At about three in the afternoon on the day I arrived in Singapore, I found myself lurking behind a pillar on the corner of the city’s bustling Chinatown neighborhood, trying to stay inconspicuous. Across the narrow street in one direction was a tiny Taoist temple with a metal burner about the size of a hot dog cart parked outside the entrance. I watched as a lady with a pink shirt slowly and methodically fed the burner with sheets of joss paper—a type of paper, often printed to look like money, that is burned at certain times of the year by Taoists to appease the ghosts of dead ancestors. Across the street in the other direction, a group of men and women had gathered around a large open pen, maybe eight feet long, five feet wide, and two feet tall, and were filling it completely with joss paper of all different colors and sizes. At first I thought that perhaps they were planning to sell the paper to worshippers who would then burn it at the temple. It soon became clear, however, that they were in fact going to fill the entire pen with joss and then set it on fire. I was delighted!
I had come to East Asia and Southeast Asia—five days in Singapore, followed by a few days in Hong Kong and then a week in Taiwan—to investigate the religious practice of burning joss paper and its effect on the environment in the region. Though August was hardly the most comfortable time to make the trip, I went then because that is when the Hungry Ghost festival falls—the month of the year (specifically, the seventh lunar month in the Chinese calendar) when Taoists believe the ghosts of everyone’s ancestors are released temporarily from hell so they can come visit earth and catch up on what’s happening here. The burning of joss sheets and all sorts of other items made out of paper (shirts, cigarette cartons, watches, even paper iPods) is particularly pervasive during Hungry Ghost month; believers burn this stuff as a way of pleasing and appeasing the ghosts. During my time in Asia, I wanted to understand a number of things—how much air pollution the burning causes, what these societies and legal systems have tried to do about the problem, and how these efforts have affected the traditional ways of practicing religion in the area. At the same time, I also wanted to see just how humungous a bonfire I could actually witness in the limited time I was there. And here I was, only hours into my trip, and it looked like I was already going to see an enormous open conflagration right on the corner of a busy neighborhood.
I waited and watched patiently, as the group of twelve or so worshippers piled their paper into the pen. They put the types and colors of paper into the pen in a particular order and then added the finishing touch by draping red streamers embossed with golden Chinese characters over the top of the pile. The pen was completely filled and ready for burning. I rubbed my hands together in eager anticipation and waited for the imminent religious ceremony to begin—maybe some chanting, or bowing, or recitation of prayers—followed by the lighting of the whole giant heap on fire.
Instead, everybody left. “Hey, hey, where are you going?” I wanted to call out after them. But no, they were definitely gone. I wasn’t sure what to do. I could have camped out on the corner, waiting for someone to come back and burn the paper, but what if that took eight hours? Or two days? Plus, I was jet-lagged. I needed a nap. So I went over to the neighboring hawker center—the awesome Singaporean version of an outdoor food court, where for very little money you can get everything from fish-head curry soup to Chinese noodle dishes to fried bananas—and asked an old lady if someone was going to come back and burn the pen of paper. We conversed for a bit, mostly in English, with some leftover college Mandarin and hand signals mixed in. I learned that at seven thirty that evening, there was going to be a big to-do involving singing, praying, and burning. I was psyched. I returned to the hotel, took my much-needed nap, and at about seven o’clock, headed back to see my Day One Joss Jackpot.
Of course, though, when I returned to the corner, the pen was empty. Some ash residue was left on the street under and near the pen, but there wasn’t so much as a single piece of paper left, where before there had been thousands and thousands. I had completely missed the fire.
As it turned out, a Hungry Ghost ceremony did take place at seven thirty; it just did not involve burning, or at least that much burning (there was a little burning). A temporary stage had been set up on the street with lines of folding chairs in front, and a swelling crowd was arriving and taking their seats. I had heard of these things. Known as getai, they are shows, usually involving music, that are put on to entertain the ghosts and keep them happy while the spirits roam the earth for the month. The first row of seats is kept empty because that is where the ghosts are supposed to sit. I walked across the street and sat on the second floor of the hawker center, where I would have a bird’s-eye view of the festivities.
Let me tell you, if this show was our best hope to keep the hungry ghosts from wreaking havoc on our world, then we are in pretty bad shape. The show started off okay as a live band ripped into an instrumental version of the 1970s Donna Summer hit “Hot Stuff,” which I thought was an appropriate selection for a hell-related festival. Unfortunately, this was the high point of the evening; I sat upstairs watching for about an hour, hoping that maybe at some point someone would burn something big, as a variety of kitschy singers in vaguely space-age outfits came up to the stage and sang cheesy tunes backed by an awful electronic beat. It reminded me a lot of the bar mitzvahs I regularly attended in my hometown in the northern suburbs of Boston back in 1981, only without all the amateur French kissing. After a while, I couldn’t take it anymore, so I got a beer and headed back to the hotel to call it a night. My Joss Jackpot would have to wait for another day.
