remind yuan-singers of their own potential to embody the bodhisattva ideal to relate to all sentient beings compassionately.
It is also vital to note that these self-originative and other-oriented bodhisattva wish-vows are decidedly performative.As mentioned previously, Chinese temple-goers often display an indifferent attitude toward the question of faith.Instead, they readily participate in a broad range of temple rituals based on their private understandings of "devoutness" (qiancheng) and specific needs.When ordinary ritual practitioners encounter various yuan texts in their temple activities, they sing, chant, or mimetically recite aloud sample wish-vows.Belief operates at the practice level as a faith in the effects of their ritualized acts (Morgan 2010).Practitioners trust that the ritual recitation will ultimately fulfill their desire for extraordinary efficacy by introducing responses in their everyday lives.
After years of studying Chinese religious practices, Bell observed that "ritualization and ritual mastery are not only circular; they are also an exercise in the endless deferral of meaning and purpose.The effectiveness of exercising ritual mastery as strategic practice lies precisely in this circularity and deferral" (Bell 1992, 109).The circular productivity of Chinese ritual engagement is exemplified in the case of bodhisattva liturgies.On the one hand, ordinary temple-goers' expectations of extraordinary efficacy are perpetually deferred through their ongoing participation in bodhisattva rituals.On the other hand, the ritual's mimetic schemes, as forms of reality, increasingly become absorbed into temple-goers' sense of self and environment.Ultimately, an agent's sense of ritual transforms into a sense of reality itself.

Ritual Differentiation and the Challenge of Staking a Greater Wish-Vow
In light of an action-oriented ritual analysis, the key empirical change induced by bodhisattva performances is that they produce an awareness of the size of the performer's heart.That is, the Buddhist ritual framing repeatedly orients mimetic performers' attention to their individual degree of resoluteness and commitment to the standardized wish-vows they recite.
Through rituals and informal conversations, temple-goers are introduced to a bodhisattva claim stating that bodhisattvas, buddhas, and individuals of their rank can give "immeasurable" wish-vows and remain unwavering throughout.Whether one understands "immeasurability" through a Buddhist "non-existence" theory in a philosophical sense or via a popular fascination with magical powers, a critical distinction is imposed on popular cognitive schemes.In addition to professing a yuan (wo de yuanwang shi) before a diviner or promising a yuan (xu yuan) before a patron deity, Chinese temple-goers encounter the ritual need to give a yuan (fa yuan) through enacting divine bodhisattva performances.As a result, temple-goers learn to speak of a grand wish-vow (da yuan) alongside cherishing personal wishes of the heart (xin yuan).While both dimensions of wish-vows serve to validate conduct, the former makes a claim of authenticity, while the latter asserts awe and outstanding credibility.
This performative epistemic differentiation does not necessarily entail ontological transformation unless ritual performers "raise" their own hearts.In a temple conversational space, the urge for ritual differentiation often takes the form of performers posing personal ethical challenges to one another as fallible fellow human beings.Overwhelmed by the bodhisattva level's incredible wish-vows, many temple-goers readily admit their inability or unreadiness to offer comparable wish-vows.Their narrative usually goes, "Think about so-and-so's wish-vow [mostly but not exclusively monastic individuals].Ask yourself, can you do it?I dare not!" The expectation is that Chinese Buddhist monastics must prove their extraordinariness by performing daunting tasks, including caring for the sick amid messy conditions, attending 4 am morning classes daily, or cooking for the entire resident community and a dramatically varying number of visitors without help.In some ways, the situation is similar to a competitive Chinese feasting culture, where personal power differentials are established during the back-and-forth of toasting acts in drinking games (Harmon 2010).In both situations, competence is overridden by willingness, while participation in the play implies ranking in a fluid status hierarchy.
The conflation of willingness and competence places significant pressure on Chinese Buddhist monastics.Firstly, the ethical imperative for monastics to embrace the bodhisattva way stems from undertaking standardized Bodhisattva Precepts during their monastic initiation.Then, in addition, it becomes a moral obligation for them to maintain the social role and reputation of a bodhisattva in a broader Chinese society.Thanks to dramatic renditions, including TV adaptations of popular stories featuring the well-known bodhisattva Guan-yin, even those with little interest in Buddhism are familiar with the bodhisattva ideal of embodied universal compassion.Consequently, a social expectation exists that Chinese monastics, who publicly declare their commitment,

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must live up to their claim as practicing bodhisattvas in this world.In other words, individual monastics have to earn credit and trustworthiness in their social interactions with all kinds of non-monastics when they, on a case-by-case basis, satisfy the standards imposed by the public imagination of the bodhisattva way.
