After the Zen boom of the 1960s and 1970s, Tibetan Buddhism increasingly captured the West's imagination. Today, entire stadiums fill when the Dalai Lama speaks, training centers mushroom, and books proliferate. Even the most esoteric form of Tibetan Buddhism, rDzogs chen or Great Perfection, has found numerous followers in the West. But the West stands not alone: in communist China, too, this form of Buddhism experienced a kind of camouflaged boom from the 1980s. Monica Esposito (1962-2011), one of Europe's foremost scholars of Chinese religions, observed this process up close. After her...
After the Zen boom of the 1960s and 1970s, Tibetan Buddhism increasingly captured the West's imagination. Today, entire stadiums fill when the Dalai L...