Singapore is an interesting—some would surely say bizarre—place. A tiny city-state located at the southeastern tip of the Malaysian peninsula that extends down from Thailand into the South China Sea, Singapore is often described as a red dot in a sea of green, because it is a largely Chinese city surrounded by the much larger Muslim countries of Malaysia and Indonesia. In fact, the city is incredibly diverse. More than 70 percent of the population is Chinese, but there are significant numbers of Muslim Malays, Indians, and Westerners, a holdover from Singapore’s history as an English colony. On any given day while riding Singapore’s sleek modern subway, you might see (hypothetically) an Asian guy with red-tinted hair, orange shorts, and a purple shirt standing next to a pudgy Muslim woman with a red head covering and a black and white print dress, sitting across from an Indian guy with a pink shirt that says OPIUM on it, talking on the phone and looking at a beautiful young woman of unidentifiable identity, who is keeping her distance from a dumpy white guy taking notes for a book about religious practices that harm the environment. It is this diversity that makes Singapore so unique and fascinating. Most public signs are written in four languages (Chinese, English, Tamil, and Arabic), and many people speak both Chinese and English, the language that is primarily used in schools, although it is a quirky version of English and some other languages and is often referred to as Singlish.
The diversity of Singapore directly affects the issue of joss burning in a way that you do not see in less diverse places like Hong Kong or Taiwan. Joss gets in people’s faces. Literally. Whether it is burned in a bin outside someone’s apartment block, on the side of the street in front of a business, in a pen on a crowded corner while I’m taking a nap, or in a burner in a temple, or anywhere else as densely populated as the places I was visiting, the smoke is going to get into other people’s eyes, throats, and lungs. This is bad enough when the population is relatively homogeneous, but in Singapore, where you might find a Hindu temple, a mosque, a church, and a Taoist shrine all within the same block, tensions over joss smoke can get extra fiery.
The Internet is filled with stories and comments sections illustrating this battle of the cultures. In 2012, a Muslim actor caused a brouhaha when he attacked the practice of joss burning on his Facebook page: “If you think our prayer’s call is kind of noise pollution, what about those ‘burning activities’ you have out there? Talking about Global Warming? I think you’re just Gorblok.” (Gorblok is a Singlish word for a fool or an idiot.) The actor took down the comments after they attracted public criticism. Here is a fairly typical comment on an online forum from the year before: “I’m Catholic and I don’t mind it unless they burn big black patches in fields or be dumbasses and decide to burn a HUGE pile at the same time causing flying burning offerings to burn down other things.” Another Christian commenter compared joss burning to the smog from Indonesian forest fires that practically shut down Singapore in the summer of 2013; a response urged the commenter to “be a patient Christian” and “have some religion [sic] tolerance.” Another person, apparently lacking such tolerance, posted pictures of a burned-out field in front of his house and proclaimed: “Seriously wtf is wrong with these idiots?” And in August 2011, a man died of a heart attack after two sisters threw a bunch of flowerpots at him because he was burning joss paper and incense outside his home.
I wanted to understand more about the racial dimension of the tension over joss, so I made an appointment to meet with National University of Singapore professor Tong Chee Kiong, perhaps Singapore’s leading expert on ethnic and religious diversity in the country. We met at something called the Kent Ridge Guild House, a club for NUS alumni and faculty. Tong drank glass after glass from the private bottle of whiskey he keeps in the club, while I drank Tiger beer and wondered why a Scorpions album was playing on the club’s sound system. Luckily, I had checked the club’s website earlier in the day and learned that the guild’s dress code for weekdays was “smart casual,” so I was wearing some “closed shoes” and “proper trousers.” I shudder to think what would have happened if I hadn’t seen the website and had shown up in the purple clown pants I had originally chosen for the afternoon.
Among other interesting things, Tong described how environmental laws have significantly affected the practice of joss burning in Singapore. It used to be that Taoist families would primarily burn joss inside their homes, a preferable practice because it ensured that the ghost ancestors would know who was making the offering and to whom it was intended. When the government prohibited open burning within the home, families instead burned on the ground outside their homes. But since this too is dangerous, the government started providing bins—they look just like trash cans—for the apartment complexes, where most people in Singapore live. The residents were required to burn their joss inside the bins.
The effect of these laws in Singapore has been to turn a private family religious ritual into a public communal one. Although some families and individuals still burn on the ground or in their own container (once I even saw a couple of guys burning paper in a wok) outside their homes or businesses—many either use the bins or burn joss at temples. On the whole, Tong suggested, the Chinese worshippers do not really like this communal practice so much, because if everybody is burning their offerings together, how will the ghosts know who the offerings are for? Still, the Taoists in Singapore have largely been willing to follow the laws. Things would be different, however, if the government actually tried to prohibit burning altogether. This, Tong said, would be over the line. Indeed, when one local official tried to ban joss burning, Lee Kuan Yew—the prime minister at the time and the most important and famous political figure in Singaporean history—had to personally intervene to avoid political disaster for his party.
