Stay connected: China’s digital natives turning to online tools to pray for luck and wealth from deities like QR code donations and incense apps
- A temple-worship renaissance among China’s youth is seeing a parallel rise in digital innovation to satisfy a tech-savvy generation
- Everything from QR code donation collection boxes to temple social media accounts have sprung up in recent years in mainland China
Hiding behind her office computer, social media user, known as Tangdaoyaxiaohong, “lights up” three digital joss sticks on her phone and begins knocking on the wooden fish, or Chinese temple block, installed on her iPad with her Apple Pencil.
Meanwhile, her left hand is busy rotating the Buddhist beads on her digital watch.
Posting the video of her “cyber Buddhist practice” on the Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu, Tangdaoyaxiaohong said this was the moment when she felt her spirit had been enhanced.
There are millions of digital worshippers like her in China. The Wooden Fish app — a virtual version of the Chinese temple block used when chanting Buddhist texts — has exploded in popularity since September last year when it launched.
Within a month, it had been downloaded more than 4 million times on China’s iOS app Store alone, online news outlet Ran Caijing reported.
The trend of digital worship coincides with a renaissance in temple attendance among Chinese youth in recent years.
At the same time, Chinese temples are moving into the digital sphere to cater to the growing numbers of digitally-savvy worshippers. Innovations such as smart donation boxes can now be found in many temples providing worshippers with a convenient way to donate money by scanning a QR code.
Douyin user Xiaweiweiyang said she had taken a photo of one temple’s donation collection QR code so that she could donate money whenever she felt the need to make an offering.
The Jingfeng temple in southeastern China’s Fujian province has even switched to digital incense. Anyone wanting to burn a stick of incense to ask for the gods’ blessing can now scan the QR code on a screen for 8.8 yuan (US$1.27).
Despite these innovations, visiting temples in person can be a hassle. People often have to queue and occasionally fight for tickets, meaning many find it more comfortable to worship the gods anytime, anywhere, using their smartphones.
As one online commenter said, it is “convenient” to worship gods using the incense-burning app because “you can type anything in the app’s wish box, and feel free to set up the number of joss sticks you would like to burn”.
“Besides, it is environmentally-friendly.”
Besides knocking on an e-wooden fish and worshipping digital Buddhas, Chinese youths also engage in superstitious cyber activities for luck such as forwarding pictures of koi carps, an auspicious fish in Chinese culture, and photographs of people perceived as successful such as Chinese actress and singer Yang Chaoyue, on social media.
Most recently, some iOS users also combined koi carps and digital fang sheng or animal release — a Buddhist ritual of buying and setting free captive animals into the wild — by copying images of the fish using a photo app’s cut-out function and dropping them into rivers on map apps.
