Citizen Bodhisattvas: Educational Reform and Identity Production in Modern Chinese Buddhism

Event time: 
Thursday, March 7, 2019 - 4:30pm to 6:00pm
Location: 
Department of Religious Studies (COLL451), B-04 See map
451 College Street
New Haven, CT 06511
Event description: 

“Citizen Bodhisattvas: Educational Reform and Identity Production in Modern Chinese Buddhism”

with
RONGDAO LAI
University of Southern California

Thursday, March 7, 4:30 PM
451 College Street, B-04

Monastic education was one of the most important aspects of the modernization project in Chinese Buddhism. This talk highlights several paradigm shifts in identity production that originated in the new-style Buddhist academies in the 1920s. The reimagining of a national Buddhist community and reinterpretation of orthodoxy produced a distinctly Buddhist citizenship discourse, which became the basis for Buddhist engagement with the nation-state in terms of property rights, political participation, and wartime activism.

Bio
Rongdao Lai is Assistant Professor of Religion at the University of Southern California. Her research focuses primarily on the changing landscape in modern Chinese Buddhism and identity production. Her recently completed manuscript is a study of modern Buddhist education and citizenship in China. Her other on-going projects include lineage networks and transnational movements in Chinese Buddhism, and monastic economy in postwar Hong Kong.

For more information, please contact Hwansoo Kim

Sponsored by the Glorisun Global Network for Buddhist Studies

Open to: 
undergraduate