Joss burning may not be the biggest source of air pollution in places like Singapore and Hong Kong—far from it—but it is still a big deal. It is unclear exactly how much joss is burned in Singapore, but data from the Taiwanese Environmental Protection Administration suggests that close to three hundred thousand tons of joss paper is burned every year in that small island nation. And the stuff is terrible for the environment, particularly for the local area around where the joss is burned. For whatever reason, scientists in Taiwan have been doing the most research on the effects of burning joss, and their studies clearly show the harmful effects of the practice on the environment and human health. In scientific papers with titles like “Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbon Emissions from Joss Paper Furnaces,” “Characterization of Polycyclic Aromatic Hydrocarbon Emission from Open Burning of Joss Paper,” and “Removal of Particulates from Emissions of Joss Paper Furnaces” in fun-filled journals like Atmospheric Environment, Journal of Hazardous Materials, and Aerosol and Air Quality Research, these scientists have demonstrated that joss burning significantly increases the amount of particulate matter, metals, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and other pollutants in the ambient air, all of which can cause cancer and serious respiratory ailments.
After my conversation with Professor Tong, I spent a couple of days temple-hopping to see what I could find out about how joss burning really takes place and how it affects the air inside and around the temples. My first stop was a place called the Lian Shan Shuang Lin Temple and Monastery, pretty far out from the center in Toa Payoh, which is considered a heartland town, meaning that it’s the kind of place where most people in Singapore live, generally in enormous housing complexes administered by the government. In English, the name of the temple translates into something like “The Twin Grove of the Lotus Mountain Temple.” Lian Shan Shuang Lin was founded by a father and son in the late nineteenth century as a place to stay for some monks who were on their way back to China from a trip in India. Like many of the temples I visited in Singapore and Hong Kong, this one was originally built in a desolate area, but as the population blossomed, more and more people started moving in all around it. The spacious temple and monastery grounds now sit right in the middle of a packed residential area; a walk from the temple to the nearest high-rise apartment complex takes only a couple of minutes.
Most of the temple and monastery is for Buddhist worship and is smoke-free except for some incense burning here and there, but one temple building in the front, where the taxi left me off, is completely different from the rest. This is the temple devoted not to any Buddha, but rather to the town god. A newspaper article posted at the entrance explained that because the town god administers justice in hell and supervises the return of ghosts to hell at the end of the Hungry Ghost festival, the temple’s architecture is not tall or spacious, and the place exhibits “an air of gloom and eeriness reminiscent of the nether world.” They weren’t kidding. Directly outside the entrance of this little temple stood two giant joss-burning furnaces shaped like ornate pagodas. I sat and watched for about an hour as person after person after person came with stacks of paper and loaded them into the hot fire inside the furnaces. Smoke and ash and little scraps of crispy paper belched out of holes in the top of the fifteen-foot structures, turning the whole place into something resembling the inside of a barbecue grill. By the end of my time there, my eyes were red and itchy, and I smelled as if I had just gone swimming in a giant ashtray.
Next, I took the metro out to a temple called Phoh Kiu Siang T’ng. This was a very different kind of place from the first temple. It was in the middle of a residential neighborhood (not a high-rise government complex) and tiny. An article in the Singapore newspaper the Straits Times had piqued my interest in the temple when it reported that, just a month earlier, the place had purchased and installed two state-of-the-art burners that emit almost no smoke at all for a seemingly exorbitant amount of money. Apparently, the temple installed the burners in response to increasing complaints from nearby residents about the smoke that was emitted by the previous burners. According to the temple spokesman, “Some of the residents have asthma, and are very vocal during the lunar seventh month, to the point where even the police are called in.”
Even though one of my goals in coming to Asia was trying to see the most nasty paper-burning event possible, I also had my eye out for environmentally friendly burning situations, so I could compare the good with the bad. The burners at this temple turned out to be a perfect example of what I was looking for. It was easy to see how these twenty-foot-high golden pagoda-shaped burners would be good for the environment. Fitted over the vents that would have ordinarily sent the smoke from the burning joss paper into the air were thick silver-colored pipes that rerouted the smoke into a large, unsightly filter located directly behind the burners. The filter presumably gets rid of all or most of the smoke, although I have to admit that I do not know for sure how much of the smoke is removed by the filter, because in the hour or so that I awkwardly stood around waiting to find out, not a single person came to the temple to burn any paper. Unlike the bustling traditional temple I had just visited hours before, this place was a veritable (excuse the pun) ghost town. Even when I came back a second time—ten days later, on a weekend afternoon, on my way back through Singapore before returning to the United States—I didn’t see anyone at all using the burners.
