By asking what food does as a social and affective agent within Buddhist communities, this cross-regional panel examines Buddhist food economies through historically grounded ethnographic cases in Myanmar, Taiwan, Japan, and the United States. Across temples, farms, kitchens, markets, and ritual spaces, food moves through infrastructures of cultivation, exchange, offering, and waste that connect monastics and lay practitioners, the living and the dead. The panel approaches food as relational, highlighting how practices of growing, circulating, and discarding food organize labour, authority, care, and belonging. The papers examine food scarcity among Buddhist nuns in Myanmar, tea production and commercialization in Taiwanese Buddhist communities, food offerings in Vietnamese American funeral rites, and the management of perishable offerings in Japanese ossuaries. Together, they show how Buddhist food economies generate infrastructures of care and sites of tension, revealing how food actively shapes and disrupts ethical, affective, and institutional life.
Tea is historically entangled with Chinese Buddhism, as networks of monasteries in medieval China were predominantly growers and distributors of tea. Beyond production, Buddhist communities over the years were responsible for the ritualization of tea, contributing to a thriving culture of tea in East Asia. In contemporary Taiwan, Buddhist communities are involved in the production, circulation, ritualization, and consumption of tea. Tea is harnessed for modern forms of practice, community building, and the financial sustainability of Buddhist groups. Approaches to the place of tea and its relationship with Buddhist identities and cultivation vary in ethical, philosophical, and practical aspects. This paper examines the place of tea within the context of environmental approaches to its production, consumption, and incorporation in modern rituals. The study is based on ethnographic data, examining large-scale Buddhist monasteries and smaller-scale Buddhist grassroots communities, from the perspectives of practical, material, and social effects on Buddhist life worlds.
Looking at a case study in Sagaing, Myanmar, a main monastic hub, this paper explores how gendered structures of merit and monastic discipline often place Myanmar Buddhist nuns (thilashin) at a disadvantage when receiving food. At the same time, the ability to “make their own rules” and flexibility in practice may strategically help them in navigating these material constraints. Culinary knowledge formed in the villages together with thilashin food practices not only help in the formation of these female renunciants but also cement reciprocal relationships and responsibilities between monks and nuns as well as between monastics and the laity. These practices are essential for maintaining the sāsana, which are often dismissed as being insignificant as domestic duties.
At Cherry Blossom Zen Monastery, Vietnamese American families gather every Sunday to perform funeral rites for their dead. There, resident nuns help them navigate the perilous crossings that connect life and death. Together they chant sutras, light incense, and, most importantly, offer food to help the consciousness of the deceased move from their previous existence on to the next. Mahayana Vietnamese Buddhism teaches that, when a person passes away, their consciousness wanders for forty-nine days before being reincarnated into a new body. In this period of liminal existence, the deceased, distressed, confused, and sometimes angry, needs guidance. Living family members, also afflicted by the broad spectrum of emotions and potentially unwholesome states that accompany grief, need attention too. In this paper, I present ethnographic data to show that food serves crucial functions in enabling and conditioning the crossings that shape the experience of death at Cherry Blossom temple.
When nourishment turns to rot, what happens to Buddhist offerings to the dead? By focusing on nōkotsudō, indoor ossuary facilities that house cremated remains, this paper examines food offerings in contemporary Japanese Buddhist deathcare practice. In this context, food waste emerges not simply a matter of excess or neglect but a distinctly Buddhist problem of care. Offerings are embedded in logics of abundance in which nourishment sustains ongoing relations between living and dead. Yet these practices unfold within temple ritual economies that must manage perishable goods within institutional infrastructures. Drawing on ethnographic research in rural Japan, I show that waste emerges when multiple temporal regimes embedded in Buddhist deathcare practice, such as ritual cycles, microbial decay, bureaucratic regulation, and disaster preparedness, fall out of alignment. I describe this friction as temporal dissonance, revealing how temples become sites where abundance, decay, and ancestral care must be continually negotiated.