Until recently, most scholarship on Buddhism in North America privileged the study of institutionalized Buddhist organizations. For example, few attempts have been made to study the lived experiences of North American Asian Buddhists and their lived religious practices in digital environments. Scholars have highlighted the idea of “global Buddhism” in the past decade, arguing that Buddhism in the West must be viewed as part of a worldwide transformational process. With the exponential development of digital technology, a global Buddhism approach has expanded and now encompasses the digital world, along with many issues such as digital Buddhist community and identity formation, digital rituals, digital Buddhist education, and the authenticity of digital Buddhist practices. Was the digital Buddhist community just a short-lived necessity, or is this the general direction of the future of Buddhist communities in North America? What does it mean to be globally networked Buddhist communities in a digital world?
The COVID-19 lockdown and social distancing caused religious organizations to adapt to maintain relevancy or lose potential followers. The Foguangshan Buddhist temple in Raleigh reopened their temple for in-person weekly meetings two years after covid began, offering a mix of both online and local teaching, rituals, and news. This newly hybridized Chinese Buddhist sangha places the local community in closer connection to other FGS followers both within the United States as well as globally producing an enhanced transnational religious consciousness. Venerable Master Hsing Yun’s weeks long funerary rituals including the globally broadcast ceremony epitomizes the newly formed local-transnational connection. While the funeral was filmed at the FGS temple headquarters in Kaohsiung Taiwan each center around the world was filled with followers being guided how to act ritually by the funeral announcer. This paper argues FGS’s shift to a hybridized format produced a stronger transnational religious consciousness than previously possible.
Drawing on my online fieldwork conducted from early 2020 to the present, this paper examines how globally-networked Chinese Buddhist individuals and communities in French Canada utilize multiple digital platforms to study, and communicate and practice Buddhism. I argue that digital space can be viewed as a crucial religious arena with both secular and transcendent affordance for Chinese Buddhists to engage in cyber-Buddhist rituals, form virtual Buddhist communities, and promote alternative Buddhist practises. I want to argue that the internet is not merely a temporary solution for cyber-Buddhists, but rather this new form of practice, which has flourished and thrived during the pandemic, will become a more natural and enduring aspect of people's Buddhist experiences. Additionally, the digital space should not be viewed as a substitute for physical communities, but rather as a thriving “home” for a strong and prosperous North American Chinese virtual sangha.
Recent scholarship on Buddhist youth has focused on their agency in constructing religious trajectories beyond the confines and expectations of families and institutionalised Buddhist organisations. However, the protraction of the youth phase, amid interrupted education to employment transitions and the rising cost of living, raises questions about the extent to which young Buddhists are (semi)-dependent on, and influenced by a diverse range of socialising influences with regard to religious identity development throughout young adulthood. Drawing on data collected from qualitative interviews conducted with young adult Buddhist practitioners living in Australia, this paper examines how young Buddhists live out both agentic and other-oriented religious trajectories in conditions of precarity through their embeddedness and interdependencies within families, institutionalised Buddhist organisations, and global and digital flows of Buddhism.