Being Young and Buddhist in Precarious Times

Abstract

In recent years, scholarship on Buddhist youth has emphasized their agency in navigating religious trajectories within and beyond the confines of families and institutionalized Buddhist organizations. However, questions of agency regarding religious identity construction are renewed during times of social, economic, environmental, and geopolitical upheaval. They may also be considered in relation to religious teachings of selfhood and relationality. Adopting a lived religion approach, this chapter delves into three factors—sociality, cultural bricolage, and digital technology—to unpack how two young Buddhist practitioners experience and understand Buddhist teachings of non-self and interdependence in the context of precarious transitions to adulthood. For these young Buddhists, religious agency is dependent on the relational, cultural and digital factors in their everyday lives. As conditions of precarity increase, greater attention to these factors may help illumine the conditions in which agency as described in scholarship on young Buddhists may be simultaneously supported, challenged, and made possible.