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What do Buddhist monks learn about Buddhism? Which part of their
enormous canonical and non-canonical literature do they choose to
focus on as the required curriculum in their training, and what do
they elect to leave out? The cultural depository of Buddhism
includes some four thousand canonical texts, hundreds of other
historical works, modern textbooks, oral traditions, and more
recently, an increasingly growing body of online material. The
sheer diversity of this mass of information makes the pedagogical
choices of monastics worthy of close study.Monastic Education in
Korea is essentially a biography of the Korean Buddhist monastic
curriculum over the past five centuries. Based on extensive
ethnographic work and archival research in Korean monasteries, it
illustrates how a particular premodern syllabus was reimagined in
the twentieth century to become the sole national Korean monastic
pedagogical program—only to be criticized and completely
restructured in recent years. Through a detailed analysis of these
modifications, the work demonstrates how Korean Buddhist reformers
today tend to imitate the educational practices and canonize the
textual totems of the contemporary international discipline of
Buddhist studies, and how, by doing so, they ultimately transform
the local Korean tradition from a particular brand of
Chinese-centered scholastic Chan into the inclusive, pluralistic,
Indian-focused Buddhism common in English-language introductions to
the religion. The book further examines the proliferation of
diverse graduate schools for the sangha, as well as the creation of
a novel examination system for all monastics. It reveals some of
the realities of operating large monastic organizations in
contemporary Asia and portrays a living, vibrant Buddhist community
that is constantly negotiating with modern values and reformulating
its core orthodoxies.
Although Buddhism is known for emphasizing the importance of
detachment from materiality and money, in the last few decades
Buddhists have become increasingly ensconced in the global market
economy. The contributors to this volume address how Buddhists have
become active participants in market dynamics in a global age, and
how Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike engage Buddhism economically.
Whether adopting market logics to promote the Buddha's teachings,
serving as a source of semantics and technologies to maximize
company profits, or reacting against the marketing and branding of
the religion, Buddhists in the twenty-first century are marked by a
heightened engagement with capitalism. Eight case studies present
new research on contemporary Buddhist economic dynamics with an
emphasis on not only the economic dimensions of religion, but also
the religious dimensions of economic relations. In a wide range of
geographic settings from Asia to Europe and beyond, the studies
examine institutional as well as individual actions and responses
to Buddhist economic relations. The research in this volume
illustrates Buddhism's positioning in various ways - as a religion,
spirituality, and non-religion; an identification, tradition, and
culture; a source of values and morals; a world-view and way of
life; a philosophy and science; even an economy, brand, and
commodity. The work explores Buddhism's flexible and shifting
qualities within the context of capitalism, and consumer society's
reshaping of its portrayal and promotion in contemporary societies
worldwide.
|
Buddhist Tourism in Asia (Hardcover)
Courtney Bruntz, Brooke Schedneck; Series edited by Mark Michael Rowe; Contributions by David Geary, John Marston, …
|
R2,315
Discovery Miles 23 150
|
Ships in 12 - 17 working days
|
This innovative collaborative work-the first to focus on Buddhist
tourism-explores how Buddhists, government organizations, business
corporations, and individuals in Asia participate in re-imaginings
of Buddhism through tourism. Contributors from religious studies,
anthropology, and art history examine sacred places and religious
monuments as they have been shaped and reshaped by socio-economic
and cultural trends in the region. Following an introduction that
offers the first theoretical understanding of tourism from a
Buddhist studies' perspective, early chapters discuss the ways
Buddhists and non-Buddhists imagine concepts and places related to
the religion. Case studies highlight Buddhist peace in India,
Buddhist heavens and hells in Singapore, Thai temple space, and the
future Buddha Maitreya in China. Buddhist tourism's connections to
the state, market, and new technologies are explored in chapters on
Indian package tours for pilgrims, thematic Buddhist tourism in
Cambodia, the technological innovations of Buddhist temples in
China, and the promotion of pilgrimage sites in Japan. Contributors
then situate the financial concerns of Chinese temples, speed
dating in temples in Japan, and the diffuse and pervasive nature of
Buddhism for tourism promotion in Ladakh, India. How have tourist
routes, groups, sites, and practices associated with Buddhism come
to be possible and what are the effects? In what ways do travelers
derive meaning from Buddhist places? How do Buddhist sites fortify
national, cultural, or religious identities? The comparative
research in South, Southeast, and East Asia presented here draws
attention to the intertwining of the sacred and the financial and
how local and national sites are situated within global networks.
