"Making Tibetan Buddhism Modern in China"

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Buddhism becoming modern isn’t news anymore. Among scholars, Budd­hist modernity or modern Buddhism is being extensively discussed. The geographic emphasis of this scholarly attention is often given to the Western Hemisphere as shown in the works of Charles Prebish (1971; 2011), David McMahan (2008; 2012), and Cristina Rocha (2011). This “Buddhist modernization” is also taking place in the homelands of different Buddhist traditions in Asia. The growing popularity of Tibetan Buddhism in contemporary Chinese society is a modern Buddhism at work. It is not because the canon of Buddhism is undergoing modern transformation but rather because Dharma teachers are becoming ever more mobile reaching out through new mediums of Buddhist conversion, public discourses, and personal practices. I’m not blogging about a theory within modern Buddhism but about a leading figure in modern Buddhism – Khenpo Sodargye – a Tibetan lama from Larung Gar Buddhist Academy in Sertar, Kham, currently western Sichuan Province of PRC.