Global Ties and Local Divides: How an Austin Buddhist Temple Responded to COVID-19 and its Implications for Transnational Buddhist Communities

Abstract

Drawing on interviews held in the Spring of 2021 with the head nun of the Fo Guang Shan (FGS) Xiang Yun temple in Austin, Texas, this article is a case study in how COVID-19 and the new-found reliance on virtual practice transformed the role of this node in FGS’s global ritual network. Before the pandemic, the FGS Xiang Yun temple served as one of the major Buddhist communities in Austin, Texas, and supported two congregations—an English-speaking congregation and a Chinese-speaking congregation. In the estimation of head nun Venerable Jue Ji, these communities operated largely independently due to differing spiritual interests and religious practices. Like many religious communities during the pandemic, the FGS Xiang Yun temple made dramatic changes to its practice, including organizing virtual funerals, instituting distance chanting, and creating online Dharma talks. My interviews with Venerable Jue Ji revealed that these changes brought about three unanticipated results that increased its transnational connectivity: (1) They strengthened its ethnic and linguistic Chinese ties at the expense of its so-called “English congregation”; (2) The FGS Xiang Yun temple’s role as a node in a transnational ritual network grew as the nuns performed funerals in America for dying parents and grandparents around the world; (3) the FGS Xiang Yun temple became a greater participant in promoting the global spiritual goals of the FGS organization, including vegetarianism and cremation. This article examines, therefore, how an increased reliance on virtual ritual accelerated by the pandemic might alternately strengthen transnational ties and weaken trans-linguistic ones, ultimately leading to more globally connected, but more culturally and linguistically discrete religious communities.