There are, of course, all sorts of possible reasons why I didn’t see anyone burning joss paper in my two trips to visit these fancy-pants pagodas. As a small, local temple, it is not frequented by all that many people in the first place. Perhaps people tend to come at night. Or maybe I was just unlucky. But what kept occurring to me as I sat, bored, watching the unused burners, was that maybe, just maybe, people don’t really want to burn joss paper in a burner where the smoke goes into a pipe and into a filter and then comes out, if at all, as a tiny puff of purified air. Doesn’t taking away the smoke kind of take the oomph out of the whole experience? What a bore, to burn a bunch of paper and have nothing actually come out of the burner. Sitting there looking at the lonely pagodas, the structures ornately decorated with carved pictures of deities and gleaming under the hot Singapore sun, I thought about how encouraging or requiring religious practices to be more environmentally friendly can run the risk of making religion dull and pedestrian, perhaps even discouraging people from practicing their rituals. Is protecting the environment, I wondered, always worth the cost?
The following day, I visited a third temple, a place that was yet again very different from the ones I’d seen so far. The Kong Meng San Phor Kark See Monastery (also called the Bright Hill Temple) is the biggest Buddhist temple in Singapore. Probably a hundred Phoh Kiu Siang T’ngs could fit inside it. This third temple was far from the city center; to get there, I had to take a bus that sported a sign announcing NO DURIANS ALLOWED. The sign referred to the spiky, odiferous national fruit that nobody wants to sit next to in a closed, crowded space.
Although Singaporean Buddhists are not big joss burners, I was visiting a Buddhist temple because Dr. Tong had explained to me that in Singapore, many Taoists bury their dead ancestors in Buddhist temples and burn joss for them there. Apparently, the Taoists like the burying facilities at Buddhist temples and prefer to bury their dead in a place where there’s a lot of chanting and praying going on, even if it’s not quite the right chanting and praying. The Buddhists allow the Taoists to bury their dead in the Buddhist temples because of some combination of being compassionate and wanting the money that they charge for burial. But the Taoists still want to burn joss paper at certain times during the year at the site where their dead ancestors are buried, so the Buddhist temples will set up an area, maybe in the back of the temple, where the Taoists can burn their paper to honor their ancestors. In other words, the temple is predominantly Buddhist, but there is one small area that the Taoists use for burning.
I thought this arrangement was extremely weird when Tong explained it to me, but sure enough, that’s exactly what I found at Bright Hill. At the far back of the grounds of this giant temple, past the enormous halls for Buddhist worship, past the bodhi tree and the koi ponds, past the Pagoda of Ten Thousand Buddhas and the Hall of Universal Brightness, you finally come upon the Pu An Columbarium. It is here at this bleak furnace that Taoists come bearing stacks of joss paper, which they hand over to a temple worker in a yellow uniform. The worker then throws it all into the furnace, where it’s burned and turned into smoke that comes belching out the top of a giant metal apparatus and into the air around the temple and surrounding neighborhood. Of all the places I visited to watch joss being burned in my travels, this was one of the most depressing. Two big English-language signs had been hung in front of the furnace urging people to PROTECT THE ENVIRONMENT by BURNING LESS JOSS, but the signs were so blackened from the ubiquitous soot that they were nearly impossible to read.
Luckily, I didn’t have much time to sit there breathing pounds of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons into my increasingly abused lungs, because I had an appointment to meet with Nancy Tan, the temple’s public affairs officer, to talk about some of the changes that the temple was making to their burning process in response to complaints from people in the neighborhood. Nancy is so nice and sweet that while we were talking in a lovely conference room, I actually wrote “Nancy is so nice and sweet” in my little notebook. I asked Nancy about the temple’s relationship with the residents of the nearby neighborhoods, and she explained that up until a few years ago, the burner had been completely uncovered, so the ashes from the joss paper went everywhere. People who lived in the area were not happy. Since then, though, the temple has “worked hand in hand” with the government and the nearby residents to solve the problem. Recently, for example, the temple upgraded its burning facility, hired a team of employees trained in reducing ash emissions to take the paper from the worshipper and put it in the furnace, and began letting the furnace rest for a while after it gets too hot, an innovation that results in far less ash being emitted into the air.
I arrived in Hong Kong the day after a typhoon had passed through and shut the city down. Light rain was still falling, and the air was so damp that it took only ten minutes of walking through the crowded, haphazard streets until a midsize swamp developed in my slacks. Before I went to law school, I had briefly worked in mainland China for a law firm headquartered in Hong Kong and had visited the tiny, bustling city-state many times. I always loved it—the chaos, the endless streams of people, the bright, blinking neon lights, the mix of old and new, of things Western and Chinese. In the nineteen years since I lived there for six weeks in a crowded apartment with a coworker and an entire Chinese family, though, I had forgotten just how New York–ish the place is. Going from sedate Singapore to frenzied Hong Kong is like putting on an AC/DC song after listening to hours of classical guitar. The city is also crazy expensive. One night, as I sat in a hotel bar at the edge of Kowloon staring through two-story-high glass windows at the harbor, drinking margaritas, and watching the boats traveling every which way in front of the gorgeous, twinkling skyline of downtown Hong Kong Island, I accidentally spent forty dollars on a cheeseburger.
