Shawn McHale : "Contemporary Vietnamese Buddhism and its interactions with Southeast Asian societies"

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Vietnamese Buddhism, like many Buddhist societies in East and Southeast Asia, underwent a profound renewal of religious doctrine and practice. The terms used to describe this modernisation of Buddhism vary according to the authors who have studied it (modernism, reformism, Protestantisation, vernacularisation) or a return to the sources of the original doctrine (fundamentalism, revivalism). Because of its shared history with the Chinese world, historians interested in Vietnam often cite the influence of modernist Chinese thinkers, especially Tai Xu and the committed, secular Buddhism he advocated. Few pay attention to the exchanges that took place at the same time with the Theravada Buddhist societies of the Indochinese peninsula. This lecture series aims to shed new light on this question. We will focus on the situation in southern Vietnam, and in particular on cross-border religious exchanges (mainly Cambodia-Vietnam, but also Thailand-Cambodia and Vietnam-Laos). In the political context of the twentieth century, we also examine the impact of violence and war on religious beliefs, discourses and institutions.