Tradition and Translation: Vision, Struggle, and Contingency in Chinese Temples Abroad

Abstract

This thesis examines how Chinese Buddhist institutions from mainland China and Taiwan construct, communicate, and adapt their religious visions within the American context, particularly through practices that engage questions of identity, belonging, and soft power. Drawing on two years of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork at Fawang Temple in Manhattan, the NYU Buddhist Club, and the Chung Tai Zen Center of Houston, it explores how these institutions articulate and embody their ideals—and how those ideals are negotiated, reinterpreted, or at times undermined through encounters with complex local realities. These realities involve multiple agents who continuously co-produce Buddhism through emotional labor, informal teaching, improvisation, and micro-level decision-making. At the same time, local communities, spatial constraints, and broader sociocultural conditions are not mere backdrops to these transformations but active forces shaping the forms of Buddhism practiced and presented in the American religious landscape. Building on those discussions of lived religion, this thesis examines what “soft power through Buddhism” looks like in practice—how it is enacted, acquires meaning, and evolves through everyday religious life. While scholars such as Ashiwa and Wank argue that the Chinese state mobilizes Buddhism as a form of religious soft power, my fieldwork demonstrates that such influence must be actively enacted through affect, moral vision, and institutional practice rather than assumed from policy discourse. Ultimately, the question is not who speaks for Buddhism abroad, but whose Buddhism people are willing to follow.