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FROM COMRADES TO BODHISATTVAS: Moral Dimensions of Lay Buddhist Practice in Contemporary China. Topics in Contemporary Buddhism. By Gareth Fisher. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2014. x, 263pp. (Figures, tables.) US$50.00, cloth. ISBN978-0-8248-3966-6.
From Comrades to Bodhisattvas, by Gareth Fisher, is a comprehensive and highly readable ethnographic study of lay Han Buddhists in post-Mao China in Beijing. Fisher magnificently gives the lay Buddhists, who were severely socially and economically marginalized during the grand social transition after the Mao administration, distinct faces and compelling voices as they apply "temple courtyard" Buddhist moral teachings to address what he calls the "moral breakdown" and imbalances of their daily lives. In the six chapters of this monograph, Fisher seeks to describe the social, as well as moral, transformations that lead these lay people from "chaos" to "balance" and the establishment of "Buddhic bonds."
Borrowing the analytical framework ofJarrett Zigon and Foucault, Fisher defines moral breakdown "as an unsettled psychological state that occurs when changing circumstances challenge the cultural norms within which one exists as a social person, forcing one to engage 'ethical demands' to work out the contradictions that these changing circumstances provoke" (3). Fisher attempts to advance Zigon's concept by suggesting that "the solution...