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Belgium has a small East Asian diaspora, within which the Chinese community is the largest, as well as a long local reception of Chinese and Japanese art, philosophy, and religion which led to some Belgians identifying as Buddhist from the 1950s onward. Today there are a significant number in particular of Belgian Buddhist converts in various East Asian traditions, with centres identifying as “Zen” (sometimes in practice Chan, Thiền, or Sŏn) the most visible, alongside East Asian-led groups. East Asian Christianities, new religious movements, holistic healing, and martial arts are all also visible. Research on East Asian religiosities in Belgium is constrained both by a shortage of statistical data and limited scholarly interest.

In: East Asian Religiosities in the European Union
In: Marxism and Social Movements
In: Marxism and Social Movements
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Abstract

Globalising “Buddhism” beyond its pre-colonial homelands was a complex practical challenge. Actors seeking to bring Buddhism to new audiences in very different cultures met with failure far more often than success until recent decades. Modern-era Buddhist missionaries to Europe had to experiment, selecting elements of Asian Buddhism that could theoretically be transmitted – ordinations, preaching, textual knowledge, rituals etc. – and attempt to institutionalise these as conversion mechanisms.

This article uses the lens of Irish and British converts and sympathisers in Asia and Europe in the late C19th and early C20th centuries to explore the European situation – one with fewer Asian missionaries and different relationships between society and religion than those in North America. It explores the sources of their various versions of Buddhism; their organising techniques and repertoires of “Buddhist” activity, their audiences and how they defined “Buddhism” in relation to politics, ethnicity and colonialism. It argues that meditation (and “practice”) became central to European Buddhism because it solved a crucial organisational problem: what could Buddhist globalisers offer to turn audiences into Buddhists?

Open Access
In: Interdisciplinary Journal for Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society
In: Matatu

Abstract

This article argues that there is no single relationship between Japanese Buddhism and Ireland. Rather, there is a series of changing relationships mediated by different world-system contexts between one island and another (peripheral and post-colonial) one: as ethnographic information, as cultural influence and as religious practice. The process of building such relationships has a long history, stretching back to the Irish reception of both Jesuit and traveller’s accounts of Japan, later made concrete by early intermediaries like Lafcadio Hearn / Koizumi Yakumo and Charles Pfoundes. W.B. Yeats in particular helped to give Japanese Buddhism a significant place in Irish culture, notably in poetry. From the 1960s and 1970s, Japanese Buddhists started to settle in Ireland and Japanese Buddhism began to be practiced; both are now an established part of the Irish religious landscape. The article sketches this history, culminating in the present situation of Japanese Buddhism in Ireland.

In: Journal of Religion in Japan
In: Marxism and Social Movements
In: Marxism and Social Movements
This book explores how East Asian religions affect EU countries, both through Asian diaspora communities and through European converts and sympathisers. East Asia (China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam) and the EU are two of the planet's most dynamic regions economically, politically, and culturally. East Asian diasporas have a long history in Europe and represent a growing part of the EU's population. Meanwhile, Europeans have long been attracted to and interested in East Asian religion and are increasingly converting or incorporating elements of East Asian religiosities into their own identities.
For the first time ever, this book presents the state of the art of research in this area, with chapters on most of the EU's 27 countries and on themes such as migration, Orientalism, gender and sexuality. It covers, among others, East Asian Buddhism and Christianity, Daoism and new religious movements, as well as martial arts and other looser forms of spirituality.

Abstract

This volume aims to provide an overview of East Asian religiosities in the European Union, with the aim of shedding light on their increasingly significant presence, revolving around the informal or structured practices of several million Europeans and East Asians (Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Vietnamese people) living in Europe. In this introductory chapter we address some of the main scholarly issues concerning the study of these religiosities, paying attention to the reasons why this topic is relevant to religious studies and other related disciplines, to the methodological challenges inherent to this field, and to some conceptual questions emerging from the country-related and thematic chapters.

In: East Asian Religiosities in the European Union