RSS 1.0Journal of Global Buddhism
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The Journal of Global Buddhism is a diamond open access journal dedicated to the study of the globalization of Buddhism, both historical and contemporary, and its transnational and transcontinental interrelatedness. We publish research articles, special issues, discussions, critical notes, review essays, and book reviews.
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The Globethics library has vol. 1(2000) to current.
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Buddhist Pro-Woman Attitudes Towards Full Ordination: Tibetan and Himalayan Monastics’ ViewsSince the 1980s, Tibetan religious leaders and Vinaya scholars have been examining the possibility of restoring the Buddhist ordination vow lineage for women (Tib. dge slong ma, gelongma) in India. These leaders and scholars focus primarily on canonical prescriptions and emphasize that this issue precludes questions of gender equality (pho mo ‘dra mnyam). However, little attention has been paid to the perspectives of Himalayan and Tibetan monastics outside of leadership positions. In order to understand how these Buddhist nuns and monks reconcile Vinaya prescriptions and gender equality, I interviewed and surveyed monastics residing in Bodh Gaya, India, between January 2018-March 2019. Their responses indicate a diversity of views about the relationship between restoring gelongma vows, Vinaya, and gender equality. And yet taken as a whole, they hold a view that is pro-woman but also accounts for gender asymmetries in ways that are sometimes at odds with a gender-justice and rights-based feminism. Their monastic version of feminism downplays social differences and instead emphasizes similarities between men and women’s practices as sites for ethical cultivation within the confines of celibate Buddhist monasticism.
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Reimagining a Buddhist Cosmopolis: Conveying Marble Buddhas from Burma to China, 1890s-1930sDiscussions about Buddhist connections between China and Southeast Asia in the late Qing and Republican periods often conform to a meta-narrative of Buddhist modernism that emphasizes the trajectories of eminent monks and reformative initiatives in and beyond China. Drawing on research on archives in China and Myanmar (Burma) and field visits to temples and museums in China, this article investigates the efforts to convey marble Buddhas from Burma to China by a broad spectrum of Chinese Buddhists from the 1890s to 1930s as a strain of Buddhist mobility that has receive scant attention in the studies of transregional Buddhist interconnectivities. It examines how the fascination with marble, which is vernacularly categorized as jade/white jade in Chinese, motivated such endeavors and how these icons shaped the perception of a developing Buddhist cosmopolis among Chinese Buddhists by helping them locate Burma in the Buddhist world in a spiritually and materially meaningful way.
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Buddhism and Modernity: 4th International Vajrayāna ConferenceThis article provides an analytical report on the fourth International Vajrayāna Conference themed 'Buddhism and Modernity', which was organised by the Centre for Bhutan and GNH Studies in collaboration with Bhutan’s Central Monastic Body.
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Reimagining a Buddhist Cosmopolis: Conveying Marble Buddhas from Burma to China, 1890s-1930sDiscussions about Buddhist connections between China and Southeast Asia in the late Qing and Republican periods often conform to a meta-narrative of Buddhist modernism that emphasizes the trajectories of eminent monks and reformative initiatives in and beyond China. Drawing on research on archives in China and Myanmar (Burma) and field visits to temples and museums in China, this article investigates the efforts to convey marble Buddhas from Burma to China by a broad spectrum of Chinese Buddhists from the 1890s to 1930s as a strain of Buddhist mobility that has receive scant attention in the studies of transregional Buddhist interconnectivities. It examines how the fascination with marble, which is vernacularly categorized as jade/white jade in Chinese, motivated such endeavors and how these icons shaped the perception of a developing Buddhist cosmopolis among Chinese Buddhists by helping them locate Burma in the Buddhist world in a spiritually and materially meaningful way.
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Buddhism and Modernity: 4th International Vajrayāna Conference: An Analytical Conference ReportThis article provides an analytical report on the fourth International Vajrayāna Conference themed 'Buddhism and Modernity', which was organised by the Centre for Bhutan and GNH Studies in collaboration with Bhutan’s Central Monastic Body.
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Buddhist Pro-Woman Attitudes Towards Full Ordination: Tibetan and Himalayan Monastics’ ViewsSince the 1980s, Tibetan religious leaders and Vinaya scholars have been examining the possibility of restoring the Buddhist ordination vow lineage for women (Tib. dge slong ma, gelongma) in India. These leaders and scholars focus primarily on canonical prescriptions and emphasize that this issue precludes questions of gender equality (pho mo ‘dra mnyam). However, little attention has been paid to the perspectives of Himalayan and Tibetan monastics outside of leadership positions. In order to understand how these Buddhist nuns and monks reconcile Vinaya prescriptions and gender equality, I interviewed and surveyed monastics residing in Bodh Gaya, India, between January 2018-March 2019. Their responses indicate a diversity of views about the relationship between restoring gelongma vows, Vinaya, and gender equality. And yet taken as a whole, they hold a view that is pro-woman but also accounts for gender asymmetries in ways that are sometimes at odds with a gender-justice and rights-based feminism. Their monastic version of feminism downplays social differences and instead emphasizes similarities between men and women’s practices as sites for ethical cultivation within the confines of celibate Buddhist monasticism.