I only had two full days before heading off to Taiwan, so I packed the time I had in Hong Kong full of appointments and activities. The first day, I would talk to people; the second, I would tour the temples. My first meeting was with Dr. Tong Wai Hop, the head education officer at the Taoist Association of Hong Kong. In Hong Kong, the government actively regulates joss burning in temples and other institutional settings by requiring the installation of certain smoke-scrubbing technology (more on this later). I wanted to talk with a Taoist representative to find out how Taoists feel about this regulation of their religious practice.
As I took the subway out to meet Dr. Tong, I wondered what a Taoist office might look like. Would it be floating in the air, in the middle of park made out of marshmallows? Maybe it would be totally empty, except for thousands of butterflies. When I exited the subway into a particularly gray and grimy part of the city and found the office in a characterless building that also housed the offices of the Top Ten Snooker Club, however, I realized that my fantasies were misplaced. Other than a small prayer room with a little shrine and a red rug, the Taoist office turned out to be pretty much like any other office—a reception area, a few cubicles, and a meeting room, where I took a seat in an ornate wooden chair across from Dr. Tong and his young, stylish assistant, Sam. I am not sure exactly what I had thought a Taoist sage might look like—maybe something involving bare feet and a long, white beard—but Dr. Tong was wearing brown pants, a brown-plaid shirt, white socks, and navy-blue Crocs, a weird outfit for sure and not what I had expected. The interview got off to a slow start. The Taoists seemed skeptical of me, which I could fully understand, and the combination of the warm room and my anxiety about the interview was making me sweat like Richard Nixon drinking hot tea in a sauna.
As the conversation got going, though, we all relaxed a bit, and I was eventually able to learn some interesting things from Dr. Tong, who made it clear that he was speaking only for himself, rather than for all Taoists. When I asked him about the regulation of furnaces at temples, his irritation with the government was palpable. It was not that reducing the amount of smoke would make it hard for Taoists to worship the ancestors that made him angry. Indeed, when I mentioned the smokeless Singapore temple, he said, “It does not matter if the smoke is coming out—we believe the ghosts will receive it.”
Rather, he was upset about the significant cost of installing and running the control technology, particularly because that technology has to be working all day long, even if worshippers are only burning paper for fifteen minutes. Tong said that the Taoists would prefer to use the money to directly help people by providing health care to the elderly and education and scholarships to young people than to achieve some “vague” amount of environmental protection. He stressed that the pollution created by burning joss is minimal, particularly in comparison with the pollution caused by industry. Although he said that he believes people ought to be urged to reduce their energy use and pollution, the government should not enforce such reductions through regulation because, among other things, this discriminates against his religion. “I don’t think the government understands the Taoist perspective,” he said. “We have had these habits for thousands of years. Why should we change them? This is discrimination.” Altogether we probably only talked for an hour, but I feel as though I at least got some insight into how Taoists feel about the regulation of joss burning, as well as what kind of plastic shoes Taoists prefer these days. Before I left, I asked Sam and Dr. Tong if they could recommend some places I should visit to see how Taoists burn joss in Hong Kong (their suggestions turned out to be terrific, as we’ll see later), and then I took my leave.
After a brief visit with Kin-Fai Ho, the air pollution scientist whose work on incense I discussed in chapter 1, I arrived at the Environmental Protection Department for my final interview of the day. I was met by Danny Lo and Duncan Wong, two terrific, funny, eager government officers who showed me into a cramped meeting room dominated by a cruddy yellow table. Not only were Danny and Duncan smart and fun to talk to, but they were also able to clearly explain exactly how Hong Kong law tries to deal with the dangers of joss burning in a variety of contexts. The key legal provision that the government employs is the Air Pollution Control Ordinance, a statute that was first passed in 1983 and subsequently amended several times to control different types of air pollution. Section 10 of the statute provides for the following actions:
Where the Authority or an authorized officer is satisfied that the emission of air pollutants from a polluting process is causing or contributing to air pollution . . . the Authority . . . may give an air pollution abatement notice . . . to the owner of the premises or to the person carrying out the activity requiring him:
1. to cease the emission of air pollutants from the premises or to cease the operation of the polluting process;
2. to reduce the emission of air pollutants from the premises or polluting process;
3. to take other steps to abate the emission of air pollutants from the premises or polluting process.
Anyone who fails to comply with a government-issued abatement notice can be fined a lot of money and even be sentenced to a prison term. According to Danny and Duncan, the government uses this provision to regulate temples and columbaria, and other permanent, significant sources of joss-paper emission. Because the resources of the office are limited, however, and because the people who work there have a lot of other things to do, the government does not necessarily regulate every single emission source. Rather, the agency is, as the guys put it, “complaint oriented.” If a group of neighbors brings to the agency’s attention some temple that is emitting a bunch of harmful smoke, then the government will do something about it. If nobody complains, however, the government won’t even know about the emissions, much less regulate them.
