Interconnections of Asian Diaspora

Mapping the Linkages and Discontinuities

Sam George

• Publisher: Fortress Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9781506478289
• eBook ISBN: 9781506478296
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Ministry

Asians make up the largest and most dispersed peoples of the world, and Christians make up a sizable proportion of this demographic. Asian Christians are more likely to emigrate, and many have continued to embrace Christian faith at their diasporic places of settlement. They are quick to establish distinctively Asian churches all over the world and infuse diversity, revival, and missionary consciousness into their adopted communities. They preserve the ties and cultures of their ancestral homelands while assimilating and adapting into the new setting. They have become a recognizable force in the transformation and advancement of Christianity itself at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

The dozen essays in this volume are written by leading scholars of Asian backgrounds situated in various diasporic locations. The authors trace the contours of their dispersion and highlight diverse missiological themes, including the scattering ( diaspora ) and the gathering ( ekklesia ) of Asian Christians around the world.

This volume traces the origins and destinations of major Asian migration and diaspora communities from a variety of perspectives and geographical locations. It is pan-Asian in scope and multidisciplinary in nature. It also provides the latest data and infographics on Asian diasporas worldwide.

1

Global Buddhist Diaspora

Alex G. Smith

From ancient times, the mobility of people of all religious persuasions has played a consequential role in reshaping societies, cultures, nations, and religion itself. This chapter focuses on two aspects—the massive migrations of Buddhists worldwide and the urgent need for biblical witness and ministry to scattered Buddhists. Though statistical details of the Buddhist diaspora are difficult to estimate accurately, the trends of global dispersion of Buddhists are quite evident, and ministry among the diaspora Buddhists remains unaddressed and very challenging.

Wherever you find Chinese, Japanese, or Koreans dispersed across the world, there you will find Buddhists. One only needs to look at the expanding presence of East Asian restaurants in any city across the world. Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, and Malaysian cuisines are often just around the corner and seem to have become a staple diet of people everywhere. A flood of Buddhist refugees from Southeast Asia augments their numbers, and many international students and business executives from the Buddhist world are now spread globally.

Buddhist Diaspora History

Buddhism was founded by Siddhartha Gautama (born 563 BCE), who later came to be known as Buddha. Its origin can be traced back to Bodh Gaya, Bihar (India), where Gautama attained enlightenment while meditating under a Bodhi tree. Since most of the Buddhists now live somewhere other than the place of its origin, this makes Buddhism a totally diasporic religion. With over five hundred million1 followers around the globe, Buddhism is the fourth-largest religion in the world and represents about 7 percent of the world population. A vast majority of Buddhists are in the Asia-Pacific region (99 percent) and are concentrated mostly in East, Southeast, or South Asia. Buddhism is the state religion of four nations in Asia, the majority religion in three other nations, and a significant minority in yet another seven countries (Cambodia, Thailand, Myanmar, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, Laos, and Mongolia). According to the Pew Research Center, about half of the world’s Buddhists live in one country, China, and the others live in places such as Thailand (13 percent), Japan (9 percent), Burma (Myanmar; 8 percent), Sri Lanka (3 percent), Vietnam (3 percent), Cambodia (3 percent), South Korea, India (2 percent each), and Malaysia (1 percent).2 There are also more than a million Buddhists in the United States and the United Kingdom.

From the beginning, Buddha himself went to different places to preach his message and later sent monks to scatter the dharma across north India and Nepal initially. After the death of Gautama in around 483 BCE, his followers began to organize a religious movement based on Buddha’s teachings. A formalized version of Buddhism was gradually exported to other nations, and Buddhism became a widespread religion. In the third century BCE, Mauryan emperor Ashoka made Buddhism the official state religion of India. He built many monasteries and encouraged missionary work. According to Bouvert Regulas, Emperor Ashoka made three major contributions to Buddhism: applying Buddhism to government and foreign policies, sending and supporting missionaries to spread Buddhism across his kingdom and beyond, and maintaining Buddhism as a major religion through positive interfaith dialogue.3

There are many forms of Buddhism in different regions of the world, and they are closely linked to the migration of Buddhists. Theravada Buddhism is found mostly in Thailand, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar, while Mahayana Buddhism is prevalent in China, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, Singapore, and Vietnam. Tibetan Buddhism is mostly found in Tibet, Nepal, Mongolia, Bhutan, and parts of Russia and northern India. Each of these groups reveres different texts and has different interpretations of Buddha’s teachings. There are also other sects, such as Zen Buddhism and Nirvana Buddhism.

