ZEN and the art of business management have reached China: monks from the Jade Buddha Monastery in Shanghai are attending business school.

The Antai School of Management accepted 18 of them this month for a new MBA course in temple management.

“We live in the metropolis of Shanghai and we need to find a way to interact between Buddhism and society. This requires a different management style,” Master Chang Chun, the general manager at the Jade Buddha temple, said in a luxurious boardroom in a state-of-the-art glass and marble building behind the place of worship. The century-old temple attracts a constant stream of visitors — more than a million pilgrims and about half a million tourists each year — and managing the revenues is a daunting job.

The new building has been paid for and the buzz of electric saws resounds through small side courtyards where a big renovation programme is under way. In temple offices, shaven-headed monks dressed in saffron robes sit in cubicles like those found in London banks. Some peer at computer screens and answer telephone calls; others monitor visitors by walkie-talkie.

The scene is only a few dozen yards but a world away from the temple entrance, where pilgrims fall to their knees to pray before huge statues of the Buddha and acrid incense smoke thickens the air.

Master Chang Chun (Eternal Spring) said that he hoped that the MBA course would enable the monastery to balance better the spiritual and material wealth of the temple.

Once a week he and 17 colleagues take a full day of classes in modern management techniques, corporate strategy and tactics from Sun Tzu’s famed The Art of War.

The monk said: “We have a strong sense of faith but our commercial knowledge is weak. Now we have many more opportunities to meet people from the secular world and need to understand how to deal with and negotiate with outsiders.”

The entrance ticket costs 75p. A bunch of incense sticks from a temple shop costs about £2.70. And then there is the income from donations.

Some visitors have paid £750 each for ten gold-leaf Buddha statues at the temple entrance, each bearing a plaque inscribed with the donor’s name. For a fee, the temple blesses cars, homes and women’s jewellery. A temple donation is a tradition to ensure that the Buddha will hear prayers for health and wealth.

The president of the Antai School of Management, Wang Fanghua, who created the MBA for monks, said: “These temples are not in remote mountains but in big cities, and they need to know how to operate in a metropolis. They must keep pace with the world.”

The pilgrims seem content. One of them, Wang Junma, said: “I come here often to find peace of mind. In some temples you really feel they are ripping you off. Here it is not too bad. After all, the temple needs to survive.”

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