Together these findings generate a compelling comparative
investigation of Buddhist spaces, identities, and practices.
In Guardians of the Buddha's Home, Jessica Starling draws on nearly
three years of ethnographic research to provide a comprehensive
view of Jodo Shinshu (True Pure Land) temple life with temple wives
(known as bomori, or temple guardians) at its center. Throughout,
she focuses on ""domestic religion,"" a mode of doing religion
centering on more informal religious expression that has received
scant attention in the scholarly literature. The Buddhist temple
wife's movement back and forth between the main hall and the ""back
stage"" of the kitchen and family residence highlights the way
religious meaning cannot be confined to canonical texts or to the
area of the temple prescribed for formal worship. Starling argues
that attaining Buddhist faith (shinjin) is just as likely to occur
in response to a simple act of hospitality, a sense of community
experienced at an informal temple gathering, or an aesthetic
affinity with the temple space that has been carefully maintained
by the bomori as it is from hearing the words of a Pure Land sutra
intoned by a professional priest. For temple wives, the spiritual
practice of button hosha (repayment of the debt owed to the Buddha
for one's salvation) finds expression through the conscientious
stewardship of temple donations, caring for the Buddha's home and
opening it to lay followers, raising the temple's children, and
propagating the teachings in the domestic sphere. Engaging with
what religious scholars have called the ""turn to affect,""
Starling's work investigates in personal detail how religious
dispositions are formed in individual practitioners. The answer,
not surprisingly, has as much to do with intimate relationships and
quotidian practices as with formal liturgies or scripted sermons.
Despite popular images of priests seeking enlightenment in
snow-covered mountain temples, the central concern of Japanese
Buddhism is death. For that reason, Japanese Buddhism's social and
economic base has long been in mortuary services - a base now
threatened by public debate over the status, treatment, and
location of the dead. "Bonds of the Dead" explores the crisis
brought on by this debate and investigates what changing burial
forms reveal about the ways temple Buddhism is perceived and
propagated in contemporary Japan. Mark Michael Rowe offers a
crucial account of how religious, political, social, and economic
forces in the twentieth century led to the emergence of new
funerary practices in Japan and how, as a result, the care of the
dead has become the most fundamental challenge to the continued
existence of Japanese temple Buddhism. Far from marking the death
of Buddhism in Japan, Rowe argues, funerary Buddhism reveals the
tradition at its most vibrant. Combining ethnographic research with
doctrinal considerations, this is a fascinating book for anyone
interested in Japanese society and religion.
Southeast China is a traditional stronghold of Buddhism, but little
scholarly attention has been paid to this fact. Brian Nichols’s
pioneering book, Lotus Blossoms and Purple Clouds, centers on a
large Buddhist monastery in Quanzhou and combines ethnographic
detail with stimulating analysis to examine religion in post-Mao
China. Nichols conducted more than twenty-six months of field
research over a fourteen-year period (2005–2019) to develop a
re-description of Chinese monastic Buddhism that reaches beyond
canonical sources and master narratives to local texts, material
culture, oral history, and living traditions. His work decenters
normative accounts and sheds light on how Buddhism is lived and
practiced. It introduces readers to Quanzhou Kaiyuan Monastery and
its community of clergy striving to revive traditions after the
turmoil of the Maoist era; the lay Buddhists worshiping in the
monastery’s courtyards and halls; the busloads of tourists
marveling at the site’s buildings and artifacts, some dating as
far back as the Tang Dynasty (ninth century); and the local
officials dedicated to supporting—and restricting—the return of
religion. Using gazetteers, epigraphy, and other archival sources,
Nichols begins by tracing the history of Quanzhou Kaiyuan Monastery
from the Tang Dynasty to the present, noting the continued
relevance of preternatural events like the lotus-blooming mulberry
trees and auspicious purple clouds associated with the founding of
the monastery. The contemporary monastery is then explored through
ethnographic participation/observation and interviews. Nichols
uncovers a number of unexpected features of Buddhist religious
life, making a case for the fundamentally liturgical nature of
Buddhist monastic practice—one marked by a program of daily
dharaṇi (sacred text) recitation, esoteric traditions, and
ancestor veneration. Finally, he presents an innovative spatial
analysis of the Quanzhou Kaiyuan Monastery temple that reveals how
different groups engage with the site to create a place of
religious practice, a tourist attraction, and a community park.