I asked Danny and Duncan what the government requires of temples that are burning a lot of joss. Does it ban emissions altogether? Does it require the temples to limit their emissions to a certain level, and if so, to what level? The officers explained that instead of banning emissions or even requiring them to fall below some threshold amount, the government insists that the temples install what’s known in the environmental-law game as best available technology (BAT). Specifically, the government generally requires temples to install both water scrubbers and electrostatic precipitators on their furnaces. The scrubbers inject water into the flue gas to cool it down, thus controlling the fly ash and big particles of dust, while the precipitator removes the smaller particles of dust from the gas. According to Danny and Duncan, the Hong Kong Products Council has developed a furnace that contains scrubbers and precipitators, and it’s available for about twenty thousand US dollars, an amount that Duncan told me the temples are willing to spend.
According to the guys, the agency works collaboratively with the temples to make sure the temples know what they have to do and how to do it, and the temples invariably respond positively both because of the possibility of legal sanctions and because of Hong Kong society norms, which push people toward compromise and conciliation. This last part was pretty interesting. My conversation with Dr. Tong from the Taoist Association suggested that the law, rather than any of these so-called norms, was what motivated the Taoist temples to install the required technology. Whatever is at work—probably some combination of law and norms—the system seems to be fairly successful. According to Danny and Duncan, the agency has never fined a temple under Section 10 of the statute.
It was great talking to the Taoists, the scientist, and the funny guys from the government, but by the end of all the interviews, I had had enough yapping and was looking forward to seeing some serious smoke. The next day, I got my wish. The morning started rough because the night before, I’d eaten a mussel that tasted like an armpit, but before long, I was back on the subway and off to see my first temple of the day. Wong Tai Sin is one of Hong Kong’s biggest, busiest, and most famous temples, where thousands of worshippers come every day to pray, burn incense, and have their fortunes told. I came on a weekend afternoon, so the place was completely chaotic—packed with people, earsplitting, and smoky. Everywhere I looked, worshippers were chanting and bowing and kneeling and praying and, inevitably, clutching bouquets of incense sticks, whose plumes of smoke mingled together to create a toxic fog that was impossible to avoid. Having just heard about the health effects of incense and joss-stick burning the day before, I tried to stop breathing, but, alas, that turned out to be impossible.
Actually, there was one place within the complicated maze of buildings, staircases, and statues where it was possible to breathe completely smokeless air. Located off to the side, near the restrooms and the line of barbecue-grill-like things where people come to light their incense sticks, is a little ticket booth and a short set of stairs going down into what looks like the basement of the temple. For one hundred Hong Kong dollars (about twelve US bucks), I bought a ticket to Sik Sik Yuen, an underground circular chamber that looks like something out of a science fiction movie. Lit with indirect, space-age, glowing blue light, surrounded by seemingly hundreds of small statues of various deities, and featuring a large inlaid yin-yang symbol in the center of the floor, this hall was definitely the environmental jackpot that I had been looking for. It was also one of the strangest places I had visited in all my travels.
The temple had added the room a few years ago, at considerable cost, as a way of promoting environmentally friendly worship. As I found out, moreover, if you pay the one hundred Hong Kong dollars, you are pretty much forced to worship in an environmentally friendly way. When I arrived in the hall, a lady came up to me and opened the little pouch that I had received along with my ticket. In the pouch were three incense cones and a little amulet, which the lady arranged on my hand in some specific way that I did not understand before leading me to a central incense-holding place, where she told me to place one of the incense cones. I did what she said, and then she took me to one of the god statues, which she explained was the monitor god for the year, and I placed another incense cone in front of him. Finally, she asked me what year I was born, which then led us to a different god, where I placed the third incense cone. Nobody lit any of the incense, and when I had done all the things I was supposed to do, a guy gave me a tiny red pouch with a coin in it, which probably signified something, although I don’t know what.
When this was over, the lady left me alone to wander around the room. The only other people present were three serious-looking guys wearing deep-red robes and tall black hats. After a while, one of them came up to me and started chatting. He told me his name was S. Y. Chu, and he wrote it in both English and Chinese in my notebook. Explaining that he was a Taoist priest, he asked me if I too was religious. I told him that I’m not religious now, but that I was raised Jewish. His eyes got really big when I mentioned this. He asked for my notebook again and wrote the word “Jevish” in it. I asked him what was going on with this part of the temple, and he said it was a “green temple.” I mentioned that it seemed empty, while outside, the place was packed, and he said yes. I said, “It’s kind of expensive to get in here,” and again he agreed.
We stood there for a minute, S. Y. Chu and I, looking around at the place, and as I tried to think of something to say to fill the awkward silence, I thought back to the newspaper article I had read about the green temple. In the article, I recalled, there was a paragraph about how when a worshipper does something in the temple, something happens. I couldn’t remember what either “something” was, but I had some inkling that when a worshipper puts the incense into the central holder, maybe a symbolic puff of smokeless smoke comes out of somewhere, or maybe a sound goes off to symbolize that the offering had been received. Nothing had happened like this when I put my little cone of incense anywhere, but this didn’t stop me from saying to the Taoist priest, “So when you place the incense in the right place, there’s like a beep sound, huh?”
