Public Space Participatory Construction of Contemporary Buddhist Temples in Aging Society
Yiwei Pan, Jiping Wang
Buddhist temples have long been the spiritual center of many communities, but its social value has not been deeply explored under the background of current aging and urbanization process. Promoting participatory construction in temple public space can arouse the community identity, activate the space, help the elderly realize the goal of active aging, and ultimately achieve self-transcendence. The paper discusses the methods and principles of introducing participatory construction into temples. On this basis, by taking an experimental participatory construction in P temple in Shanghai as a case study, the paper records and analyzes its approaches. It shows that participatory construction can bring positive impact on community elders, which is a sociological approach for practicing the theory of humanistic Buddhism in contemporary temples.