Social Life History of Chinese Buddhist Monks
A special issue of Religions (ISSN 2077-1444).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (1 March 2023) | Viewed by 42300
Special Issue Editors
Interests: East Asian Buddhism
Special Issues, Collections and Topics in MDPI journals
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
We are pleased to invite you to submit original research articles to our special issue Social Life History of Chinese Buddhist Monks. For long monastic communities in the history of Chinese Buddhism had been labelled as “elitist” or a distinct social group, but in fact, the identities and social life of Buddhist monks in Chinese historical records are much more complex and diverse. Accordingly, Buddhist monks’ relations and interactions with the multi-layered Chinese cultural life and other social communities in different periods require more nuanced academic investigation. From a perspective of “the social life of the monk masses in China”, we need to reevaluate the social landscape and dynamics of Chinese monastic communities and explore more possibilities in understanding Chinese Buddhist “monasticism”. We need to rethink the seemingly over-studied questions such as “Is Buddhism systematically sinicised as a social institution?”, “how does Chinese Buddhism spread socially?”, “how to understand the religiosity in Chinese monks’ daily life experience?” with more case analyses and discussions in depth. Here, “Chinese monk masses” and “social life history” will be our main focuses. We wish to use new methods, texts and archeological evidence to challenge extant dichotomies in interpreting the social life of the monk masses in China, such as the doctrinal vs. the popular, localization vs. globalization, or secularisation vs. consecration.
In this context, this special issue aims to recruit exciting original papers about all possible historical periods, geographic regions and subjects salient to our focus. We call for research that problematise existing opinions and impressions on Chinese Buddhist monastic communities and look at the monk masses as innately multivariant and socially mobile. Topics about Chinese monks’ religious life, institutional life, political life, culture life, material life, ritualistic life, monastic economics, monastic spaces and social life, etc. are all welcome. We particularly encourage research with an interdisciplinary spirit and liaising existing material with new theoretical developments in other academic fields to establish new understandings, including sociology, anthropology, religious studies, philosophy and art history.
We look forward to receiving your contributions.
Prof. Dr. Jinhua Chen
Prof. Dr. Kai Sheng
Guest Editors
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