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Flows and Counterflows of Buddhism ‘South of the West’: Australia, New Zealand and Hawai‘iIntroduction to the JGB Special Focus section, "Flows and Counterflows of Buddhism ‘South of the West’: Australia, New Zealand, and Hawaiʻi." In this special issue, we endeavour to explore horizontal flows and counter flows of Buddhism on ‘paths less travelled’ across the Pacific sea of islands, and ‘South of the West’ (Gibson 1992) rather than the usual ‘from Asia to Europe and the Americas’ story. As such, this special issue fits within the more recent scholarship on the globalisation of Buddhism that seeks to point to a more complex picture of historical and contemporary flows of Buddhist ideas, practices, objects and peoples across the globe.
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Flows of Innovation in Fo Guang Shan Oceania: Transregional dynamics behind the Buddha’s Birthday FestivalFo Guang Shan (FGS), a transnational Buddhist movement in the Chinese Mahāyāna tradition, has grown rapidly in the last fifty years to become a global network of close to 180 branch temples. For almost thirty years, FGS Oceania has invested heavily in the Buddha’s Birthday Festival annually in the form of weekend-long festivals in public spaces across Australia and New Zealand, involving months of planning and thousands of volunteers to welcome tens of thousands of visitors. FGS Oceania served as an incubator, exporter, and importer of innovations to make the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha accessible to the public through these festivals. Here, we map the flows of such innovations among the headquarters in Taiwan, the Oceanic branches, and other regional headquarters to examine the dynamics of organisational learning that drive these innovations. Using a system of systems model, we argue that such flows were enabled by FGS’ culture of innovation and the independent yet collaborative nature of its transregional network.
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Buddhism in the Far North of Australia pre-WWII: (In)visibility, Post-colonialism and MaterialityBuddhism was first established in Australia through flows of migrants in the mid-nineteenth century, and is currently Australia’s fourth-largest religion. Yet Buddhists have received significantly less scholarly attention than Christians, Jews and Muslims in Australia. Previous research conducted on Buddhism in Australia has also largely centered on the southern states, and on white Buddhists. This article shares findings of archival research on Buddhism in the far north of Australia, focused on Chinese, Japanese, and Sri Lankan communities working in mining, pearling, and sugar cane industries, pre-WWII. It documents the histories of exclusion, resistance and belonging experienced by Australia’s Buddhists in the far north of Australia pre-WWII, during times of colonial oppression and Japanese internment. In so doing, this article challenges dominant narratives of a white Christian Australia, and also of white Buddhism in Australia, by rendering Asian communities in scholarship on religion in Australia more visible.
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Casting Indra’s Net across the Pacific: Robert Aitken and the Growth of the Diamond Sangha as a Trans-Pacific Zen MovementRobert Baker Aitken and Anne Hopkins Aitken cofounded Diamond Sangha (DS) as a small living room sangha in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi, in 1959. By 1993, DS served as the primary hub for an international network of sanghas, extending across the Pacific region. This paper traces DS's development from its humble beginnings into a major conduit for the flow of trans-Pacific Zen from Hawaiʻi to the continental USA, Latin America, Australia, and New Zealand. It argues that DS played a vital role in the rapid growth of Zen throughout the Pacific region by utilizing a horizontal networking style of visiting teachers nurturing local leadership in distant sanghas, creating a lattice of interrelated sanghas across the Pacific. It likewise argues that Aitken's vision for DS entailed a blending of innovation and tradition, straddling the divide between the imperatives to meet the needs of local contexts and to preserve inherited styles of practice.
