“In this roundtable episode, host Ellie Woodacre is joined by a panel of five experts on monarchy in premodern Asia–including the Indian subcontinent, China and Southeast Asia. This episode captures a vibrant discussion on the impact of Buddhism on the ideals and practice of monarchy in the region, drawing on their respective research.”
The recent launch of the video game “Black Myth: Wukong” has broken numerous records around the world for the number of users. The game is set in the world of the famous Chinese novel “Journey to the West,” where players battle gods and demons of traditional popular Chinese religion. In the first few weeks following its release on Aug. 19, 2024, “Black Myth: Wukong” had reportedly sold over 18 million copies, making it one of the fastest-selling games of all time.
Players take on the role of freeing Sun Wukong, the monkey protagonist from the popular 16th-century novel. The story details the journey of the Chinese monk, Xuanzang, as he makes his way to India in search of Buddhist scrolls. Sun Wukong aids the monk in this trip. Yet, the monkey proves to be the ultimate troublemaker, as Sun Wukong insults popular gods of the Chinese pantheon and insists on besting them in magical battles. Sun Wukong’s fate is sealed when the Buddha imprisons him under a mountain as punishment for all the havoc he created in Heaven.
The video game picks up after the end of the story, pitting the player against those whom Sun Wukong had fought in the popular narrative. In so doing, the game continually references the complex and competitive world of traditional Chinese religion in which Buddhist, Taoist and popular gods are always interacting with one another.
As a scholar of Chinese religion, I am interested in the ways narratives of Chinese deities become popular and spread across different contexts. The popularity of “Black Myth: Wukong” is the most recent example in a centuries-old tradition of retelling this story through popular media.
“Journey to the West” was first published in 1592, but the stories were popular long before that.
As scholar of Chinese literature Anthony Yu notes, the various tales describing Xuanzong and Sun Wukong’s adventures existed for nearly 1,000 years before they were collected and published in “Journey to the West.” People in traditional China would hear many of these adventures through oral storytelling, but also through various media such as dramatic performances, poetic tales and short stories.
Traveling opera troupes were one of the most popular ways to tell Sun Wukong’s tale. Professional actors would perform tales of Sun Wukong’s exploits through dramatic renditions coupled with acrobatic fight scenes and dazzling displays of martial arts. These entertaining performances would disseminate information about the gods to both literate and illiterate audiences all throughout China.
Stories of Sun Wukong’s mischievous, and often irreverent, behavior made their rounds throughout traditional Chinese society. The monkey hero’s brash attempts at subverting authority and picking fights with divine personae cemented his place as a popular cultural icon. As scholar of Chinese religions Meir Shahar notes, novels such as “Journey to the West” served as a way to define and transmit an entire pantheon of deities all across the various regions of traditional China.
In so doing, these forms of media would reflect the dynamic world of Chinese religion and, at the same time, help shape the way people would come to understand the stories of their own gods.
Many of the characters who appear in “Journey to the West” come directly out of the Chinese pantheon. Guanyin, the Buddhist deity of compassion and one of the most popular gods across East Asia, has her struggles against Sun Wukong; Taoist figures, such as the deified Lao-tzu, the purported author of the Taoist classic “Tao Te Ching,” battles with the monkey, and ancient Chinese deities like the Queen Mother to the West and the Jade Emperor play a prominent role as authority figures throughout the story.
Sun Wukong also battles localized gods like the martial deity Erlang. Many of these figures are also referenced throughout the video game, while some, like Erlang, appear as “bosses” who need to be defeated before moving on to the next level.
In the novel, the gods work together to stand in the way of Sun Wukong, representing the authority of the Chinese pantheon. At the same time, Sun Wukong often gets the better of the gods, either through trickery or martial prowess. Eventually, the authority of the gods wins out, with the monkey trapped under the mountain. Yet, this is not the end of Sun Wukong. As the recent release of the video game demonstrates, it is but one more beginning to the monkey’s story.
While the game is careful not to promote any one religious identity, the cultural source for these compelling characters remains deeply rooted in the long history of Chinese religions.
Today’s gamers get to encounter aspects of Chinese culture in a whole new way. Players who may be unfamiliar with Sun Wukong’s character from the novel can still see Sun Wukong flip in the air, brandish his weapons and defeat his enemies with dramatic flair. Only now the gamer gets to perform these feats through their connection with the video game’s hero.
Still, while the gaming experience may be relatively new, enjoying tales of the gods is very old.
Michael Naparstek, Lecturer in Religious Studies, University of Tennessee
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
With his delighted expression, round belly, bald head and monastic robes, the “Laughing Buddha” is instantly identifiable. However, astute observers might wonder why this buddha does not look like the historical Buddha, who lived in India about 2,500 years ago.
Images of the historical Buddha, known as Siddhartha Gautama or Shakyamuni, depict him with a neutral expression, slim build, tightly coiled hair and monastic robes. If the Laughing Buddha isn’t the historical Buddha, who is he, and how did he become so popular?
As a scholar of East Asian Buddhism who studies how and why deities transform over time, I see the Laughing Buddha as a key figure that shows how people have adapted Buddhism to different cultural and historical contexts.
One of the names for the Laughing Buddha is “Cloth Bag,” which is pronounced “Budai” in Chinese and “Hotei” in Japanese. Cloth Bag was the nickname of a Chinese Buddhist monk who lived in the 10th century. He belonged to the Zen school of Buddhism, which is known for its stories about monks who reject conventional pursuits like wealth and fame.
Cloth Bag got his nickname because he wandered from town to town carrying a cloth bag full of treasures that he shared freely with children.
Chinese Buddhists, seeing Cloth Bag’s legendary generosity, compassion and joy, concluded that he must not be an ordinary monk, but that he must be a human incarnation of the future Buddha, whose name is Maitreya. Artists in China depicted Cloth Bag as a plump, laughing monk often surrounded by children or animals. In a traditional East Asian context, his round belly represents his generosity and abundance, and also symbolizes the positive qualities of wealth and fertility.
From China, images of Cloth Bag as the Laughing Buddha traveled in two directions. They spread first in East Asia to countries such as Vietnam, Korea and Japan. Zen is a popular form of Buddhism in all of these countries, but it was Japanese Zen Buddhism that attained global popularity in the 19th and 20th centuries. This means that many images of the Laughing Buddha in the West are based on Japanese models.
Images of the Laughing Buddha also spread west from China to Europe, where 18th-century elites showed their aesthetic sophistication by displaying Chinese-style porcelain, including statues of the Laughing Buddha.
The Laughing Buddha’s transformation into a global icon results from both the fascination with Chinese porcelain in 18th-century Europe and the 20th-century spread of Japanese Zen Buddhism.
Today we see the Laughing Buddha in stores, homes and even as a brand name. A lot of people may know what the Laughing Buddha looks like, but few may be familiar with who he is or how he became so popular.
Megan Bryson, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, University of Tennessee
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Marcus Harvey joined the Department of Religious Studies in fall 2023 as an assistant professor of the religions of Africa and its diaspora. He comes to UT from the University of North Carolina Asheville, where he served on the religious studies faculty beginning in 2013. Prior to that, he earned his PhD with distinction from Emory University’s Graduate Division of Religion. He teaches courses on African indigenous and diaspora religions, Zora Neale Hurston and religious thought in black literature (including folklore), and religion and horror.
Informed by fieldwork conducted between 2013-2014 in Ghana, specifically Accra, Kumasi, Larteh, Kwahu, Ananse Village, Koforidua, Asikuma, Mampong, and Cape Coast, as well as the Nigerian cities of Lagos, Ilé-Ifẹ̀, and Modakeke, Harvey’s research explores sacred matrices of knowledge production among the Akan of southern Ghana and the Yorùbá of southwestern Nigeria, two of the largest ethnic groups in each country. The book he is currently completing, titled “Life is War”: African Epistemology and Black Religious Hermeneutics, places this work in conversation with black religion and literature in the United States as a means of challenging the assumption that black religious experience is most legible within the hermeneutics of liberationist biblical imaginaries. Harvey’s research also appears in such journals as the Journal of Africana Religions, Estudos de Religião, and Religions.
Earlier this year, Harvey presented his research at a national conference and is scheduled to present again at a second conference this fall. In previous years, his research has been presented internationally as well. Beyond his central research focus, Harvey also has an abiding fascination with the horror genre in its various cinematic forms. Of great interest to him are the ways horror movies often disclose the religio-cultural foundations of popular fears.
Dr. Sinnreich joined the Religious Studies Department in Fall of 2016 as an Associate Professor and Director of the Fern and Manfred Steinfeld Program in Judaic Studies. She is a scholar of Jewish experience during the Holocaust and European Jewry. Dr. Sinnreich serves as the editor in chief of the Journal of Jewish Identities (Johns Hopkins University Press). Dr. Sinnreich’s main research focus is on the experience of Jews in Nazi ghettos. She has a special focus on the Lodz and Krakow ghettos and recently published, A Story of Survival: The Lodz Ghetto Diary of Heinek Fogel (Yad Vashem Press, 2015).
Dr. Sinnreich comes to the University of Tennessee from having served as Director of the Center for Judaic and Holocaust Studies at Youngstown State University since 2005. She has also served as a fellow at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington D.C. in 2007 and at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem in 2009. Dr. Sinnreich received her Ph.D. in 2004 from Brandeis University and her BA in 1997 from Smith College.
Dr. Sinnreich’s most well-known research is on sexual abuse of Jewish women during the Holocaust. This work appeared first as an article “And it was Something we Didn’t Talk About…” The Rape of Jewish Women During the Holocaust” Holocaust Studies (December, 2008). It has been recognized as some of the most important scholarship on the Holocaust in the past decade, has been featured on CNN.com (it was a front page story) and served as part of the inspiration for Gloria Steinem to start the Women under Siege Project, which investigates rape and genocide. (http://www.womenundersiegeproject.org/author/profile/gloria-steinem) Dr. Sinnreich is working on several projects at the moment. She will be presenting a paper at the upcoming Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies meeting this fall on Hunger in the ghettos which expands on her research on human-made famine in the Lodz Ghetto and looks at hunger across all the ghettos of Nazi occupied Europe. This work will also be appearing as a book chapter in The Ghetto in Global History, 1500 to the Present eds. Wendy Z. Goldman and Joe W. Trotter (Routledge, forthcoming). Dr. Sinnreich is also beginning a new book project, Who will Live and Who Will Die?: Rosh Hashanah at Auschwitz in 1944 which examines two “selections” carried out by Joseph Mengele during the fall of 1944 at Auschwitz. It will be a continuation of her research into factors of survival during the Holocaust. In addition to her traditional scholarship, Dr. Sinnreich has produced a number of pieces of public scholarship including multiple exhibitions and serving as the consulting scholar of a number of documentary films.
As of Fall 2013, Dr. Megan Bryson is a new Assistant Professor of East Asian Religions in the Department of Religious Studies, but she isn’t new to UT or Knoxville. She arrived in 2010, after many years spent in her native Oregon and then in California, where she earned her PhD from the Buddhist Studies Program of Stanford University’s Department of Religious Studies. In her three years as a lecturer, Dr. Bryson has already accomplished much. She curated the award-winning exhibit “Zen Buddhism and the Arts of Japan” at the McClung Museum and in 2013, she won a prestigious Alumni Outstanding Teacher Award. As an Assistant Professor, she regularly teaches courses on East Asian religions, including “Religions of China,” “Religions of Japan,” and “Zen Buddhism.”
Dr. Bryson’s research focuses on Buddhism in Southwest China, specifically in the Dali region of Yunnan Province, an area with a large ethnic minority population, where she conducted fieldwork between 2006-2009. She is completing a book, The Boundaries of Chinese Religion, that uses Dali as a case study to examine the role religion has played in representing Chinese identity from the twelfth century to the present. Dali has been neglected in studies of Chinese religion because it is not seen as “Chinese.” In her manuscript, Dr. Bryson argues that Dali’s religious traditions come primarily from Chinese territory, which reveals the limitations of the black-and-white terms “Chinese” and “non-Chinese.” Her other research projects focus primarily on the Dali kingdom’s distinctive Buddhist traditions, particularly texts and artworks that have not been found anywhere else. She has also written articles about ethnicity, gender, and Dali religion for journals such as Asian Ethnology, Signs, and the Journal of International Association of Buddhist Studies. Dr. Bryson plans to return to Dali soon to begin research on new projects.
In the 2013-14 year, Dr. Bryson has presented (or will soon present) her research at several national and international conferences, including in Belgium, Japan, Israel, and Germany. As much as Dr. Bryson enjoys this global travel and exchanging ideas with international scholars, she always looks forward to returning to her new home in Knoxville. She especially loves the outdoor recreation here: she frequently hikes in the Smokies and has completed the Knoxville Marathon twice.
Manuela Ceballos was born and raised in Medellín, Colombia. In the 2014-2015 academic year, she joined the faculty in the department of Religious Studies as an Islamic Studies specialist. Manuela comes to the University of Tennessee from Emory University’s Graduate Division of Religion via the American Southwest, where she has spent the last few years while writing her dissertation. She has also lived abroad in Morocco and France. During the Fall of 2014, Manuela has been teaching a course entitled “Classical Islam” and a seminar on Sufism (Islamic mysticism). In the Spring semester, she will teach a class on Jewish-Muslim-Christian interactions in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia, and another course on modern Islam.
Manuela’s research brings together literary sources in Arabic and Spanish from the Early Modern period that deal with Muslim-Christian encounters in the shifting geographical and communal boundaries that eventually led to the contemporary notions of nationhood and nationality in the Morocco and Spain. Her current project, ‘The Favor of Good Companions:’ Violence and the Formation of Religious Communities in Early Modern Iberia and North Africa, focuses on the role of violence in the formation of religious and political communities as represented in Islamic and Christian mystical texts from the Western Mediterranean. She is also engaged in further research on Islamic notions asylum and hospitality in the context of the mass forced migration that resulted from the so-called Reconquista in the Iberian Peninsula. Her article on the writings of the fifteenth-century Sufi reformer and fighter Muhammad ibn Yaggabsh al-Tāzī is forthcoming in the Journal of Religion and Violence. She plans to return to North Africa to continue her research. In December, she will be presenting her work in Alexandria, Egypt.