Most studies of Buddhist communities tend to be limited to
villages, individual temple communities, or a single national
community. Buddhist monastics, however, cross a number of these
different framings: They are part of local communities, are
governed through national legal frameworks, and participate in both
national and transnational Buddhist networks. Educating Monks makes
visible the ways Buddhist communities are shaped by all of the
above-collectively and often simultaneously. Educating Monks
examines a minority Buddhist community in Sipsongpanna, a region
located on China's southwest border with Myanmar and Laos. Its
people, the Dai-lue, are "double minorities": They are recognized
by the Chinese state as part of a minority group, and they practice
Theravada Buddhism, a minority form within China, where Mahayana
Buddhism is the norm. Theravada has long been the primary training
ground for Dai-lue men, and since the return of Buddhism to the
area in the years following Mao Zedong's death, the Dai-lue have
put many of their resources into providing monastic education for
their sons. However, the author's analysis of institutional
organization within Sipsongpanna, the governance of religion there,
and the movements of monks (revealing the "ethnoscapes" that the
monks of Sipsongpanna participate in) points to educational
contexts that depend not just on local villagers, but also
resources from the local (Communist) government and aid form
Chinese Mahayana monks and Theravada monks from Thailand and
Myanmar. While the Dai-lue monks draw on these various resources
for the development of the sangha, they do not share the same
agenda and must continually engage in a careful political dance
between villagers who want to revive traditional forms of Buddhism,
a Chinese state that is at best indifferent to the continuation of
Buddhism, and transnational monks that want to import their own
modern forms of Buddhism into the region. Based on ethnographic
fieldwork and interviews with Dai-lue monks in China, Thailand, and
Singapore, this ambitious and sophisticated study will find a ready
audience among students and scholars of the anthropology of
Buddhism, and religion, education, and transnationalism in
Southeast and East Asia.
Southeast China is a traditional stronghold of Buddhism, but little
scholarly attention has been paid to this fact. Brian Nichols’
pioneering book, Lotus Blossoms and Purple Clouds, centers on a
large Buddhist monastery in Quanzhou and combines ethnographic
detail with stimulating analysis to examine religion in post-Mao
China. Nichols conducted more than twenty-six months of field
research over a fourteen-year period (2005–2019) to develop a
re-description of Chinese monastic Buddhism that reaches beyond
canonical sources and master narratives to local texts, material
culture, oral history, and living traditions. His work decenters
normative accounts and sheds light on how Buddhism is lived and
practiced. It introduces readers to Quanzhou Kaiyuan Monastery and
its community of clergy striving to revive traditions after the
turmoil of the Maoist era; the lay Buddhists worshiping in the
monastery’s courtyards and halls; the busloads of tourists
marveling at the site’s buildings and artifacts, some dating as
far back as the Tang Dynasty (ninth century); and the local
officials dedicated to supporting—and restricting—the return of
religion. Using gazetteers, epigraphy, and other archival sources,
Nichols begins by tracing the history of Quanzhou Kaiyuan Monastery
from the Tang to the present, noting the continued relevance of
preternatural events like the lotus-blooming mulberry trees and
auspicious purple clouds associated with the founding of the
monastery. The contemporary monastery is then explored through
ethnographic participation/observation and interviews. Nichols
uncovers a number of unexpected features of Buddhist religious
life, making a case for the fundamentally liturgical nature of
Buddhist monastic practice—one marked by a program of daily
dhara?i (sacred text) recitation, esoteric traditions, and ancestor
veneration. Finally, he presents an innovative spatial analysis of
the Quanzhou Kaiyuan Monastery temple that reveals how different
groups engage with the site to create a place of religious
practice, a tourist attraction, and a community park.
Although Buddhism is known for emphasizing the importance of
detachment from materiality and money, in the last few decades
Buddhists have become increasingly ensconced in the global market
economy. The contributors to this volume address how Buddhists have
become active participants in market dynamics in a global age, and
how Buddhists and non-Buddhists alike engage Buddhism economically.
