Change from the Ground Up: Buddhism and Other East Asian Religions at the Grassroots

Dear Colleagues,

We know that a community is greater than the sum of its parts. Despite this commonly-held assertion, the academic study of religion—and the study of religious communities and institutions in particular—has long treated “religions” as monolithic entities, defined from the top down by clerical elites and institutional authorities. To study a sectarian tradition was, in effect, to study its canon, taking liturgical prescriptions and ritual codes preserved in normative texts as representations of the most authentic form of any given tradition. This approach, inheriting a Protestant model of religion that privileged doctrine and scripture, shaped the modern academic study of religion from the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century.

This tendency was especially pronounced in Western writers' engagements with religious and intellectual traditions in the so-called “Orient”, frequently distilling the nuances of these traditions down to their textual corpora. Ritual practice, performing arts, and narrative literature—that is, the realm of lived religion—were often relegated to the domain of the “popular” or “vulgar.” Such categorizations obscured the dynamic, negotiated, and locally embedded character of religious life while reinforcing artificial boundaries between elite and non-elite forms of religiosity, as well as those between textual authority and embodied practice.

In recent decades, however, the field has undergone a welcome and significant shift. Moving beyond top-down, text-centered paradigms, scholars increasingly embrace smaller-scale and socially attentive approaches to the study of East Asian religions. Our attention turns to the religious actors who shape and reshape religious communities—monastics and laypeople, institutional leaders and local organizers, ritual specialists, patrons, pilgrims, and activists. Rather than presuming the existence of clearly demarcated traditions, researchers now investigate how communities were formed, how they negotiated boundaries between denominations, and how groups articulated their identities in specific historical, social, and political contexts.

This Special Issue seeks to contribute to this ongoing reorientation by foregrounding the grassroots components of religious communities—whether labelled Buddhist, Daoist, Confucian, Christian, or otherwise—and by examining how individual agents and local groups defined their beliefs and practices within broader historical frameworks. We are particularly interested in studies that draw attention to the interplay between institutional structures and lived experience, and that highlight the creative, adaptive, and dialogical dimensions of religious life.

We warmly invite scholars from around the world to contribute to this Special Issue and to foster sustained dialogue on religion in East Asia from the ground up. Interdisciplinary perspectives and diverse methodological approaches are especially welcome.

The scope of this Special Issue includes, but is not limited to, the following:

• The role of Buddhist lay practitioners, past and present;
• Dialogue and negotiation between monastics and lay communities;
• Liturgy and religion “on the ground”;
• Pilgrims and pilgrimage networks;
• Overlap and interactions between different religious groups and systems of belief;
• The relationship between religion and the state;
• The reception and social infiltration of Buddhism;
• Buddhism and activism;
• Buddhism and civil society.

Through these topics and related inquiries, this Special Issue aims to deepen our understanding of how religious communities in East Asia have been formed, sustained, and transformed at the grassroots level.

Prof. Dr. Jinhua Chen
Prof. Dr. Kai Sheng
Guest Editors

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