海角社区

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?人間佛教). Against this movement’s this-worldly, presentist, and humanistic focus, conservative Buddhist communities — especially those espousing literalist understandings of karma and rebirth — 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?法界佛教總會), 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.