On the market: Consumption and material culture in modern Chinese Buddhism

For many Chinese speakers in China and elsewhere, experiencing or connecting with matters of religion often includes mediation through or with material objects. Such mediation is readily accessible to larger and larger audiences and often occurs through the consumption of religious material goods, thanks also to media technologies and the Internet. In this article, the author seeks to complicate the notion that the production and consumption of novel Buddhist religious goods can be analyzed solely in terms of 'market theory.' While on the one hand the author shows that Buddhist technologies of salvation are historically associated with materiality, she also contends that the 'aura' of Buddhist-inspired modern religious goods - in the spirit of Walter Benjamin's essay 'On Some Motifs in Baudelaire' (1939) - is not so much effaced as it is reconfigured and transformed by technological mediations. © 2011 Taylor and Francis Group, LLC.