Please join us in San Diego at our two events:
SSCR Mentoring Breakfast
Saturday, November 23, 7:30 AM - 9:00 AM
Marriott Marquis-Marriott Grand 1 (Lobby Level)
This is a breakfast meeting for scholars of Chinese religions who would like to receive or offer mentorship in the field, especially around the topics of the job search, publishing, and dealing with discrimination. We especially welcome junior scholars, scholars of color, women scholars, and scholars from underrepresented groups. Light refreshments will be served.
New Voices in the Study of Chinese Religions
Sunday, November 24, 12:30 PM - 2:00 PM
Marriott Marquis-Marriott Grand 2 (Lobby Level)
Our Emerging Voices event will feature short research presentations by the following junior scholars:
- Kelly Carlton, “Children in Medieval Chinese Buddhism: Discourses on Ethics and Practice”
This talk provides an overview of my dissertation, which examines how a burgeoning Buddhist tradition in medieval China (4th–10th centuries CE) understood children and conceptualized childhood in relation to Buddhist ethics and practice. I argue that children’s moral status was distinct from that of adults in medieval Chinese Buddhism. This distinction arose as Chinese adherents reconciled novel concepts introduced from Indian Buddhist traditions, such as a karmic doctrine and system of rebirth, with indigenous Chinese notions of childhood and moral development. Children’s place in Chinese Buddhist ethics and practice exemplifies the tensions and negotiations that arise when ethical and soteriological ideas cross cultural, linguistic, and geographic boundaries. In particular, this talk will consider how insights from histories of childhood can inform studies in Chinese religions. My project employs age as an analytical category to reevaluate textual, visual, and material sources with attention to cultural definitions of childhood. The figure of the child was imbued with emotional and symbolic significance in medieval Chinese religious discourses. Due to concepts of childhood’s temporality, as well as perceptions of children’s moral malleability, the child constituted a powerful medium through which medieval Chinese Buddhist authors defined and debated religious and ethical values.
- Yuanyuan Duan, “Unaligned Time: Temporality in the Transmission and Reception of Tang Chinese Esoteric Buddhism Beyond China”
This presentation addresses the temporality issue in the transmission and reception of Tang Chinese Esoteric Buddhism in the Sinitic periphery by taking the Dali kingdom as an example. Although Dali existed simultaneously with the Song, its Esoteric textual corpus shows more affinity with the Tang Esoteric Buddhist ritual manuals, particularly those associated with Amoghavajra's teaching, than with those mediated by their contemporaneous Song neighbor. Yet Dali was not isolated: As far as we know, Tang China’s Esoteric Buddhist legacy remained influential in Dali’s counterparts, like Dunhuang and Heian Japan, long after the Tang empire’s fall. This raises questions: Was this temporal lag due to reduced interactions between the Song and neighboring states? Or does it reflect the enduring currency of the Tang Chinese Esoteric Buddhist legacy as a shared heritage in an age of political fragmentation? By challenging the assumption of synchronicity and highlighting the pluralization of time within Buddhist communication and textual transmission networks in the Sinosphere, this presentation shows that an examination of the Esoteric tradition in peripheral regions like Dali can contribute to a comprehensive understanding of Tang Chinese Esoteric Buddhism and its lasting impact beyond the scope of China and the paradigm of the Tang-Song transition.
- Felix Erdt, “Duan Zhengyuan’s Theory of Cosmological Causality in the Context of a Global Critique of Modernity”
In this talk, I will discuss the writings of the redemptive societies in Republican China as part of a global critique of modernity that emerged after World War One. The emphasis on self cultivation, moralism, and a redemptive vision of the future highlights the socially relevant role of Confucianism in society, contrasting with its “musealization” and the focus on its purely historical importance in the academic writings of May Fourth Movement scholars. As a case study, I will refer to the writings of Duan Zhengyuan 段正元 (1864-1940) from Sichuan, the founder of the Daode Xueshe 道德學社, a highly influential redemptive society during the Republican era with a strong self-identity rooted in Confucian tradition. I will specifically discuss the concept of causality, which forms the basis of his moral teachings and is heavily influenced by Buddhist, Daoist, and Confucian concepts like karma and the relationship between humans and spirits. Through this notion of causality, Duan formulates a general critique of scientism and nationalism, positioning his work within the global discourse of modernity critique.