Both legendary bodhisattvas and human bodhisattvas-the Chinese Buddhist monastics-reside in temples.Often, temples are considered spatial entities that are the product of a pre-existing wish-vow project and, hence, an indexical sign of wish-vows.A temple, once built, is supposed to last many generations and dynasties.Upon seeing a temple, many temple-goers quickly perceive it as demonstrating the temporal aspects of worldly accomplishment and seek to ascertain the role of wish-vows in its creation and continued existence.
This desire for association with an auspicious site was evident among tourists at Temple Hillside, a relatively new temple.Mr. Wang, a retired policeman, and his ex-colleagues were on an intra-province tourist trip.Although Temple Hillside was not on their itinerary, their tourist bus stopped there because Temple Hillside's architecture and scale caught their attention on the way.Thanks to the local government, the state-built highway had an exit leading to this "fantastic geomantic" (hao fengshui) spot.Gazing around the temple courtyards like a geomancer, Mr. Wang stopped a temple-keeper and asked expectantly, "Who is the residency chair (zhu chi, abbot) of this temple?Do you know any of his/her stories?"As a resident layperson responded to his inquiry, the ex-policeman's eyes grew wider and wider until he finally exclaimed "Incredible" (liao bu qi) three times, declaring, Grand temples and small temples deserve respect alike.They are all sustained by the wish-vow power of some cultivation practitioners (xiu xing ren).But to build and sustain a new temple of this scale, the power of yuan is inconceivable!When Mr. Wang's wife joined him, he immediately retold the story, emphasizing that the residency chair had burned 48 incense spots on her arms.The extraordinary act was undertaken to solemnize her determination to fulfill her wish-vow to build a temple that would be a pure land "where everyone can find a place." The number 48 emulated the 48-grand wish-vows (da yuan) made by Amitabha Buddha, whose wish-vows for believers were incredibly potent.The most famous of Amitabha's forty-eight wish-vows among Chinese Buddhists concerns the wish-vow to deliver the souls of dying individuals to a pure and peaceful land whenever they call out Amitabha's name and seek his help (de Bary 1969, 197-204).Without asking for more information about Amitabha, Mr. Wang's wife exclaimed her admiration, took out her phone, and urged their colleagues to take a group picture in the temple.
Wish-vow stories like those of the abbot at Temple Hillside hold great justificatory value for Chinese temple-goers.It is as if a narrative of "he/she/I/you have given the wish-vow" was a magical mantra, sufficient to suspend doubt and validate a normative scenario.Whenever specific wish-vows are revealed, they influence and refine the expectations placed on yuan-givers.As a result, the pressure intensifies, as fulfilling a wish-vow is no longer just about private self-actualization; rather, it becomes a moral demand supervised by those who respect other people's wish-vow projects and may potentially benefit from them.
Shifu Gentle, another resident monastic at Temple Hillside, once conveyed this pressure by showing me a text message thread: (Temple-goer:) "I have a question, Shifu.My family recently rented our house to my brother, but my husband says this is bad for our home's future fortune (jia yun).What should be the solutions to this problem?Please help us!" Shifu Gentle: "Amitabh!Thank you for your trust!Please come up to the hillside when you have time and see what the Guanyin Bodhisattva may say/reveal to you! [referring to the self-help lottery divination device that was available in Temple Hillside]" Then the Shifu commented to me with a tone of concern, "You see, so many people just assume that we monastics must know everything and can solve every problem!"The Shifu sighed and returned to her work; temple constructions were ongoing, and engineering logistics needed daily examination.In Shifu Gentle's words, her "tiny little wish" (xiao xiao de yuan wang) was simply to help Shifu Grandiose (the temple abbot, who burned 48 incense spots on her arms) to fulfill her grand wish-vow to bring the Pure Land into reality.In other words, it is not only the action of yuan that is honored everywhere in a Chinese Buddhist temple; it is the interlocking of wish-vow powers that have fueled a world-creating dynamism that is both open-ended and self-sustaining in an interactive Chinese Buddhist world.

