New Books In Buddhist Studies

Chan-fang Yu‘s new book, Passing the Light: The Incense Light Community and Buddhist Nuns in Contemporary Taiwan (University of Hawaii Press, 2013), focuses on a community of nuns in Taiwan founded in the early 1980s, and discusses the appearance and development of this community within the context of rapidly changing social and economic circumstances in Taiwan during the last half of the twentieth century.  Based on extensive fieldwork and numerous interviews conducted between the mid-1990s and 2013, Yu provides the reader with a vivid picture of daily life in the seminary and a close examination of the Buddhist education classes for laypeople taught by the nuns.  Along the way she explores the appearance of Buddhist seminaries in China during the late Qing and Republican periods, the transformation of Taiwanese nuns from individuals devoted to Buddhist ritual and personal salvation into religious teachers of the Buddhist laity, the changing demographics of the Taiwanese Buddhist nunnery, and the devel