Monks in Motion: Buddhism and Modernity Across the South China Sea. By Jack Meng-Tat Chia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 305. $99.00 (cloth).
摘要
Although it has long had connections beyond the shifting borders of the Chinese state, Chinese Buddhism in the twentieth century was profoundly molded by a dynamic flow of people and ideas that cut across national boundaries. Monks in Motion: Buddhism and Modernity Across the South China Sea adds important nuance to our knowledge of this aspect of Chinese Buddhism, but this is not just a book about how modern Buddhism in China went somewhere else; instead, it begins to tell the story of what Jack Meng-Tat Chia has dubbed “South China Sea Buddhism,” a Buddhism that is “neither an extension of China’s Mahāyāna Buddhism nor Southeast Asia’s Theravāda Buddhism, but a localized form that uses Mandarin Chinese, Southern Chinese dialects, and Southeast Asian languages in their liturgy and scriptures to serve local purposes” (157). This is not a comprehensive history; it focuses on recounting the biographies of three ethnically Chinese monks and the ways their activities impacted Buddhism in maritime Southeast Asia. In so doing, Chia builds a bridge between the flourishing scholarship on mainland Chinese Buddhism in the early twentieth century, and the concerns of Southeast Asian religious historians.
