INTRODUCTION: REINVENTING A SYNCRETIC BUDDHISM

Singapore is made up of originally migrant populations that arrived during the early nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A vast majority of the Chinese migrants were peasants who came from the two coastal provinces of Guangdong and Fujian in South China. When they arrived, they brought along their cultures and religion and reproduced them in a colonial environment, including knowledge of a syncretic Chinese religious belief system which was a composite mixture of Buddhism, Taoism and Chinese folk beliefs.

Scholars of Chinese syncretic religion refer to this form of syncretism in various terms. For example, Tan called it “Chinese religion” (Tan 1995, p. 139), while Elliot termed it “Shenism” (Elliot 1955). Wee noted that the majority of the Singaporean Chinese Buddhists were in fact practising Chinese religion with Buddhist elements (Wee 1976, pp. 155–88), while in my own work, Elliot's definition of Shenism is adopted here, as the Chinese continually termed their religious act as “bai shen”, literally “praying to the gods”. This syncretic system presents the Chinese cosmological worldview with a synthesis of Taoist and Buddhist metaphysical ideas, with Confucianism providing the moral base. It is therefore essential to explore the intersections of the Taoist, Buddhist, Confucianist and Shenist universes to understand how the early Chinese viewed their belief system.

These syncretic religious rituals continue to be practised by the older generation Chinese in Singapore. According to Watson, the Chinese were concerned with the ritual practices rather than the ideological purity of their religious practices (Watson 1988, p. 5). Religion was seen to serve an instrumental function rather than for expressive spiritual needs, although at times the two came hand-in-hand. The result of such practices was the emergence of various types of religious cults, some Buddhistic while others are Taoist and Shenist in nature. Thus, we see a proliferation of the cults of Guandi, Ancestors, Heaven, Heavenly Mother or Empress, Goddess of Mercy (Guanyin), Dabogong (Great Paternal Uncle) and others since the days of early immigration and which have continued into the present (Kuah-Pearce 2003, pp. 33–49).