Dharma and Difference in Dar es Salaam: An Ethnography of the First Chinese Buddhist Mission in Tanzania

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Abstract

Tanhua Temple is the first Chinese Buddhist mission in East Africa, and part of an emerging Buddhist missionary movement on the continent. This talk draws on over 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork as a volunteer driver and translator at Tanhua Temple in Dar es Salaam. My own interest in Tanhua Temple was stimulated by the unique combination of languages, religions, nationalities and other positionalities that coexist there. Over the course of fieldwork it became clear that the kinds of differences being negotiated in daily life at the temple could not be captured by simple China-Africa binaries. Instead, in my dissertation I explore five different sets of engagements that took place within the temple including chapters on; (1) the transnational Buddhist ‘system’ (tixi) at its core, (2) the emergence of a local congregation, (3) the tensions, conflicts and compromises produced by differences between the temple’s ‘merit model’ and local workers’ values, (4) the perspective of young Chinese backpackers who volunteered at the temple during their travels, and finally (5) the Chinese business community, Tanzanian translators and various state institutions that came into contact with this Buddhist mission. In this talk I will speak about the first four of these engagements, and attempt to draw some initial comparisons between the ways in which these various differences were negotiated. In doing so I engage with debates in the anthropology of Buddhism, the nature of cosmopolitan ethical projects, theorisations of value hierarchies and conflict along with ongoing debates about Chinese civil society.

Speaker's bio

Theo Stapleton began his tertiary studies majoring in Philosophy and Chinese at the University of Western Australia, during which he also spent two years on exchange in Beijing as a New Colombo Plan scholar (2015-2017). After completing an honours degree in Asian Studies (2018), he undertook a master's degree at Oxford in Contemporary China Studies where he received the Ko Cheuk-hung Prize for best thesis (2019), and then took a second master's degree at Peking University as a Yenching scholar where he studied Social Anthropology (2020). His PhD research was conducted at the first official Buddhist institution from the People’s Republic of China in East Africa and was funded by the AHRC Open Oxford Cambridge Doctoral Training Program, the Cambridge Trust International Scholarship, and the St John’s Benefactor Scholarship. In 2024/25 he is co-convening a seminar series entitled ‘Frontiers of Faith: Religion in the China-Africa Space’ at the Cambridge Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH).