6 research outputs found
Responses to COVID19 in Buddhist Communities of Contemporary China-Preliminary findings
No full textThis teaching resource by PhD student Daigengna Rosin Duoer of UC Santa Barbara focuses on the Buddhist response to COVID-19 in China. The teaching resource covers issues such as government restrictions on Buddhist places of worship, transition from in person to online worship, and social outreach efforts made by Buddhist communities during the pandemic. The teaching resource also discusses Chinese Traditional Medicine, vegetarianism, Buddhist doctrine related to the pandemic, and personal experiences of Buddhists
From “Lama Doctors” to “Mongolian Doctors”: Regulations of Inner Mongolian Buddhist Medicine under Changing Regimes and the Crises of Modernity (1911–1976)
No full textThis paper focuses on how Buddhist medicine in twentieth-century Inner Mongolia was defined, restricted, regulated, and transformed under different ruling political regimes since the fall of the Qing empire in 1911 to the 1980s. The paper argues that the fate of Mongolian medicine was closely linked with the fate of Mongolian Buddhism in twentieth-century Inner Mongolia. As Inner Mongolian Buddhism came to be re-defined, regulated, and coerced by various systems of governance that came to rule the region, Mongolian Buddhist medicine faced crises of modernity in which processes of secularization, exercises of biopower, practices of colonial medicine, and discourses of ethnicity and hygiene challenged the tradition to either reform and adapt to new standardizations imposed by Western biomedicine or lose relevancy in rapidly evolving eras of change
Making the Esoteric Public: The Ninth Panchen Lama and the Trans-ethnonational Rituals of the Kālacakra Initiations in Early Twentieth-Century East Asia
No full textThe Kālacakratantra is an early eleventh-century esoteric treatise that belongs to the highest class of tantras, the unexcelled yoga-tantras (S: niruttara-yoga-tantra) and is believed to be the last niruttara-yoga-tantra to appear in India. The tantra spread to Nepal and Tibet under the promulgation of Piṇḍo and his disciple Atiśa, as well as Nāropa, and became highly influential in Tibetan Buddhist traditions, especially with the Jonang and Gelug traditions. In the Kālacakra tradition, an initiation (S: abhiṣeka; T: dbang/dbang bskur) is an essential ritual in which a qualified teacher confers the authority and ability to practice a certain tantric method. It can be understood as a process of purification, a rite of passage into a superior spiritual path, an empowerment of potencies, and a type of healing for both worldly and mental distresses
TO THE END OF REVOLUTION: THE CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY AND TIBET, 1949–1959. By XiaoyuanLiu. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. Pp. x + 401; Paperback, $35.00.
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Buddhism Beyond the Nation and the Empire: Transnational Geluk Buddhism in Modern East and Inner Asia
No full textThis dissertation is a history of religion on the “peripheries” of the modern Chinese state, the Japanese wartime empire, and the Tibetan Geluk Buddhist world. Using a transnational history approach, the project uses multilingual source materials collected from archives located in China, Japan, Taiwan, and the United States and challenges traditional disciplinary categories in postwar Religious Studies and Area Studies. Focusing on interwar Inner Mongolia and Manchuria, an understudied region within the postwar academic disciplines of Buddhist Studies and Areas Studies, my dissertation explores the history of transnational Buddhist networks in the region that both supported and challenged the nation-building and empire-building efforts of modern China and Japan (1912-1949). The specific temporal scope of this project is between the fall of China’s multi-ethnic Qing Empire in 1912, and the retreat of the Chinese Nationalists and their Republican government to Taiwan in 1949 after their defeat in the Chinese Civil War. This period also saw the rise and fall of the Japanese Empire in 1945 and the establishment of the People’s Republic of China under the Chinese Communist Party in 1949. During this period, Inner Mongolia and Manchuria, the continental regions of Northeast Asia and the “frontiers” of the Qing Empire, became the new “borderlands” that both the modern Chinese Nationalist Republican State and the expanding Japanese Empire competed to take control of. The two regions were administratively disciplined through the laws of Republican China (albeit often nominally) and effectively occupied by Japanese settler colonization as well as military and industrial annexation. Both regions also eventually saw the births of two modern states, the states of Mengjiang United Autonomous Government (1939-1945) and Manchukuo (1931-1945), although both are often referred to as “puppet states” of the Japanese Empire. At the same time, local Buddhists, both monastic and lay, in Inner Mongolia and Manchuria positioned themselves differently and beyond the spatial and temporal limits of the modern nation and empire. Using Buddhist networks connecting Manchuria in the East to Tibet in the West that have existed since the eighteenth century, Buddhists negotiated agency and mobility in this volatile interwar period marked with various crises of modernity. In this dissertation, I identify three types of Buddhist networks operating in early twentieth-century Inner Mongolia and Manchuria, namely, 1) a transregional Inner and East Asian monastic and intellectual network formed in the Qing period, 2) border-crossing Buddhist networks informed by old lineages in Inner Asia and new patronage in modern China that responded to Buddhist sacred geography, historiography, and apocalyptic time, and 3) transnational networks paved by Japanese Buddhists and Mongol monks that promoted an Esoteric Buddhist Pan-Asianism in the Japanese wartime empire. I argue that these Buddhist networks not only engaged in various overlapping nation-building and empire-building projects in the interwar geopolitical landscape of Northeast Asia, but they offered cross-border access to Buddhist and non-Buddhist individuals to exercise agency and mobility to extend and maintain landscapes of their own that challenged the spatial-temporal orders of the modern nation-states and empires
Buddhism in the Pandemic
No full textThe Jivaka Project features a collection of pedagogical resources on their website designed for teachers or professors who wish to teach about the national and international Buddhist response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The webpage includes a webinar, various resources, and articles focused on Buddhism and the pandemic. The Jivaka Project features pedagogical resources from Dr. Amy Paris of Eckerd College, Dr. Jack Meng-Chia of the National University of Singapore, Dr. Jeff Wilson of Renison University College, Dr. Levi McLaughlin of North Carolina State University, Daigengna Rosin Duoer of UC Santa Barbara, and Dr. Brooke Schedneck of Rhodes College
