Blessed are the meat eaters: Christian antivegetarianism and the missionary encounter with Chinese Buddhism

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Volumn 12, Issue 2, 2004, Pages

  Reinders, Eric ^a  

^a EMORY UNIVERSITY   (United States)

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EID: 36148929901     PISSN: 10679847     EISSN: 15278271     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/10679847-12-2-509     Document Type: Article

References (64)

1. See, for example, Mrs. Arnold Foster, In the Valley of the Yangtse (London: London Missionary Society, 1899), 158
2. Miss Johnson, "Nangwa: The Women's Hospital, Nangwa-ke" India's Women and China's Daughters (1894): 555
3. Raphael Israeli, Muslims in China: A Study in Cultural Confrontation (London: Curzon Press and Humanities Press, 1980), 22-25
4. Ignatius of Loyola, letter to the Jesuit Patriarch of Ethiopia, February 1555, in Obras completas de San Ignacio de Loyola (Complete Works of St. Ignatius of Loyola), ed. Ignacio Iparraguirre, 2nd ed. (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1963), no. 143, 911
5. Matteo Ricci, S.J., The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven (T'ien-chu Shih-i), trans. and intro. Douglas Lancashire and Peter Hu Kuo-chen, S.J.; Chinese-English edition ed. Edward J. Malatesta, S.J., Variétés Sinologiques New Series 72 (Taipei: Ricci Institute, 1985), 253
6. It is difficult to trust these vaguely cited statistics at face value, but Crow lists percentages of diet by type for Chinese and British in Shandong "according to the university survey," with "meat and fish" as 2.3 percent for Chinese and 13 percent for British. Statistics from Shandong Christian University list "meat and fish" as 6 percent of the diet for Chinese and 23 percent for Americans. Carl Crow, Four Hundred Million Customers (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1937), 233-35
7. For example, "The Chinese live largely on vegetables; they are the usual accompaniment of rice with the great majority of the people. As a rule, the poorer people only eat meat twice a month." W. Munn, "Street Scenes in Western China," October 1911, 153
8. For other examples, see Alain Peyrefitte, The Collision of Two Civilizations: The British Expedition to China in 1792-1794, trans. Jon Rothschild (London: Harvill, 1993), 344
9. Isabella Bird, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond: An Account of Journeys in China, Chiefly in the Province of Sze Chuan and among the Man-tze of the Somo Territory (1899; Boston: Beacon, 1987), 143 (on the Chinese diet of rice), 297 (on the scarcity of livestock)
10. The Protestant missionary C. Maud Bettersby noted, "Rice forms the staple food, and beef is rarely eaten, but fowls, fish, and pork make up for the deficiency." C. Maud Bettersby, "China's Darkness and Dawn," part 2, India's Women and China's Daughters (1897): 272. Note the lack of red meat, which is here a "deficiency."
11. Jonathan D. Spence, The Chan's Great Continent: China in Western Minds (New York: W. W. Norton, 1998), 38
12. Timothy Morton, Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1994), 16
13. "Domestic Manners of the Chinese," Church Missionary Gleaner, May 1859, 61-62
14. This writer did not like that they all picked food from the same dish but notes that spoon and fork were provided for those unable to use chopsticks. Collier remarks on the unpleasantness of seeing dogs, cats, rats, hawks, reptiles, and grasshoppers as food. Price Collier, The West in the East: From an American Point of View (London: Duckworth, 1911), 400
15. "Missionary Tours in the Interior of China," Church Missionary Gleaner, August 1856, 98
16. Robert Fortune, Two Visits to the Tea Countries of China and the British Tea Plantations in the Himalaya (London: John Murray, 1853), 1.115
17. Thomas W. Blakiston, Five Months on the Yang-tsze; with a Narrative of the Exploration of Its Upper Waters, and Notices of the Present Rebellions in China (London: John Murray, 1862), 4, 8, 15
18. Collier, The West in the East, 400
19. See also Blakiston, Five Months on the Yang-tsze, 310-11
20. "The Chinese say they perceive also a peculiar odor in an European," M. Hue, A Journey through the Chinese Empire, vol. 1 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1855), 46
21. Bird, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond, 231. In Japan, the distinctive odor of Europeans has been identified as butter, as in the expression bata kusai ("butter smell")
22. Carl Crow, Four Hundred Million Customers, 148-49. On the other hand, "no Chinese, not even an unfumigated soldier, who is covered with lice, have that wrath provoking smell" (149-50)
23. Also: "Our cook's cow, like many another animal, shares nation's antipathy to foreigners, and we have to give it a wide berth." Mabel C. Nickerby, "Some of Our Servants in Sieng-iu," India's Women and China's Daughters (1902): 261