Whether adopting market logics to promote the Buddha's teachings,
serving as a source of semantics and technologies to maximize
company profits, or reacting against the marketing and branding of
the religion, Buddhists in the twenty-first century are marked by a
heightened engagement with capitalism. Eight case studies present
new research on contemporary Buddhist economic dynamics with an
emphasis on not only the economic dimensions of religion, but also
the religious dimensions of economic relations. In a wide range of
geographic settings from Asia to Europe and beyond, the studies
examine institutional as well as individual actions and responses
to Buddhist economic relations. The research in this volume
illustrates Buddhism's positioning in various ways-as a religion,
spirituality, and non-religion; an identification, tradition, and
culture; a source of values and morals; a world-view and way of
life; a philosophy and science; even an economy, brand, and
commodity. The work explores Buddhism's flexible and shifting
qualities within the context of capitalism, and consumer society's
reshaping of its portrayal and promotion in contemporary societies
worldwide.
|
Buddhist Tourism in Asia (Paperback)
Courtney Bruntz, Brooke Schedneck; Series edited by Mark Michael Rowe; Contributions by David Geary, John Marston, …
|
R924
Discovery Miles 9 240
|
Ships in 12 - 17 working days
|
This innovative collaborative work-the first to focus on Buddhist
tourism-explores how Buddhists, government organizations, business
corporations, and individuals in Asia participate in re-imaginings
of Buddhism through tourism. Contributors from religious studies,
anthropology, and art history examine sacred places and religious
monuments as they have been shaped and reshaped by socioeconomic
and cultural trends in the region. Following an introduction that
offers the first theoretical understanding of tourism from a
Buddhist studies' perspective, early chapters discuss the ways
Buddhists and non-Buddhists imagine concepts and places related to
the religion. Case studies highlight Buddhist peace in India,
Buddhist heavens and hells in Singapore, Thai temple space, and the
future Buddha Maitreya in China. Buddhist tourism's connections to
the state, market, and new technologies are explored in chapters on
Indian package tours for pilgrims, thematic Buddhist tourism in
Cambodia, the technological innovations of Buddhist temples in
China, and the promotion of pilgrimage sites in Japan. Contributors
then situate the financial concerns of Chinese temples, speed
dating in temples in Japan, and the diffuse and pervasive nature of
Buddhism for tourism promotion in Ladakh, India. How have tourist
routes, groups, sites, and practices associated with Buddhism come
to be possible and what are the effects? In what ways do travelers
derive meaning from Buddhist places? How do Buddhist sites fortify
national, cultural, or religious identities? The comparative
research in South, Southeast, and East Asia presented here draws
attention to the intertwining of the sacred and the financial and
how local and national sites are situated within global networks.
Together these findings generate a compelling comparative
investigation of Buddhist spaces, identities, and practices.
What do Buddhist monks learn about Buddhism? Which part of their
enormous canonical and non-canonical literature do they choose to
focus on as the required curriculum in their training, and what do
they elect to leave out? The cultural depository of Buddhism
includes some four thousand canonical texts, hundreds of other
historical works, modern textbooks, oral traditions, and more
recently, an increasingly growing body of online material. The
sheer diversity of this mass of information makes the pedagogical
choices of monastics worthy of close study. Monastic Education in
Korea is essentially a biography of the Korean Buddhist monastic
curriculum over the past five centuries. Based on extensive
ethnographic work and archival research in Korean monasteries, it
illustrates how a particular premodern syllabus was reimagined in
the twentieth century to become the sole national Korean monastic
pedagogical program - only to be criticized and completely
restructured in recent years. Through a detailed analysis of these
modifications, the work demonstrates how Korean Buddhist reformers
today tend to imitate the educational practices and canonize the
textual totems of the contemporary international discipline of
Buddhist studies, and how, by doing so, they ultimately transform
the local Korean tradition from a particular brand of
Chinese-centered scholastic Chan into the inclusive, pluralistic,
Indian-focused Buddhism common in English-language introductions to
the religion. The book further examines the proliferation of
diverse graduate schools for the sangha, as well as the creation of
a novel examination system for all monastics. It reveals some of
the realities of operating large monastic organizations in
contemporary Asia and portrays a living, vibrant Buddhist community
that is constantly negotiating with modern values and reformulating
its core orthodoxies.
In Guardians of the Buddha's Home, Jessica Starling draws on nearly
three years of ethnographic research to provide a comprehensive
view of Jōdo Shinshū (True Pure Land) temple life with temple
wives (known as bōmori, or temple guardians) at its center.
