Building Inter-Asia New Age Networks: Balancing Heterodoxy And Patriotism In Chinese Spiritual Tourism To India

Post Author(s)

The recent military clashes between India and China in the Galwan Valley resulted in the Sino-Indian border heating up to levels unseen in recent years. Meanwhile, India continues to downplay China’s Belt and Road Initiative and refuses to sign a BRI Memorandum of Understanding. In June 2020, parallel to the reports on these tensions, Chinese state media issued a series of articles warning against the proliferation of India-derived new religious movements among middle class urbanites in the People’s Republic, as part of the nation-wide New Age/Body-Mind-Spirit (shen xin ling) fever. Focusing on the case study of O&O Academy (previously known as Oneness University), a popular ashram located in the Southern Indian Andhra Pradesh state, this research discusses the emerging phenomenon of Chinese spiritual tourism to India. It traces the pathways of mainland Chinese spiritual seekers who, following their journey to O&O Academy campuses in India, bring its gurus’ teachings back home and disseminate them by organizing self-cultivation courses, inviting spiritual teachers from India to China, hosting live transmissions from Indian ashrams via WeChat, and offering “spiritual travel packages” to India. These transnational circulations of guru-worship are characterized by frictions, as Chinese New Agers craft different visions of spiritual utopias that combine state-castigated heterodoxy and patriotic/nationalistic discourses: the millenarian message about the coming of the “Golden Age” of humanity and the universal opening of “awareness,” promoted by their Indian teachers, and the project of establishing global socialism with China as a “spiritual leader of the nations,” derived from Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese characteristics for a New Era.

(accepted) Iskra, Anna. 2022. “The Mainland Chinese Body-Heart-Soul Milieu and the ‘Return’ of New Age Teachings to the Sinosphere.” Nova Religio 25(4).

ABSTRACT

Since the 2000s, Chinese society has experienced a state co-directed psychologization of everyday life. This is reflected in the popularity of the Body-Heart-Soul (shen xin ling), a New Age self-cultivation milieu that emerged at the intersections of religiosity and secularity. This essay examines the process of “parallel glocalization,” in which Taiwanese and Hong Kongnese intellectuals and spiritual seekers engaged in creative translations of western New Age concepts to introduce them to Chinese speakers. It follows the multiple trajectories through which New Age teachings were rebranded as shen xin ling and introduced in mainland China where they undergo further transformations, an important dimension of the “return” to Asia of many New Age concepts inspired by “eastern” philosophies and religions. These dynamics both facilitate China’s incorporation into the networks of globalizing spirituality and resonate with the processes of the Sinicization of religion used as a tool for control in today’s China.

“Crafting utopias for the New Age. Balancing heterodoxy and patriotism in Chinese spiritual tourism to India.” To be submitted to The Journal of Contemporary Religion.

“Battling kundalini. Imagining India-derived ‘chaotic sexuality’ as a transnational political threat in the Chinese state’s responses to the circulation of neo-tantra in the People’s Republic.” To be submitted to Journal of Contemporary China.

Alternative Healing Methods And China’s Health Silk Road: Chinese Muslim Medical Enterprises And Practitioners In Dubai

China has gained more prominence in terms of its global health leadership during the coronavirus pandemic. The state dispatched medical teams and supplies to many Belt and Road countries in the last six months. Sinopharm, a large state-owned Chinese pharmaceutical company, established its first overseas COVID-19 vaccine clinical trial program in...

Modern China And The Question Of Muslim Sectarianism In The Context Of Inter-Asian Religious Circulations

Sinophone Islam, as found in the Xibei (Xinjiang, Gansu, Qinghai and Ningxia), is characterized by sectarian (jiaopai) divisions among four groupings: the Qadim, the Sufi orders (menhuan), the Ikhwan, and the Salafis. With the exception of the latter, all of these sects adhere to a common doctrinal and legalistic tradition, shared by their...

Spacializing the BRI in the History of Asian Imperial Imaginations

This subproject situates the contemporary mapping of the BRI within the history of the spacial imagination of Asia, using the notion of “empire” as a conceptual tool to interrogate how the connecting and separation of places through networks and infrastructures of trade and religion have been associated with different imaginations, juxtapositions...

Buddhism At The Borders Of Trade: Colonial And Post-Colonial Discourses On Trans-Himalayan Economic Networks And Connectivity

The expansion of international trade exerted and continues to exert considerable influence on the negotiation of nation-state borders and on the formation of cultural, social, and religious identities. While the relationship between religion and trade is undeniably complex and multifaceted, it has been suggested that commercial connectivity has...

Religious Circulation, Transportation Routes, And Urban Space: Christianity In Late Imperial And Modern China

This project studies the intricate and largely overlooked relationship between religious circulation, transportation routes and urban space in the historical context of state building and global connection in mid-eighteenth to mid-twentieth-century China. Focusing on the case of Christianity, it examines three cities and regions that have played...

BRI Mapbox: An Online Map Generating Database

The BRI Mapbox illustrates the spatial configuration between infrastructures and religious factors in the BRI region. This work maps out and correlates routes, borders, railroads, pipelines, ports and free trade zones with demographic, economic and geo-political data in both contemporary and retrospective timeframes. These spatial features form a...

Paving Portions Of The ‘One Road’ Across The Indian Ocean: China’s Highway And Bridge Projects In The Republic Of The Maldives

Our work examines the work of constructing domestic overland roads and bridges within the Republic of the Maldives. This archipelago of atolls stretches across 90,000 square kilometres, but of that vast territory only less than 300 square kilometres is comprised of dry land. The country includes within its territorial waters two major deep-water...

Back To Jerusalem: The Missionary Movement Of The Chinese Protestant House Church

Chinese Protestant Christianity has grown exponentially in the last few decades. China has become a missionary-sending country at the same time as its political and economic importance in the world has grown. Many Chinese Christians believe that God has been calling on them to undertake the great mission of converting Muslims to Christianity. The...

Muslim Humanitarian Networks and Chinese Infrastructures in Northern Pakistan

This project investigates the intersection of Muslim humanitarian networks and Chinese-built infrastructures in Gilgit-Baltistan in northern Pakistan. The central aim of the project is to examine how at this meeting point of material and social entities that are often seen as disjointed new meanings emerge which alter the use and poetics of...

Between A Rock And A Hard Place: Sinophobia And Religious Nationalist Sentiments In Vietnam

President Xi Jinping’s launch of the One Bell One Road Initiative (OBOR or BRI) was met with a negative reaction in the Vietnamese public sphere, although the speedy development of infrastructure connecting Vietnam and China would stimulate a number of trade sectors. The discussion focused on whether part of Vietnamese sovereignty should be given...