Centre of Buddhist Studies, The University of Hong Kong
HKU Centre of Buddhist Studies 20th Anniversary Series
Tung Lin Kok Yuen Lecture Series
Technology and change in the
21st-century Sino-Tibetan Buddhist sphere
Speaker: Dr. Catherine E. HARDIE
Lecture 1: Mediating Tibetan Buddhism for Sinophone audiences on WeChat.
Time: 7:00 - 9:00 pm on 11 October, 2022 (Tuesday)
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Lecture 2: Digital religiosities in China’s contemporary Tibetan Buddhist landscape.
Time: 7:00 - 9:00 pm on 18 October, 2022 (Tuesday)
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Lecture 3: Exploring continuity and change across one hundred years of modern Sino-Tibetan Buddhist interactions.
Time: 7:00 - 9:00 pm on 25 October, 2022 (Tuesday)
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Venue: Room KK102, 1/F, K.K. Leung Building, HKU
Conducted in English | All are welcome | Free admission
Enquiry hkucbs@hku.hk ∣ (852)3917-0094
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Organized by HKU Centre of Buddhist Studies
Sponsored by Tung Lin Kok Yuen
About the speaker:
Catherine Hardie is Assistant Professor in the Department of Translation, Interpreting and Intercultural Studies at Hong Kong Baptist University. Her research lies at the intersection of the Tibetan and Chinese cultural worlds with a focus on contemporary Han Chinese involvement in Tibetan Buddhism. She completed her doctoral studies in anthropology at the University of Oxford in 2019 with the thesis titled “Tibetan Buddhist Spiritual Capital in Contemporary China.” She is currently working on her first book project as well as completing a GRF-funded research project looking at the digital dissemination of Tibetan Buddhism in China.
Lecture 1: Mediating Tibetan Buddhism for Sinophone audiences on WeChat.
Time: 7:00 - 9:00 PM on 11 October, 2022 (Tuesday) | Venue: Room KK102, 1/F, K.K. Leung Building, HKU
Since the 1990s, Tibetan Buddhism has made a deeper missionary footprint in mainland China than ever before. The growth of digital technology has played a vital role in this religious spread, particularly the popularisation of the smartphone and the of the mobile-based social media platform WeChat. In the past decade, thousands of Tibetan Buddhist teachers and followers have created WeChat ‘official accounts’ (Ch: gongzhonghao) to propagate Tibetan Buddhism in China, thereby investing significant cultural labour in producing and curating Buddhist content that is relevant and appealing to Sinophone/ethnic Chinese audiences. In this lecture, I approach WeChat as a fertile domain for investigating the adaption of Tibetan Buddhism to the contemporary Chinese socio-cultural matrix. Based on an analysis of a representative corpus of Chinese-language WeChat official accounts dedicated to Tibetan Buddhism, I will discuss key visual and linguistic discourses through which Tibetan Buddhism is represented in this digital ecology. In so doing, I will make a case for the importance of WeChat in the ‘mainstreaming’ of Tibetan Buddhism in contemporary Han Chinese society.
Lecture 2: Digital religiosities in China’s contemporary Tibetan Buddhist landscape.
Time: 7:00 - 9:00 PM on 18 October, 2022 (Tuesday) | Venue: Room KK102, 1/F, K.K. Leung Building, HKU
Throughout the world, and across religious traditions, the unfolding of the digital age has impacted religious life in significant ways. The term ‘digital religion’ has been coined to describe the increasingly commonplace integration of ‘online religious practices and spaces into offline religious contexts, and vice versa’ (Campbell, 2013, 4 ). In this talk, I draw on face-to-face and online ethnographic research conducted over the past decade to discuss the impact of the internet and digital technology on the sociality and practice of Tibetan Buddhism in China. I analyse differing patterns of digital engagement among ethnic Tibetan and ethnic Chinese Tibetan Buddhist constituencies, and zero in on several consequential manifestations of Tibetan Buddhist ‘digital religiosity’ that have emerged in the last decade or more. Through these case studies, I aim to shed light on new forms of Tibetan Buddhist community, practice, identity and outreach that have been brought into being by China’s new communications landscape.
Lecture 3: Exploring continuity and change across one hundred years of modern Sino-Tibetan Buddhist interactions.
Time: 7:00 - 9:00 PM on 25 October, 2022 (Tuesday) | Venue: Room KK102, 1/F, K.K. Leung Building, HKU
A little more than one hundred years have passed since the modern era of Sino-Tibetan Buddhist interactions first got underway. From our current vantage point, what can be said about the developmental arc of this century-long period of cross-cultural religious encounter? In this lecture, I will attempt to answer this question by charting a path through scholarly research on twentieth and twenty-first century Sino-Tibetan Buddhist interactions to explore issues of continuity and change. My focus will be on comparing the transmission of Tibetan Buddhism in Han Chinese society during the Republican and Post-Mao periods, with particular attention given to issues of geographical diffusion, religious mobility and organisational innovation, as well as Buddhist identity, discourse, and practice. I will also draw on my fieldwork interactions with contemporary Han Chinese followers of Tibetan Buddhism to examine how some practitioners regard the antecedents of the first half of the twentieth century and understand issues of continuity and changes for themselves.