Throughout, she focuses on "domestic religion," a mode of doing
religion centering on more informal religious expression that has
received scant attention in the scholarly literature. The Buddhist
temple wife's movement back and forth between the main hall and the
"back stage" of the kitchen and family residence highlights the way
religious meaning cannot be confined to canonical texts or to the
area of the temple prescribed for formal worship. Starling argues
that attaining Buddhist faith (shinjin) is just as likely to occur
in response to a simple act of hospitality, a sense of community
experienced at an informal temple gathering, or an aesthetic
affinity with the temple space that has been carefully maintained
by the bōmori as it is from hearing the words of a Pure Land sutra
intoned by a professional priest. For temple wives, the spiritual
practice of button hōsha (repayment of the debt owed to the Buddha
for one's salvation) finds expression through the conscientious
stewardship of temple donations, caring for the Buddha's home and
opening it to lay followers, raising the temple's children, and
propagating the teachings in the domestic sphere. Engaging with
what religious scholars have called the "turn to affect,"
Starling's work investigates in personal detail how religious
dispositions are formed in individual practitioners. The answer,
not surprisingly, has as much to do with intimate relationships and
quotidian practices as with formal liturgies or scripted sermons.
The speed and extent of the Tibetan Buddhist monastic revival make
it one of the most extraordinary stories of religious resurgence in
post-Mao China. At the end of the 1970s, there were no working
monasteries; within a decade, thousands had been reconstructed and
repopulated. Most studies have focused on the political challenges
facing Tibetan monasteries, emphasizing their relationship to the
Chinese state. Yet, in their efforts to revive and develop their
institutions, monks have also had to negotiate a rapidly changing
society, playing a delicate balancing act fraught with moral
dilemma as well as political danger. Drawing on the recent "moral
turn" in anthropology, this volume, the first full-length
ethnographic study of the subject, explores the social and moral
dimensions of monastic revival and reform across a range of Geluk
monasteries in northeast Tibet (Amdo/Qinghai Province) from the
1980s on. Author Jane Caple's analysis shows that ideas and debates
about how best to maintain the mundane bases of monastic
Buddhism-economy and population-are intermeshed with those
concerning the proper role and conduct of monks and the ethics of
monastic-lay relations. Facing a shrinking monastic population,
monks are grappling with the impacts of secular education,
demographic transition, rising living standards, urbanization, and
marketization, all of which have driven debates within Buddhism
elsewhere and fueled perceptions of monastic decline. Some
Tibetans-including monks-are even questioning the "good" of the
mass form of monasticism that has been a distinctive feature of
Tibetan society for hundreds of years. Given monastic Buddhism's
integral position in Tibetan community life and association with
Tibetan identity, Caple argues that its precarity in relation to
Tibetan society raises questions about its future that go well
beyond the issue of religious freedom.
The speed and extent of the Tibetan Buddhist monastic revival make
it one of the most extraordinary stories of religious resurgence in
post-Mao China. At the end of the 1970s, there were no working
monasteries; within a decade, thousands had been reconstructed and
repopulated. Most studies have focused on the political challenges
facing Tibetan monasteries, emphasizing their relationship to the
Chinese state. Yet, in their efforts to revive and develop their
institutions, monks have also had to negotiate a rapidly changing
society, playing a delicate balancing act fraught with moral
dilemma as well as political danger. Drawing on the recent "moral
turn" in anthropology, this volume, the first full-length
ethnographic study of the subject, explores the social and moral
dimensions of monastic revival and reform across a range of Geluk
monasteries in northeast Tibet (Amdo/Qinghai province) from the
1980s on. Author Jane Caple's analysis shows that ideas and debates
about how best to maintain the mundane bases of monastic
Buddhism-economy and population-are intermeshed with those
concerning the proper role and conduct of monks and the ethics of
monastic-lay relations. Facing a shrinking monastic population,
monks are grappling with the impacts of secular education,
demographic transition, rising living standards, urbanization, and
marketization, all of which have driven debates within Buddhism
elsewhere and fueled perceptions of monastic decline. Some
Tibetans-including monks-are even questioning the "good" of the
mass form of monasticism that has been a distinctive feature of
Tibetan society for hundreds of years. Given monastic Buddhism's
integral position in Tibetan community life and association with
Tibetan identity, Caple argues that its precarity in relation to
Tibetan society raises questions about its future that go well
beyond the issue of religious freedom.
This book introduces contemporary Buddhists from across Asia and
from various walks of life. Eschewing traditional hagiographies,
the editors have collected sixty-six profiles of individuals who
would be excluded from most Buddhist histories and ethnographies.
