St. Elizabeth was a grand daughter of Queen Victoria of Great Britain and Ireland, and the sister of the last Czarina Alexandra. Following the assassination of her husband, the Grand Duke Serge, in 1905, she became a nun. This short work sets forth in the Grand Duchess's own words her vision for monastic life in inner city early twentieth century Moscow. The style is very different from that of better-known monastic rules, as for example of St. Benedict. Through it the reader is offered a glimpse into the daily life of this short-lived but fruitful outreach to the poor of pre-revolutionary Russian society. A short life of the new martyr, murdered by the Bolsheviks, is provided at the end of the work. Well illustrated with black and white photos.

"A long overdue corrective to the androcentric scholarship that has ignored Zen nuns' importance.... This very readable book is ideal for classroom use."-Religious Studies Review "Arai's sensitive first-hand account is at times emotional, but the reflexive recollections that derive from her personal experiences and interactions with the nuns are insightful and well documented....the book is valuable in providing us with a different mode of appreciation in order to understand the position of women living in [an]other religious and cultural context."-Japanese Journal of Religious Studies "This is an anthropological study, carried out with love, care, and attention to detail...By the end of the journey, readers will find themselves moved, their humanity reassured and refreshed."-Journal of Asian Studies In this study, based on both historical evidence and ethnographic data, Paula Arai shows that nuns were central agents in the foundation of Buddhism in Japan in the sixth century. They were active participants in the Soto Zen sect, and have continued to contribute to the advancement of the sect to the present day. Drawing on her fieldwork among Soto nuns, Arai demonstrates that the lives of many of these women embody classical Buddhist ideals. They have chosen to lead a strictly disciplined monastic life instead of pursuing careers or leading an unconstrained contemporary secular lifestyle. In this, and other respects, they can be shown to stand in stark contrast to their male counterparts.

The Dalai Lama has represented Buddhism as a religion of non-violence, compassion, and world peace, but this does not reflect how monks learn their vocation. This book shows how monasteries use harsh methods to make monks of men, and how this tradition is changing as modernist reformers - like the Dalai Lama - adopt liberal and democratic ideals, such as natural rights and individual autonomy. In the first in-depth account of disciplinary practices at a Tibetan monastery in India, Michael Lempert looks closely at everyday education rites - from debate to reprimand and corporal punishment. His analysis explores how the idioms of violence inscribed in these socialization rites help produce educated, moral persons but in ways that trouble Tibetans who aspire to modernity. Bringing the study of language and social interaction to our understanding of Buddhism for the first time, Lempert shows and why liberal ideals are being acted out by monks in India, offering a provocative alternative view of liberalism as a globalizing discourse.

Much has changed for the priests at the Minakshi Temple, one of the most famous Hindu temples in India. In "The Renewal of the Priesthood," C. J. Fuller traces their improving fortunes over the past 25 years. This fluidly written book is unique in showing that traditionalism and modernity are actually reinforcing each other among these priests, a process in which the state has played a crucial role.

Since the mid-1980s, growing urban affluence has seen more people spend more money on rituals in the Minakshi Temple, which is in the southern city of Madurai. The priests have thus become better-off, and some have also found new earnings opportunities in temples as far away as America. During the same period, due partly to growing Hindu nationalism in India, the Tamilnadu state government's religious policies have become more favorable toward Hinduism and Brahman temple priests. More priests' sons now study in religious schools where they learn authoritative Sanskrit ritual texts by heart, and overall educational standards have markedly improved.

Fuller shows that the priests have become more "professional" and modern-minded while also insisting on the legitimacy of tradition. He concludes by critiquing the analysis of modernity and tradition in social science. In showing how the priests are authentic representatives of modern India, this book tells a story whose significance extends far beyond the confines of the Minakshi Temple itself.

Anne Blackburn explores the emergence of a predominant Buddhist monastic culture in eighteenth-century Sri Lanka, while asking larger questions about the place of monasticism and education in the creation of religious and national traditions. Her historical analysis of the Siyam Nikaya, a monastic order responsible for innovations in Buddhist learning, challenges the conventional view that a stable and monolithic Buddhism existed in South and Southeast Asia prior to the advent of British colonialism in the nineteenth century. The rise of the Siyam Nikaya and the social reorganization that accompanied it offer important evidence of dynamic local traditions. Blackburn supports this view with fresh readings of Buddhist texts and their links to social life beyond the monastery.

Comparing eighteenth-century Sri Lankan Buddhist monastic education to medieval Christian and other contexts, the author examines such issues as bilingual commentarial practice, the relationship between clerical and "popular" religious cultures, the place of preaching in the constitution of "textual communities," and the importance of public displays of learning to social prestige. Blackburn draws upon indigenous historical narratives, which she reads as rhetorical texts important to monastic politics and to the naturalization of particular attitudes toward kingship and monasticism. Moreover, she questions both conventional views on "traditional" Theravadin Buddhism and the "Buddhist modernism" / "Protestant Buddhism" said to characterize nineteenth-century Sri Lanka. This book provides not only a pioneering critique of post-Orientalist scholarship on South Asia, but also a resolution to the historiographic impasse created by post-Orientalist readings of South Asian history.

In 16th and 17th century Ireland religion and nationality fused together in a people’s struggle to survive.  In that struggle the country’s links with Europe provided a life line.  Members of religious orders, with their international roots, played an important role. Among them were the Irish Jesuits, who adapted to a variety of situations – from quiet work in Irish towns to serving as an emissary for Hugh O’Neill in the south of Ireland and in the courts of Rome and Spain, and then founding seminary colleges in Spain and Portugal from which young Irishmen returned to keep faith and hope alive. In the seventeenth century persecution was more haphazard.  There were opportunities for preaching and teaching and, at time, especially during the Confederation of Kilkenny in the 1640s, for the open celebration of one’s religion. This freedom gave way to the savage persecution under Cromwell, which resulted in the killing of some Jesuits and others being forced to find shelter in caves, sepulchres, and bogs, the Jesuit superior dying alone in a shepherd’s hut on an island off Galway. There followed a time of more relaxed laws during which Irish Jesuits publicly ran schools in New Ross and, for Oliver Plunkett, in Drogheda, but persecution soon resumed and Oliver Plunkett was arrested and martyred. At the end of the century, as the forces of King James II were finally defeated, some Jesuits lived and worked through the sieges of Limerick and then nerved themselves to face the Penal Laws in the new century.

Translated here for the first time are four works written by Stephen for his monks: A Mirror for Novices, A Threefold Exercise, On the Recitation of the Divine Office, and Meditations on the Joys of the Blessed Virgin. Each expresses the devotion of his day and provides an insight into the inner life of an early thirteenth century Cistercian monastery.  A monk at Fountains Abbey and later abbot of Sawley, Stephen in his Meditations on the Gospel, on the Virgin, and on the Divine Office, delicately expresses the monastic devotion of the early thirteenth century.

The manuscript contains the 259 documents in Latin and medieval Danish which made up the economical foundations for the monastery's 400 year-old history. This first collected translation of the papal and royal privileges, the court roll and the many deeds of gifts gives an extraordinary insight into a Danish monastery's national and international relations.