The Chinese Buddhist Ritual Field

The Taiwanese order Fo Guang Shan is a major representative of renjian Buddhism. The order maintains a global network of over 200 temples and practice centers that spans over not only most of the Asian continent, but also includes Oceania, the Americas, Europe and Africa. This article examines how the order negotiates the modern secular/religious divide by considering the example of its flagship diaspora temple Hsi Lai Temple in L.A., California. Particular attention is given to two prevalent religious practices at the temple—ritual and social engagements—that are often associated with the 'religious' and the 'secular' respectively. Based on multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork, the article aims to assess the relationship between the two practices and discusses how they resonate with a new generation of highly educated, affluent Chinese migrants.

History of Religions 51.1, 2011

Hōrin: vergleichende studien zur japanischen kulktur 15 (2009): 139-202, 2009

Chinese Studies in History, 2019

Material Religion The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief, 2023

Among the most noteworthy practices in Buddhist temples in China today are yuan or wish-vow actions. Wish-vows encompass both wish-making (xuyuan 许愿) and vow-giving (fayuan 发愿), with both modalities embraced by average temple-goers from a general population. Chinese Buddhist liturgies encourage ritual performers to adopt a bodhisattva stance, wishing/vowing for the well-being of all beings. This introduces an ethical dimension to yuan performances. This paper analyzes the continuity in practice between wish-making and vow-giving, exploring how popular and Buddhist understandings of ritual entangle and how ritual generates meaningful narratives for practitioners. The article shows how the human pursuit of ritual effects and ethical self-transformation are not contradictory but rather complementary processes. Considering this Chinese ritual situation deepens our comprehension of votive practices in syncretic religious traditions. Additionally, it offers a new direction for considering religious potentialities in late socialist societies. Furthermore, it usefully challenges the use of the term “prayer” in Chinese contexts. In this way, the article bridges anthropology, Chinese studies, and religious studies and enhances our conceptual toolkit for studying ongoing human transformation.

by the collaborative research center SFB 619 "Ritual Dynamics", the international conference "Ritual Dynamics and the Science of Ritual" assembled most of the leading experts on rituals studies and more than 600 participants for the purpose of reassessing the traditional subject in view of the latest research. The results, which are presented in five volumes, are pathbreaking for future transcultural, interdisciplinary and multi methodical research on rituals. The convention was marked by the broad range of disciplines and the corresponding diversity of methods. It embraced a great variety of topics in terms of cultural geography and spanned a time horizon from the antiquity to the present. The proceedings show how broadly the term ritual can be defined, as well as the conditions, modes and functions of ritual actions in different cultures of the present and past.

Monks, Money, and Morality: The Balancing Act of Contemporary Buddhism, 2021

The provision of Buddhist domestic ritual services (individual-or householdlevel apotropaic rituals, healing rituals, propitiation of deities, etc., carried out in a Buddhist idiom by Buddhist religious specialists) and the patronage relations within which this activity unfolds constitute an understudied domain in the larger field of Buddhist studies. As we will see, under certain circumstances, providing such ritual services can become the object of ethical critiques, even in strongly ritual-centered forms of Buddhism such as Tibetan tantric Buddhism. The emic value hierarchies that these critiques reflect (soteriological vs. worldly orientations, etc.) may have influenced the choices of a Western scholarship sometimes prone itself to Protestant biases (which express partly similar value hierarchies: higher valuation of the soteriological, the doctrinal/textual, etc.). In any case, if the rituals' "internal" ritual/religious logics in themselves have been deemed worthy of interest, 1 the economics and social embeddedness of this "lesser" dimension of Buddhist religion has received, on the whole, only much more modest scholarly attention. 2 As I have argued in a recent overview of the anthropological treatment of the "gift" and other religiously inflected modes of economic transfer

Fieldwork note and vignettes on Buddhism and economic growth in Vientiane, 2019

http://maxcam.socanth.cam.ac.uk/index.php/2019/03/29/fieldnote-3-buddhism-booming-businesses-and-the-ritual-economy-in-urban-laos/ The third fieldnote in our Max Cam series takes us to Vientiane, the capital of Laos, where Patrice Ladwig is undertaking fieldwork this year. After a long period of isolation after the communist revolution in 1975, the politics of reform, and investments from neighboring countries have lead to substantial economic growth in urban areas during the last decade. In his research, Patrice traces the effects of the expanding economy onto the religious field, and especially rituals. He wants to analyze how and why specific actors channel parts of their new acquired wealth into Buddhist rituals, and thereby support temples and Buddhist institutions. Moreover, in the second phase of research he intends to explore how increasing inequalities in wealth are expressed in ritual, and how these developments are justified, criticized and morally evaluated by Buddhist practitioners.

The China Journal, 2017

This is the first volume to focus exclusively on Jain pat : as, large-format paintings. These include square cloth renderings of yantras typically carried by monks; depictions of scenes from the lives of the Jinas, especially P ar svan atha; vijñaptipatras, long scrolls sent to monks to invite them to a city for the rainy season; diagrams of the cosmos and parts thereof; and images of pilgrimage sites kept in homes and local temples. Unique objects include a scroll illustrating image-poem verse forms (citra-k avya bandhas) and an astrological chart concerning the slaying of a child (si sum ara-cakra). Most of the images collected here are housed in the L. D. Institute of Indology in Ahmedabad. Forty-one objects are presented in 131 stunningly clear images; nearly all text on the objects is legible. Two scrolls are rendered as foldouts. Several detail images are in actual size. The authors offer sparse analysis throughout and make few arguments. While rightly pointing out that these paintings are understudied, they frequently do not take recent work into consideration in their analyses, claiming that less has been written about some objects than is actually the case. Their most substantial contribution is to expand U. P. Shah's twofold typology of pat : as (tantric and non-tantric) into five categories, though even this could be expanded further. The authors' stated interest is to introduce these paintings to researchers, rather than to analyze pat : as as a category-they omit embroidered pat : as. These objects give us a vivid picture of the lived medieval and early modern Svet ambara Jain tradition in western India, demonstrating their importance as resources for understanding the Jain tradition. The authors share valuable insights into how several pat : a forms continue to be used today. Historically significant portions of text on select pat : as are transcribed in Devanagari or Gujarati script, with a few errors, and are imprecisely paraphrased rather than translated. Several points of fact about Jainism are confused. For these reasons, the volume will be primarily useful to researchers with the ability to read from the images directly and who have enough knowledge of Jainism to handle nonstandard interpretations. This volume is recommended for university libraries with a South Asian art collection.

Modern China 13:63-89, 1987