In addition to monks and nuns, readers will encounter artists,
psychologists, social workers, part-time priests, healers, and
librarians as well as charlatans, hucksters, profiteers, and
rabble-rousers—all whose lives reflect changes in modern Buddhism
even as they themselves shape the course of these changes. The
editors and contributors are fundamentally concerned with how
individual Buddhists make meaning and display this understanding to
others. Some practitioners profiled look to the past, lamenting the
transformations Buddhism has undergone in recent times, while
others embrace these. Some have adopted a “new asceticism,”
while others are eager to explore different religious traditions as
they think about their own ways of being Buddhist. Arranging the
profiles according to these themes—looking backward, forward,
inward, and outward—reveals the value of studying individual
Buddhists and their idiosyncratic religious backgrounds and
attitudes, thus highlighting the diversity of approaches to the
practice and study of Buddhism in Asia today. Students and teachers
will welcome sections on further readings and additional tables of
contents that organize the profiles thematically, as well as by
tradition (Theravada, Mahayana, Vajrayana), region, and country.
Buddhism is gaining popularity among Internet users at a faster
rate than any other religion. In this sweeping and ambitious
intellectual history, Daniel Veidlinger traces the affinity between
Buddhist ideas and communications media back to the efflorescence
of Buddhism in the Axial Age of the mid-first millennium B.C.E. He
uses both communications theory and the idea of convergent
evolution to show how Buddhism arose in the largely urban milieu of
Axial Age northeastern India and spread rapidly along the
transportation and trading nodes of the Silk Road, where it
appealed to merchants and traders from a variety of backgrounds.
Throughout, he compares early phases of Buddhism with contemporary
developments in which rapid changes in patterns of social
interaction were also experienced and brought about by large-scale
urbanization and growth in communication and transportation. In
both cases, such changes supported the expansive consciousness
needed to allow Buddhism to germinate. Veidlinger argues that
Buddhist ideas tend to fare well in certain media environments;
through a careful analysis of communications used in these
contexts, he finds persuasive parallels with modern advances in
communications technology that amplify the conditions and effects
found along ancient trade routes. From Indra's Net to Internet
incorporates historical research as well as data collected using
computer-based analysis of user-generated web content to
demonstrate that robust communication networks, which allow for
relatively easy contact among a variety of people, support a
de-centered understanding of the self, greater compassion for
others, an appreciation of interdependence, a universal outlook,
and a reduction in emphasis on the efficacy of ritual-all of which
lie at the heart of the Buddha's teachings. The book's
interdisciplinary approach should appeal to those interested in not
only Buddhism, media studies and history, but also computer
science, cognitive science, and cultural evolution.
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.
Most studies of Buddhist communities tend to be limited to
villages, individual temple communities, or a single national
community. Buddhist monastics, however, cross a number of these
different framings: They are part of local communities, are
governed through national legal frameworks, and participate in both
national and transnational Buddhist networks. Educating Monks makes
visible the ways Buddhist communities are shaped by all of the
above-collectively and often simultaneously. Educating Monks
examines a minority Buddhist community in Sipsongpanna, a region
located on China's southwest border with Myanmar and Laos. Its
people, the Dai-lue, are "double minorities": They are recognized
by the Chinese state as part of a minority group, and they practice
Theravada Buddhism, a minority form within China, where Mahayana
Buddhism is the norm. Theravada has long been the primary training
ground for Dai-lue men, and since the return of Buddhism to the
area in the years following Mao Zedong's death, the Dai-lue have
put many of their resources into providing monastic education for
their sons. However, the author's analysis of institutional
organization within Sipsongpanna, the governance of religion there,
and the movements of monks (revealing the "ethnoscapes" that the
monks of Sipsongpanna participate in) points to educational
contexts that depend not just on local villagers, but also
resources from the local (Communist) government and aid form
Chinese Mahayana monks and Theravada monks from Thailand and
Myanmar. While the Dai-lue monks draw on these various resources
for the development of the sangha, they do not share the same
agenda and must continually engage in a careful political dance
between villagers who want to revive traditional forms of Buddhism,
a Chinese state that is at best indifferent to the continuation of
Buddhism, and transnational monks that want to import their own
modern forms of Buddhism into the region. Based on ethnographic
fieldwork and interviews with Dai-lue monks in China, Thailand, and
Singapore, this ambitious and sophisticated study will find a ready
audience among students and scholars of the anthropology of
Buddhism, and religion, education, and transnationalism in
Southeast and East Asia.
This book introduces contemporary Buddhists from across Asia and
from various walks of life. Eschewing traditional hagiographies,
the editors have collected sixty-six profiles of individuals who
would be excluded from most Buddhist histories and ethnographies.
In addition to monks and nuns, readers will encounter artists,
psychologists, social workers, part-time priests, healers, and
librarians as well as charlatans, hucksters, profiteers, and
rabble-rousers-all whose lives reflect changes in modern Buddhism
even as they themselves shape the course of these changes.
|
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