Speaker: Yang Shen (Zhejiang University)
Date and time: Thursday, 6 March, 2025 – 14:00
Location: FAMES Room 8/9, University of Cambridge
Abstract: Votive prayer texts (愿文, yuan wen) constitute a significant genre within the discursive universes of Chinese Buddhism. When preserved as mass manuscripts, they provide valuable insights into idealized worlds and socio-historical contexts. Text-based scholarship has productively treated these texts as repositories of doctrinal ideals or historical artifacts, particularly in periods where material documents are scarce. However, such analyses often rest on the premise of a static, closed archive—a notion that loses relevance in contemporary contexts where yuan repositories continue to expand, evolve, and play an integral role in Chinese Buddhist cultural production in the 21st century.
Building on my earlier work (Shen 2023), which reconceptualized yuan practices as wish-vows or optative commitment actions formalized through ritual performances, this article extends the inquiry by examining the modular implications of textualized commitment templates. These templates, I argue, function as heuristic tools for practitioners to re-model the meta-relationship between ideals and reality, thereby shaping their positionality in ways that go beyond semantic interpretation.
Revisiting Clifford Geertz’s distinction between rituals as models of and models for“reality,” the article highlights the limitations of representational frameworks when viewed through the lens of Chinese Buddhist wish-vows. While rituals are often understood as reflective or enactive of an external ideal world, wish-vow modeling operates differently—it produces non-representational, transformative visions in which ideals dynamically emerge through specific promises and actions.
This article advocates for re-contextualizing Chinese Buddhist wish-vows as mediating tools of modeling rather than merely as culturally specific acts. By introducing an analytic focus on why commitment templates matter practically—beyond their textual content or the mechanisms of their realized efficacy—this study seeks to position Chinese Buddhist Studies as a vital resource for rethinking key issues in anthropology, particularly in a time when many foundational pathways of world-making are undergoing transformation.
Speaker: Yang Shen is a cultural anthropologist of religion and secularism. Her work explores forms of Chinese secularism and how Chinese conceptions of religion and secularity transform global projects of modernity. Yang received her Ph.D. from Boston University and worked at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen a post-doctoral researcher. She also taught at the Department of Asian Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem as a Frieberg-Glorisun Fellow at the Louis Frieberg Center for East Asian Studies. Yang is currently Assistant Professor in Anthropology at Zhejiang University, based in Hangzhou, China.
“Book Culture in Buddhism and Beyond” Lecture Series:
This new lecture series, launching in Michaelmas Term 2023, features talks on writing and publishing in the Buddhist tradition and in related religious and cultural spheres. Lectures in this series offer insights into the various ways in which writing and printing has been shaping Buddhism, as well as the multifaceted impact of Buddhism on book culture in East Asia, past, present, and future.
Registration is not required. The lectures are free and open to scholars, students, and the public.
Please note: all events take place in person at the University of Cambridge. Exact times and location will be circulated via email and posted on the webpage of Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies.
This lecture series is organised by Dr Noga Ganany (ng462@cam.ac.uk) in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at Cambridge with the generous support of the Glorisun Global Network.