Causes of Buddhist Dispersion

Since the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Eden (Gen 3) and the global scattering from the Tower of Babel (Gen 11), the peoples of the world have been transient nomads. In the ancient times and Middle Ages, powerful nations captured regions beyond themselves and transported people as slaves. Famine, drought, and other environmental conditions forced many to find solace in foreign lands. Invading rulers of the Huns and Islamic Mughals attacked Buddhists in India and caused a widespread scattering of Buddhist people. In recent decades, a record number of Buddhist people have voluntarily migrated to distant lands for greener pastures and better living conditions.

Three centuries before Jesus Christ, Ashoka dispersed tens of thousands of Buddhist missionaries in all directions, as far as Cyrene (Libya), North Africa, Greece, and Macedonia.4 Missionary monks traveled on the Silk Route to take the Buddhist message to mainland China and even Japan. Much of the early dispersion was deliberate, and centuries later, the Buddhist Dai people in China fled to remain free of the Han who encroached on their territory, and the Dai spread to Vietnam, Yunnan, Laos, Thailand, Burma, and into India’s northeastern state of Assam.

For centuries, Buddhist rulers fought against neighboring kingdoms in greater India and Southeast Asia. For instance, frequent invasions arose between the Burmese and Thai; both were predominantly Buddhist nations. During the 1500s–1700s, the Burmese captured whole towns in Thailand and took them back as slaves. Today over 80 percent of Burmese and over 85 percent of Thai are Buddhists. Anne, the wife of famed American missionary to Burma Adoniram Judson, led the first Thai to Christ in Rangoon, Burma, in 1816. The first Thai Buddhist convert was part of that Thai Buddhist diaspora.5

The primary causes driving the dispersion of the Buddhists are war, poverty, famine, persecution, and political instability. Recent instances include Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, and Korea. The fight for survival and the hope for a better life and freedom to worship, work, and seek education caused many people to scatter across the globe. Skilled and unskilled workers, as well as international students, constitute a major section of the diaspora communities. While some of the forces of dispersion have been involuntary, trade and international commerce also have added to the growing human dispersion of the Buddhist people. Buddhist migrants include both legal and illegal immigrants, war refugees, business travelers, and tourists. Many migrants from East and Southeast Asia and some from South Asia are Buddhists. A major surge in migration out of this region occurred in the 1970s, primarily for two main reasons—people who were forcibly displaced on account of conflicts in the region and those who voluntarily moved to foreign lands for economic opportunities. The United Nations (UN) designated 1980 as “the year of the refugee,” and Asian Buddhists were a significant part of it. Furthermore, out-migration from Southeast Asia swelled dramatically because of the migration of skilled and semiskilled laborers to perform contract work in the new industrial nations of the Middle East and East Asia.

According to the UN Population Division, the total number of international migrants in 2019 worldwide was 272 million, up from 221 million in 2010 and 174 million in 2000.6 This annual report provides details of international migrants from every country but does not provide their religious affiliation. However, it is fair to assume that a large number of migrants from countries such as Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, China, Tibet, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and so on are Buddhists or hail from a Buddhist background. There is an extensive intermingling of Buddhism with Chinese religions such as Daoism, Confucianism, and Shintoism. There are new offshoots of Buddhism in the form of Cao Dai in Vietnam, Falun Gong in China, and Soka Gakkai in Japan. Since the post-Communist era in Southeast Asia, Buddhism has experienced a new level of resurgence, and over the last sixty years, the geopolitical crisis in the Tibetan region, most of whose residents are adherents of Tibetan Buddhism, has caught the attention of much of the world. Buddhism became widely popular in the West on account of the Dalai Lama’s worldwide travels, teachings, and books. Many international students and business professionals from China and Southeast Asia are another sector of the Buddhist population that is moving to nearby Asian countries and across the globe. The ease and affordability of travel and communication are further causing widespread dispersion while allowing people to remain in close contact with the rest of their family in their ancestral homelands.