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Buddhism in Aotearoa New Zealand: Multiple Sources and Diverse FormsThis article presents a provisional survey of Buddhists and Buddhist organizations in Aotearoa/New Zealand, identifying their key characteristics in terms of national origin, ethnicity, and areas of geographical concentration. We draw on three decades of the New Zealand census (1991-2018) to analyze demographic data about those who identify as Buddhist, and information from the NZ Charities Register to identify general characteristics of the diverse range of Buddhist organizations in the country. Based on this demographic data, we identify three main types of Buddhist institutions: (1) centers/temples serving heritage or “migrant” communities from Asian countries with Buddhist heritage; (2) centers which we refer to as “Pākehā/Multi-ethnic” because they serve newer Buddhists (“converts”) who are primarily but not exclusively Pākehā (NZ European), and (3) “multi-ethnic” organizations that include varying combinations of heritage and non-heritage Buddhists. Within each of the three categories we see diverse organizational forms and streams of distinctive Buddhist traditions, including sectarian, ethnic, and hybrid forms, each of which have contributed to a diverse religious landscape in significant ways. Most Buddhist centers are in urban areas, with 70 percent in or near Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch. The main Buddhist traditions are almost equally represented across these institutions with 35 percent identified as Mahayana, 32 percent as Theravada, and 35 percent as Vajrayana (and 0.7% as mixed). The number of Buddhists in New Zealand has increased over the past three decades from 12,705 to 52,779, and approximately 80 percent identify with at least one of the Asian ethnic groups. Buddhists constitute only 1.1 percent of the total population, with at least 134 centers of varying sizes across the country. However, Buddhism may be exerting a cultural influence beyond these numbers, as recent research identified Buddhists as the “most trusted” religious group in contemporary New Zealand. In presenting this preliminary survey, we aim to provide a base for more in-depth investigations.
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Seeding Buddhism in New Zealand: Namgyal Rinpoche and the Lake Rotoiti Retreat, 1973One of the earliest Buddhist events to take place in New Zealand was a three-month retreat led by a Canadian Buddhist teacher known as Namgyal Rinpoche, on the shores of Lake Rotoiti, in 1973. This article will provide a qualitative case study of the retreat, and show how the practices and motivations of the group reveal and challenge the assumptions of some of the theoretical frameworks scholars have used to interpret the spread of dharma to the West. Instead, more contemporary frameworks such as “lived religion” and “postmodern Buddhism” more accurately classify the group and their practices. In addition, I argue that a set of horticultural metaphors, proposed by Wakoh Shannon Hickey with the additional category of “seeding,” best describes the mechanisms of transmission that brought Buddhism to New Zealand.
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A Monastery for Laypeople: Birken Forest Monastery and the Monasticization of Convert Theravada in CascadiaTheravada as practiced by most converts in the West is distinguished by the absence of monasticism, its dominant institution. Nevertheless, Thai Forest monasticism has managed to gain a foothold in the convert West, thanks to the efforts of convert monastics trained in Thailand. This article analyzes the missionary project to “monasticize” Western lay converts through the history of Birken Forest Monastery in British Columbia, Canada, founded in 1994. To establish a monastery in Birken’s isolated, non-Buddhist environs, the abbot, Ajahn Sona in effect created a lay village to attract converts to and to teach them their role in orthodox Thai Forest monasticism. The all-consuming nature of the monasticization project among laypeople has cut short the training of a homegrown Sangha at Birken, demonstrating the challenges of establishing a domestic convert monasticism and the continuing dominance of the laity in North American Theravada.
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Seeding Buddhism in New Zealand: Namgyal Rinpoche and the Lake Rotoiti Retreat, 1973One of the earliest Buddhist events to take place in New Zealand was a three-month retreat led by a Canadian Buddhist teacher known as Namgyal Rinpoche, on the shores of Lake Rotoiti, in 1973. This article will provide a qualitative case study of the retreat, and show how the practices and motivations of the group reveal and challenge the assumptions of some of the theoretical frameworks scholars have used to interpret the spread of dharma to the West. Instead, more contemporary frameworks such as “lived religion” and “postmodern Buddhism” more accurately classify the group and their practices. In addition, I argue that a set of horticultural metaphors, proposed by Wakoh Shannon Hickey with the additional category of “seeding,” best describes the mechanisms of transmission that brought Buddhism to New Zealand.
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A Monastery for Laypeople: Birken Forest Monastery and the Monasticization of Convert Theravada in CascadiaTheravada as practiced by most converts in the West is distinguished by the absence of monasticism, its dominant institution. Nevertheless, Thai Forest monasticism has managed to gain a foothold in the convert West, thanks to the efforts of convert monastics trained in Thailand. This article analyzes the missionary project to “monasticize” Western lay converts through the history of Birken Forest Monastery in British Columbia, Canada, founded in 1994. To establish a monastery in Birken’s isolated, non-Buddhist environs, the abbot, Ajahn Sona in effect created a lay village to attract converts to and to teach them their role in orthodox Thai Forest monasticism. The all-consuming nature of the monasticization project among laypeople has cut short the training of a homegrown Sangha at Birken, demonstrating the challenges of establishing a domestic convert monasticism and the continuing dominance of the laity in North American Theravada.