In Conversation with Contemporary Chinese Pure Land Buddhism: What It Means to Practice

“In Conversation with Contemporary Chinese Pure Land Buddhism: What it Means to Practice” is a study of the relationship between objects and practice in Pure Land Buddhism as told by the practitioners themselves. Interviewing scholars and practitioners of contemporary Chinese Pure Land Buddhism and visiting key sites of practice in the Shanghai area, I will ask questions such as: What objects, if any, define contemporary Chinese Pure Land practice? Does curated space count as a material object? When Buddhism moves locales, from Japan to China for example, how does the materiality of the tradition get transferred? How do objects lose or gain meaning when they change locations? This project is an extension of work that I began as an intern for the Pluralism Project at Harvard University in the San Francisco Bay Area and will now extend into the urban Shanghai area. The outcome of this research will be three podcasts, a research paper that will be included in my Master’s thesis, a presentation and five entries in the Material Culture and East Asian Religion website we are developing at Mount Allison University.

Faculty Supervisor:

Susan Andrews

Student:

Emma Bass

Partner:

Discipline:

Religion

Sector:

University:

Mount Allison University

Program:

Globalink Research Award