Time: Thursday, 4 December, 2025, 14:00-15:30(GMT)
Venue: Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies room 8/9.
Title: Lion City’s Dharma: Tracing Buddhism in Singapore
Abstract:
This lecture introduces Jack Meng-Tat Chia’s new book, Dongnanya fayin: Xinjiapo fojiao yanjiu lunji (Southeast Asia’s Dharma: Essays on Buddhism in Singapore), published in 2025 by Boyoung Culture as part of its “Classics of Religious Studies” series. The book illuminates the often-overlooked presence and significance of Buddhism in maritime Southeast Asia, a region more commonly associated with the Malay Archipelago and predominantly Muslim or Catholic societies. Within this context, Singapore, with its majority ethnic Chinese and largely Buddhist population, has frequently been regarded as an anomaly. Chia challenges this perception by advancing the concept of “South China Sea Buddhism,” arguing that Buddhism has long played a vital role in shaping Chinese communities across Islamic and Catholic environments in the region. Rooted in centuries of interaction between China and Southeast Asia, this regional form of Buddhism has continually evolved through processes of adaptation, localization, and innovation. Drawing from the book, this lecture explores themes such as transnational Buddhist networks, religious diplomacy, and modernist Buddhist reform. Through interdisciplinary perspectives, it sheds light on the complex historical development of Buddhism in maritime Southeast Asia and offers new ways of understanding the region’s diverse and dynamic religious landscapes.
Speaker’s Bio:
Jack Meng-Tat Chia is the Foo Hai Associate Professor in Buddhist Studies at the National University of Singapore, where he serves as Assistant Dean of Research at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. He is the founding chair of the Buddhist Studies Group and convenor of the GL Louis Religious Pluralism Research Cluster at NUS. Chia is a historian of religion specializing in Buddhism and Chinese religions in Southeast Asia. His first book, Monks in Motion: Buddhism and Modernity Across the South China Sea (Oxford, 2020), received the 2021 EuroSEAS Humanities Book Prize and has been translated into Chinese and Indonesian. His second book, Dongnanya fayin: Xinjiapo fojiao yanjiu lunji 東南亞法音：新加坡佛教研究論集 [Southeast Asia’s Dharma: Essays on Buddhism in Singapore] (Boyang, 2025), examines the historical development and contemporary transformations of Buddhism in Singapore and its regional connections. His forthcoming edited volume, Figures of Buddhist Diplomacy in Modern Asia (Bloomsbury, 2026), explores twenty-two monastic, lay, and political figures involved in Buddhist diplomacy from the early twentieth century to the present.
Discussant: Dr Rachel Leow (University of Cambridge)
Host: Dr Noga Ganany (University of Cambridge)
About the Yin-Cheng Distinguished Lecture Series: Launched in September, 2021, the Yin-Cheng Distinguished Lecture Series (印證佛學傑出學術系列講座) is a collaborative, multi-university partnership between Peking University, University of Oxford, University of Cambridge, Inalco (Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales), Princeton University, Harvard University, the University of British Columbia, University of California, Berkeley, SOAS, University of London, University of Tokyo, and Taiwan University. The Lecture Series is established in honour of Venerable Cheng-yen 證嚴, founder of Tzu Chi, and her mentor Yinshun 印順 (1906–2005), with the goal of promoting topics in Buddhist Studies.
