|
Showing 1 - 4 of
4 matches in All Departments
The Irish Buddhist is the biography of an extraordinary Irish
emigrant, sailor, and migrant worker who became a Buddhist monk and
anti-colonial activist in early twentieth-century Asia. Born in
Dublin in the 1850s, U Dhammaloka energetically challenged the
values and power of the British Empire and scandalized the colonial
establishment of the 1900s. He rallied Buddhists across Asia, set
up schools, and argued down Christian missionaries-often using
western atheist arguments. He was tried for sedition, tracked by
police and intelligence services, and died at least twice. His
story illuminates the forgotten margins and interstices of imperial
power, the complexities of class, ethnicity and religious belonging
in colonial Asia, and the fluidity of identity in the high
Victorian period. Too often, the story of the pan-Asian Buddhist
revival movement and Buddhism's remaking as a world religion has
been told 'from above,' highlighting scholarly writers,
middle-class reformers and ecclesiastical hierarchies. By turns
fraught, hilarious, pioneering, and improbable, Dhammaloka's
adventures 'from below' highlight the changing and contested
meanings of Buddhism in colonial Asia. Through his story, authors
Alicia Turner, Brian Bocking, and Laurence Cox offer a window into
the worlds of ethnic minorities and diasporas, transnational
networks, poor whites, and social movements. Dhammaloka's dramatic
life rewrites the previously accepted story of how Buddhism became
a modern global religion.
Hidden at the margins of Burmese Buddhism and culture, the cults of
the weikzaweikza in relation to the Vipassana insight meditation
movement and conventional Buddhist practices, as well as the
contemporary rise of Buddhist fundamentalism. Featuring research
based on fieldwork only possible in recent years, paired with
reflective essays by senior Buddhist studies scholars, this book
situates the weikza cult in relation to broader Buddhist and
Southeast Asian contexts, as the Burmese expressions of the weikza
cults themselves. Champions of Buddhismopens the field to new
questions, new problems, and new connections with the study of
religion and Southeast Asia in general.
Saving Buddhism explores the dissonance between the goals of the
colonial state and the Buddhist worldview that animated Burmese
Buddhism at the turn of the twentieth century. For many Burmese,
the salient and ordering discourse was not nation or modernity but
sasana, the life of the Buddha’s teachings. Burmese Buddhists
interpreted the political and social changes between 1890 and 1920
as signs that the Buddha’s sasana was deteriorating. This fear of
decline drove waves of activity and organizing to prevent the loss
of the Buddha’s teachings. Burmese set out to save Buddhism, but
achieved much more: they took advantage of the indeterminacy of the
moment to challenge the colonial frameworks that were beginning to
shape their world. Author Alicia Turner has examined thousands of
rarely used sources - newspapers and Buddhist journals, donation
lists, and colonial reports—to trace three discourses set in
motion by the colonial encounter: the evolving understanding of
sasana as an orienting framework for change, the adaptive modes of
identity made possible in the moral community, and the ongoing
definition of religion as a site of conflict and negotiation of
autonomy. Beginning from an understanding that defining and
redefining the boundaries of religion operated as a key technique
of colonial power—shaping subjects through European categories
and authorizing projects of colonial governmentality—she explores
how Burmese Buddhists became actively engaged in defining and
inflecting religion to shape their colonial situation and forward
their own local projects. Saving Buddhism intervenes not just in
scholarly conversations about religion and colonialism, but in
theoretical work in religious studies on the categories of
“religion” and “secular.” It contributes to ongoing studies
of colonialism, nation, and identity in Southeast Asian studies by
working to denaturalize nationalist histories. It also engages
conversations on millennialism and the construction of identity in
Buddhist studies by tracing the fluid nature of sasana as a
discourse. The layers of Buddhist history that emerge challenge us
to see multiple modes of identity in colonial modernity and offer
insights into the instabilities of categories we too often take for
granted.
Saving Buddhism explores the dissonance between the goals of the
colonial state and the Buddhist worldview that animated Burmese
Buddhism at the turn of the twentieth century. For many Burmese,
the salient and ordering discourse was not nation or modernity but
sasana, the life of the Buddha's teachings. Burmese Buddhists
interpreted the political and social changes between 1890 and 1920
as signs that the Buddha's sasana was deteriorating. This fear of
decline drove waves of activity and organizing to prevent the loss
of the Buddha's teachings. Burmese set out to save Buddhism, but
achieved much more: they took advantage of the indeterminacy of the
moment to challenge the colonial frameworks that were beginning to
shape their world. Author Alicia Turner has examined thousands of
rarely used sources - newspapers and Buddhist journals, donation
lists, and colonial reports-to trace three discourses set in motion
by the colonial encounter: the evolving understanding of sasana as
an orienting framework for change, the adaptive modes of identity
made possible in the moral community, and the ongoing definition of
religion as a site of conflict and negotiation of autonomy.
Beginning from an understanding that defining and redefining the
boundaries of religion operated as a key technique of colonial
power-shaping subjects through European categories and authorizing
projects of colonial governmentality-she explores how Burmese
Buddhists became actively engaged in defining and inflecting
religion to shape their colonial situation and forward their own
local projects. Saving Buddhism intervenes not just in scholarly
conversations about religion and colonialism, but in theoretical
work in religious studies on the categories of "religion" and
"secular." It contributes to ongoing studies of colonialism,
nation, and identity in Southeast Asian studies by working to
denaturalize nationalist histories. It also engages conversations
on millennialism and the construction of identity in Buddhist
studies by tracing the fluid nature of sasana as a discourse. The
layers of Buddhist history that emerge challenge us to see multiple
modes of identity in colonial modernity and offer insights into the
instabilities of categories we too often take for granted.
|
You may like...
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
Loot
Nadine Gordimer
Paperback
(2)
R398
R330
Discovery Miles 3 300
The Flash
Ezra Miller, Michael Keaton, …
DVD
R264
Discovery Miles 2 640
|