Student Wellness Hub
Buddhism for the (More Than) Human Realm: Tradition, Modernity, and Transnational Chinese Buddhism
This talk will present portions of Lina Verchery¡¯s current book project,?Buddhism for the?More Than?Human Realm: Rebirth, Ethics, and the Dharma Realm Buddhist Association.
For several decades, scholarship on modern Buddhism has focussed almost exclusively on Humanistic Buddhism: a modernist movement spearheaded by several twentieth-century reformers who promoted ¡°Buddhism for the human realm¡± (renjian fojiao?ÈËég·ð½Ì). Against this movement¡¯s this-worldly, presentist, and humanistic focus, conservative Buddhist communities ¡ª especially those espousing literalist understandings of karma and rebirth ¡ª have been dismissed as superstitious, un-scientific, and un-modern.?
Buddhism for the?More Than?Human Realm?draws on over twelve years of multi-sited ethnographic research with one such traditionalist Buddhist organization: the Dharma Realm Buddhist Association (DRBA,?Fajie Fojiao Zonghui?·¨½ç·ð½Ì¿‚•þ), a monastic order active in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Australia, the United States, and Canada. It argues that their?literalist,?non-modernist, and decidedly?non-humanistic cosmology opens alternative horizons of moral engagement with the more-than-human world and challenges how we think about ¡°modern¡± Buddhism itself. In contrast to?the anthropocentric focus of Humanistic Buddhism, which can undermine the multi-species fungibility at the heart of the Buddha¡¯s teachings on karma and rebirth, the book argues for the renewed salience of the DRBA¡¯s literalist cosmology in light of the current environmental crisis, while highlighting the significance of so-called ¡°premodern¡± epistemes for current innovations in the Environmental Humanities and ¡°post-modern¡± critical theory.