站內檢索
Sacred Secularities: Ritual and Social Engagement in a Global Buddhist China
Surrounded by greenery and build on a quiet hillside in an unincorporated suburban community of Los Angeles County lies a brightly colored Chinese Buddhist temple. This Temple, Hsi Lai Temple xilai si 西來寺 or ‘Coming West Temple’ in English, is one of the biggest Chinese temples in the US and serves as the North American headquarters of the modernist Han Buddhist order Fo Guang Shan 佛光山 (Buddha’s Light Mountain). The Buddhist tradition promoted by Fo Guang Shan is renjian 人間or Humanistic Buddhism.1 It is a modern Buddhist tradition with its roots in late 19th and early 20th century China that has become Buddhist mainstream in Taiwan today (Long 2000). Fo Guang Shan is one of the biggest promoters of this tradition, not only in Taiwan but on a global scale, and while different groups have adapted different interpretations of renjian Buddhism, one of the primary characteristics of this modern tradition is a new esteem for society, or, in other words, the sphere of ‘the secular’.
The Influence of Indian and Buddhist Elements in Medieval China: A Study of Buddha’s Birthday Celebrations In Luoyang during the Northern Wei dynasty
The Buddha’s birthday festival reached an unprecedented level of grandeur during the rule of Northern Wei when its capital was at Luoyang (495 to 534 CE). Buddhism was indigenous to neither the rulers nor the native Han Chinese. Yet, the Buddha’s birthday celebration on the eighth day of the fourth lunar month became a popular ritual in which the entire city participated. This paper studies a particular phenomenon in this public ritual, the use of carriages in image processions, tracing the heritage of these carriages back to the religion’s land of origin, India, and their literary sources. The intention of this paper is to study the reasons for such phenomenal success, in particular as they relate to the functional role of a religious festival and how the tenets of a religion can enable itself to be popular and sustainable. The Buddha’s birthday is a relevant case study because over 1,500 years later, countries such as Cambodia, Hong Kong, Macau, Malaysia, Myanmar, Nepal, Singapore, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Thailand and Vietnam continue to celebrate it as their public holiday.
世俗的神聖性質——全球佛教華人地區的法會及社會參與
在洛杉磯郡一個不屬於任何城鎮的偏遠社區，寧靜的山丘上，矗立著一間色彩鮮明的中國佛教寺院，周圍綠樹環繞。這間寺院名為西來寺，英文意義是「來到西方」（coming to the West），是美國數一數二的大型中國寺院，也是現代漢傳佛教教團佛光山在北美洲的總本山。