- Tali Hershkovitz, “Between Home and Open Terrain: Women’s Religious Landscape in Song Dynasty China (960-1279)”
My dissertation project examines women’s religious lives during the Song period (960–1279) through a spatial lens. By focusing on the places and spaces where women practiced and experienced religion, I endeavor to delineate, albeit imperfectly, the religious landscape of Song women. This approach allows me to capture information from a range of different textual sources and to reinterpret the spaces that structured women's experiences. My usage of “place” and “space” draws on Yifu Tuan’s understanding of these two concepts as interrelated. Guided by Tuan’s theory, my dissertation “travels” through a religious landscape comprised of places and spaces. It portrays the home as a diverse socio-religious place, highlights the multifunctionality of Buddhist nunneries, compares Daoist women’s cenobitic and non-cenobitic places and spaces, and concludes with women’s religious experiences in open spaces such as the road or in nature. My presentation will focus on the benefits of adopting a spatial approach for the study of Chinese religion and women's religiosity. I will also reflect on research challenges related to reticent and problematic historical sources, a challenge I attempted to overcome by exploring Taiwan’s living religious landscape as a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Fellow.
- Yang Wang, “Symbolic Communication among Chinese Buddhist Volunteers: Bridging Multiple Meanings in Suixi-Huixiang Practices”
The rituals of suixi (rejoicing in the merit of others) and huixiang (returning one’s merit to another), are commonly practiced by lay Buddhists in contemporary China, percolating in worldviews and interpersonal relationships grounded in a soteriology of merit-making as well as a cosmology of interconnectedness. Doctrinal articulation of suixi and huixiang provides a model for “spiritual gifting” extended in a social network where everyone involved enjoys a “positive externality” of merit-making. In practice, while individual experiences with these practices often vary, they suggest a lesser degree of engagement in “spiritual gifting” as in the texts, but voice out more realistic and mundane pursuits. For both clerics and temple volunteers, such a difference between the dogma and praxis in “suixi-huixiang” does not invalidate everyday practices; they are, in fact, necessary conditions of one’s path to the Dharma. This presentation argues that, in sociological terms, “suixi-huixiang practices” entail another layer of social reality among temple volunteers in addition to their religious meaning. Specifically, they underlie an important form of symbolic communication that not only creates an affective field of mutual appreciation for one to accumulate spiritual and emotional capital, but also informs moral conduct, self-identities, and meaning-making processes.
- Hong (Promise) Xu, “‘Chinese Learning as Substance, Western Learning as Function’: Shen Yugui and the Religious Foundations of an Alternative Reform Movement in Late Qing China”
My dissertation project intends to recover the long-neglected significance of Chinese and Western Christian intellectual community in the late Qing reform movements. It argues that the community played a leading role in presenting alternative visions of modernizing China, which involve not only the secular and practical dimensions especially science and technology but also religion and morality. Unlike mainstream reformers, the Christian reformers sought to revitalize Chinese civilization by liberalizing Chinese political, economic, and educational order rather than strengthening the imperial state and patriarchy. The dissertation aims to build on and contribute to the intersection of modern Chinese history and the history of Christianity in China. It calls attention to the understudied religious dimensions in the late Qing reform movements and the broader issue of Chinese modernization. It demonstrates that the interplay of a nonconformist version of Confucianism and a nineteenth-century Western Christian view of knowledge was crucial in shaping a notable liberal approach to modernizing China. My study challenges a long-standing assertion that Chinese Christians were negligible in intellectual contributions before the twentieth century by reclaiming the rightful place of late Qing Chinese Christians in modern Chinese history as well as the history of Christianity in China.