21st century monks
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Abbots a go-go
Master Xuecheng is not the sole star on Chinese mainland Buddhist cyberspace, but one of 67 masters, abbots, academy teachers and devotees listed on the Sina Weibo microblog. The 67 have 380,000 followers.
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Master Xuecheng. Courtesy of Longquan Temple |
"The focus of my job from now on is to promote Buddhist music pieces, films and large cross-cultural dialogue TV programs," according to microblogging abbot Master Yancan, vice president of the Hebei Province Buddhist association.
Master Yancan has broadcast 3,052 tweets since January 2010, mentioning Hong Kong superstar Andy Lau and forwarding a backstage picture of Taiwanese actress Ruby Lin.
Like most of the 67, Master Yancan sticks to Chinese, but Master Xuecheng broadcasts his message in Chinese, English, Russian, Korean, Japanese, German, French and Spanish.
He sent 1,774 Chinese language tweets since April 2009 and 99 English tweets. For other languages, he sent between 61 and 143 from February at time of writing.
Foreign language tweets are seldom forwarded or commented upon. On the rare occasions comments are made, they are mostly written in Chinese.
There is so much new Buddhist activity springing up that Masters Xuecheng and Xianqi cannot always keep up with it all.
Quyu belongs to a group of three volunteers that send out Master Xuecheng's words daily in both Chinese and English.
On March 28 her mobile phone text reads: "Virtues are equal to fortunes and giving is equal to saving."
It's the same for Longquan's websites and microblogs, run by volunteers.
"The number of volunteers fluctuates with time," Master Xianqi said. "It's very hard to give a definitive number."
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