Whether or not we are entering the so-called Age of Aquarius, in which astrologers believe people will become more altruistic and humane, there are certainly signs around town that bookstores – and publishers – hope we are. It seems there's a growing readership in China willing to believe in it, explaining the amount of spirituality books now being offered to a credulous public. 


The Book of Life, byJ iddu Krishnamurti

Books on healing, psychology, astrology, Buddhism, tarot, magic, yoga, karma, mysticism and alchemy – all claiming to have the answers to inner peace – are emerging, even though it's been over a decade since Chicken Soup for the Soul became a 2000 bestseller in China.

On Douban Reading, a site where user-generated archives are shared by enthusiastic readers, reading notes and reviews for works by Ken Wilber, Eckhart Tolle, Osso, Dr. Brian Weiss, Carlos Castaneda, AH Almaas are doing a roaring – if unpaid – trade. 

Jiddu Krishnamurti, a renowned spiritual guru who died in 1986 and whose works were introduced to China in 2005, with more than 40 books now in print, today enjoys hundreds of thousands of mainland fans.

According to his official website, Krishnamurti claimed not to belong to any religious organization, sect or even country, nor did he subscribe to any school of political or ideological thought. On the contrary, he maintained such dogmas are the very factors that divide human beings and bring about conflict and war.

The Krishnamurti Foundation Trust, his official publisher, maintains an extensive archive of Krishnamurti's original works and had a dozen Chinese publishers bidding for the rights to the remaining 20 at this month's Beijing International Book Fair. 




Terry Hu Yin Meng, an actress-turned-author from Taiwan, has been a teacher and healer of mind-spirit-body development for 20 years. It was she who first translated and introduced Krishnamurti into Chinese, after first reading them in 1988 in New York. She has also translated works by the comprehensive philosophical thinker Ken Wilber, "transpersonal psychology"teacher AH Almaas, American Tibetan-Buddhist nun Pema Chodron and American Ordinary Mind Zen School teacher Ezra Bayda.  

The teachings of these self-styled gurus generally tend to integrate modern Western psychology with ancient Eastern Buddhist philosophy into what's presented as a cohesive spiritual whole, meeting the needs of those in contemporary China in desperate search of spiritual transcendence and liberation.

On July 31, a rare salon themed "Freedom, Love, Action."held to mark the 25th anniversary of Krishnamurti's death, took place in Bookfun, a store in Beijing. Publishers, translators and readers shared personal experiences about the guru's ideas and what his teachings could mean to China.

Wu Xiaobing, a magazine editor, said Krishnamurti's works are both a luxury and necessity; reading his works, one should try to zone out of any attempts to "think hard and figure out the meaning. 

"I had to read it with complete peace of mind, all distractions pushed aside, which is not easy,"he admitted. Our own limits, as well as upbringing, education and all sorts of social restrictions all hinder us from pursuing freedom, Wu added.

Wu realized that Krishnamurti's works were both prescient and imperative after the Wenzhou train crash of July 23, which seemed to encapsulate an ever-harsher social environment faced for modern-day Chinese. 

"I believe, after the deadly train crash, more people would agree that we should seek personal liberation, if there is nothing we can do to change the severe facts [of life]."

Chen Shouwen, the event's organizer and editor of the bestselling Chinese edition of The Book of Life, said he prefers humanistic, transpersonal psychology books with the "right view, or middle road", which is essential to a country "lacking rational ability."

This boom of spiritual publications comes nearly half a century after the Western spiritual revolution was first initiated by Abraham Maslow in the 1960s. That eventually led to the quack philosophy of the 1980s New Age Movement and a further "spiritual revival,"marked by the publication of therapist and religious historian Thomas Moore's Care of the Soul (1991). It is apparently now spreading to China. 

Encountering Your Unknown Self is a work of spiritual fiction by Zhang Defen, a TV-anchor-turned psychologist from Taiwan, who sold more than a million copies on the mainland. Meanwhile, the Chinese version of The Power of Now, by German-born spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle, has exceeded half a million copies. 

But impressive as these numbers are, they represent a mere drop in the ocean for a country where initial print runs, even of turgid political memoirs, can run into the millions. 

Recent Western history suggests such books and new-fangled philosophies normally appeal to the recently monied, emerging middle and upper classes who also aspire to further intellectual enlightenment. 

But whether it's snake oil or spirituality they're selling, it's only readers in cities such as Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou – the coastal areas that benefited first from China's sudden economic trajectory – that are buying. They are, said Chen, more accepting and understanding of these books.

"In the West, spiritual books are bestsellers even if they have religious freedom... in China, it's normal to seek spiritual succor from less-familiar channels, since [we] have got rid of [our] material deficiencies,"Chen added.