Recording Self-Cultivation: Online Lay Buddhist Videos as Experimental Engagement with the Ethical-Religious

Through an analysis of the online circulation of short videos produced by Chinese lay Buddhists featuring their temple visits, this paper explores how such audio-visual artifacts mediate religious experiences and serve as a reflexive process in (re)constructing the interplay between religious traditions and ethical experiences. I focus on videos posted on one of China’s biggest social networking platforms, RedNote, which is especially popular for sharing tips on travel, makeup and fashion, to examine how lay Buddhist videos circulated in a media environment, where mass culture, consumer culture, and religious traditions interact with each other, reconstruct the concepts of religious experience, authenticity, and legitimacy. I also situate these videos within the context of the revival of Buddhism in reform-era China to see how they, embodying the renewed interest in traditional Buddhist self-cultivation, reveal the nexus of personhood construction and the social project of moral cultivation in contemporary China.