onebir wrote:I read that some of the temples in Beijing were saved by senior CCP people, so it's not implausible someone with connections might manage to be left alone.
The White Cloud temple was used as an army barracks during the Cultural Decimation. Dongyue (where John Blofeld, during the late 1930's when he lived in Beijing, visited on a Daoist practitioner friend) was housing until it was converted back to a 'temple' in 2003, complete with plaster cast deity statues... Praise be to the IOC, because getting the Olympics no doubt had a huge impact in getting a number of cultural sites restored. The eyes of the world and the potential tourist bucks spoke louder than anything else.
It's important to remember that 'superstitious nonsense' was being condemned long before the PRC was founded and that many temples fell into disrepair after the fall of the Qing in 1911, when imperial patronage stopped. From the 1950's the old Beijing largely ceased to exist. The old practitioners were persecuted viciously, some murdered, during the decimation. Having spent many hours walking around the city, it can be deeply moving to think about what has disappeared and the money grabbing race to the bottom of the cesspit that has replaced it.
Present day, the place in best repair I've seen in the city is Yonghegong Lama temple. There's money in Buddhism for sure and lots of expensive cars have shiny golden prayer wheels stuck to their dashboards. There's a rebuilt monastery in the Western hills that has had serious cash spent on it. I'm not aware of any Daoist sites that have had the same kind of patronage.
As always, it doesn't matter if your teacher, or your teacher's teacher, flew around on a pink cloud, could summon an army with a handful of nasal hairs and had a penchant for concealed weapons that could be gotten past the metal detectors on the metro system around here. Not one bit if you can't deliver the goods. If people like BKF and his stuff they will go to him. If not, then they can go elsewhere. You pays your money and you makes your choice. Don't however look to BKF's words, because he is a bullshitter and self-promoter who was claiming back in the 1980s that all the old masters were dead and he was basically the last source of the good stuff. Bet he never made that comment during his later visits to Feng Zhiqiang...