An investigation on the interrelationship between religious volunteering and volunteer's spiritual attributes

Abstract

In the 1980s, volunteer activities began to spring up in China. Since then, a variety of Chinese institutions and individuals have engaged in volunteering act. Thereinto, religious, especially Buddhist, groups and adherents have played an important role in promoting the course of Chinese volunteering work. However, studies, either English or Chinese, on religious volunteering in China remain scarce. Even though some researches mention religious volunteering, they mainly focus on its role in the overall development of Chinese volunteering cause, but seldom link volunteers‘ experience in a religious community to their spiritual dispositions and development. Therefore, this study attempts to make some contributions to this field by investigating the interplay between religious volunteering and volunteers‘ spiritual attributes.

Ethnography is utilized as the main research method in this study. Participant observation and interviews are employed as the means of data collection. After three-month participant observation in Ningbo Fojiao Jushi Lin which is a volunteer-based Buddhist community, 22 of them are invited to take part in the semi-structured interviews. The findings of the study are generated principally based on the interviews and participant observation.

The findings reveal that volunteers provide their service in Ningbo Fojiao Jushi Lin with multifarious intention, not just for the benefits of others. Although it is a Buddhist community, not all the volunteers do volunteering there because of the faith in Buddhism. However, volunteers are more or less instilled with Buddhist values and tenets while volunteering Ningbo Fojiao Jushi Lin, which makes some of them get into Buddhism and even become a Buddhist after a period of time volunteering in the community. The volunteering experience in Ningbo Fojiao Jushi Lin also has some other impact on volunteers‘ knowledge, character, family life, social relations, etc. Moreover, the findings also show that volunteers‘ dispositions in turn can exert a considerable influence on the community‘s inclination, practice and influence.

The concepts of social capital and spiritual capital are used to better interpret the findings. The study reveals that one‘s spiritual capital plays a dominant role in motivating him/her to participate in religious volunteering activities, and on the other hand, volunteering in the religious community produces and accumulates volunteers‘ social capital, based on which one‘s spiritual capital is influenced as well. Furthermore, there exists a mutual impact between volunteers and the community in terms of spiritual attributes and corresponding practice, or in other words, an interaction between individual spiritual capital and organizational spiritual capital.