LECTURE - Dr. Rongdao Lai: Tracing the Tiantai Lineage in Southeast Asia

The second installment in the Modern and Contemporary Buddhist Encounters in the Southern Sinosphere monthly lecture series features a talk by Dr. Rongdao Lai of McGill University in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

Dr. Lai's description for this lecture:

The close ties between migration networks from Fujian and the transmission of Buddhism to Southeast Asia have been well documented by scholars. In contrast, there are only scant references to the activities of Tiantai monastics in the region in the first half of the twentieth century. From the 1980s onward, we can observe an uptick in Tiantai lineage transmission to the region. These transmissions were mainly carried out by monks from Hong Kong and Taiwan. More recently, lineage transmission has also been the catalyst for re-establishing connections with groups and monasteries in mainland China. This talk offers a survey of Tiantai lineage transmission practice, and examines how these trends shed light on the shifting centers of authority, influence, and legitimacy in modern Chinese Buddhism.