Asian Religions (Zhange Ni)

Asian religions – Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, Confucianism, Daoism, Shinto, folk traditions, and new religious movements, among many others – are sites where we examine the variated significance of rupture on personal, communal, national, and cosmic scales. These ruptures are voluntary or imposed, creative or destructive, path-breaking or decimating.

For instance, renunciants, ascetics, and monks/nuns break away from a secular life to seek enlightenment. Or different doctrinal interpretations and ritual practices can cause schisms in a religion, which split into sects, branches, and lineages. When Asian countries were pressured to embrace modernity by Western colonial powers, established traditions were disrupted, forced to adapt themselves to new models of religion and secularism, or pushed to defend some newly invented essence distinct from, if not superior to, Western modernity.

More specifically, traumatic events such as the Meiji Restoration (1868) that reinvented Japanese religions to serve the imperial state, the Partition in modern South Asian history (1947) and the Hindu-Sikh conflict that followed, and the anti-superstition campaigns launched by the modern Chinese state that culminated in the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) claiming to obliterate religion – all these are stories of ruptures. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the rise of nationalisms in Asian countries interestingly adopted the language of revival/renaissance to mend the modern ruptures in allegedly native traditions.

Last but not least, in Asian cosmologies, the world is viewed as moving through cycles called kalpa, translated into jie in Chinese. It is believed that like individual lives, the cosmos goes through cycles of emergence, development, decline and destruction. This explains why apocalyptic imaginaries in Asian religions are narratives of rupture and regeneration and have given rise to social, cultural, and political experiments.

This panel invites papers that consider or even problematize rupture, most broadly construed, in Asian religions by studying religious texts, figures, practices, and institutions and/or how these are featured, reimagined, and celebrated or challenged in works of literature and other arts produced in Asian countries, the Euro-American West, and the Global South.

Queries and abstract proposals of no more than 350 words should be sent to Zhange Ni (Virginia Tech) at nizhange@vt.edu no later than 31st January, 2026.