Papers by Christopher Emory-Moore
Journal of Global Buddhism, 2020
This article examines the New Kadampa Tradition's North American missionary deployment of the epi... more This article examines the New Kadampa Tradition's North American missionary deployment of the epithet "Modern Buddhism" in publicity, text, and teaching. I argue that while "Modern Buddhism" branding supports the NKT's international growth by promoting its founder's teachings as universally accessible and not Tibetan, those teachings are more continuous with traditional Geluk doctrine than with David McMahan's (2008) portrayal of Buddhist modernism. Specifically, I find minimal evidence of detraditionalization, demythologization, and psychologization in the NKT founder's 2011 book Modern Buddhism and in public meditation instruction derived therefrom at a Canadian NKT center. My findings locate the NKT's deployment of the "Modern Buddhism" brand within a graduated missionizing strategy that combines promotional modernism and pedagogical traditionalism to attract North American non-Buddhists by offering culturally desired, this-worldly benefits (e.g., stress reduction) followed by less familiar, other-worldly Buddhist goals (e.g., happiness in future lives).
Religious Studies and Theology, 2020
Euro-North American Buddhism consists of a diversity of transplanted Asian traditions whose cultu... more Euro-North American Buddhism consists of a diversity of transplanted Asian traditions whose cultural adaptations often include heightened emphases on both family and meditation. This paper considers the nexus of these two themes in an examination of children's meditation instruction in two of the largest international Gelukpa Tibetan Buddhist networks, the Foundation for the Preservation of the Mahayana Tradition (FPMT) and the New Kadampa Tradition (NKT). Through a comparison of these organizations' recently published English-language children's meditation manuals , the paper aims to produce a clearer picture of how children and their capacities for meditation are being conceptualized and cultivated in diasporic Tibetan Buddhist formations. I argue that the texts of the FPMT and NKT reflect respectively enthusiastic and measured approaches to the adaptation of Gelukpa Tibetan Buddhist meditation's traditional doctrinal context and goals for primarily non-Tibetan audiences.
Buddhist-Christian Studies, 2016
Book Reviews by Christopher Emory-Moore
Canadian Journal of Buddhist Studies, 2019
Religious Studies Review, 2019
Religious Studies Review, 2019
Religious Studies Review, 2020
Religious Studies Review, 2020
Thesis Chapters by Christopher Emory-Moore
Canadian Journal of Buddhist Studies News Blog, 2017
Toward an improved understanding of Tibetan guru devotion traditions, this paper re-describes the... more Toward an improved understanding of Tibetan guru devotion traditions, this paper re-describes the ritual of ‘uniting with the spiritual guide’ (Skt. Guru yoga, Tib. Bla-ma’i rnal-’byor) as a system of exchange relations. I employ a structuralist method of textual analysis drawn from the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Hans Penner to identify the basic conceptual mechanics of the principal guru yoga ritual text in the Gelug-pa school of Tibetan Buddhism, “Offering to the Spiritual Guide” (Skt. Guru pūjā, Tib. Blama mchod-pa), compiled by Losang Chokyi Gyaltsan (1570-1662) in the mid seventeenth century. I argue that the puja operates as a ritual gift economy between guru and disciple (offerings given, blessings received) with the final aim of this binary’s dissolution in emptiness (the lack of inherent existence of phenomena).
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Papers by Christopher Emory-Moore
Book Reviews by Christopher Emory-Moore
Thesis Chapters by Christopher Emory-Moore