Monastic Training and Education in Contemporary Taiwanese Buddhism" Matthew Orsborn March 16, 2021

H-Buddhism LECTURE> "Monastic training and education in contemporary Taiwanese Buddhism" Matthew Orsborn March 16, 2021.

Discussion published by Charles DiSimone on Friday, March 12, 2021

Dear Friends,

Below please find information on the second lecture in theGhent Center for Buddhist Studies Spring Lecture Series (Permanent Training in Buddhist Studies (PTBS)) generously sponsored by by the Tianzhu Foundation. Matthew Orsborn (Oxford University) will give a lecture on March 16, 2021 at 19.00 Belgian time. All lectures in this series will be held remotely over Zoom. Interested parties are welcome to attend the series or individual talks. To get the Zoom link, please register by writing to [email protected].

With my kind regards,

Charles DiSimone Monastic training and education in contemporary Taiwanese Buddhism

Matthew Orsborn Faculty of Oriental Studies, Oxford University

Since the middle of the 20th century, Buddhism in the Republic of China has been led by the reformist ‘Humanistic Buddhism’ (Renjian fojiao人間佛教 ) movement. One key area of Taixü’s 太虛 program of modernization was that of monastic education and training, centered on Buddhist colleges (Fo xüe yüan 佛學院). However, this proposed ideal system was unable to be actualized during his lifetime in mainland China. His successors in Taiwan, such as Yin Shun印順 , Hsing Yun 星雲 and Sheng Yen 聖嚴, encountered the challenge of a new social, cultural and political climate. Numerous Buddhist colleges were established by various monastic leaders and monasteries, promoting a flourishing of modern Buddhist education. Such institutions were able to maintain a full range of traditional Chinese Mahāyāna Buddhist models of education, drawing from numerous lineages (zōng宗 ). Political forces, however, restricted the Ministry of Education from accrediting these colleges and recognizing the degrees and qualifications offered by such institutions. Meanwhile, ‘Buddhist studies’ (Fo xüe 佛學) as an academic discipline began to emerge in recognized

Citation: Charles DiSimone. LECTURE> "Monastic training and education in contemporary Taiwanese Buddhism" Matthew Orsborn March 16, 2021.. H-Buddhism. 03-12-2021. https://networks.h-net.org/node/6060/discussions/7413921/lecture-monastic-training-and-education-contemporary-taiwanese Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Buddhism

Taiwanese universities, influenced first by Japanese and later Western models of scholarship. Many Humanistic Buddhism monastic orders then set up departments and institutes within their own privately-run universities. But they still face a critical dilemma in educating and training their future generations of monastics: Continuation of training monastics in non-recognized Buddhist colleges under their own control, or adoption of degree-granting university Buddhist studies education which must conform to Ministry of Education secular requirements. This paper seeks to examine the responses of the leading educators of Humanistic Buddhism to this quandary at the start of the 21st century.

Key terms: Humanistic Buddhism, Taiwanese Buddhism, Buddhist college, Buddhist studies, Buddhist education

Bio

Matthew Orsborn is a Buddhist studies scholar originally from New Zealand. After starting seminary training with the Fo Guang Shan Buddhist order in 2000, he was an ordained monastic for 17 years. During this time he studied for a master’s degree and PhD at the University of Hong Kong, graduating in 2012. His dissertation on inverted parallel structures in the Perfection of Wisdom literature was later published as The Structure and Interpretation of Early Prajñāpāramitā: An Analysis via Chiasmic Theory, and he has several other journal articles on such structures in other Buddhist texts. Working with Pāli, Sanskrit and Chinese literature, Matthew’s other main work is Old School Emptiness: Hermeneutics, Criticism and Tradition in the Narrative of Śūnyatā, which challenges the standard narrative of emptiness in Indian Buddhism. Along with such writings on Indian Buddhist texts and doctrines, Matthew’s many years of experience in contemporary Chinese/Taiwanese Buddhist traditions has inspired him to recently turn his research attention in this direction. This includes a planned forthcoming series of articles on Chinese Buddhist monastic ordination, education, and the lived experience of monastic life. He has taught Buddhist studies in Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, Australia and Thailand, and is presently at the Institute for Oriental Studies at Oxford University in the UK.