Leading scholars in the field of Chinese History and Buddhist Studies will discuss a new book manuscript by Rongdao Lai, Assistant Professor of Religion at USC, entitled Becoming Bodhisattva Citizens: Buddhist Education, Student-Monks, and Citizenship in Republican China (1911-1949). Manuscript discussants include Raoul Birnbaum, Professor and Chair of History of Art and Visual Culture at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Rebecca Nedostup, Associate Professor of History at Brown University.

This book is a study on the intersection between institution, identity, and politics in modern Chinese Buddhism. The aim is two-fold: 1) to produce a history of modern monastic education in China; and 2) to investigate the intended outcomes of this new system of education as shown in the student-monks it produced. Focusing on identity formation, the book examines the production of a collective identity – the student-monk – within and outside of the Buddhist academies (foxueyuan). Student-monks were those who identified with the imagined community formed around modern Buddhist academies and, more importantly, Buddhist periodicals that were widely circulated during the Republican period. The book argues that this collective identity was indispensable to the young monks’ creation of a distinctly Buddhist citizenship, which allowed them to engage and negotiate with the nation-state in a series of encounters. In other words, student-monks were both the products of a reformulated Buddhism-state relation and agents for that very transformation in twentieth-century China. Therefore, the emergence of student-monks as both an actual and imagined community is crucial to our understanding of the development of modern Chinese Buddhism.