Manuela is happy to be back in the Southeast and to live close to the mountains. In her free time, she practices Arabic calligraphy and enjoys the company of her family and friends, as well as that of her two very patient cats and lively border-collie mix.
Jennifer Collins-Elliott joined the Religious Studies Department as a part-time lecturer in fall of 2014. She specializes in early Christianity, with a focus on gender, the body, and violence in early Christian literature. She received her BA in Religious Studies from the University of Kansas and her MA in Religion from Florida State University, where she is also pursuing her doctoral work.
Jenny is currently working on her dissertation entitled “‘Bespattered with the Mud of Another’s Lust’: Rape and Physical Embodiment in Christian Literature of the 4th-6th Centuries CE.” This project explores the ways that sexual violence is described and deployed in a variety of early Christian texts. Focusing on the writings of select Church leaders and stories of martyrs, this dissertation demonstrates that responses to rape reveal how these authors imaged the relationship between the body and chastity and how this concept changes over time, moving toward a more dominantly body-centric model of sexual purity. Jenny’s research has been furthered by her recent participation in a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Summer Institute on “Diverse Philosophical Approaches to Sexual Violence” at Elon University. She has also presented her work nationally at the annual Society of Biblical Literatures conference and the North American Patristics conference, as well as internationally at the International Patristics conference at Oxford.
In her time at the University of Tennessee, Jenny has taught a variety of courses, including an honors section of World Religions in History; Introduction to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam; and Gender and Religion. Starting in 2016, Jenny has developed a Comparison of World Religions class that focuses on world religions and film. This class encourages students to think critically about the ways in which film displays and creates religion and religious discourses in both American and international contexts. This course has also provided an opportunity for Jenny to further her interest in representations of religion in media as well as her interest in critical approaches to the academic study of religion. Coming from the Midwest, Jenny is enjoying Knoxville’s mountainous landscape and learning about Appalachia’s history, food, and language.
Dr. David Kline joined the Religious Studies Department as a full-time lecturer in Religion, Race, and Ethnicity in the Americas in fall of 2017. His academic specialties are religion and race in the Americas, critical race theory, and political theology. He holds a Bachelor of Music Education from the University of Texas at Austin, and Master’s degrees in Theology and Religion from St. Andrews University (M.Litt.), Duke University (M.Div.), and Rice University (MA). In August of 2017 he received his Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Rice University under the supervision of Anthony B. Pinn.
Dr. Kline is currently turning his dissertation, which was defended with distinction in July 2017, into manuscript form. The project, titled The Apparatus of Christian Identity: Religious (Auto)Immunity, Political Theology, and the Making of the Racial World, provides a critical analysis of western Christian racism and violence as reactionary responses to the perpetual inescapability of social, political, and cultural transformation. Dr. Kline is also the co-author (with CERCL Writing Collective at Rice University) of the book Embodiment and Black Religion: Rethinking the Body in African American Religious Experience (Equinox Press, 2017), which explores the centrality of the body in African American religious experience. In addition, he is also undertaking a research project aimed at producing a book length introductory study of Caribbean theorist Sylvia Wynter from a religious studies perspective. Exploring Wynter’s vast critical explorations of what she calls the modern colonial west’s “monohumanist” figure of “Man,” this project will provide detailed overviews and engagements of Wynter’s use of history, science, philosophy of religion, literature, systems theory, and black studies.
Over the last year, Dr. Kline has enjoyed teaching courses in comparative American religion and race/ethnicity at the University of Tennessee. These include Christianity, Race, and Science; Religion, Theology, and Social Movements in North America; and American Religious History. As a humanities teacher at a public university, these courses have provided wonderful environments through which to explore how complex histories, identity formations, and structures of power really do matter to the lives of students—both as individuals and as citizens within a democracy. On top of teaching, Dr. Kline has also coordinated and produced a podcast interview series titled “UTK Religion Podcast” for visiting speakers at the religious studies department at the University of Tennessee.
Born and raised in Houston, TX, Dr. Kline is an avid Houston Astros baseball fan, realizing a lifelong dream when they won the World Series in 2017. He is also a musician, and was a professional working bass player in Austin, Texas for many years before pursuing graduate training in religious studies. He is delighted to be in Knoxville, and enjoys being close to the Great Smoky Mountains and experiencing four distinct seasons.
