Nomadic Spirituality: Unstable Buddhist Identities in East Asian Borderlands
My current research project builds a new understanding of the political and literary history of East Asian borderlands in the first half of the 20th century by focusing on the spiritual dimension of identities in relation to borders. Bridging Japanese and Chinese studies and drawing on cultural, postcolonial, and border studies, this project is centred around the concept of nomadic spirituality – that is, the open spiritual affiliation of individuals whose faiths fluctuate between the religious and the secular during their lives, as opposed to maintaining a single religious faith. The project examines prominent Chinese and Japanese writers/intellectuals, who are dominantly associated with the secular literary scene. The main goal is to demonstrate that at specific stages of their literary careers, their writings engaged with Buddhist concepts, which they used for various purposes, both personal and social.
The project is based on three case studies of writers living at the meeting points of East Asian cultures: in the Chinese diaspora in Japan of the 1900s, in the Manchurian borderlands under Japanese rule (1931–45), and in the Japanese colony of Taiwan (1895–1945). The focus in each of these cases is the borderland identity of one individual writer, namely, modern Chinese literature’s leading figure, Lu Xun (1881–1936); one of the first female writers in Manchuria, Xiao Hong (1911–42); and a prominent Japanese writer active in Taiwan under Japanese rule, Nishikawa Mitsuru (1908–99). By focusing on the effects of border crossing on their unstable spiritual identification, this project contributes not only to a new understanding of these luminaries and the spiritual identification of intellectuals in East Asia in general but also to our grasp of historical borders in East Asia.
I have been working on Nomadic Spirituality at Heidelberg University since October 2024.
This work was supported by the MSCA Fellowships CZ project ‘Nomadic Spirituality: Unstable Buddhist Identities in East Asian Borderlands’ (reg. no. CZ.02.01.01/00/22_010/0008597), which was implemented by the project partner, the Oriental Institute, Czech Academy of Sciences (OI CAS).
Martin Blahota 