Introduction: Chinese Buddhism in Transnational Contexts

Abstract

This special section began with a panel called ‘ Dharma Tourists, Diasporas and Buddhist Transnationalism: Spreading the Dharma Under the Global Condition ’ at the Association for Asian Studies Annual Conference in 2018. In the panel, we presented our case studies of contemporary transnational Buddhism and asked questions such as why and how Buddhists move and what it takes to formulate Buddhist border-crossing networks. The three papers selected here all relate to transnational Chinese Buddhism. The three papers are: Jack Meng-Tat Chia ’ s ‘ Nanputuo Monastery and the Xiamen Buddhist Networks ’ , Jens Reinke ’ s ‘ The Buddha in Bronkhorstspruit: The Transnational Spread of the Taiwanese Buddhist Order Fo Guang Shan to South Africa ’ and my own ‘ Transnational Buddhism and Ritual Performance in Taiwan ’ . Taken together, they provide a chronological picture of the development of transnational Chinese Buddhism since the modern period. In this Introduction, I will explain, fi rstly, our choice to use a transnational approach over a globalisation approach for our analysis; and, secondly, the de fi nition of Chinese Buddhism and the common determinants in transnational Buddhism that emerged from our three papers.