Impersonal Intimacy: Relational Ethics and Self-Cultivation in a Transnational Chinese Buddhist Monastic Network

Abstract

“Impersonal Intimacy: Relational Ethics and Self-Cultivation in a Transnational Chinese Buddhist Monastic Network,” is an ethnographic study of relational ethics in a contemporary Chinese Buddhist monastic organization, the Fajie Fojiao Zonghui (法界佛教總會), active throughout East Asia, Southeast Asia, and North America. The study explores how Fajie members negotiate a paradox at the heart of the monastic vocation: the tension between the Buddhist ideal of interpersonal non-attachment and the irreducibly social nature of everyday monastic life. Drawing on scriptural, commentarial, and ethnographic data from multi-sited fieldwork, this study argues that Fajie monastic training aims to reconfigure conventional notions of intimacy and affection, sublimating personal bonds into forms of impersonal intimacy. Drawing on Illana Silber’s notion of the “segregative-connective principle” – a structural paradigm that describes the state of simultaneous separation and connection that characterizes Buddhist monastic and lay relations – this study argues that maintaining the tension between distance and closeness is the cornerstone of relational ethics in Fajie. As such, this study challenges simplistic conceptions of intimacy as mere closeness, and argues that difference, distance, and separation are at the heart of the impersonal forms of intimate relationality valorized in Fajie. This is illustrated by analyzing the segregative-connective principle on three different levels, each gradually expanding in scope: i) the micro-social level of daily life in Fajie monasteries, ii) the global level of Fajie’s transnational cosmopolitanism, and iii) the cosmological level, where the Fajie vision of karma and rebirth challenges narrow conceptions of the human subject. On each level, we find that the tension between distance and closeness informs Fajie notions of personhood and self-cultivation, and these in turn shape the nature and scope of relational ethics. This is also the first long-form academic study of Fajie and its founder, Hsuan Hua (pinyin: Xuanhua 宣化, 1918-1995), a historically significant but largely overlooked figure in scholarship on contemporary Chinese Buddhism. I suggest this lacuna is in part due to longstanding biases in the study of modern Buddhism, which tend to perpetuate problematic binaries of “traditional” versus “modern,” “east” versus “west,” and “global” versus “local,” all of which are challenged by the case study of Fajie. Methodologically, this study aims to offer an alternative to these binaries, and to model a rapprochement between fieldwork-based ethnographic methods and the textual and doctrinal foci of traditional Buddhist Studies. While contributing to current research on contemporary Chinese Buddhist monastic life, this study also raises broad interdisciplinary questions about the nature of intimacy, relationality, kinship, and collectivism. As such, it hopes to engage wider debates in the Humanities, particularly in the fields of Buddhist Ethics, Religious Studies, Anthropology, and Critical Theory.