Selective Sketch of Contemporary Buddhist Diaspora

Due to limited space in this chapter, I would like to provide a brief portrait of some key countries or areas of the Buddhist diaspora. Since the 1980s, the twenty-five-year civil war in Sri Lanka has pushed millions to Asia, Europe, North America, and Australia.7 By 2004, upward of two million people of Sri Lankan origin lived outside this island nation. Between 1979 and 2011, the annual exodus of migrants increased tenfold, from 25,785 to 260,000. The bulk of these migrants came from the Buddhist Sinhala majority regions of the country. Most Sri Lankan migrants are contract workers in the Middle East, primarily in Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Around 2010, these combined nations had a population of approximately 45 million, which comprised 52 percent nationals and 48 percent expatriate nonnationals. In some of the Gulf nations, such as Qatar and UAE, expatriate foreign workers account for nearly 90 percent of the population.

Vietnam is another Buddhist case in point. Between 1975 and 1981, an estimated 565,757 Indo-Chinese refugees arrived in the United States,8 and between 1980 and 1994, the number of Vietnamese admitted into the United States reached 882,862.9 I interviewed a Vietnamese leader who is actively involved in planting churches and training leaders among Vietnamese people in Malaysia, Vietnam, Canada, and the United States.10 According to him, ten years ago, over 100,000 Vietnamese worked as contract laborers in Malaysia, including those who became wives of Chinese Malaysians. Usually, formal contracts are for four years, and then the workers must return to Vietnam. In recent years, the numbers have decreased to about 30,000 Vietnamese in Malaysia. One reason is the prospect of lucrative jobs for Vietnamese workers in China, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, and in the last five years, the Middle East. South Korean men taking Vietnamese wives is another common practice. The first year Korean law allowed this, more than 13 percent of all weddings there were with Vietnamese women. An estimated 10 percent of the Vietnamese diaspora are wives in Korea. In 2016, intercultural weddings of Korean men with Vietnamese women amounted to 27.9 percent of 21,709 marriages, and nearly 27 percent of Korean men married Chinese women.11 Asian tourist agencies provide tours for Vietnamese and other men to meet Asian brides. These figures are augmented by tourists who illegally overstay their visas and are not counted in statistics. In Canada and the United States, the Vietnamese have set up Buddhist temples and monasteries. Many international students from Buddhist countries go to Western countries for higher education and professional training. Though many churches have been established among the Vietnamese immigrants in North America, a vision for missions in their ancestral homelands is generally missing.

Taiwan has 630,000 foreign Southeast Asians working there, mostly from Vietnam and Thailand. In 2014, Vietnamese brides married to Chinese men in Taiwan totaled 120,000, and many others get married in China or America.12 The brides come mostly from South Vietnam, while contract workers are largely from the North. Nearly three-tenths of Taiwanese are Buddhists, amounting to about seven million people, and most of the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Series Introduction: Asian Diaspora Christianity—Sam George
• Introduction—Sam George
• 1. Global Buddhist Diaspora—Alex G. Smith
• 2. Hinduism in Diaspora—John Arun Kumar
• 3. Transnational Family Dynamics of Overseas Filipino Workers—Gerardo B. Lisbe Jr.
• 4. Kerala Nurses in Britain: Race, Gender, and Transnational Migration—Christy John Jacob
• 5. Spiritual Longing and Religious-Cultural Negotiation in the Indian Diaspora: Reflections from Indian Writing in English—Robbie B H Goh
• 6. Migration, Remittances, and the Asian Diaspora—Cherian Samuel
• 7. From Bridging God and Human to Bridging the Digital Divide—Bill Tsang
• 8. Transnational Churches: Indian Denominations in the Persian Gulf—Sam George
• 9. Adventures of the Lebanese Diaspora: Mental Well-Being in Foreign Lands—Naji Abi-Hashem
• 10. Navigating Hyphenated Identities: Missional Communities of Global Indians—Prasad D R J Phillips
• 11. Diasporic Hybridity and Its Potential for Mission: Koreans, Chinese, and Japanese in the United States—Byoung Ok Koo
• 12. Practicing Diasporic Habitus: Asian Americans in International Missions—Peter T. Lee
• Index
• About the Authors