24. "Chinese dogs are very anti-foreign, and smell Europeans from afar." Foster, In the Valley of the Yangtse, 143
25. Paul A. Cohen, China and Christianity: The Missionary Movement and the Growth of Chinese Antiforeignism, 1860-1870 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), 31
26. See also Bird, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond, esp. 215, 246, 254, 269
27. On the specifically Western concept of the vampire, and its inappropriateness in other cultures, see Luise White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 27-30
28. "Missionary Itinerancy in the Neighbourhood of Ningpo," Church Missionary Gleaner, November 1870, 123
29. Frederick Wells Williams, The Life and Letters of Samuel Wells Williams, LL.D.: Missionary, Diplomatist, Sinologue (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1889), 385
30. See Cohen, China and Christianity, 49-51, 54-55, 89-92
31. White, Speaking with Vampires, 191
32. Robert Palmer, "A Day's Preaching in the Shaou-hing Plain," Church Missionary Gleaner, October 1877, 113
33. "Hong argued that such a practice could not be meritorious, for God had provided animals to be used as food by man." Rudolph Lechler, quoted in Jessie G. Lutz and Rolland Ray Lutz, Hakka Chinese Confront Protestant Christianity, 1850-1900: With the Autobiographies of Eight Hakka Christians, and Commentary (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1998), 123
34. See Charles Brewer Jones, Buddhism in Taiwan: Religion and the State, 1660-1990 (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1999), 14-30, on the categories of zhaijiao and Buddhism
35. "Good News from China," Church Missionary Gleaner, July 1868, 74
36. A. E. Moule, "The Chinese Vegetarian Vow," Church Missionary Gleaner, November 1914, 174
37. Joseph Ritson, An Essay on Abstinence from Animal Food as a Moral Duty (London: Richard Phillips, 1802), 184
38. Moule, "The Chinese Vegetarian Vow," 174
39. "The Fuh-Kien Mission," Church Missionary Gleaner, September 1884, 105
40. Miss Schneider, "Broken Vows," Church Missionary Gleaner, May 1914, 77
41. "The Fuh-Kien Mission," 138
42. Schneider, "Broken Vows," 77. One can't help think that eating meat after so many years of vegetarian diet - long after the stomach had lost the enzymes to digest meat - must have pushed her over the edge
43. Foster, In the Valley of the Yangtse, 158
44. Miss Vaughan, "At Home in China," Church Missionary Gleaner, July 1894, 99
45. The selfish accumulation of merit was the standard missionary explanation for Chinese vegetarian diet. Another example is T. P. Tindall, "A Thorough Break with the Past," Church Missionary Gleaner, July 1922, 147
46. Mrs. Marshall, "The Story of a Buddhist Nun," Church Missionary Outlook, March 1929, 53
47. Schneider, "Broken Vows," 77. Emphasis added
48. Huc, Journey, 1.185-186
49. Miss Couche, "The Swing of the Pendulum," Church Missionary Gleaner, July 1916, 93
50. J. W. Lambuth, "Standard of Admission to Full Church Membership," Records of the General Conference of the Protestant Missionaries of China, Held at Shanghai, May 10-24, 1877 (Shanghai: Presbyterian Mission Press, 1879), 241. He notes that initial stages are unreliable. A six-month probation period was extended if needed. Lambuth mentions several criteria, including abstaining from opium (244)
51. H. R. Rodd and L. J. Bryer, "After Furlough: At Ciong-Bau Once More," India's Women and China's Daughters (1906): 125
52. Timothy Kung (Gong Tianmin), Gong Tianmin xinwenji sanshipian (Thirty Selected New Works of Timothy Kung) (cited hereafter as Thirty) (published by the author, 1993), 29-44
53. Da Fojiao renshi shiwen (Answers to Ten Questions of Buddhists) (cited hereafter as Answers) (Taipei: Guizhu Chubanshe, 1998), 7-12
54. Kung, Answers, 7
55. See Carol J. Adams, The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory (New York: Continuum), 2000
56. Kung, Thirty, 41
57. Thirty, 41
58. See Eric Reinders, "The Iconoclasm of Obeisance: Protestant Images of Chinese Religion and the Catholic Church," Numen 44 (1997): 295-322
59. Timothy Kung, Gong Tianmin dengdaoji (Christian Sermons of Rev. Timothy Kung) (published by the author, 1993), 123-46
60. Marshall, "The Story of a Buddhist Nun," 52
61. Philip Kapleau, To Cherish All Life: A Buddhist Case for Becoming Vegetarian (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982), 39-40
62. John Gregerson, Vegetarianism: A History (Fremont, CA: Jain Publishing Company, 1994), 21
63. Robert E. Buswell Jr., The Zen Monastic Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 25-33
64. Miss K. E. White, "New Year's Day in a Chinese City," Church Missionary Gleaner, January 1915, 6, emphasis added