Buddhism, often described as an austere religion that condemns
desire, promotes denial, and idealizes the contemplative life,
actually has a thriving leisure culture in Asia. Creative religious
improvisations designed by Buddhists have been produced both within
and outside of monasteries across the region-in Nepal, Japan,
Korea, Macau, Hong Kong, Singapore, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam.
Justin McDaniel looks at the growth of Asia's culture of Buddhist
leisure-what he calls "socially disengaged Buddhism"-through a
study of architects responsible for monuments, museums, amusement
parks, and other sites. In conversation with noted theorists of
material and visual culture and anthropologists of art, McDaniel
argues that such sites highlight the importance of public, leisure,
and spectacle culture from a Buddhist perspective and illustrate
how "secular" and "religious," "public" and "private," are in many
ways false binaries. Moreover, places like Lek Wiriyaphan's
Sanctuary of Truth in Thailand, Su?i Tien Amusement Park in Saigon,
and Shi Fa Zhao's multilevel museum/ritual space/tea house in
Singapore reflect a growing Buddhist ecumenism built through
repetitive affective encounters instead of didactic sermons and
sectarian developments. They present different Buddhist traditions,
images, and aesthetic expressions as united but not uniform,
collected but not concise: Together they form a gathering, not a
movement. Despite the ingenuity of lay and ordained visionaries
like Wiriyaphan and Zhao and their colleagues Kenzo Tange, Chan-soo
Park, Tadao Ando, and others discussed in this book, creators of
Buddhist leisure sites often face problems along the way. Parks and
museums are complex adaptive systems that are changed and
influenced by budgets, available materials, local and global
economic conditions, and visitors. Architects must often compromise
and settle at local optima, and no matter what they intend, their
buildings will develop lives of their own. Provocative and
theoretically innovative, Architects of Buddhist Leisure asks
readers to question the very category of "religious" architecture.
It challenges current methodological approaches in religious
studies and speaks to a broad audience interested in modern art,
architecture, religion, anthropology, and material culture.
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