Efficacy Re-situated and Ritual Effects Reconsidered
The article examines overlapping ritual processes in Buddhist temples in China by exploring the temple encounters of average temple-goers.In their ritual actions, these non-exclusive ritual practitioners predominantly pursue divine power or numinous efficacy (ling).In the study of Chinese religions, the pursuit of ling is, by default, situated in the realm of so-called "popular religions" (minsu/minjian/minzhong zongjiao), in which context ling is often rendered as "magical power."Recent anthropologists of Chinese religions have attempted to move beyond the framing of efficacy as a matter of magical effects and instead elaborate on the generative, efficacious processes that produce cultural-historical dialectics (Sangren 2012(Sangren , 2020)); disruptively reformulate the terms of social order (Dean 1998); organize collectivities and communities (Chau 2008;Murray 2018); or constitute the self (Hatfield 2002).However, few have discussed the efficacy question in Buddhist temple encounters, where popular practitioners and state-institutional stakeholders share their ritual spaces.We will not delve into lengthy and often unhelpful debates about the problems arising from adopting the category of "magic" itself.Instead, suffice it to say that the "magic" category is primarily established through a distinct, morally charged hierarchical ordering between generalized rationality and its antithetical irrationalities.Accordingly, the challenge of situating the experiences of efficacy in Chinese Buddhist temples comes from the limits of conventional understanding that sees the pursuit of practical effects in the world and the concern for the ethics of action as two distinct journeys.To overcome the false dichotomy between the "magical" rituals of the masses and the "ethical" stances of rationalist religionists, I show how generic and Chinese Buddhist temple liturgies interpolate one another and co-produce reframed understandings of human desire, action, and divine powers.Even in a narrowly-conceived "religious" realm (such as "Buddhist temples"), so-called ritual activities do not have to rely exclusively on formalized liturgical programs that institute prescriptive religious norms.
In this article, I have offered a more productive approach to the multifaceted nature of Chinese Buddhist temples, illustrating how a reframed ritual analysis enables us to see what is precluded by conventional scholarly idioms.By not presupposing a rationalist view of religion, we have thought through the paradigmatic non-exclusive ritual culture prevalent in Chinese Buddhist temples.
The article examines multiple layers of yuan performances, focusing on the ritual transformation of human desire into wish-vows and the Mahayana Buddhist ritual transformation of wish-vows from ordinary to extraordinary.Often, the thisworldly orientation in popular wish-making practices is unfairly labeled as too utilitarian, too self-oriented, and profaning the "ideally" transcendental goals.However, in Chinese Buddhist temples, even mundane desires are inherently part of a movement toward self-awareness of the countless activities an active human heart-mind can achieve.
Our analysis of the yuan narratives generated in temple rituals reveals that worshippers' wishful yearnings are relational rather than egoistic, as demonstrated by Ioana's parents' wishes for her, the daughter who finally heard her parents through a ritualized movement infused with personal meanings.Furthermore, when expressed through ritualized yuan performances, desire itself is restructured and becomes a solemn commitment that can cause or induce concomitant actions.From a performative perspective, wish-making ritualists develop new terms to speak of their lives without assuming a uniform purpose, and they gain the momentum to align with their unique relational ritual realities.This article conceptualizes yuan as "wish-vows" to capture the Chinese temple's production of a willing agent fulfilling their unique visions.Specific to Chinese Buddhist temples, Mahayana Buddhist liturgical structures provide additional ritual incentives for performance-loving temple-goers in China to expand the range of their wish-vow beneficiaries and to imagine and commit to otherwise unlikely ties.In this way, wish-vowing performances in Chinese Buddhist temples provide a concrete example of ritual technologies that can transform pathos into words, words into actions, and actions into self-obligations.
It is important to note that the long-term ritual effects of wish-vows are not always immediately noticeable and often involved ex post facto attributive narratives.Future inquiries may investigate the social production of "optative" selves more thoroughly-namely, by following how subjects persist in bringing wish-vows to non-temple settings.Nonetheless, in the very moment of wish-vowing, ritualistic performances concretely document specific possibilities for what a performer may become, ensuring that at the epistemic and normative level, nothing can dismantle those possibilities, visions, and optative realities.
