Anyone, whose image of Shanghai Buddhism may be associated with a visit to today’s Jing’an Temple, its glaring yellow walls perched over an underground station at one of the city’s busiest traffic intersections, would be partly justified in thinking that very little of Buddhist significance has survived the city’s passage to modernity, and that whatever has made it to the twenty-first century has ruthlessly been repackaged as a tourist attraction.6 This may well be partly the case, but there are also other, perhaps less visible, currents in the recent history of Buddhist Shanghai.