presents a
Distinguished Scholars Lecture Series
Seminar
by
3:30 – 5:30 p.m.
Tuesday, November 23, 2010
Room 1118, K.K. Leung Building
The University of Hong Kong
Abstract:
When religions split into different entities under the conditions of global modernity, what is involved when these entities meet? Daoism in the West has now made its way back to China where it is encountering more traditional monastic Daoism. This talk will examine two types of encounters. First,
“spiritual” tours, focusing on “China Dream Trip” sponsored Healing Tao USA, one of the largest popular Daoist groups in the United States. Their annual tour includes (in addition to visiting famed tourist destinations and shopping), the opportunity to perform Healing Tao practices at sacred sites, to reside in monasteries and caves, and to converse with Daoist monks. Second, Western Daoist scholarpractitioners, academics who have personally embraced the tenets and practices of Daoism, are also researching and living with monks in China. They are often critical of the “New Age” entrepreneurship of the founder of Healing Tao and his ilk. This talk will focus one such scholar-practitioner who maintains, as does the leader of the Healing Tao trip, an ongoing relationship with a former vice-abbot of a major Chinese monastery, who is currently an urban hermit. All three of these individuals—the spiritual entrepreneur, the scholar-practitioner, and the monk-hermit -- must define themselves in opposition to or in conjunction with the others. And, as they negotiate between the poles of experience vs. intellectual, and perennialism vs. historicism, they each construct different, yet intersecting, visions of “authentic” Daoism.
About the speaker:
Elijah Siegler is Associate Professor of Religious Studies at the College of Charleston, South Carolina,
USA. Originally from Toronto, Canada, he obtained his BA at Harvard University and his Ph.D. at the
University of California at Santa Barbara in 2003, where he had graduate training in film studies. Dr.
Siegler is a historian of American religions, with expertise on new religious movements, religion and popular culture, and Asian religions in America. Most of his recent research has focused on Daoism in
North America and the globalization of Daoist practices. He is the author of New Religious Movements
(Prentice Hall, 2007) and, with David A. Palmer of HKU, is preparing a book manuscript on Dream
Trippers: Global Daoism and the Predicament of Modern Spirituality.