Mr. Chu was astounded by this. He turned to look at me, his eyes growing even larger than when I had said I was Jewish, and asked if I had really heard a sound when I placed my incense. “Did you have religious experience?” he asked, hopefully.
I shook my head and apologized. “No,” I said. “I’m afraid not.”
As I emerged from the silent and pristine underground chamber back into the chaos and noise and smoky fog of the temple above, I felt the same way that I had felt at the little Singapore temple with the brand-new smokeless golden pagodas that nobody was using. Sure, the thousands of people who were bowing, chanting, and lighting incense at the above-ground temple were making a big mess of the local airspace, but the place was vital in a way that the lovely cave was not. What good is it to have a place where people can worship without polluting the air if it’s going to be so sterile (not to mention expensive) that nobody wants to worship there? I definitely admire what the temple did by building a place for worship where people can breathe without putting their lives at risk, and perhaps over time such temples will catch on. For now, though, I just found the setting odd and a little depressing.
After leaving Wong Tai Sin, I made my way to the Yuen Yuen Institute, which had been recommended to me by the Taoists as a spot where I could lay my eyes on some real, old-fashioned, unregulated joss burning. Located way out from the center of the city—a taxi ride from the last stop on the subway’s Red Line—the institute is an enormous, sprawling place filled with temples and pavilions and prayer halls and other buildings and areas dedicated to all three of the country’s major religions—Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism. Tong Wai Hop had told me that on the day I was going to visit, which was a weekend day during the Hungry Ghost festival, maybe a million people would be visiting the institute to pray and burn joss paper. And when my taxi pulled up to the entrance of the place on the top of a large hill, I could see that he was probably right. A lot of people had been at Wong Tai Sin, but this was another order of magnitude. And unlike Wong Tai Sin, there were no tourists to be seen. Among the thousands and thousands of people arriving at the institute, mine was the only white face around.
Because the institute is so large, I had no idea where to go or what I should be looking for. I wandered around the smoky grounds (like at Wong Tai Sin, it seemed as if everyone was carrying around some smoldering sticks of incense), popping into watch a Taoist prayer ceremony here, admiring a Buddhist statue there. I stood for a while at what seemed like the main center of the institute and watched the people. Almost everyone had arrived with at least one big bag of joss paper. Some families had several big bags among them. Somewhere in this crazy, smoky maze, there had to be a place where all the people were bringing their joss and burning it. I just couldn’t figure out where it was.
So I started following people. I had a few false starts—one old guy heading to the bathroom, a family that put their bags down to light incense for some god or other—but before long, I had fallen behind a tiny old lady who was definitely dragging her two overstuffed bags of joss paper to be burned somewhere. I sauntered lazily behind her, watching her struggle mightily with the two unruly sacks. She turned a corner onto a wide road leading up a hill that was filled with similarly minded people carrying their bags of paper to the promised land. About a week after arriving in Asia, I knew I was finally hot on the trail of a truly huge burning extravaganza. Eventually I found myself in a clearing with hundreds of people and a monstrous, towering, filter-less black furnace, its three smokestacks barfing out smoke and ash into the atmosphere like some kind of angry dragon. Jackpot!
The place was astounding. I stood off to the side and, for as long as my lungs could stand it, watched as people old and young, male and female, approached the furnace, held their brightly colored sacks of joss in front of them, waved them up and down like the bags were bowing to the furnace, and then threw them in, where the stuff was promptly engulfed in hot flames and turned into dark plumes of carcinogenic smoke. I thought to myself, Not a good day to wear these white linen pants. Some people threw in only one package. Others tossed in several sacks. One group even brought a smartly constructed paper castle that took two men to hurl into the fire. I lifted my gaze to the top of the three smokestacks and watched the dense soot and scraps of half-burned paper fly into the sky and get carried away by the wind. I was glad that the wind that day was blowing away from the institute rather than toward it, or I might have had a cardiac infarction right on the spot.
From my travels in Singapore and Hong Kong, I learned a number of things about religious practices that harm the environment. First, the pollution from joss burning, which, like many other religious practices, harms the environment, justifies at least some government regulation. When faced with a substantial risk to the environment and human health, the government has an obligation to regulate activities to protect its citizens, regardless of the religious motivation of the activity. Observing and breathing in the smoke coming out of many of these furnaces, I felt certain that the practice of burning joss paper is dangerous, not only to those who personally engage in it but also to the bystanders who are basically forced to breathe in the dangerous, carcinogenic smoke sent up by all the burning. Joss paper is hardly the biggest contributor to air pollution in the region, but this detail is beside the point. In localized areas, and at certain times, the bursts of pollution from temples and other burning sites can be substantial, and when it comes to pulmonary issues, these kinds of short bursts can cause significant problems. In the United States, for example, the American Lung Association has long supported stricter air pollution measures to protect against bursts of pollution as short as five minutes long.