notes and references 1 In the paper, I have chosen to maintain pseudonyms for both the temples and the city to respect the temples' key institutional actors' desire to remain low-key.This decision also allows for consistency with my discussions elsewhere and helps to differentiate my anthropological portrayal of temple activities, emphasizing the experiences of occasional temple-goers, from the preferred representations of various organizational stakeholders.At the present stage of late socialist modernism in China, institutional discourses surrounding ritual activities tend to be quite narrow, while the representation and evaluation of these activities within temple entities are closely regulated according to Chinese understandings of secularism.More discussions see Y. Shen (2020). 2 The study is interested in anthropological framings and the general implications of spontaneous, unorganized temple encounters in a ritual arena shared by resident Buddhist monastic actors and a broad public audience.The focus thus differs from recent ethnographies of contemporary Chinese Buddhism, which tend to emphasize the play of community identities or organizational innovations (Borchert 2017; Weller et al. 2018;Ji, Fisher, and Laliberté 2019;Nichols 2022). 3The relic-body is called the flesh-body bodhisattva.C.F. Gildow and Bingenheimer (2002).  This is not to say that the notion of "prayer" cannot be reconstructed to apply to non-monotheistic situations; Sun (2016) offered a sociological attempt. 5For philosophical treatises on the Chinese articulations of "heart/mind" (xin), see Angle and Tiwald 2020. 6The boundary between these spiritual beings, again, is porous rather than absolutist.c.f Shahar and Weller 1996;  Meulenbeld 2016.  Shi (2019, 5-6) lists the wishes inscribed on 801 wish-cards in a Chinese Buddhist temple in Australia.Popular topics are quite similar. 8For readers interested in the economic aspect of wish-vowing, it is helpful to distinguish between a divine economy of the gift and a technical economy of temple management.As wish-makers return to the temple where they started a specific wish after its fulfillment, temples-as spatial markers of an endured event-are likely to receive a sum of donation.Playing a custodian's role, a temple becomes a key agent in the sustenance of the personal, private relationships between a wish-maker and a divinity.The temple's role in mediating the temporality of a wish-making event is crucial for enabling a structure of exchange.Thus, in a Maussian sense (Mauss 2003), the emergence of a non-dyad structure of exchange motivates a unique divine economy of the gift, powerfully inserting Buddhist temples into the fabric of contemporary Chinese social lives.The monetary value of donations-either in the form of returned gifts or as expressions of excess generosity-varies from case to case and rests upon one's free will.Occasionally, a significant amount can help secure funding for a temple agenda.However, such gains are not comparable in significance to the unfolding of a divine economy of the gift, a game in which a temple can assert its social presence.
Regarding the technical economy of temple management, when temple-goers leave their wishes and signature in a text-card and look for temple storage and display, temples do charge a space-usage fee.As temples are rule-makers for this amount, the fees constitute a regular and non-negligible source of income.Campergue (2015) offers an illuminating discussion about the cultural construction of understandings of gifts and merits in French Buddhist centers, where French visitors carry assumptions of money and exchange that differ from their Asian hosts.It would be interesting to explore the cultural economy of wish-making along this line in the context of global Buddhism and anthropology of religious economy more generally.For example, outside Buddhist situations, Werbner (1988) discusses the extension of moral space in a Pakistani migrant setting, and Kreinath (2020) without the loss of a single one [Each stanza followed by a strike] [Sing different buddhas and bodhisattvas' names, each a strike] [Repeat the bell-verse three times 11 ]

Volume 19 Issue 3 The Power of Wish-Vows: Ethics and Ritual Transformation in Buddhist Temples in Contemporary China Yang Shen 215 community
, " these segregated ritual activities are open to the public and do not structure role-based community interactions. 2

Volume 19 Issue 3 The Power of Wish-Vows: Ethics and Ritual Transformation in Buddhist Temples in Contemporary China Yang Shen 221 theories
, she did not offer divinatory consultation.Instead, the Shifu provided a book of interpretation, so divination-seekers could "take pictures with their phones and study it at home if needed."The Shifu seemed confident in the ability of ordinary temple-goers to "help themselves" in ritual matters.She explained, Many people visit temples only to look for divination rituals.Most of them probably need to make critical decisions.Seeking out (qiu) Guanyin Bodhisattva [who is the most well-known Buddhist divinity in Chinese societies] will always generate the extraordinary efficacy (ling) they desire.It is the case [i.e., responsiveness is guaranteed] whichever [manifestation of ] Guan-yin you seek.It is because the Guan-yin bodhisattvas are compassionate, and by compassion, one feels the suffering conditions of all sentient beings.However, when one seeks for (qiu) something, one also needs to make a wishful promise (xuyuan).After giving your word, you must return to it.Who have money promise money; who do not have money promise to eat vegetarian food (chi zhai) or do good deeds.8