Second, when it comes to regulating religion, if it is possible, finding a technology-based approach will usually be preferable to outright bans. With joss burning, for example, the approach taken by the Hong Kong government—requiring temples to install scrubbers and other technology in their furnaces—is one that makes a lot of sense and that others should follow. Complete bans make it impossible for believers to practice their faith (or, worse, force believers to practice in secret, where regulation may not be able to reach them) and are therefore both unfair to believers and likely to backfire politically. The reaction of the community to the local government’s attempt to ban joss burning, and the Singaporean prime minister’s need to intervene in this issue, is a perfect example of regulation’s going too far. Technological approaches to decreasing pollution, though inevitably only partial solutions, are a hallmark of modern environmental regulation. In the United States, for instance, both the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act require factories and power plants to impose certain technologies to reduce the pollution they emit rather than prohibiting the discharge of any pollution as a way of balancing the costs of regulation to industry with the benefits of reducing pollution. Given the large stakes on the religion side of the environment-religion balance, technological solutions should play at least an equally big role when the government seeks to reduce pollution caused by religious practices.
Third, the government should recognize that regulating religious practice will have significant impacts on the religion itself and should seek to minimize these impacts. Of course, many aspects of modern culture and society, including law, will inevitably affect how individuals practice their religion, but the government should attempt to keep its own effects to a minimum if possible. Having watched Taoists and Buddhists in three countries in all sorts of places (near their homes, in temples large and small, on the sidewalks outside their stores) burn joss paper to please their ancestors, I have learned that this is a practice that many, many millions of people take very seriously. The practice is part of these believers’ identities as individuals and members of their communities, and they believe that burning the paper is necessary to keep angry ghosts at bay and their ancestors happy. Those of us who are not religious, or who are religious but are not Taoists, may scoff at this idea, but spend one afternoon at an enormous monastery where a million people have come on a single day with great seriousness to burn paper in a giant furnace, and you will realize how big a deal this joss burning really is.
Even if the government thinks that the effects of its regulation will be minimal, it is likely that the regulation will in fact have substantial effects on how the religion is practiced. As Professor Tong in Singapore explained to me, the regulation of joss paper burning in his country has significantly changed the way that Taoists practice their faith, essentially turning a private family ritual that took place at home into a public one, where groups of people now come together in public spaces like street corners and temples and use shared bins and furnaces rather than private receptacles. The point is that we cannot ignore the costs that religion will incur from regulation. This isn’t to say that regulation won’t be justified—only that government officials should remember these costs and try to minimize them if they can. Regulating those who practice their religion is very different from regulating, for example, a business that is producing nickel washers for sale in the marketplace. Regulating the nickel producer may cause the business to earn less money, but it will not affect the way that the producer fundamentally relates to what he or she believes is most meaningful in life. Regulating how a believer practices his or her religion does exactly that.
Fourth, the government, when crafting a technology-based regulation, should make sure to avoid requirements that will thoroughly reduce the vitality and vibrancy of the religious practice. At the extreme, even technological solutions have the potential to alter the religion so much that it becomes nearly unrecognizable and ultimately empty of any life. During this trip to Asia, looking at the sad, smokeless joss burners in Singapore and the space-age, smoke-free worship chamber in Hong Kong, I first started thinking about the danger of, for lack of a better word, neutering religion. The examples I witnessed in East Asia (similar to the example of the artificial pool for immersing idols in Mumbai) were the result of the changes made by religious institutions themselves, but one can easily imagine a government regulation that has similar results. Does anyone really want to turn religious practice into a quiet, pallid, lifeless affair? Such a result would only be justified if it were absolutely necessary to protect against particularly egregious environmental results. In my opinion, the air pollution caused by joss burning doesn’t reach that level. A little smoke is bad, but it’s not that bad.
Finally, to reduce negative effects on religion while still decreasing environmental harm, the government should work together with religious individuals and groups while drafting and implementing its regulations. The importance of such a relationship would seem to be one of the lessons that we can learn from Danny Lo and Duncan Wong, who ascribed some of Hong Kong’s success in getting temples to implement technological changes to the collaborative nature of the regulatory process. Such collaboration is in fact fairly common in regulatory environments outside the religion context, and there’s no reason to think that religion should be treated any differently. In other words, just because the secular government is planning to impose requirements on a religious community does not mean that the government should keep the religious community at arm’s length. Learning the needs and fears of the community should help the government craft a regulation that will work to protect the environment without unduly alienating or harming the community. Of course, collaboration may not work as well in some cultures as it does in others, but even in a litigious culture like the one we have in the United States, there is reason to think collaboration will help. As we have seen in the example of the Pennsylvanian Amish, for example, the government made far more headway when it started working with the religious community than when it came in “with guns ablazing.” When it comes to regulating religious practices to protect the environment, the government should definitely put its guns away.